Actress Diana Handjieva wants to become a biology teacher in Uganda

20 Africans greet the Bulgarian woman with the Danube dance, a month later she cries at the parting

Since she was 15, actress Diana Handjieva has been dreaming of visiting Africa, but every time she finds some “stupid excuses” not to do so, as she says.

However, last month he finally set foot on the continent – first in Uganda. “It was the image of Africa as I always imagined it,” said the actress, known from the series “Dear Heirs.”

She leaves with all the fears caused by the shows she has watched about Africa. “I didn’t know how my body would react to the food there or the water, whether I would survive malaria if, God forbid, the sinful mosquito bit me,” explains Handjieva. In addition to these concerns, she must be very vigilant about high crime. “When we stop with the car at a traffic light, we raise the windows so that no one can pass quickly to pick up your phone.”

In fact, Diana decided to leave because of Daniel Delibashev, founder of the Smile for Africa Foundation. Now that she is in Bulgaria again, she is aware that if she had left alone, she would hardly have known exactly where to go and what to do. “Thanks to him, I was able to experience Africa and Uganda specifically not as a tourist, but as living there.” “I was on a trip with a cause” – this is how he describes his trip to the continent.

The two have known each other for 4 years and after Daniel found out about Handjieva’s ambitions to go to Africa and help there as much as she could, he invited her to go with him on each trip. The actress is leaving, ready to help Delibashev’s new project – to make dormitories in one of the schools for children who have nowhere to sleep. “I was ready with the gloves, the hammer and the nail,” she laughs.

However, he finds on the spot that he is doing something very important – to promote the life of Ugandans through social networks and to show how to deal with the troubles there. “I want Bulgarians to learn how to respond positively to life’s difficulties and not focus on the nasty, because that doesn’t change anything,” she said. She has already seen with her own eyes how the people there survive day by day and despite the great poverty they are not immersed in it.

The Uganda Children’s Center, where the actress spends most of her time, is somewhere between a study hall and a boarding house. But she’s not the only one helping the kids. He finds time to learn various musical instruments and dances, traditional for the locals. She even bought an adungu – a vaulted harp, on which she still practices. “Everything there is rhythm and energy,” she says. A great joy for the children were the rope and the elastic band that the actress brought them.

“The children in Uganda are the biggest suns I’ve ever seen,” Handjieva said. On the day of her arrival in the capital Kampala, they greeted her with traditional dances and music, singing Bulgarian songs. But the biggest surprise is the Danube Dance, which they play. Finally, 20 children rush to hug Diana without even knowing her. “It won me over so much that it was the hardest thing for me to break up with.”

On the first day, the actress gave her heart to three-year-old Roshana. The girl was smaller, not even smiling, but eventually became attached to Diana.

“Everyone in Africa wants to be educated,” she said, noting that many Ugandan children are willing to go to school, but rarely have the financial means to do so. Delibashev and I often go around the schools to see how the children are. When they arrive in one of them on the way to the town of Kabale, there is no teacher in one of the rooms and Diana takes on the role of teacher. She takes a biology class and clings to her head because the lesson she has to tell is about blood vessels and circulation. And she is afraid of blood. So he decided to show the children some gestures from the international sign language, which he has been studying for some time.

Many of the children in Uganda live in orphanages, the actress sees, but understands that there are also the happiest. “They focus on being alive, being dressed and having something to eat right now,” she said.

According to her, everyone in Uganda is looking for a way to survive. Some trade mainly in fruit, others raise goats and cows.

Uganda is divided into regions, and the actress was in the largest – Buganda, where the capital Kampala is located. Different languages ​​are spoken in each region, so Diana can boast that she has learned words from the “capital language”. Interestingly, offensive words are rarely used there. Even when biology studies human anatomy in school, English words for the genitals are used because they are considered offensive.

Some traditions typical of Uganda are quite strange for Handjieva. One of them is the circumcision ritual, as it is performed without anesthesia in front of the whole village, when a boy is ready to go home.

Handjieva is also shocked by the story of the island of Punishment, famous for the fact that pregnant women were exiled there. They were a disgrace to the family because they could not be sold as brides.

But perhaps the biggest shock for the actress is driving in the country. “You have to have eyes everywhere, be very careful and survive on the road,” she said, seeing a total of five traffic lights and two footpaths across Uganda. More scary, however, are the Boda Boda mopeds, which perform the function of taxis. “They stop at each other and get ahead of each other,” Handjieva explains, describing driving there as an amusement park.

The police were the most corrupt people. “There are cases when a policeman stops you for no reason and tells you to give him some money and you give it to him, because otherwise he will still find a reason to stop you.”

The Africa adventure for Diana ends in early March. She says she hasn’t cried in a long time, but when the time came to say goodbye, it happened. “At the first opportunity, when I have at least one month off, I go to Africa again,” she said.

“I can’t say that I’ve changed in the time I’ve spent there, but I already know the direction I want to go and think,” says Diana.

Now she is again dedicated to her profession and is rehearsing for the production of “Killer Flight”, which is a European project for the development of culture in smaller settlements.

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