Interview with my old Math Teacher – Ms. Karnik

At age thirty- five, Ms. Karnik lives in California and can be found teaching Geometry or Algebra at Clark Magnet High School in La Cresenta. She is interviewed in her very own classroom at lunch time about her home country and what it was like growing up. Ms. Karnik was born in the country Bulgaria which at the time was under communistic ruling; she would play just like any other child in Bulgaria. Now she spends her time teaching kids how to do Geometry and he still has many of her family members still living in Bulgaria which is  now not under any communistic ruling. She says that if she could she would return back to her home country because even though communism was around all in all it still was a beautiful country.

I left Bulgaria when I was six years old in about the nineteen eighties and I went back there fourteen years later in nineteen ninety four and when I was their it was a beautiful beautiful experience it is  a beautiful country I mean there’s unbelievable mountains and beaches. The food is just delicious and most of the people are very nice but its obviously a poor country even the beaches which were pristine at some point I’m sure were covered in tar you know this petrol which washes up from the sea because there’s a lot of oil tankers that are you know digging drilling for oil in the black sea. Well al that due to you know unregulated procedures and um fish are dying because of the toxins and so its not uncommon for you to go to the beach and you have this like tar basically stuck to your feet on your way back.

I was very young so I have some vague memories while I was in Bulgaria the president at the time was Todor Zhivkov. The neighborhood that I lived in was pretty quite and most people are very well mannered and highly educated, but due to the communist regime a lot of people were very fearful of being abnormal. I think that their was a lot of mistrust among people in my neighborhood and because communism relies on sort of spying you never knew if your neighbor was watching you to see if you might say something anti government.

One other flaw that was about my neighborhood was that if somebody was a little bit more wealthy then anybody else it would be very noticeable and people would start watching and they would become very jealous. I remember when I was five I had a pair of brand new roller skates and I was playing with some friends and I just happened to walk away from the skates and they were in the lobby of our building and maybe a half hour later when I came back they were all gone.  And it wasn’t uncommon for neighbors to steal from each other when one wasn’t looking because there was an extreme neediness because people live with the bear bear minimum, but their was stuff lacking.

Their was so many things that were lacking and when it comes to you know going to the super market you take here for granted such as the meats, and vegetables that you can buy but when you live in a country where there is just a limited amount of everything and there is some thing that do not even get your country. And that then creates a huge desire in people so if someone has something that they don’t have of course there’s going to be some stealing and that’s how some of the laws were broken but of course you know it was done in a way that you know you can’t point fingers because if you point fingers then somebody’s going to point a finger at you.

The freedoms that were generally seen in a country like the United States were basically every body had freedoms to gather with their friends and relatives um but their were things that were lacking were you know that limited your lifestyle in the sense that like you can go to any different type of church you want to go to. In Bulgaria certain churches had been closed down like back in the fifties or maybe even before which you know twenty years before I was born. When communism was originally started in Bulgaria um a lot of churches were closed down and so if um my family wanted to say worship at an Armenian Christian church that was not available because they were all closed down.    

The main religion in Bulgaria was an Eastern Orthodox religion that they also practice in Greece and it’s just a different version of Christianity and if you were caught practicing another religion it was frowned upon. Also there was a lot of Turks from Turkey that had somehow immigrated to Bulgaria and there was a lot of like racism toward Muslims so anybody who was not full Bulgarian was looked at as a weirdo and you can tell by a persons last name that is it did not end in “ob” then that person was probably not Bulgarian.  And I think a lot of people changed their last names so that they could look like they were more part of the majority you know of the Bulgarians.

In Bulgaria freedom of speech was very very limited so in um in a communist society you basically um limited to accepting communism and anybody who accepts communism is given um the more loyal you are to the communist the more freedoms you have.  If you go to communist party meetings then at your job you get certain like benefits are given to you because you are one of them, so um freedom of speech was extremely limited. Basically there was a lot of like limitation of what information comes out of Bulgaria of what’s going on around the world. So everybody knew that you know that in America things were totally different in everybody’s mind you know America was like the big dream where everything was just wonderful. There was all this freedom but you didn’t hear much about what was going on and information and information on what was going on in Bulgaria wasn’t coming out either so the newspapers were very very limited on what they could print.

People tried many different ways of escaping from Bulgaria and some people ended up going to France or to Germany or to Italy. It was under the pretense that they were visiting relatives or going on a vacation and they never cam back. But when they left they left pretty much everything they own, all their relatives behind so you may like for an example to brothers they leave their Parents their um Cousins, Aunts, and Uncles but together they somehow manage to get across the border and they might make up reasons like they’re going to get across for a couple of weeks to do work they might go to Greece and they don’t come back. This was going on for decades since communism was uh started and even after communism fell like in the nineties when I visited in nineteen – ninety-four and things were a little bit more free but again financially the whole country was almost in a collapse I mean so many people were desperate for work.  Bulgaria is not very economically in debt but that’s what the country’s are like in present day two thousand and fives’ countries.

Interviewed by Walter Cano