Am I a Freak Show (Get Ur Mind Out the Gutter)?
I am going to try to make this quick and painless.
This morning I left for work really early because I had a meeting with the program director from the Peace Corps. My program director was coming to see how things are going now that I have been in Veliko Turnovo for a month. I walked about half a block from my apartment and was fumbling with my MP3 player when I heard this woman gasp in surprise. My heart started to beat faster because I thought a car might be near me or that a street dog might be ready for attack.
Than, to my surprise she looked me straight in the eyes and said, “Can I touch, you?” in English. I answered immediately in Bulgarian “Zachto? (Why)”. From her reaction I thought a bird might be on my head or that a snake was on my shoulder and she needed to get off. She walked towards me with her hands outstretched and said, in Bulgarian, “Because I have never seen someone that looks like you before”. How weird is that?!!!!! Can you image someone coming up to you touching you because they have never seen someone that looks like you!!! This totally caught me off guard and almost made me cry. She touched my hand, gasped again, and walked away.
After her violation I felt like a freak show!!! On my walk to work I began to see what I had not totally noticed before this woman touched me. People are seriously staring at me. Every third person that I passed on the street was looking at me today. When I was in my small town Rila people stared, but after a while everyone got to know me so they didn’t stare as much. Veliko Turnovo is a rather large town, so I see different people everyday.
Urggh let me vent for a little please….
Who does this woman thinks she is that she can touch me! I mean I understand that people might not have had interaction with a black person before, but we are almost in the year 2007! Come on! They have MTV in Bulgaria. Bulgaria is about to join the EU for goodness sake. They get all the same music videos here that we get in America. They know that Condalesa Rice is the Secretary of State. I can not be that different or exotic!!! Furthermore, the world is becoming much smaller as people are traveling more to live and work in foreign countries. I mean, I have seen about four black people in Bulgaria since I got here four months ago. Ok, that’s not a lot considering the population of Bulgaria is about 8 million, but still it is very annoying. Peace Corps warns us about how people we stare and treat us as foreigners, but I didn’t expect to feel like an object.
My friends talked about being stared at in their small villages but I thought it was just because they lived in a small village. I didn’t think I stood out as much in Veliko Turnovo considering there are so many foreigners here. Now I am kind of paranoid about meeting new people here. Do they really want to be my friend or do they want to be seen with the “Black American”? On my way home from work, I decided to take the side streets because I couldn’t deal with people staring at me.
Feeling violated and like an object,
Crystal
2 comments:
ohhhhhhhh don't even let me get started on this.
i can't believe someone seriously did that to you.
no one touched me, but i know how you feel about kind of being afraid to meet people because of their intentions.
i was talking to my language trainer the other day about how it is kind of intimidating when i walk down the street and there are people that i have never even met just staring at me like they hate me or something.
his response? "they DO hate you."
uhhh... kakvo?
"because you are different, they hate different."
fantastic.
remind me why i'm here again?? to help who???
This sort of thing happend to me a bit on travels as well. Since my hair is blonde and I am about 6'4", I got a lot stares in my travels, usually accompanied by smiles and fingerpointing. When I was in India, people would take my hand, touch my tanned white skin and say "super" because apparently it is desired to have lighter skin in India (which was was noticeable since most of the upper class Indians had lighter skin, though I think that has something to do with more wealth in India being in the north and the wealthy never working in the fields).
When I was in Africa, people would touch my hair. I remember some kids touching my hair and saying "simba" or lion in swahili. When I was in Asia, I was walking with a black friend who had her hair in twist braids (not sure what they are called). We had crowds of people following us, some girls at a bar wanted to and were allowed to touch my friends hair.
People are curious about the strange looking foreigners walking their streets.
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