Few people in New Haven know that violent floods ravaged the tiny country of Bulgaria this summer, leaving 14,000 people homeless and 330 schools unable to open for the 2005 – 2006 academic year. So Galina Draganova, a Bulgarian who received her master’s degree in ethics and political science from Yale last year, decided to organize a fundraising event that would bring together New Haven’s Bulgarian residents and their friends to celebrate and learn about her country while raising money for the Bulgarian Red Cross.
When Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast, Draganova expanded her fundraiser’s financial borders. She collected money for the American Red Cross, and stressed the common plights of her native country and her adopted one. But the cultural essence of Friday’s event, “A Taste of Bulgaria,” held in Yale’s Sage Hall auditorium, could be expressed only in Bulgarian.
About 200 friends, fans and members of Southern Connecticut’s Bulgarian community packed the hall to capacity, and trailed out its back door, while Bulgarian musicians and folk dancers performed. The Bulgarian food laid out in the back of the hall was nearly gone by the time the first musicians (Yale Slavic Chorus, in traditional garb) sang their first note.
Over the course of the nearly three-hour event —” which ended with improvised traditional dancing by a few elderly audience members and a younger Yale “Slav” —“someone was always standing at the back door with a box for the Bulgarian and American Red Crosses. The exact amount of funds raised won’t be known until next week, but every person in the hall responded to the plea Draganova issued in the event’s program: “Please remember all those who have been unfairly treated by life’s catastrophic storms.”
Joe Dendas of Branford, relegated to a seat on a folding table outside the doors because of the large turnout, met his Bulgarian wife, Ina, when she was a student and au pair in Connecticut several years ago. Ina saw Joe’s band play at Toad’s by chance; they went out for diner burgers after the gig and soon started dating. Since their marriage, Dendas has been to Bulgaria four times and says he “definitely” wants his two-year-old daughter to grow up bi-cultural and visit Bulgaria. (“The Black Sea,” he says, “is amazing.”).
Dendas says he and his wife were glued to the TV during the summer floods, and were kept up-to-date by Ina’s mother, who lives in downtown Sofia. “The news really mentioned very little about Bulgaria,” Dendas observes. “Germany is mostly what we heard about, because of the economic ties with the U.S. But we knew it was pretty drastic over there, and that’s why we’re here tonight.”
Unlike Katrina, from which U.S. citizens may feel protected here in the northeast, the floods in Bulgaria directly affected 63 percent of its citizens. Nikolay Milkov, the Bulgarian Consul in New York, spoke at the event and thanked people for their gracious donations to his country’s flood victims. “We are living on the edge of our capabilities financially,” he explained outside Sage Hall after the event. He said that Bulgarian communities in New York and Connecticut (totaling about 50,000 people) have been active in raising funds, but that more aid is needed. In Bulgaria, unlike in the U.S., the Red Cross is the only formal charity that can collect and distribute aid efficiently. “We are aware that this is a difficult period for the U.S., and maybe in a different period we would be able to collect more for Bulgaria,” Milkov said. “But at the same time, I believe in the charity of the Americans. They have such a tradition of giving to people in need.”