Attitude Adjustment

To be quite honest, I haven’t been enjoying teaching much. There are a lot of reasons and I don’t really want to get into them all (plus, I’ve already whined about this) but I’ve been having a difficult time finding the motivation I need. It seems that I simply can’t wait to leave my village on the weekends and meet up with other volunteers. I try not to do it too much but my weekend’s quickly fill up and I so look forward to the end of the week. This is beginning to worry me. I’m here not simply to help, I’m here for the experience as well. But I’m not gonna experience much in terms of Bulgarian life and culture if I’m not a part of it, right?


After the flu vacation and my many days off from school, I did not want to go back. I wanted to stay in bed and be lazy and pretend that I didn’t have any responsibility here. I mean, who would miss me really? I team-teach every class so it isn’t as if the students would be left without an English teacher. The Bulgarians I tutor were getting on just fine a few months ago without me. Volleyball isn’t going to define the futures of the young girls in my village. And my school’s fully capable of collecting money and supplies when needed. Who would miss me?

But, I got out of bed. I went to school. And all my students, all my little monsters, greeted me with big smiles, with English “Hello, Miss Hadaway, how are you?”’s, with “happy birthday”’s, and made it perfectly obvious that they did in fact miss me. There are some students who could care less about whether or not I’m there and those students are louder. They used to grab my attention with more frustrating strength but now I know that most of my students are sweet and kind and benefitting from my presence. It felt good.

Not only that, I had my friend, Marietta, and her husband, Angel, over for dinner to celebrate my birthday and they immediately began to fix every problem I had in the place. They showed me how to make a fire, offered to find me wood to last the rest of winter, unfroze my pipes so I could shower (hallelujah!), and changed the breakers so that I’d stop losing electricity. She also said that I should come for dinner at her house once a week and sleepover – it’ll be fun and more warm, she says. They are always taking such good care of me.

It’s good to be back.

I’m still running around and planning to meet volunteers in various places but I’ve decided to try and spend more time in my village because there are some amazing people here and the relationships I’ve made are real and worth the struggles. I’m blessed. I’ve been trying to foster this attitude for months knowing it was somewhere inside of me and I think I’ve finally found it. I’m going to focus on the good and exciting things that are happening (like the National Spelling Bee and International Writing Olympics!) and really enjoy the rest of this school year.

-Age