I suppose, now that I’m back from Berkeley and don’t have the excuse of this huge project, I should try to produce something for my blog. The obvious topic is the trip itself. I will do my best to get something up regarding how the trip itself went and some of the many interesting things that happened with the kids while we were there. But I want to wait until I have more of a chance to talk to them a few more times and get their impressions on everything America before I tell their side of the story. Thus this entry will concern my side of the story and my grand return to the homeland after almost exactly two years’ absence.

A number of the people in my group have been back to America at some point in the last two years for Christmas and the like, and they always come back depressed at having to leave what they describe as a Mecca of comforts and civility. The underlying message behind their stories is “I LOVE America. I can’t wait to get the hell out of here and go back.” As I could have (and did) predicted, I am not one of those people. I certainly don’t love America, and I have no real desire to go back there anytime soon. I don’t hate the place, either. I just don’t love it.

There were two things that I enjoyed about those two weeks in America.

1) wrapping my mouth around something other than the 5 flavors available in Albania. I have never been a major ethnic food person, enjoying things like Thai or Indian or Chinese. But almost from the instant we landed and our host family ordered Thai food, I was in a frenzy. I don’t think I’ve ever eaten that much in a two week span before. I literally felt like I had a canon ball in my gut. Maybe part of the motivation was the knowledge that if my plan for post-PC works, I won’t be seeing a lot of those things again for a long time, so I wanted to get while the getting’ was good.

2, and much more significant) Being extracted from the fishbowl. I don’t know why this didn’t hit me as hard or as clearly during the trips I’ve taken to Italy and Sweden since being in Albania. Maybe it’s because this time I had ten young Albanians to see the effect mirrored in, as well. But going from Albania, Gramsh specifically, where everyone, EVERYONE, is watching you and judging you and commenting on you and a lot of them are trying to screw with you somehow, to Berkeley, where you could be as whacky as you ever wanted to be and never be half as whacky as the general population and NO ONE gives you an ounce of attention no matter what you do, there was a very physical sensation of just weight being lifted from the shoulders of my soul. I have been remembering something that the local Dutch missionary told me during my very first week in Gramsh. He said that Albanians act like lawnmowers. If anyone sticks their head up above the rest, all the rest rush to cut him or her back down to be level with the rest again. They react very negatively to people who stick out. And as a person who carries the irremovable label “amerikan,” I can’t ever do anything but stick out. So they just keep hacking and chopping at me, trying to get me to become unnoticeable again, without success.

Looking back in comparison to the first day off the boat in Bari last July, I recognize now that I was experiencing the same general feeling of being freed from a weight even then. But at the time I thought it was just contentment at being back in my favorite country. The oppressive weight of constant unwanted (and almost always negative) attention is hard to describe if you’ve never felt it, and it was apparently not something I really noticed until it was removed. And by constant, I mean literally continuous. Not just weekly or daily. I mean that every single time I have to travel from one destination to another in town, I will experience at least one person or group yelling something at me or mumbling something that includes the word “amerikan” and then laughing, someone spitting at my feet, children throwing firecrackers, and so on. Over the two years that I’ve been here in Gramsh, I’ve been transformed from the “classic American” who is overly friendly and talks to everyone (as described numerous times by Shkelqim while I was in Librazhd) into a highly subdued (even more than ever before for those of you who have always known me as being subdued) being who stares at the ground while he walks, pretends to be more or less deaf while in the street, and downplays absolutely everything done in public. The only place where I feel I can truly relax and free myself from my public ball and chain is in my house, and the result is that I crave the place and spend a lot of my time “hiding” there. So going to Berkeley helped me to have hope that this not particularly positive outlook I’ve developed in the last two years is not permanent. I can look forward to being relieved of it to a certain extent once I am no longer a victim of the Albanian street culture. And while maybe Berkeley is an example of a completely opposite culture from Gramsh, I don’t think that it was necessarily the fact of being in “America” that helped me to realize this. I think that anywhere where individualism is allowed would have (at least eventually) had the same effect.

Having two weeks with that feeling and being so close to the end of my service (or at least so close to the specter of Kayla leaving) has caused me to do a bit of careful introspection in the last few weeks since being back in Gramsh. My final conclusion is that I’m tired, worn out, exhausted. Spiritually. It’s been a slow slide to this state. I can look back and start seeing the effects of it really showing up last November. I have realized that, for the last two years, I have given everything I had available to give. Every time someone asked me for something, I gave it, even if it would have been better for me to have declined. For two years, I have given and never asked for or done much of anything that was specifically for me. The result is that I just feel drained.

