AAAAHH, Summer!

Korca Beer Fest in the rain, glad I came prepared! (Tyler, Alex, Phoebe, Myself)

Wedding in Miredite (Rubik Tourism Day)

View from Beach camp

Wedding in Miredite

Rubik, My site

Staff of Youth Volunteerism Project

July 17-September 1, 2009

Pushime is the all encompassing word for a nap, a weekend, vacation, or basically anything that requires no work. Albanians love it and take it extremely seriously; I think this is a good thing in a certain respect. I will start with the end of my last blog. The last time I wrote on this thing I had just finished visiting a small village that is very old (hence the name katund i vjeter, old village) and was actually on a main trading route during the Middle Ages. The next day after my trip to Katund i Vjeter I was given several documents that had been prepared by my counterpart and were then translated by the one English speaker in my Bashkia who is the English translator. Schools in Albania do not teach students how to write professionally, critically, or even creatively. I have met countless Shqiptares who have finished three to five years (they call it the Belgian system, I don’t really know what that means) and have never written a paper with entirely self generated content. The longest paper that a person with a “master’s degree” had written was 7 pages long and she admittedly had taken a good portion of it from resources. Plagiarism is also a huge issue in the schools here. Anyway, the documents required a large amount of, I will say, adjustment before they were sent out. The documents were invitations and itineraries for foreign guests at a Tourism Day the Bashkia of Rubik was planning for the following weekend. The event was funded by the French embassy in order to stimulate and advertise touristic amenities in the municipality of Rubik (that’s where I live if you don’t remember). The documents that I was to “adjust” were given to me on Thursday, July 16 and I returned them to my counterpart on Friday. The invitations for the event were sent out via only email on Monday, July 20^th for an event that was taking place on Saturday, July 25^th. If you follow, that means that during the summer in Albania, during the first weeks of serious pushime, my bashkia sent out invitations for an event that had been in planning since before I was in Albania 5 days before the event took place. This is a great example of Albanian culture in the workplace, especially in government. We sent an invitation to various international entities including the French, Dutch, Swiss, Austrian, and American embassies, along with the Peace Corps. SDC (the Swiss equivalent of USAID) was the only foreign organization that came to the event. The rest of the participants were people from the area and surrounding areas, not the point of the event. The French, who paid for the day, did not even come to the event. This is just one small problem that occurred during the planning of the event that I hope not allow to happen next year when I will hopefully have a bigger hand in the process. Other than a long list of suggestions that I have for the Bashkia the day was excellent. The day included visiting various points of interest in the Municipality including Vele; a beautiful and natural looking village with a interesting church, Rubik; which consisted of driving through the main street and then riding up to the 950yr old church, then giving a briefing on its history and significance, and finally finishing in Katund i Vjeter for a lunch and mach Mirditan (I live in the region of Mirdita) wedding. The drive is on village roads so we took a caravan of “Relly Albania” (pronounced Rally) 4x4 vehicles which was great and the participants really enjoyed it. The lunch was fantastic and the wedding was also great, although I had problems that I will discuss with the Bashkia about the presentation of these items to foreigners. The day after the event I traveled south to Pogradec, a city on Lake Ohrid near the border with Macedonia, for Connie’s 60^th birthday. Connie was in my training group and I think I have mentioned that during the training my group became fairly close. I met Alex and Rachel (also in my training group, Seth canceled last minute due to a bowel issue) in Pogradec and we went to the beach, cooked Connie dinner and then took her out for music and dancing. Pogradec is beautiful, and during the summer it is fairly crowded with tourists from Macedonia and Albanians who normally live in other places in the world. We met and made friends with many Albanians who currently live in the United States and are home for the summer to visit family. The weekend was great except for one incident with a middle aged Albanian man that I won’t get into. I returned to Rubik where work was even slower than before I had left. My counterpart and Mayor were basically M.I.A. for the remainder of the month and all of August. In fact I just saw my counterpart today, he just returned from France where he participated in a Cultural integration event with various other countries, who told me that I am off for the rest of August and that I can choose whether to come to the office or not but he will not be there. Luckily I am still working a couple of days a week on a Youth volunteerism project with World Vision, UNV, CAAP, and Ndrryshimi Fillon Nga Ty (translates to change begins with you, it is a NGO started by the 2008 winner of Big Brother Albania named Arber who used his winnings to start a non-profit to encourage youth to volunteer throughout Albania). The goal of the project is to recruit several groups of youth in three regions in northern Albania and training the youth on what volunteering is, the benefits, the costs, and finally how to change their community through a project. The youth will be assisted in writing a proposal for funding that will be presented to a panel of their peers during a “Grant Event” that we are also in the process of planning. The project is a great idea and is concentrated on three regions; Shkoder, which is the 3^rd or 4^th largest city in the country depending on who you ask, Lezhe, which is also a fairly large city on the beach, and the region I am helping with which is Kurbin and consists mostly of small villages and a few towns. The youth groups I have been helping to arrange and train are in Milot and Frushe Kruje, about a 20min and 45min ride, respectively, from my town. My primary group is in Milot and we had one of our last meetings before the event yesterday where we planned to decide on a project and begin writing the proposal. I had prepared methods on how to engage the youth and determine which project would be best for their community and the available budget, I had also called Arber (who is a big celebrity in Albania) to join the meeting, youth are usually more motivated and focused when he is around and he would translate for me. We waited an hour and a half drinking coffee with Arber and his father (who is a former Albanian Ambassador to Cuba, Mexico, and Italy) and no one showed up, one week before the event and no group, at least I am not a complete failure, I did help with the planning of the project and grant event (I will also attend the grant event as staff).

