Changing the World, One Smile at a Time
Bistra Ivanova’s wide, memorable smile is contagious. So is her enthusiasm to help others. Bistra is a human rights activist, social entrepreneur, idealist, integration expert, researcher, passionate reader, and lifelong learner… The list is long. Oh, and she also loves cooking. “I have never worked for a cause I do not find meaningful and I have never worked with people I dislike,” Bistra says. She cannot imagine working for a profitmaking organization, either.
Bistra greets me with an apology. She is wearing an oversized white t-shirt, probably her pajamas. “It has been such a crazy day; I have not had the chance to…” she laughs. She mentions nonchalantly that she has slept in her living room for the past few nights. When she starts explaining the reason, her face lights up with a smile: she has invited a Ukrainian mother with her two children to stay in her apartment in Sofia.
“We have been very busy amid the immigrant crisis with so many people coming from Ukraine,” Bistra says. She is the co-founder of Multi Kulti Collective — a non-profit organization that helps with refugees’ cultural integration in Bulgaria.
Bistra’s work and private life are intertwined or, rather, inseparable.
Throughout her 15-year-career, Bistra has worked on thousands of initiatives. The campaign that touched her the most was a crowdfunding initiative for a family that she loves dearly, Linda Awanis and Freddy Beniamin. They had been forced to leave everything behind in Iraq and flee to Bulgaria in 1994. On Dec. 19, 2020, they lost everything they had for the second time because their house burned down. Soon after, messages from friends and strangers filled up MultiKulti’s inbox. “The warmth and kindness were truly impressive, so much generosity and care! We worked for 14 hours a day and I was crying the whole time because it was so touching,” Bistra says. To her, the best thing about the initiative is that Linda and Freddy got to experience the love of their community.
Nothing is impossible for Bistra. “She always finds a way to help,” her friend Linda says, “I admire her strength.”
Bistra is a full-time social entrepreneur. When she has an idea, she uses her contagious enthusiasm to inspire people and make them participate. She is proud of having taken her boyfriend’s father to the gym, which no one in the family had thought was possible. “Not only did I take him to the gym, but I also made him take off his socks and do yoga for his toes,” she giggles.
Even though Linda, who is very close to Bistra, says she has never seen her upset, Bistra herself shares that a lot of things make her angry. She thinks it has to do with being Balkan. “Take, for example, my boyfriend, he is Belgian. Their mood is like that:” and she shows a flat line with her hand. “No emotions. But for us, Balkan people, it is always like tiri-diri-diri:” and she waves her hand up and down.
In a blog post from 2009, when she was studying for her Bachelor’s degree at Sofia University, she wrote about how much she loved life. That the world was an inherently good place with no evil in it and that she had 100 percent faith in humanity. Now, 13 years later, Bistra feels the same way. Sure, tragedies, human vices, and inequality exist. But Bistra has the exceptional ability to truly see past all the negativity. To witness it every day, to touch it and yet remain unaffected by it.
“I have this red bike, you might have seen it somewhere in my blog,” she laughs. She has had it since she was a child. “It had this little horn,” she imitates the sound “Paw paaawr!” One time she left the bike somewhere in the city. When she and her partner came back, the horn was gone. Her boyfriend then said, “Terrible people, someone stole it!” To which Bistra replied, “No, no, they did not steal it, they just took it.”
Bistra believes that there is a piece of God within every person in the world.
She sees people as humans, not as refugees, thieves, or whatever label society has glued to them, as Linda says.
Whenever she travels abroad, Bistra finds herself browsing through the children’s section of bookstores and buying colorful books in languages she does not speak. “I probably have thousands of them,” she says. “These books bring me back to when I was a child.” She finds magic in looking at the beautiful illustrations, not fully understanding the words, and having to imagine how the story goes. Bistra is a curious child in the body of a grown-up and she intends to stay that way.
“I live by the saying: if you see a hedge dog, put it in your pants,” Bistra says. Every time she feels uncomfortable at the thought of doing something, she takes this as a sign to go ahead and do it. “With age, you get more fearful and I have noticed that about myself,” she says. Looking back at all the places you have climbed as a child, you think that you would not do it again because you know the risks — of falling, breaking a bone, getting hurt. But to Bistra, challenging herself is the only way to grow.
She shares that when she was little, she used to go straight to the most extreme water slides at the aquapark. She did the same last summer. But when she got to the steep stairs, she felt fear. Bistra was ready to go back but then she told herself “Wait a minute, are you becoming a scaredy-cat?” Although she was terrified, she climbed the stairs and conquered the water slide. She felt proud.
Bistra is confident in saying that growth is her purpose in life; the movement to some endpoint or goal that goes farther every time you get close to it. “I am very critical of happiness,” she says. “It makes you feel satisfied and content and strips you of the strive to fight for change.”
Her life is marked by constant fights for change, both personal and social.
The dark side to being that socially active is that Bistra often neglects her closest people. “I rarely clean my house but I would clean up the trash in front of my apartment building any day.” She says she also tends to sabotage herself by taking up too many initiatives at the same time. Her biggest dream is for the day to have more than 24 hours so that she has the time to do everything she wants to.
Bistra remembers that as a child she used to organize initiatives to clean her neighborhood. Looking back, she acknowledges that she already had the drive for social activism. When she was in university, Bistra found a space that allowed her to put her enthusiasm to use. She heard about a volunteer position at the Open Society Institute and discovered a world of people who shared the same values as her and who truly cared about the world. Her tireless activism led her to win the Volunteer of the Year prize in 2011.
Bistra values education above all. She thinks that learning is what keeps humans alive. Throughout the years, she has taken numerous courses and has participated in many academies outside of her formal university education. The most recent summer school she attended was organized by the University of Oxford. “I want to continue getting educated until my very last day. I hope I will be healthy enough to never stop learning,” Bistra says.
Nadezhda is a journalism student at the American University in Bulgaria. She is deeply inspired by people like Bistra and believes that their stories have to be told.