That doesn’t mean that I wish I hadn’t done it. I came here more or less to do exactly that. Of course, I never would have expected my efforts to be met the way they have here, but I did come here to give as much as I could. So I don’t regret it. But I just realize that I don’t have much left to give, that I’m relieved that my request to do another service in another country was denied by the Peace Corps. I never would have made it running on an empty tank like I am right now. The question now is, what do I do to “refuel”? I don’t think I have completely found the answer, yet…

This will be a short one. I just feel bad that it's been about 4 months since I wrote anything. A lot has happened since then, and I've extraordinarily busy.

I spent the holiday season in Sweden with Anders. It must have been perfect timing for me to go, because it was apparently abnormally warm in Sweden during that period, and I am told that it was freakishly cold in Albania during those two weeks. Sweden was as good as I remembered it from before in every way. The only really new thing that happened during that time was that I got to see how Swedes do Christmas.

They do Christmas on the 24th, while the 25th is like the major party day of the year. So on Christmas Eve, Anders' dad picked us up and took us to their house. There, we got to eat the traditional breakfast. There was the ubiquitous ham, which is eaten on bread with mustard and butter. The other main special part of the breakfast was the porridge. I'm not sure what it was made with, but the special part of it is that hidden somewhere inside the porridge is one almond. And they told me that whoever got the almond is supposed to be getting married within the year. Guess who got the almond... Later, Anders gave me a Magic 8 Ball as my Christmas present. He made me ask it if I was going to get married to an Albanian. And it said yes. Then he made me ask it if I was going to get married to one of my students. And it said absolutely. So that's comforting. At least I know that I should be free to do some "shopping" for my wife at the school like most of the men in town.

After breakfast, we went for a walk around the area where they live. Anders' dad wanted me to try out these special kind of skates. When we got to the lake, though, there was about an inch of water covering the ice. Bjorn went out to test the thickness of the ice, and apparently it was okay. But I chickened out in the end because I was sure that I would fall down, which would get me soaked. I promised to try it another day, but it never got cold enough.

After that, we went to Grandma's house to have another meal. There was the ham again, but there was also a few interesting things containing herring and anchovies. I wasn't thrilled to try them, but they weren't that bad. Not something I would ever crave, but edible. The rest of my time in Sweden, we probably ate Christmas food for 10 more meals. Needless to say, I've had my fill of Christmas ham for a while.

On New Year's, we went to Anders' girlfriend's house. They usually make turkey for this occasion, and it ended up that I made what was basically a Thanksgiving dinner for them. Kalle, another of Anders' friends, came, and it was just the four of us. At midnight, we went outside and watched the fireworks that they were shooting in the city. This was a major change from last year in Albania, since the fireworks in Sweden are actually colorful and not so bomb-like. One thing that seemed out of place in Sweden and like a page from Albania was that we witnessed a pretty serious police arrest outside Cissi's apartment. Never found out what that was about.

Other than that, it was two weeks of Playstation, movies, and wine, in classic Anders fashion. We went to a hockey game and a game of Sweden's national sport, Bandy, which is like a cross between soccer, field hockey, and ice hockey.

I came back to Albania with a completely full plate. The largest portion of the work was involved with the MUN project. We are extremely close to achieving our goals with this project, as most of you know from that email that I sent out a couple of weeks ago. We are currently short about $3-4000 from getting the minimum amount we need to cover the expenses for at least the kids. I need to thank once again everyone who has offered to contribute! It is really a huge help, and now that we are on the verge of achieving this, I am getting really excited about it.

On the 23rd, we will be going to Tirana to do the visa interviews. After that, the kids will be focusing mostly on preparing for the conference and the cultural presentations. They will be working really hard on that for about a month, and then we will be going! We have had some help from the presidents of the MUN team at Berkeley High School who have organized the host families for us. We now have a schedule for what will happen, a place to stay, and almost all the money we have to find! It's incredible that the vast amount of work that Kayla and I have been doing on this will pay off. We have been working with our heads down for almost this whole time, and to now look up and see it so close to happening, it's hard to believe.

But I have to go now. We are on our way up to Kruja for our Close of Service conference. It seems incredible that I'm this close to finishing, but also strange that they are making us do this 6 months before we finish.

As some of you may know, I was intending to do another service in either Jordan or Morocco. Unfortunately, the Peace Corps is experiencing some budget problems. Thus Morocco said no flatly, while Jordan said ok as long as I was willing to do my home leave before starting training. That would have meant that I would have to leave here at the beginning of May, which I just can't do. I have made a lot of commitments to some of my students, and I will probably actually have to extend here until the end of the summer in order to complete them, not leave early. So as I head up to talk with the rest of my group about what comes next, I am left with ZERO answers for myself. That is also comforting.

