Christmas and IST...

Donkey cart!

Trip to Kukes during the big snow, a truck fell off the edge and the backhoe just made a new road, although it took one hour for the Albanian men to decide what to do through arguing, and another hour to navigate the backhoe, ow Albania!

UNDP (United Nations Development Project) presentation for re-development of Rubik's industrial zone. We had a Czech consultant come to the Bashkia and help us brainstorm on how to develop the project.

First of all I wrote this in the middle of February but I plan to cover the last two months! My life here is, well, honestly pretty laid back. My day basically starts when I decide to get my butt out of bed. During the summer I was at work earlier but that is only because it was easier to get up, now it is so damn cold I need to pep myself up every morning to face my freezing apartment. Literally, tomatoes froze in my kitchen the other night! After I get up I usually have a bowl of cereal (I eat a German cereal called “shocko flakes,” which are like chocolate corn flakes and the only cereal they sell in Rubik), get dressed and then head down to café Mёriani (who is the rather fat, jovial, crossed eyed man who owns the café, and a really great guy). Almost every morning I have a makiato (a shot of espresso with a tablespoon of steamed milk) and sit either alone reading or with an Albanian, who is almost guaranteed to be an old man. I usually arrive to the Bashkia, unless I have a meeting, any time between 9am and 10:30am. The Bashkia opens at 8am and closes at 3:30pm every weekday but it is really hard to actually get any work done while I am there. There is no information office or person to tell the residents of the municipality where to find people or information so often people just barge into our office looking for someone. Also, the staff members of the municipality are constantly asking me to help them with some problem with their computers or on the internet. Don’t get me wrong, I am not complaining about this and I work at the Bashkia to help the staff learn about changes in technology, but if I have something I need to write, research, or just complete I don’t want to be interrupted every twenty minutes. On occasion, usually about two days a week, few staff members of the municipality are even in their offices so I can actually get work done while in the building. Usually my day starts with routine, but no day since I have been working at the municipality has gone the way I planned it. Some days I go in with a plan but end up in a meeting, helping on a project, working on a computer problem, or drinking raki with staff members. Someone had asked me what I do on a day to day basis; this is really the best I could come up with.

