‘Tomorrow Starts as of Today’ was the slogan, carrying the spirit of the first years after the 1989 fall of the communist totalitarian regime in Bulgaria. Despite the tough path towards democracy Nevena Mitropolitska could never picture a life abroad… till early 1997, when the Bulgarians once again faced hyperinflation. “I had my hopes, but at one point we said to ourselves: ‘It’s no use anymore!’’, Nevena says. Today she and her husband live in Quebec, Canada with their four children. She wouldn’t dare to have four in Bulgaria, she says with a smile – she would have stopped at No 3. What is the difference between the Canadian policy for birth rate stimulation and the Bulgarian one?

“The child benefits of the Quebec Province are quite generous. However, the help for families in need and also for ones that do not need it that much is real and not only limited to those benefits. More school money is granted in areas with higher concentration of poverty. Kids there may go to school earlier, as unlike kindergartens, studying there is free. When the parents don’t have the qualities to pay attention to their children, the latter receive that compensation. It turns out that the parents’ intellect is the major factor for a child’s welfare – it is the thing that is hardest to compensate. No matter how much money you pour into a poor family, it cannot compensate for the fact that the parents do not pay attention to their children. That is what the system tries to repair,” Nevena says.

Today Nevena shares her life between Bulgaria and Canada: “I do like this travel between two worlds so different, alongside the fact that I live in both simultaneously. If my physical body is in one of them, my mind is in the other. I come to Bulgaria every year and I follow the latest updates in its political and cultural life.”

Nevena studied Russian philology in Bulgaria, but in Canada she graduated library science. Now on Sundays she works with the Bulgarian library at the Sveti Ivan Rilski Bulgarian Orthodox Church in Montreal. Her love for books has its history and she is one of the initiators of the library’s establishment, where Bulgarians donate books. Nevena is also tempted by writing. On Canadian soil she wrote her Anna and The Mountain novel. The plot begins in 1989 and seizes 19 years of transition. It represents the life strategies of the Bulgarians for survival, but the events come as background only to the psychological view towards the period. Is there anything left untold from the transition period, we ask:

“It is tough to sum up about the transition period. It is good to see the different angles. My book is based on my personal experience. That period has thousands of faces, may more of those come up…”

However, why does the average Bulgarian stick to one point of view only?

“When I arrived to Canada I had that attitude: that there was only one ‘right’ way to do things and that anything else was wrong. We needed time to find out that there were so many ways for people to live, to be useful and that there was no point in restricting it all to one of them only.”

Nevena says that the Bulgarians in Quebec are some 8,500 people who live together as a community with lots of mutual support. Theatre troupes, rock and pop bands often visit the place. The church mentioned above is a huge building, bought by all Bulgarians there. It is the focal point of Montreal’s Bulgarian social life – with regular church services, a Sunday school, folk dancing courses or free charity lunches. The money collected this way goes for the church or for families in need.

English version: Zhivko Stanchev