From Sunday, a botany lesson (the tulips on the left are the same exact bulbs, planted approx 3 weeks later than the ones on the right, about 3 feet apart):

From Friday, public displays of sympathy, sadness and support near the embassy:

They really are amazing things. Who knew you could simultaneously have your heart broken and have great love and hope in your life? That a heart could be at once completely shattered by one thing and lovingly uplifted by something else? Amazing.

Perhaps the most memorable and meaningful experience of my days as a Peace Corps volunteer was running, together with 4 other PCVs, the third iteration of a young women’s leadership camp called Camp GLOW (Girls Leading Our World).  Each summer since 2000, high school-aged girls from all over Bulgaria have come together for a week of teambuilding, networking, leadership training, and empowerment (the website is a recent addition).

To call the camp inspiring would be an understatement. Working with these 80 high school girls, I probably learned as much as they did. They were a major inspiration for me to do more work on youth development, minority rights, and women’s rights while I was in Bulgaria.  My experiences at the camp were also a large factor in my decision to pursue more human rights-related work after I left Bulgaria.  I’m still in touch with many of the girls as well, and I can say that the camp has made a far, far greater difference in their lives than any of us would ever have imagined.

These young women are exceptional in so many ways, but they face the twin obstacles of being economically disadvantaged and living in a highly patriarchal society (not to mention being at extraordinarily high risk of becoming unwitting victims of human trafficking and other nefarious activities).  They’re the kinds of people who give you hope for the future.  Of all of my Peace Corps experiences, doing something that will help these young women develop the English skills, leadership skills, and life skills that they will use to pursue whatever bright future might await them was by far the most rewarding, and surely among the most important in the long run.

Peace Corps volunteers have, for seven consecutive years now, fought hard to keep the camp alive and elicit donations from kind-hearted souls who recognize the value and impact of these programs, and it’s always down to the wire on getting enough funding to make the camp happen.  Happily, this year they should have a little more help, since some of my former Peace Corps colleagues, along with volunteers from later years, have set up a new foundation to help keep this camp and the other major PCV-supported youth camp running.

It’s nice, every once in a while, to find news of good things.

A year ago today, this blog was born. It should now be able to:

• have mastered fine motor skills, able to pick up and put down toys at will
• feed itself and particularly enjoy finger-foods (finger-words? finger-links?)
• be an expert crawler
• wave goodbye, point, nod, and shake its head
• realize it misses me when I’m not around (perhaps I should do better about being around more often)
• understand the word “no”
• enjoy simple sorting games to increase its mental dexterity
• respond to its own name
• learn that doing one thing leads to another happening
• take some of its first unassisted steps
• start to become shy of strangers or people it doesn’t see very often (though I’m not sure whether this fact would encourage people to visit more often, or to avoid visiting altogether)

And in addition to all of these ordinary 1-year-old milestones, this blog has gone several times from DC to Seattle to Seoul and Shanghai, and never once cried on an airplane. Now that’s an accomplishment!

So here’s to the birthday of the blog. May it soon walk longer distances on its own, learn a few nouns, and point to parts of itself when someone says the names of them.

Usually, I’m not one to use a lot of non-English words for an audience that doesn’t speak the language in question, but in this case, I’m making an exception.  Why?  Because “yellow sand dust storms that last for weeks but fluctuate in intensity” is just too much of a pain to write out.  And besides that, it still doesn’t do a very exact job of describing the phenomenon.  Anyway, the “hwangsa,” as the Koreans call it, is a big deal in the springtime here.  Everybody talks about it.  Everyone dreads it.  Everybody has a story about it.  Oh, and it can bring various maladies and possibly even polish your teeth for you if you dare to be outside smiling when it’s thick (and you don’t mind a mouthful of grit for a day or two afterwards).  This week, it got bad.  Even the military says so.  And they say it’ll happen again.  No aerobic activity out-of-doors for a while, I guess.  Not that I’m complaining all that much…