After growing up in Bulgaria, Gergana Koleva came to the United States and was a graduate student at New York University. She later became editorial assistant to Marshall Loeb and personal finance reporter at Loeb’s Market Watch at Dow Jones when he was OPC president (2006 to 2008). Then she joined the OPC.
Gergana visited Haiti in 2005 and has just published an essay for the online journal, inthefray.org, in which “I survey the current and future situation in Haiti through the prism of my experience growing up in socialist Bulgaria.”
She wrote in part, “In the Haiti I saw, cynicism is rare, but a mischievous sense of self-deprecating irony is plentiful. It is born out of a tradition of hardship that has taught people to pat misery on the back and shake its hand for being a trustworthy companion. Ask a Haitian person how they’re doing, and you’re likely to hear a double entendre: “N’ap boule” — everything’s good — which literally means “we’re burning,” presumably because of the tropical climate there, but also due to an existence seared by an unceasing struggle for survival.
“What I discovered during that summer in Haiti and when I went back a few months later — beyond the disheartening realities of life and the people’s openhearted acceptance of them — was something I was completely unprepared for. In spite of the vast differences between the geopolitical, ethnic, temporal, and spiritual coordinates of this tiny Caribbean country and those of my only slightly larger European homeland, incredibly — almost illicitly — I felt that I’d come home.”
Koleva is a freelance journalist and lives in Queens, New York.