Well I am going to attempt to cover what I have been doing since Halloween, abridged. I am writing the majority of this entry on December 29, 2009. Following Halloween things at work really began to slow down. I was so excited to start doing some actual projects but between Halloween and Thanksgiving I didn’t do too much. It is actually hard to remember since time seems to go by so quickly here. Basically I spent my days going into the office, helping here and there with computer questions, and then on Tuesdays and Thursdays I teach a computer class at the cultural center to about 8 students from ages 14-40, but with patience comes opportunity! A few days before Thanksgiving I received a call from the director of the high school in Rreshen (Rreshen is about twenty minutes north-east of Rubik and is the prominent city in Mirdita) and is also the director of the only Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) in Rubik. I had met him several times before and he acted as the host family for the previous Volunteer in Rubik, Chuck. The next day we met for coffee which developed into a three hour brainstorming session. It turned out that Nik had recently resigned from the director of the High School in Rreshen in order to pursue ventures with his NGO, Regional Environmental Board of Albania or Bordi Rajonal Ambjentist Shqiptare. He was ready to start working on projects immediately so following our meeting where he described and showed me some of the projects he had already completed in Rubik, I went to the office so I could start looking for possible funders for some of the projects we had in mind. In case who ever may be reading this isn’t aware of what an NGO is I will explain. Most NGOs receive their funding from donors, either regularly or irregularly. Some NGOs have a consistent donor or receive funds from one source periodically that they apply for on a regular basis, say every other year. Other NGOs receive funds based on specific projects and are constantly looking for the next possible donor. Nik’s NGO would be in the later category. Anyway, I found several funding opportunities from Peace Corps resources, contacts I have made (see just sitting around at cafes and talking in Albania is useful at some point), and websites. Then I just had to adapt the ideas that I already had to fit the specific format and sector the grant was for. It took another week before I saw Nik, such are things in Albania.
I will get back to describing actual work in a bit, but I figure I should keep this thing as chronological as possible, mostly for my own benefit. We decided to spend Thanksgiving in Fushe Kruje, where Alex lives and is about 30min outside of Tirane. The embassy and other American families who live in the capital also host volunteers at their homes for Thanksgiving but I personally rather spend a holiday that is important to my family back home with close friends. So about 15 people, 11 PCVs and a family of 4 Albanians, planned on going to Alex’s house. We began preparing for Thanksgiving far ahead of time so we could ask our families back home to send ingredients that cannot be found in Albania such as; brown sugar, yams, Stove-Top Stuffing, cranberry sauce, pumpkin pie mix, and several other things. I wasn’t interested in any of this because I assigned myself to acquiring and preparing the live Turkey. So on Wednesday morning after vigorous studies of how to kill and gut a live turkey I traveled to Tirane to purchase the fowl. Chuck lives in Tirane currently so I had him find a merchant. We met and had a café and then went to the Tirane market where we met the guy who raises turkeys. We both had no idea what we were looking for when buying a turkey but I had seen other people buy chickens and I remembered what they did to inspect the thing. Of course I didn’t know what I was looking for I went through the motions in hopes of not getting ripped off. I blew on the feathers to look at the skin, no weird looking fungus so I figured it was good. I then held the thing by the feet and bobbed it up and down like I really knew how heavy 8.5 kilos feels like, inspected the feet, head, wings, and yes the pooper. We decided to buy it but were both nervous on how many people this thing would feed and if the guy meant 8.5 kilos of meat or actual weight. So we bought it, 5500 lek (about 55 usd), sounds expensive right. So Chuck went back to finish up on some work he was doing and I walked the twenty minutes back to the F. Kruje furgon station. On the way I passed several Albanians who asked me how much I paid and where I bought the fowl. I would say about half of them said I paid too much but in Albania everyone has an opinion and when it is about price they always say you paid too much. When I got to the furgons, the driver who is an off duty police officer told me that I got a good bird for a good price and the 8 old men standing around the area agreed. That is one of the things I really enjoy about this country, every experience is interesting. I have never bought something in America where I was stopped on the street more than 10 times, in the capital city of nearly 1 million people mind you, by complete strangers to inquire about my purchase. During the ride back to FK the driver proceeded to tell everyone in the van that I was an American who was celebrating thanksgiving and that I bought a turkey and was going to kill it myself. Everyone, about 12 people cram into one of these furgons, had advice or a relative that lived abroad that they wanted to tell me about. That is something that gets slightly old after a while. I realize that I am from abroad, but that doesn’t mean that I care that some stranger who I sit next to on a bus has a relative who lives in Holland or Greece. Sometimes people even ask me if I know their son who lives in Detroit. It is pretty funny. Albania is a small country and it is not uncommon to know friends of friends and it is hard to explain how truly large and vast America is.
