Thursday

It's Thursday already! The time is flying by.
Today we went over the mountains. Wow! They are spectacular! Steep sided, pointed and covered in trees, they cover a large area of Bulgaria and we hadn't even noticed them before! We set out in a convoy of four vehicles (yes, four. Count em!) The two contacts cars, the Mercedes Sprinter minibus come van and Doug Webber's hire car. The seats were down, the boots (trunks for you Americans reading this) were full and we travelled really slowly on the way there, along winding roads with vertiginous drops on one side. People have built houses up these mountains and there are no roads to get to them. Some of them use cables strung across the valley to get to their houses from the roads. I can't imagine wheeling myself across a wire in a bucket with my Asda(Walmart) shopping bags! (Not that they have Asda (Walmart) here (I think this must be the most brackets I have ever used in a sentence before, it's more like an Excel formula than English!))

There was one moment when we lost sight of the minibus, so we used the walkie talkies to say 'Are you guys in the minibus OK?' All we got back was static and then a scream. But it was just Chuck having a laugh (At least that what he said but later on he admitted that Gordon had come a bit too close to the edge for his liking so the fear we heard may have been real! Or maybe Bobby just took his shoes off?)

When we reached our destination (top secret of course) we delivered a lot of furniture (tables, filing cabinets) and childrens toys to a church who are doing a childrens club and also an old peoples club. Sometimes though, it is difficult for people here to get the idea of games and toys being useful for older people as well as children. So we think most of the equipment will be used for kids work. That's good too.

After that, we travelled a small distance to another place where a new residential home for children with special needs has been opened. Over 40 children live here and they all have varying physical and/or mental disabilities. The centre has wonderful staff all of whom obviously love their job and the kids we met all were happy and liked the staff. They were all excited to get new stuff to stimulate the children. We gave them an infinity tunnel ( a box with lights and mirrors in it with 2 levers the children can move to change the lights), assorted sets of flashcards (pictures of objects or actions to help word association and language development), toys, games etc. There was quite a lot of stuff. What got me was that one of the staff asked us if many people in the UK gave up their babies because they were disabled and I got the sense that's where the majority of these kids came from.

We have some great photos but unfortunately my camera is in Stevie's bag and he's gone to bed. So tomorrow I hope to post some more pictures.