The weeks before Christmas were difficult. I was starting to get a little home sick and work was not what I expected it to be like when I first arrived to Albania in March, wow almost a year ago! I was kind of bummed that none of the projects I had been working on were moving ahead swiftly. At that time I was still waiting to hear back from the proposal I had written for BRASH (the environmental NGO in Rubik) and the other grants we wanted to apply for didn’t leave us enough time before they closed. This is only the second time in the last year that I have felt homesick, the other time I had a bit of a fever and my host family was not helping. They wanted me to get out of my warm bed and go into the other room where the wood stove is and where they all watch TV, while I just wanted to sleep in peace. They also fed me three greasy fried eggs with a mug of tea that had enough sugar in it to bake a cake! Needless to say, in the poor state of my stomach I think my host mom is the one who ended up suffering due to that meal choice, I won’t get into detail. Anyways, I was pretty homesick and I still wasn’t sure what my plans for Christmas and New Years were. It ended up that about two days before Christmas I went into to my Mayor’s office to wish him a happy Christmas and he invited me to spend Christmas Eve and day with him. On Christmas eve he called me around 4pm and told me he would pick me up at 6pm and that I should wear something nice because we were going to a house in Rasfik (a village in the Municipalities jurisdiction) and then to Mass. Mark is really hard to understand and even my program manager who is an Albania can’t understand his Shqip so the night started out a little weird. I honestly understood little about what he said on the phone except “brbrbrbrbrbr mass brbrbrbrbrbr nice clothes brbrbrbrbr Rasfik,” so I was relieved when I understood him and he picked me up. Mark’s daughter and wife live in Connecticut and Mark actually has a Green card. His daughter goes to college in America and he visits about once a year to keep his green card valid but doesn’t plan to move there until he is ready to retire. I thought this was strange at first, but I realized he is a mayor in Albania and an important figure in the Democratic Party. If he moved to America to be with his family he would have little choice for work and it definitely wouldn’t be as good of a job. Anyway, this is why we weren’t having dinner at his house. We went to a friend of his and ate a huge dinner, large plates of meat and locally grown and produced vegetables. I heard somewhere that it is tradition in this part of the world to have fish for Christmas Eve and that is just what we had. After about three hours of eating and drinking Raki we departed to head back to Rubik where Mass was being held at the 900 year old church that overlooks Rubik on a cliff. The community I live in is 98% Catholic and the only region in Albania that was never governed by Turkish law during the Ottoman Empire’s 500 some odd years that they occupied Albania. So, needless to say Christmas is a big deal in Rubik, second only to Dite e Shelbuemit (day of the ascension of Christ, 40 days after Easter, I think, not a theology scholar). Anyways, Mark and I are running a little late so he calls the nuns who live in our community and tells them to please wait until we arrive before they start the service. I thought this was just hilarious, because Mark and I were drinking Raki at his buddy’s house is reason for a religious event to be postponed twenty minutes, thankfully the nuns are some of the few people who don’t listen to Mark’s requests. When we arrive at the Church Mark, being the egomaniac he is, proceeds to pull all the way against the Church gate. I should be more specific, the Church sits atop a natural stone altar which acts as sort of a podium where the Church can view the entire city. The road that weaves its way up to the Church gate on this night is just bumper to bumper parked cars of people from around the area who actually made it to the service on time. Mark decided that since he was Mayor he would just navigate his way through all these cars until he was as close as mechanically possible to the church, I might had that he is also quite the portly man and loses his breath while eating too fast. When we finally park the car, we are now twenty minutes late, the service has already begun and there are people standing outside of the Church listening to the service from one speaker that is placed outside for this purpose. The Church itself was wall to wall people and most of them were standing due to the lack of seats. This does not stop Mark of course. He busts into the Church and with a wave of his finger has told two people to scoot over causing one older woman to stand in the aisle so Mark and I have a place to sit. I felt so bad but could not insist she remained seated due to the disturbance we had already caused. Just a side story, this has happened to me once before. The second month I lived in Rubik I went to Tirana for some R&R and grabbed a bus from Rubik that was just packed with people. The driver, who is from Rubik, noticed who I was and told a middle aged woman to give up her seat for me “out of respect for the American” he said. I adamantly refused the chair, the ride is two hours to Tirana and I am a young dude who would have no problem standing. She insisted and ended up grabbing the back of my arm and forcing me into the chair, she had obviously milked a few cows in her day because she almost broke my arm with her G.I. Joe Kung Fu grip. The women in this country are ridiculously strong! I of course was emasculated by this experience; firstly because growing up you are always told woman and elderly first and second because she literally tossed me into the seat and was about a foot shorter than me.

