Thanksgiving and what not!

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.

Thanksgiving, I tried to leave out the graphic pictures!

Albanian neighbor helping me take out the insides, the part I wasn't so sure about?

Turkey: No head.

Seth holding the turkey before he spazed out!

Turkey: with head, 8.5 kilos

Weather, Makedonja (how they spell it in shqip), and Halloween.

Desert Rat, not anymore! I have never seen so much rain, wait…let me rephrase, water in my entire 23 years. Not to say that 23 years is a long time or that I have had much experience (more precisely, zero experience) living in climates other than the Sonoran Desert, but it rains a $h!t ton in Albania! I know most people who read this realize my situation but for those of you are just perusing the interwebs, I am from Tucson, Arizona where rainfall is a seasonal “phenomenon” we call monsoons and only lasts, if we are lucky, up to three months. I have never owned an umbrella before I came to Albania and I am almost positive no one in my immediate family even knows where to buy such a contraption. Anyways, it rains a lot here and I just love it. I am tired of the sun, blasphemy I know, and couldn’t be happier about the Mediterranean weather in winter. There are a few drawbacks to such fantastic weather. First, I wash my clothes by hand so I can only bring myself to expend enough effort for about one load per day (which translates to about half of a one gallon bucket). In the rainy season (which I am told lasts from about mid-October until the end of February) it takes my clothes about 5 days to dry completely. This means that I haven’t been washing my clothes frequently. Not a huge problem (and understand I live in a less-developed country) because I wear most of what I own until the garment can move on its own, excluding socks and skibies of course. I am mostly kidding here by the way, mostly kidding! Second, I have had basically a consistent cold. I enjoy the weather so much that at first I naively refused to wear adequate clothing. I hate being hot, so when the weather first started getting cold in Albania I was still in shorts and T-shirts. This has since changed because I got a wicked fever and missed a week of work. The third and final drawback to the cold and wet weather is travel. I first assumed that since the weather was getting cooler, that furgon (mini-bus or basically a big van) and bus travel would get more tolerable. I figured people would smell better, the heat and subsequent sweaty ass syndrome would cease to exist, and the roads would be safer due to less traffic. Boy did I hypothesis that incorrectly. Instead, people are too cold to shower and in turn smell worse. Compound this with the fact that the vehicle is now void of fresh air because it is cold and wet and they refuse to roll down a window, the result being an incubator for transmission of sickness and smells worse than a football locker room after an Arizona summer practice. I exaggerate a bit but you get the basic idea. I no longer generate symptoms of sweaty ass syndrome but the roads are definitely not safer. They may actually be safer statistically, but I don’t feel safer. Driving methods do not change in the wet weather. There is less tourist traffic but no regard to the possibility of ice on the road or reservations when it comes to puddles or flooded streets. Other than these minor factors of inconvenience, travel is better. Walking long distances across towns or cities in order to find the next mode of transportation is easier now due to better (colder) weather, although other PCVs (Peace Corps Volunteers) may protest this statement. Enough about the glorious weather, now let’s hear about the work situation.

Last month I started to get really excited about the prospects for work in the coming months. This has faded recently. The Bashkia, with my help, is working on creating a Foreign Language Computer Lab at the local 9-year school (this is years 1-9). I came into the project during the initial stage and before really knowing what was going on I assisted in writing a budget with Chuck (the previous Rubik COD PCV, maybe I will write an acronym guide because a bureaucratic entity like Peace Corps uses a lot) that was sent to the French Embassy in hopes of funding. Now that the project has been partially funded by the French, I cannot for the life of me find computer programs for teaching Albanian speakers foreign languages. The original plan was this; we went to a language computer lab in Tirana who teaches students English with computer programs and an instructor with knowledge in the English language, they agreed to provide us with the program names and supplier that they use, we were then going to purchase the programs and computers, and then I was going to set up the lab, network the computers to a server, and teach the two foreign language teachers at the 9-year school how to operate and administer the lab. The problem has materialized this week. The two contacts in Tirana who said they would help us acquire the language programs, French and English, have not been helpful. The French institute now claims that they only teach with books and knowledgeable teachers, and the English institute gave me inadequate information and now fails to return my emails. I went to Tirana last week to drop in on the English teaching facility and the two contacts I have there were, reportedly, unavailable. There are plenty of English and French teaching computer programs out in the world but I can’t seem to find any that cater to native Albanian speakers. Not a big deal, I will find something and everything will work out, I just thought the purchasing part of this project would be over by now…oh Albania. Other work related news is not too good. Today I was informed that the only English speaker and the Bashkia’s only translator got a job in Tirana with an American law firm and is quitting. The best part is that she is tight with the Mayor so he agreed not to replace her until her probationary period with her new job is over. That means that the Bashkia will not even begin looking for a replacement until January. Great!!!! Guess I will have to kick my Shqip into high gear or I will have nothing to do at work, or at least I won’t understand anything they give me to do, for a while. Also, the ideas I have to present to the Mayor about improving the transparency and efficiency of the Municipality will have to wait until I can accurately articulate them in Shqip. That could be quite a while, considering how I can barely speak my own native language, hahahaha. Other than that I have a few things in the works right now but I’d rather not jinks myself quite yet so I am just going to keep those things close. I am also teaching an information technology class at the community center, which is actually going well considering that my students range from ages 17-52 and none of them speak English. Outside of work, I had the pleasure and relief of leaving the country.

