The day before christmas I watched a news clip about a charity, where Bulgarian kids collected money for other Bulgarian kids. Completely normal and laudable of course, but there is still someething significant about it - not so long ago Swedish kids collected money for Bulgarian kids, and the thought that Bulgarian kids had money over for charity was utopian.
By Edal Anton Lefterov (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)], via Wikimedia Commons.These Bulgarian children have nothing to do with this post
Still, the number of ragged roma children who approach you for stotinki* in the train stations is not visibly lower than any time since 2007 when I started to regularly visit Bulgaria. This charity campaign, and numerous other good initiatives indicate that there are still thousand of Bulgarian children in need of help from somewhere. What has changed is that there are now Bulgarians rich enough, and good hearted enough, to give them a hand.
More people have money for consumer vanity as the incredible number of shopping malls show. The metro in Sofia is slowly growing, and roads are rebuilt. In a small city like Pleven, there are new park benches to sit on and brand new second hand city buses. Sitting on these benches an buses you can see the same poor retired workers as always. To them, development must seem like a joke.
Where development feels real is not on these benches or buses, but in the cafés of Sofia. My personal favourites are Onda and Pop Art in Sofia. What is most heartening is how cheap the coffee still is. The pricing shows that the target group is neither an impoverished intelligentia, filhty rich mafioti and their girlfriends or west european businessmen. These cafés, that are the best places in Sofia, take aim at the group of people that are said to be absolutely crucial for a positive development in any country: the local middle class.
A such class clearly exists today, and most Bulgarians I know belong to it. It is a highly educated class that can thank Foreign Direct Investments for their relative wealth. Without western multinational companies in Bulgaria most of my friends would have much lower wages, and they would not be able to support the blooming varitey of cafés and artistic shops that is the true pearl of Bulgaria.
For these Bulgarians, and many, life gets a little better every day. But next to them, or rather below them, there is a huge mass of people who are not part of this development. The rift betweens those whose life develop those whose life does not growns bigger each year. Which it is normal. Every development has its winners and losers. But ther is still a tragedy in it, and social inequalities raise a host of new problems that do not exist in a country where everyone is poor. (Was there ever a country where everyone was rich) Schools must try to diffuse the differences beween individuals. City planners must try to avoid ethnical and ecomical segregation. All public instituions must redefine their work, from simply existing to become the fabric that binds society together.
Slavenka Drakulic writes in Café Europa (I think!) about Bulgarians and the notion of social equality. After the fall of communism they where keen to enjoy the freedoms of capitalism, but abhorred by its injustices, according to Drakulic. 20 years later, I think many have accepted certain injustices as necessities and moved on. Charity campaigns where Bulgarian children help other Bulgarian childrens show both an acceptance of economical differences between Bulgarians, and a wish to deal with this new social reality.
As most often, the thoughts in this post originally came from my girlfriend.
*Stotinki is the smalles Bulgarian coins, like cents, ören or kopeks.
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