Wednesday, August 12, 2015

Inequality got your goat?

Everyone is poor in Bulgaria, even the German immigrants;
A self-described shaman who discovered the healing powers of herbs while seeing visions on his sickbed; a former consultant for IBM who ditched PowerPoint presentations to drive across Africa and an artist from Luxembourg who is a qualified plumber.

They are among a group of 22 people newly settled in the crumbling village of Odrintsi in southeastern Bulgaria where they live without electricity, but with 230 goats.
If you add the five Bulgarians who were left in the village there are still almost ten times as many goats as people. Because the Bulgarians themselves migrate to richer parts of Europe, abandoning villages like Odrintsi.
Its deserted feel is increasingly common in Bulgaria, the European Union's poorest member state, where the number of villages with a population below five people has jumped to 268 in 2014 from 184 a decade earlier. Bulgaria's population over the same period fell to 7.2 million from 7.8 million.
But they're more equal!

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