Back to Christmas Eve, the service lasted a good hour and one half, that is of course after we decided to arrive. I had never in my life been to a mid-night mass for Christmas in any language. Also, this was only my 3 Church service that I had ever experienced so I had no idea what was going on. The service was really beautiful and there was lots of singing, candles, standing, sitting, kneeling, and then standing again. When the service ended Mark and I stood around for a little while saying Happy Christmas and New Year to people and then walked back to his awkwardly parked car. This was nuts, everyone else was leaving at the same time and Mark just decided to honk his way through the traffic until we were free. I could have walked home faster. I should also add that Rubik can be walked end to end in less than 15 minutes at a slow pace. Why so many people drove to this service is beyond me. Albanians were not permitted to own or operate private motor vehicles until the fall of communism in the early 90’s, so this may be a reason people drive pretty much everywhere. Mark then dropped me off at my apartment but I did not go home. I noticed that almost the entire community was out walking, blowing off fireworks, and drinking in the cafes and locales. I decided I would have a beer to celebrate my first Christmas away from Tucson so I went to one of my favorite places, sat outside alone, and ordered a beer. When the waiter brought it out he said that one of the guys inside had bought it for me. I looked in and not recognizing the person thanked him and wished him a happy Christmas, (Gezuar Krishtlindjet). I sat there enjoying my beer, watching and eavesdropping on conversations around me, and just thinking how crazy it was that I just experienced something that only a handful of other westerns had ever experienced. When I finished my beer I got up to leave but was invited by a group of young men to sit and have another with. It turned out that they were all the same age as me but none were employed or in school. There were about 8 of them and most had worked in Greece or Italy as immigrant laborers to make their money and now were wasting it on me. I had a great time talking to these guys but realized really quickly why I spend most of my time hanging out with men two to three times my own age, maturity. I am not the most mature person. I get a good laugh from bathroom humor and still occasionally watch a cartoon or two. A huge problem in Albania right now is the education and lifestyle of its youth. Many kids do not take school seriously and for good reason. Imagine busting your ass for years to go to a college. Now imagine that college degree was only good in Albania were the unemployment rate is pushing 35%, last time I heard. Now you have spent all this time and effort with what to show for it, maybe a job serving coffee or possibly doing labor in a neighboring country. This is not to say that there are not well educated and motivated people in Albania, it is just getting less and less common, and some blame it on the new government, democracy. I am not giving an opinion or anything; this is just an observation of the country. Anyways I ended up staying up late with these guys discussing various issues with two of them who were actually fairly bright and ended up getting to bed around 5am. This is insane by the way, 5am in Rubik! This is the latest I have ever stayed out here, in America it is a different story on a weekend night, but my usual Albanian bedtime is around 8:30!!!! Going to bed so late and well lubricated I ended up sleeping through my dinner plans with Mark. I woke up around 4:30 in the afternoon on Christmas Day and was supposed to meet Mark to travel to another friend’s house for dinner around 4pm. O’well, I decided I would rather just stay home anyways and ended up eating Hormel Chilly that my mom had sent me in the last package for Christmas Dinner, it was actually awesome.

Since this time of year is pretty popular in Albania, of course no one showed up at the Bashkia. I decided I would head south to Elbasan and celebrate Seth’s birthday with him. On that note I am going to skip the next two weeks! (don’t worry, nothing bad just nothing interesting either)

Towards the end of January my group had its IST. (I am in group 12, the 32 people who came to Albania on March 17, 2009 and IST is In Service Training) To be honest I was not excited for IST. The last conference we had was the language refresher and that turned out to be a complete waste of time. About 5 days before I was going to leave for Durres where the IST was going to be held I received a phone call from my program director, Diana who is a really intelligent and kind Albanian woman. She asked me if I had finished my presentation that I was going to give during IST. I asked her “What presentation?” Apparently I had gotten an email about two weeks before this conversation asking me to prepare a presentation on GIS and issues pertaining to cartography in Albania. James, who is our Volunteer Action Committee representative for my sector had said that I would do it but like my director had only contacted me by internet. The internet in Rubik has been down since the middle of December. No problem though, this is Albania and sometimes things happen and you just have to deal with it. So I prepared a presentation, although half assed and from information a learned and tried to remember for college classes. The presentation actually turned out really good and my colleagues seemed to get a lot out of it so I will give it again to the incoming group. The rest of the conference went really well and we all learned a lot and shared ideas and information. After the IST a group of us went to Fushe Kruje for Alex’s birthday. Her quasi host family was throwing her a party and since I am good friends with the woman who was throwing the party, Teuta, I was asked to help. This is fine cause I actually do enjoy cooking and I get a kick out of Teuta and her family (çimi, her husband, and Bebe her daughter). Men in Albania do not help in the kitchen so çimi was teasing me while I helped slice vegetable and cook the two women. He was actually pretty funny. He doesn’t speak English and speaks a dialect that I am starting to understand. He kept saying that he was American because we had convinced him to smoke outside and other things that wouldn’t make since if I wrote them here. The night was really fun and we ate a boat load of food and drank a freight load of wine. Ow, right…during IST I also learned that my proposal for an Environmental Awareness campaign in Rubik was denied. Kind of a bummer, but such is life, things are up and down, cyclical!! It is a bit difficult finding funds for such a small community but we are going to look other places and possible send the same proposal again in May. Well it is not the end of March so I have effectively been writing this one entry for two months. It is getting harder and harder to think of interesting things to write as my service progresses. Every day things seem less and less weird to me, that is not to say things are still not weird. Everyday has its surprises and is exciting in its own. Okay, I am going to post this as soon as I can.