Charity Doesn't Start at Home in Bulgaria

I have been following a more than interesting story about a kind-hearted Canadian woman and the support of an English Estate Agent in Yambol, who had the idea of exporting hot water bottles from Canada to Bulgaria. The reason for this was because she had seen the poverty of the old folk who suffer terribly from the severe cold of winter in Bulgaria. This was started many months ago with the plan to get them to Bulgaria before the start of winter.

The idea of hot water bottles was a very good one and on paper it was a simple exercise of collecting donations of hot water bottles and sending them on.

It is now mid winter here, it was –10 C last night and even more snow fell. We have no gas being pumped into Bulgaria from Russia and it is a very big struggle right now for everyone to combat the cold let alone the elderly. Never has there been a greater need for hot water bottles for the old and infirm in recent times. The hot water bottles are still not here, but tucked away in a storage point in Sofia Airport with customs officials refusing to release them on a ridicules Bulgarian bureaucratic whim, which basically involved trying to get as much money out of a charitable gesture.

There are two sites I'd like to you visit, one is Our Bulgarian World where the whole saga is logged on their forum. The other is www.novanite.com where a journalist has reported on the story. By the way, the journalist apparently know nothing about Bulgaria and it was alleged he didn't even know where it was on the world map!