Thanksgiving Dinners, IST, and Nichole's town

So I had two official Thanksgiving Dinners with other Volunteers here in Bulgaria. First was on Friday night, since we all had to work Friday Thursday night wasn't gonna work out. It was in Varna at Hannah's place; she got the Turkey and we all brought a dish or two. I brought pumpkin pie; we also had mashed potatoes, green bean casserole, peas, stuffing, sweet potato casserole, pecan pie, and chocolate cake. Along with that a slew of beverages we also had Craisins acting as cranberry sauce. 

Tyler Carving the Bird

The drumstick boys

It was amazing

That night I went to Dragodanovo where another volunteer lives. She works at a boarding school there for truants. Since the winters here are freezing she had a clothing drive for her kids and a day of activities and crafts. They also cooked some pumpkin bread and cookies to give out to people around town. They had a lot of fun. That night we had a Thanksgiving dinner there with the volunteers that came to help, and some Mormon missionaries in the nearby town of Sliven since they are American and all.

Food table 1

Food table 2

Then we had in-service training (IST) with all the volunteers that came in this year. Right now that is 84 volunteers, and we all stayed in a hotel in Plovdiv (the 2nd largest city in Bulgaria) for 3 nights; attending two days of meetings. Some of the sessions were mandatory and some were choice sessions, that way we could go to sessions about what would be most useful for yourself and your site. Plovidv is nice, I prefer Varna, but that's just me.They do have a nice old town though, and some randomly high hills that are good vantage points.

Amphitheater

New Town Center

Cool Building side

After IST the group from Pavolche, where I lived for my 2.5 months of training with 5 other volunteers (Katie, Matt, Tom, Joe and Nichole), went up into the Rhodope Mountains to Nichole's village, Kasak, to help her start the world map project. It was a 4 hour, or so, bus ride up there, but it was really pretty. Her town is small, but the people there are really friendly. The World Map Project was developed by a volunteer in the Dominican Republic as a way to give kids access to a world map in order to learn geography and technical skills. You can do it on a wall, a canvas, the ground, pretty much anything. The area just needs to be twice as long as it is tall.

Figuring out how big to make the map

Measuring it out

Taping the borders

Mixing blue paint for the background Ocean Color

Have the kids paint

An Ocean

The next step is to draw grid lines over this blue area that correspond to a smaller printed-out grid from the workbook. Then the kids enlarge the map square by square, making it way easier to draw by hand. Setting up this grid is easier said then done.

Figuring out the grid lines

We let the former accountant do the math

We didn't actually get to draw the grid lines on because the room was a bit damp and the paint took a while to dry. But we had some fun with the kids while the paint was drying. We played tic tak toe, hang man, chess and a little of the limbo.

After this playful work day, we cleaned up the brushes and roller and buckets (as best we could..) and then set out on a walk around town and then made some Minestrone Soup, Sugar Cookies and like we do in Pavolche played some UNO.

We played a lot of UNO in Pavs. So we made this quick version where you can double up cards, I got dumped with 6 Draw 2s so I had to take 12. Matt thought it was funny :)

I made a wolf for Pavolche