Crooked Wood: A war on childhood
By NIKA SABASTEANSKI | November 13, 2014Last spring sitting in the Radcliffe Camera in Oxford and working on my final dissertation, I was writing somewhat frantically to my contact at Oxford Aid to the Balkans (OXAB). I desperately wanted to switch my placement in Bulgaria from an orphanage on the Black Sea to a small, dusty town a few hours south of Sofia called Pazardzhik to work with a group of Syrian refugee children. When I finally got confirmation that I would be heading to the veritable boonies of Bulgaria to teach these kids with another student from Oxford, I think the Rad Cam heard its first squeal in at least the past 150 years. A month later, I found myself on a plane to Sofia, trying to decipher the words that suddenly surrounded me. Even when I learned the Cyrillic alphabet, the world that I now inhabited remained obscure. Then again, it has never been particularly clear for the children we were to be working with. They and their parents have remained in a bureaucratic limbo, filled to the brim with political agendas and centuries-old prejudices. Even worse may be that no one actually knows of their struggle. While the Syrian refugees that remain in Iraq, Turkey and Lebanon have received widespread news coverage (not that this has benefitted them to any great extent), those who have made it out of the Middle East and into the European Union are virtually invisible. Fair enough, one might think, considering the disparity in wealth between the two locales... until you look at Bulgaria.
