Things I’m working on now

Some things I’ve been working on recently:

i. Background – I’m working in the municipal building in Nikopol, a city/town of 4,500 in North-central Bulgaria on the Danube river along the border with Romania. Nikopol is  the head municipality for 11,600 people in 13 surrounding villages.

1. Integrate into the Community – being friends with members of the community is the best way to a) make living here work well and b) understand how the town functions, and enlist help at a later date to accomplish projects.
2. Learn the language – it’s difficult work in an office setting without being fully able to communicate. Additionally, knowing job related words, such as ‘spreadsheet,’ ‘deficit’ and ‘indexed reference’ will be essential a bit later when I get on board with group projects.
3. Identify ways to be productive without complete Bulgarian language skills – this is actually very doable, given that a lot of tourists and web users have a basic understanding of English, and that tourism is something that could be expanded upon in Nikopol.
4. Tourism – Nikopol is right on the Danube river, and there are in fact tourist boats that stop in town, but the tourists don’t spend time here, as they immediately board buses to visit Pleven, a city of 80,000 people 45 minutes inland.

With the long term goal of increasing tourism in Nikopol, and the short term goal of being productive with minimal Bulgarian, I have set about trying to build web-presence for Nikopol. This includes the following two sites:

http://beautifulnikopol.wordpress.com/

http://hubavnikopol.wordpress.com/

as well as a social network campaign with an additional feeder blog to reach out to people and make connections in relevant fields [travel, nature parks, nature preservation, Bulgarian-Romanian culture alliances, etc].

Additionally, to spread the word regarding beautiful Nikopol, I have been reaching out to image hosting websites and uploading tagged, searchable pictures of Nikopol, with links to  http://beautifulnikopol.wordpress.com/ and http://hubavnikopol.wordpress.com/ to enhance search engine results.

By building web-presence now, tourists who Google ‘Nikopol’ before their tourist boats dock will have the chance to see what a beautiful town it is, and decide to spend an hour or two here for a coffee, or to see some of the local historical landmarks.

In combination with hard investments over the winter, as well as networking with people connected to the tourist boats in town, hopefully we can entice tourists to take advantage of all that Beautiful Nikopol has to offer, and increase everyones net well bing in the process.

5. Coaching girls [and sometimes] guys basketball – we have practices twice a week, and we had a tournament at our town holiday a few weekends ago. The previous volunteer did the hard work of getting this program setup, so on my end, it’s good because I don’t have to set it up, but at the same time, it’s already set up, and they love it, so I have to just jump right in. It’s been great.

[In case you hadn't noticed, this piece is full of links... that's not an accident].