Anyway, I got back to FK where we waited for everyone to arrive back from gathering supplies or from their respected sites who wanted to observe the slaughter. Of course we all needed a bit of lubrication before we slaughter a living creature. Following adequate, um, preparation we put the pot of water on to boil and gathered the supplies outside. Rachel, Alex, and Jenifer readied their cameras and cocktails while I gave Seth directions and retrieved the Turkey. We set up a chopping block a.k.a. a piece of fire wood and Seth held the body of the good girl while I held the head with one hand and the archaic meat cleaver with the other. Supposedly the person we had borrowed the knife from had just sharpened it before they dropped it off but I have my suspicions. With the first strike I came down as hard as I could but didn’t make it through the neck bone, at the first sound of the knife hitting the body Seth spazed out and released the body of the not quite dead turkey. The body of the fowl began to flail like a, well, a turkey with half its head cut off! I still had the turkey’s head in one hand and quickly dropped the knife so I could get a hold of the body. After a few choice words, none of which I would ever write on something my mom reads, and more directions directed at Seth we got the bird back in position. During this little debacle, Alex’s Albanian neighbors were watching us with distained amusement while Alex, Jenifer, and Rachel were making distraught noises, filming, and taking pictures. Just a little side note, in Albania a man would not be caught dead doing women’s work like slaughtering something as small as a bird, especially while women just watched. This must have been quite the spectacle for our audience. Back to the slaughter, I instructed Seth not to let go of the bird until I said it was okay and then, with warning, I struck the bird not once, twice, or three times, but five more times as hard as I could to finally get the head off! Then, as I had read on the internet, I held the bird by the legs and let the blood drain from its body. This took about a minute and a half for the bird to quit flapping its wings and flailing about. The water wasn’t done boiling yet so we made fun of Seth for freaking out and inquired to the Albanian onlookers for my performance evaluation. During this I realized that in the excitement I had cut my thumb, not bad but I didn’t realize it right away due to the copious amounts of blood on my hands, jeans, and shoes. Jenifer, being the health volunteer that she is, was recruited to bandage me up but due to the trauma of the turkey death and all the blood, the usual vegetarian, could not complete the task so Alex took care of my hand. This was a hilarious twenty minute span that started with Jenifer having no problem and ended in her crying in remorse for the turkey. I will repeat, Rachel and Jenifer are vegetarians on every other day but since I was actually killing the turkey they renounced for the occasion. The rest I relatively uneventful, the water that was put onto boil earlier was now brought outside. I took the turkey and lightly scolded the skin for a second or two on each side. This, I read online, is so the feathers are easily removed and sure enough they were. This is where the internet isn’t too good on describing what to do next. All of the feathers were no removed and I had lit a small fire and burnt the remaining small hairs from the body and it was now time to clean out the internals of the turkey. We sat there in Alex’s front yard discussing what we thought the best method was, I had read online that we should be extra careful not to break a gland near the anus that would release a substance! After a few minutes of discussion the neighbor came over to see what all the laughing was about and possibly to see why I kept saying “anus gland” over and over again, although she doesn’t speak a lick of English. She came over and explained it to me and said our knife wasn’t good enough so she went and got her own. She then observed my first attempt and with obvious discontent, took the knife and began to clean the turkey. She had no hesitation and was talking to us the whole time barely looking at what she was doing, she didn’t even take off her wedding ring, I think she had done it before! It was really interesting how she did it and I will have no problem next year. I insisted that I wanted to take out the heart and lungs so I dug in and it was really weird pulling a warm heart, stomach, and lungs from a newly dead animal. The stomach still had food inside of it. That night we bade a brine to marinate the turkey in from oranges, lemons and spices which we soaked the bird in overnight.
Thanksgiving morning Seth, James, and I traveled to Tirane for the embassy flag football game. That was really fun. I hadn’t ran for some time and it was great to go and network with U.S. mission in Albania workers (embassy employees, Peace Corps volunteers, Marines, and USAID staff). We played for about two hours and I was exhausted at the end of the game, I didn’t realize how much I missed running around and playing football. After the game we went back to Fushe Kruje and I helped finish preparing food, gathering beer and wine at various places (there were 15 of us and finding enough drinks is difficult so we had to go to several stores), and meeting people at the autostrada in order to show them where Alex lives. After everyone arrived we ate! No offense to my Grandmother, Mom, and Aunts who usually prepare our turkey but this was the best tasting bird I have ever had in my life! It must have been because the thing was never frozen and really couldn’t get much fresher. It is amazing what difference I naturally grown and slaughtered turkey can have on flavor. The thing was so juicy and tender, aw, it was amazing. Everyone agreed that it was one of the best meals we had had since arriving in Albania and by far the best turkey we had ever tasted. The night was great.