Macedonia is also a Peace Corps country but things are much different there. They have a good road network, intellectual property rights enforcement (which meant I got to eat a Big Mac), and…get this…a bus system with schedules and actual bus stations! Although it was really nice to get out of the country and see a little of the Balkans, I really missed the culture of Albania. The first night we were in Macedonia, we couldn’t find our hostel. We kept on asking people, taxi drivers, and various hotels for directions or even to point us in the right direction. Either the taxi drivers would quote us some ridiculous amount of money or people would just say they didn’t know and continue on their way. If this were to happen in Albania you would get a hand on the back of your arm or a forceful “hajde” and the Albanian would either guide you to the door of the place you were looking for or would find someone who would. The people in this country really know how to treat other people , especially foreign people.

When we finally arrived at our hostel in Shkopje, the capital of Macedonia, we were greeted by an excellent proprietor. He first made sure that we weren’t over charged for the taxi we eventually had to take and then asked us about ourselves. We told him about what we did in Albania and instead of charging us per person like in all hostels; he reduced the price and just charged us per room. He then set us up with a similar deal in Ohrid, which is where we were headed next. Macedonia is an extremely pretty country and we had a great time. We spent most of our time just enjoying the break from Albania and the nice atmosphere, so we didn’t really see too many of the sites, there is always next time. I will keep the rest short.

After Macedonia we went straight to the Language Refresher, which is a Peace Corps conference that takes place for all volunteers during the first 6 months of service. I honestly think it is a bit of a waste of time and money. It may be a great conference for some, but in my particular situation, learning how they speak in the central and southern portions of the country is not a real big help. Dialect and accent are such a big deal where I am from that I didn’t get much from the conference. It is also a huge bureaucratically organized event. After the conference I headed to Elbasan where we did our Pre-Service training for the Halloween party at a group 11 volunteers house. I was surprised, dude has an awesome place, I say surprised but I mean jealous. The party was pretty fun; people have to make all of their costumes so it was interesting. I went as my Turkish toilet, printed out a picture of the thing and attached it to my shirt, also made a shower head that I wore from my hat. Well I am way behind on posting to this thing so I will leave it at that. Hopefully I will be able to write something about Thanksgiving and the turkey slaughter soon!

Just some Pictures, I'll explain later!

Albanian Folk Festival in Gjirokaster, got a ride with the group from Kukes. Really fun and they played music the hole ride, they also had a spontaneous dance at a cafe we stopped to rest at.

The Kukes group performing at the Folk Festival. The event only takes place every four years and is held in the Gjirokaster Castle. Really cool cultural experience.

Crossing a foot bridge across the Shkopeti Lake near Burrell on our way to camp.

The foot bridge and the place we camped at, upper left corner in the small clearing.

Macedonia-Albania border, notice how the road starting in Macedonia gets suddenly nice!

Hike in the mountains west of Rubik on our way to the 5000 year old overhang drawing, in the rain. (Me, Seth, Tauschia, and Alex)

River near Shpella e Pёllumbas, absolutely GORGEOUS!

Shpella e Pёllumbas, cave near Tirana with Polis University students and Chuck (the tall one), possible collaborators for the Bunker Trails Project, www.bunkertrails.org

I realize these pictures probably make it seem like all I do is travel and have a good time. This is somewhat true, I do spend a lot of time traveling around the country but only on the weekend. I do spend my weekdays in the office doing actual work but who wants to see a bunch of pictures of me sitting in an office giving advice or explaining to my counterpart something on the computer. Also, Albania is a beautifull country that doesnt get enough credit for being a great travel opportunity...hope some of these pictures encourages interest.

Finally some work!

