200,000 Workers Needed for Bulgaria’s Black Sea Coast as Labor Crisis Deepens
The Black Sea region in Bulgaria is facing a serious labor shortage ahead of the summer season
Do you remember the heart-rending story of a friend of mine, whom I watched giving up the fight for survival after three years of battling cancer?
As I read about voters in Massachusetts, expected to back next month terminally ill patients' right to an assisted suicide, the story came back to my mind with a vengeance. Sadly, even at the very end of her natural life, her suffering was not reduced.
The Bulgarian care pathway for the terminally ill, it turned out, "obliges" the patient to die within twenty days (spread over a period of six months). But if God refuses to take into the air your quiet breath, the misery drags on, more abominable than before.
My friend was forced to leave the hospital because she had consumed her quota for prolonging life artificially. She did not seem to mind as conditions there were more suitable for a horror movie.
Her life-support system was removed.
Relatives ruled out the option of abandoning her at the dubious hospice nearest to her town, but still far away from it and took her home. Just because nobody from the hospital took the trouble to spend a few minutes with them, they had no idea what may be in the cards in the next few days, what they can do and whom they can contact if she can't fly with her own wings.
This is exactly what happened and it was only with the aid of an extra-strong dose of life-shortening painkillers and sedatives – thanks to the knowledge and skills of no other than her sister, a pharmacist – that she passed away. No supervising or visiting doctor, no nurse.
In any other European country such an approach would be slammed as risky at best. Not to mention America.
Is it any wonder then that in Bulgaria the idea of helping the terminally ill to die, once a taboo, is now gaining support?
True, the same shift in public opinion is evident in most European countries and America too. But for very different reasons - belief in people's right to choose between life and death, more secular thinking, coverage of hard cases in the media. Still there are heated debates over concerns that legal, easy-to-get assisted suicide will have dire social and moral repercussions.
Dire however is the word that describes best Bulgaria's health care system. That must be the reason why the assisted suicide trend is spreading here too. But unlike the civilized world, in Bulgaria it is committed unofficially, with or without a doctor's help.
If we look at history, there are not many cases in which relations between Bulgaria and Russia at the state level were as bad as they are at the moment.
The term “Iron Curtain” was not coined by Winston Churchill, but it was he who turned it into one of the symbols of the latter part of the twentieth century by using it in his famous Fulton speech of 1946.
Hardly anything could be said in defense of the new government's ideological profile, which is quite blurry; at the same time much can be disputed about its future "pro-European" stance.
Look who is lurking again behind the corner – the tandem of Advent International and Deutsche Bank, respectively the buyer of the Bulgarian Telecom Company in 2004 and the advisor of the Bulgarian government in the sweetest deal of the past decade, seem t
We have seen many times this circus which is being played out during the entire week and it only shows one thing - there is no need of a caretaker government in Bulgaria.
You have certainly noticed how many times President Rosen Plevneliev used the phrase “a broad-minded person” referring to almost every member of his caretaker government.
Bulgaria's Perperikon: A European Counterpart to Peru's Machu Picchu
Bulgarians Among EU's Least Frequent Vacationers, Struggling with Affordability