After Pogradec, I hung out in my site for a while but became very bored. During the summer months Rubik is even more less-populous than it normally is. This town is smaller than the High School I graduated from. Due to the utter lack of work we planned to go camping at a beach. Chuck, the guy who I took over for and who has decided he likes Albania so much that he extended a third year, Alex and Myself went camping on a beach north of Shingjin and south of Velipoja. The place was absolutely gorgeous except for the trash that had washed up on the shore (the beach was in between two rivers that both flow from northern cities and carry trash with them). We were almost alone during the day and completely isolated during the night. I will try to attach pictures to this entry. We sat there on the beach and thought, so this is Peace Corps huh? Don’t get me wrong there are a great many of difficulties that we all face each day but this is not what I thought it was going to be like, no better and no worse, just different.

So I am convinced that many people in Rubik think I am quite strange. I cook for myself, wash my clothes in a bucket (almost everyone here has a washing machine but no dryer), enjoy running and sometimes walk great distances just to sleep outside on the ground. My favorite part about living in such a small town and being one of two distinguishable outsiders is the rumors. Due to the difficulties of traveling in this county and the restrictions put on PCVs for safety reasons we all sleep on the couch of fellow volunteers fairly frequently. Combined with the fact that I have a female site mate some people in my town have come to the conclusion that I am sleeping with all of them. Not necessarily a bad thing as far as culture for a male to be accused of, but still extremely false and ridiculous. Chuck had heard from a neighbor of mine that I stay up very late at night, he mentioned I wasn’t loud or disruptive just that he had noticed. Why would you tell someone that? Who cares? About a week ago I was having a drink with an Albanian friend and another PCV at a locale on the opposite side of town from me, about a 4 min walk, and after we departed we decided to have one more beer before we went to bed at another locale next to my palati (apartment). My Albanian friend somehow heard that we were at this locale after we had left him and he proceeded to interrogate me on why we didn’t want to drink that other beer with him. It was nothing against him, we just thought the night was over, 9pm, but decided last minute when we saw another locale was still open. How he heard about this is beyond me, but this is a small place and I kind of stand out. There have been things recently that either reminds me how much I love this country or how happy I am that I am only here for two years!

Korça Beer Fest. I guess it was two weeks ago, we went south to Korça for their third annual beer festival. The festivities started on Thursday and lasted until Sunday but I only stayed until Saturday because I had a meeting with my youth in Milot (who didn’t show up by the way). The festival is like a mini-October fest with music, food, and yes BEER. Korça brewery makes two kinds of beer; i bardh and i zeze (blonde and dark) and is by far the best quality beer in the country. They had live bands that played mostly covered American pop music from the 90’s and before, IT WAS GREAT. The PCVs from the group before mine had a mid-service training in Korça that same week so it was really good to get to know other PCVs that were not in training with me and talk about projects (failed and successful) that they have done in their first year. The first two nights of the fest I slept on the floor of a volunteer’s hotel room and the third night about 5 people in my group camped on a hill behind the fest. Although it seems like I have very little work to do, most of the group 11 volunteers say they didn’t have any work their first six months, none. After the fest I headed back to Rubik for a night and then to Milot the next day where no one showed up for our meeting, this is when I had coffee with Arber and his father. This was a Monday and I made some calls to support in the area who arranged another meeting with different youth from before for that Friday, only three guys showed up. Due to the fact that only three young men were slightly interested and the proposal would have been due in two days we decided to thank them and scrap Milot from the project. It was a huge bummer and a shame for the community who really could have used the money and the rest of the benefits that go along with volunteers.

The Gant Event. Tuesday was the Grant Event. Even though I didn’t have a group who would be presenting I did help with the planning of the project as a whole and I was helping to chaperon the 150 youth that attended, so I went to the event. The day was great and I wasn’t completely useless. One of the presentations from Lezhe could not load their presentation properly and no one could figure out why their pictures would not load either. So, with about 15min before the presentations started I got everything in order and their presentation turned out to be one of the most logically organized of the group. The presentations were in the morning, then we took a bus up the coast to Shingjin were there was to be a beach party and the award presentations. We had lunch and then some activities for the youth to participate in. Albanians can dance for hours and have the best time doing it. I danced for a little while and then noticed some of the younger boys were not interested at all, possibly a little shy, so along with another PCV we took them to the beach and played futbol (soccer). The day was a lot of fun and considering that we had 150 youth participate and only about 20 people for staff on a crowded beach, the day went extremely well. We decided in preliminary meetings that we would operate the tutorials in a way that it would seem that the money would be given only to groups that presented a well organized and thought out proposal but in reality we planned to fund all projects in a TBD (money wise) sort of way. What I mean, is that on Tuesday of next week we are going to meet again to look at the proposals and try to shave off some of the budget in each proposal for things that they either don’t need or could possibly find somewhere else, limiting each project to about $1500.

Other than that I am still just working on the Bunker Trails project and we are slowly putting things together to make the site more functional and increase the inventory of hikes, which only has one posted so far. We now have a tentative agenda on hikes that we are going to do in the next two months. This weekend I am going on a camping trip with a fairly large group of PCVs, they do it every year in Puke (pronounced pook-ah) and it is kind of the end of summer trip. Hopefully work will start to flow in within a few weeks. Hope everyone is doing fine and feel free to shoot me an e-mail anytime, I love to hear from the other side of the world. Owe and HAPPY BIRTHDAY MOM (Urime Ditelindje)! Shi femi!