Hello everyone, it has been quite a long time since I have written in this so I guess I will have to consult my calendar to remember just what the hell I have been doing with my time. It has been a busy month and pushime is officially over which is great. Recently I have been working on several projects, with and without my primary agency.
Work with the Bashkia: This month my Bashkia sent in the report for our familiar tourism project. Rubik is surrounded by 11 villages that are incorporated within the Bashkia’s jurisdiction. My counterpart started an initiative to increase the economic base in two of these villages by housing foreign tourists with villagers. We have been visiting, evaluating, and discussing with these families on their capacity to house and entertain tourists. We are currently building relationships and getting the proper documentation to write grants for guest homes for several of these families, so far we have established 3 families which I have mapped their location and evaluated their homes. The evaluation part was my favorite. Since I am the only foreigner that the Bashkia has access to, I was taken to the three homes two months ago to have lunch at each home, meet the families, and evaluate the accommodations. I wrote about this experience a few entries ago but at the time I didn’t fully grasp what I was doing there. My language is slowly getting better but I still have constant misunderstandings.
I am also working with my Bashkia on a project for a Foreign language lab that would be located in the 9 year school here in Rubik. Some of you may recall me sending out an email about this. If anyone would like information on how you can assist the municipality of Rubik with this project please contact me at monsbm@gmail.com. Ow, I guess I better explain this. So, in order to gain entry into a University in Albania you must speak a foreign language proficiently. I am a little fuzzy on the details because we haven’t actually started writing the project yet since we are still looking for funds but, I know that in order to get into a public university in Albania, which means it is free, you must pass an English language exam. This is huge for youth in Rubik. We only have one English teacher for the first 9 years and one teacher for the last 3 years of school for the entire town and the 11 villages which accounts for about 7,000 people…I am not sure how many students that is at the time, one more thing to add to the list of information to gather. Anyway, with my site mate and myself added, the town only has 4 people that are qualified to teach English and since that is not my primary or secondary interest in Rubik I have yet to teach a student. The goal of a foreign language computer lab is to prepare the youth of Rubik for the language exams they will have to take to get into college. The lab will be complete with language programs for English, German, French, Italian, Greek, and possibly Spanish (the number of languages depends on funding). These programs will be paired with headsets that are capable of instructing the youth on speaking and comprehension. I have seen the programs work at a private training center in Tirana, but the courses are far away and cost too much money. I won’t bore you anymore with the details of the project but we are looking for possible fundraisers back in the states. If anyone is involved with a philanthropic organization or knows someone who would be willing to donate please let me know and I can have the appropriate materials sent to them. Part of the process is to generate interest so contacting me will not result in expectations on my part of participation. Enough talking about that.
Secondary work: I still occupying my free time with Geographic Information Systems (GIS) work. We are still meeting contact from the previous volunteer who ran the project and this week Tauscha (a group 11 PCV) and myself will be meeting with a University class to explain the project, which will hopefully result in me teaching a class in how the process works and a hike with the students. PC is all about building the capacity of host country agencies and people so the eventual goal is to hand this entire project over to Albanians, the University is a great place to recruit interested parties. We are also meeting with a Director of Environmental and Geographic studies at a European university, a Minister of tourism for the National government, and a guy who has a Geographic consulting company. I am really excited. This is all within the same days as a COD (community and organization development) conference; this is the sector of PC that I am in. The other work I have been doing is consulting the Qarku of Kukes, Qarku is the regional council (Albania has 12 regions) on their process of drawing property rights to be put in a digital data base. I am in no shape or form qualified to do this type of work in the United States but here I am helpful to a country that is experiencing a slight brain drain (educated people can make more money abroad, so they leave). It is a little overwhelming but the people that I am helping in the Qarku are extremely bright and hard working.
Per qejf (for pleasure): This month has been great. Three weeks ago we went camping on a lake created by two damns that were built by the Chinese a few decades ago. The lake is called Shkopeti. We made camp on the other side of the lake from the road to Burrell, near a small collection of homes belonging to subsistent villagers. In order to get to the camp we crossed an awesome “Indiana Jones” type bridge that was mostly made of wood and had several missing planks, it was great…especially when some friends I went with got half way across and then had a near breakdown!!!
I also went to a Folk festival in Gjirokaster that is only held every four years. This was awesome. Two of the PCVs in Kukes, James and his wife Jen, got us a ride to Gjiro on a bus with the Kukes folk band, the ride to Gjiro round trip costs about three days worth of allowance so it was great to get a ride, and plus they played music and sang for the entire 8 hour drive. In Albania, people aren’t really used to driving long distances and the roads tend to be winding and rough, so the drivers often stop every hour or so for a café break, and for the young people to throw up!!! This was pretty fun cause at one place where we stopped, the band got out and played for twenty minutes while the kids, who are also part of the group, did the dance they were going to perform at the festival. Albanians are probably the most hospitable people I have ever met. The director of culture in Kukes insisted on paying for everything. For the whole trip, both ways, we must have stopped at least 10 times to have a café (which is always accompanied with a raki), a beer, or lunch. Albanians take great offense if you try to pay for your own drink or food if they invite you. Even if you invite them for a café they take great offense if you pay for it so I have learned not to even try, I have even been told not to thank them. Just yesterday I had some friends come up for a hike that got rained out. When Alex arrived I met her at a locale because we were on our way to meet Seth, Tauschia and the others up the hill. It had been raining all day so furgon traffic was slow but a driver who was going to Lezhe, about an hour and a half west of Rubik decided to drive Alex to Rubik…for free…just because she is American (and partly because she is a girl). I insisted on paying for the drinks (Alex paid me back of course but it is shume torpe, very shameful, for a female to pay for things) and he had a bit of a hissy fit, little of which I understood, which mostly consisted of him yelling at me about respect. I love this country. Where else is it an insult to buy a drink for a guy who just drove an hour and a half out of his way, during working hours, for free. Fantastic!!

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!