Working With Bulgarians For Bulgarians - And Happy To Do So

For an expatriate to work in Bulgaria it is common to assume that they are working for an expat owned company and therefore serving an expatriate community. I would say from experience that apart form the retired fraternity the vast majority of expatriates that come over here to make a living a re doing so on the profits out of other expatriates that are here or have plans to live here. It is a recently created economy in Bulgaria that is completely isolated from the real Bulgarian economy and to be quite honest is self destructed on the first sign of a recession.

The idea of coming over here and reaping profits from other expatriates is a plan that is doomed for failure. Only the poorest expatiates come to Bulgaria as a rule and they do so on a tight budget that doesn’t cater for services other than cheap Bulgarian prices even at inflated rates for expatriates.

Having worked for expatriate here a few years ago, Galia and I knew after a short time that this doesn’t work as greed and exploitation of our services at Bulgarian rates was taken advantage of and contract were not honoured on many occasion and we lost out financially. Basically we could not trust the expatriates that we worked with, moreover there was no one we could trust. So working away from expatriates was the only solution. We were only after an income for a basic living and as we knew right from start that this was the only way to live in Bulgaria.

So, I now work for a Bulgarian company catering for Balkan clients at a Bulgarian minimum wage and not an expatriate in sight. It is physical work and my workmates are all Bulgarians who don’t speak a word of English, but we work as Bulgarians do. You need to be here to know how they work of course. We sweat out a 45-hour a week and this really makes the weekends a real treat and relief. My hands are raw and sore from the manual work I am faced with, but somehow I feel the need for pain with work here, after all, all the other workers must have the same pains why should I feel sorry for myself and be the only one to complain?

The air of redundancy looms over us all the time here. Only yesterday two employees were shown their card die to lack of orders on the products we make, they were taken on after me as it is last in first out, I’m the next to go if this continues. We live on a knife-edge with our jobs here, but we are luckier than most who don’t have jobs.

For now we will work with and for Bulgarians at least you know where you stand with them. There have been lots of new experiences taken on board in this vocation something that I feel very fortunate to be a part of. I hope it continues for a while yet, but work could well end here at any time with the ways things are at the moment.