Since small bajram was on the same weekend, the country was on vacation as well so I didn’t have to go to work for a week! I spent most of the time in Fushe Kruje and when I got back to Rubik I immediately began work on a grant that I was writing on behalf of Nik and his NGO. Nik and I met on the Tuesday following Thanksgiving and began hammering out the game plan for the grant, budget, timeline, list of activities, etc. Since the grant had to be submitted in English, I wrote it. This is the first time I had ever written a project (we wrote a project in PST but it wasn’t ever going to be submitted to anyone and was just for practice) and it was not the easiest format. The grant took me about a week and a half to gather information and write and the day before the proposal was due I met Nik in Tirane to finish the details for the budget. Nik is an excellent collaborator but he is still Albanian and their unofficial motto that Nik likes to joke about is “if you wait till the last minute to complete something, it only takes a minute to complete.” Not my philosophy in the least when it comes to something I am passionate about. The budget and final details took us almost 7 hours to complete and just as I was reviewing the plan I asked Nik for the documents I had asked him to gather for submission (tax documents, NGO registration, bank information, and his CV). He only had about half of the documents and said it would take him a few days to get all of the information. My stomach dropped, I had spent the last two weeks working on this project and worrying about what I was missing or if I had worded it correctly and he had forgotten to get documents that were required for submission of the proposal! Good thing I had spoken to the Albanian director of the foundation where we were submitting the proposal and Nik called him and told him the situation. Luckily they weren’t actually sending the documents to the U.K. until the end of the week for the committee to review them so he said we could turn in the project by the due date, the next day, and the NGO documents could be submitted by Thursday. Phew! This is how Albania works sometimes. I could never imagine that in a developed country that if you didn’t turn in all required information to be considered for funding, it is a competition, that they would not just throw out your proposal. I really hope that is not what they did but I will not find out until April 15 at the latest. Thankfully, Nik and I went to an Environmental conference on Thursday of that week so we were already in town and Nik submitted the documents no problem. The conference was also really interesting although it was all in Shqip and I understood about half of it, I had a chance to meet some influential people in the sector. Ow, I’d rather not talk anymore about the grant or what I even wrote it for until I receive the results, don’t want to jinx it, I will say it is an environmental education, cleanup, and tree planting project that had a relatively low budget of about 8,000 Euros.
The Friday after the conference I headed up to Kukes, northern Albania, to visit the Maytons (James and Jennifer) and Erwin. It had snowed a few days before up there and the road was nuts. I took a bus cause I figured it may be safer and the normally 4 hour trip took about 6 hours. The road was covered in snow and was slightly scary but it was a beautiful ride and I made it no problem, the ride home was a little different. My plan on the way home was to leave Kukes on the 7am bus and arrive in Lezhe in order to find a fugon to Rubik around 2pm or so. About two hours out of Kukes we were stopped for about two hours. I truck from Turkey, everyone blamed his bad driving because he was a “Turk,” had taken a turn to tight and the cargo area of his semi had fallen halfway off of the turn. Another truck had attempted to pass him and ran out of room on the front side of the Turk and was stuck up against the mountain incline in mud and snow. The first hour was passed by various onlookers coming from both directions getting out of their cars and giving the group of men already gathered their two cents about what to do to alleviate the problem. I just stood there and watched the comedic scene in front of me, there was a group of about 25 men who didn’t know each other and were just bystanders but felt they could somehow help. They argued for an hour before someone who was there the entire time unloaded a back hoe from a truck and just pushed the second truck out of the way. He then proceeded to widen the road on his own! He just took out huge portions of the mountain, and flattened it until there was enough room for one lane of traffic to drive around the Turkish vehicle. I was cracking up, who just makes their own widened road, no police ever came or road workers. Aw, I love this country! We eventually made our way around the accident and I arrived in Lezhe around 4pm. I had a significant problem though. My battery on my phone had died and I had two choices; continue on the bus to Tirane and stay at Chuck’s house where I have a key, or stop in Lezhe and try to get the last furgon back to Rubik. I decided on the latter, probably a bad decision but o’well. I couldn’t get a ride to Rubik so I went to a café to asses my options. I had forgotten where all three of the Lezhe volunteers lived so I asked a group of kids if I could use the battery in their phone, there are basically only two to three different batteries for phones in Albania. I called Peter and ended up staying with him that night. Travel in Albania, I was exhausted but only slightly worried about the situation. Even when you are stranded there is always an option. My second choice would have been to go to the bar where I know the owners brother and ask if I could stay with them for the night, not a weird request in Albania by the way and they would be happy to host an American friend who lives in Rubik! I have not been very good about updating this blog but my internet was out for the second half of December and the first half of January. I currently have internet, although it isn’t working well. I will hopefully post a new blog soon about what I did for Christmas, the New Year, In Service Training and good/bad news about projects. Hope everyone I well and Happy New Year.
