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.

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.