See ya!

A couple of weeks ago we finally reached the end of the only project I’ve done so far that felt like it had any lasting significance for the Albanians involved. The group that Kayla and I have been guiding through the Model United Nations (MUN) program for the last five months went to Tirana last week for the simulated Security Council meeting. The whole thing lasted four days, and I think it was a really exciting event for the students and a good reward for all of the months of work they have given. Anita admitted to me yesterday that when we started doing this whole thing in June, none of the students really believed that they would ever actually get to go to Tirana. They thought I was joking when I told them, that it sounded too good to be true. They were just coming for the English and debate skills that they would learn.

On Wednesday after school, we all met down at the bus stop to start the trip up to Tirana. They actually all arrived on time, which was a major concern for me. We sat in the back of the bus and the students proceeded to annoy just about everyone on the bus with their excited talking, all the way to Tirana. Kayla and I didn’t feel too much pressure to try and control them; we felt it was a sort of payback for all the times that we had had to sit in front of two raki-reeking men screaming uselessly about soccer for hours on end. Several hours and a couple of really carsick girls later, we rolled down the hill into the capitol. The bus driver was nice enough to take us all the way to the center of Tirana, otherwise we would have had to walk for almost ten minutes, which concerned the students to an extreme degree. Then we waited for the shuttle that would take us to the hotel, which was located just a little outside of the city. Once we got to the hotel, we got the room assignments for everyone and went through the torture of carrying all their bags up the hill from the reception area to the sort of apartment blocks where we were all staying. After dinner, each of the teams gave a presentation about their town and/or the country they were representing at the conference. My kids had made a powerpoint presentation that they gave. I had brought two traditional costumes with me that I had intended for them to wear during this. Seeing the number of cute ladies in attendance, none of the boys was brave enough to wear the male one, though, so two girls wore both of them. The first night seemed to pass fairly quietly. The students still seemed too nervous to really interact with one another. It wasn’t until the next morning that we found out that most of the students had managed about 4 hours of sleep. But we were surprised and relieved to find out that those late hours weren’t spent partying, but talking about the issues and each others’ countries. This was to be a trend for the next two nights, too. I guess they could have been lying to us, but that’s never happened before, so I doubt it.

There were about 80 students from nine schools all over the country represented at this conference. Meeting this many people from towns not their own is something completely new for almost all of them. Most of the towns where they came from are pretty small and secluded, which means that the students probably haven’t been out of their town much in their life, let alone met people from other towns. One of the most interesting parts of the conference was actually watching how the students interacted with each other. Every town has a sort of irrationally bad label associated with it that seems to be the only thing that someone from any other town will know about it. Gramsh, for example, is known to have extremely easy women (definitely not true). People from Librazhd are supposed to be dull-witted farmers. And so on. The other comic dynamic (for the Americans, at least) was the boy-girl ratio. Given the fact that this was an overwhelmingly academic project, girls were heavily overrepresented, so there were about 70 girls and 10 boys. While this was good because it reduced the amount of potential romantic tension that needed to be supervised, and it was also funny because of how self-conscious it made the girls. They were so concerned about how they looked and if their hair was perfect because of how they would be scrutinized by all of the other girls. But, in general, they got to be pretty good friends by the end.

The first day, Thursday, was by far the least interesting. In the morning, we got on three buses to go down into the city. The first stop was the Hotel Tirana, where the students had to sit through a press conference with all of the suits who swooped in to take credit for this amazing project that they had no idea even existed until the minute they stepped into the room. After that, the students got to meet with a diplomat who was either from or had worked in the country that they were representing, so that they could learn a little bit more about that country’s position on the issues to be discussed in the coming days. We got to meet with a young Chinese gentleman who was obviously terrified to be confronted by nine high school students. We found out later that he wasn’t really tied in any official way to the Chinese embassy, but that he was just some sort of student. So I can only imagine how he felt being asked why China isn’t putting more pressure on Iran regarding that country’s nuclear program. Who knows if he had been given any kind of guidelines as to what he could talk about. All I know is that the only thing that he seemed to talk freely and happily about was the Olympics. He did bring us a few bags of goodies, though, including some Albania-China flag pins, some cultural information, and some DVDs. He was the only diplomat to do that, which the kids appreciated. We had lunch in the hotel before going on with the day.

After that, we started a rotating tour of three offices that seemed extremely poorly organized. The first step for us was the Albanian Foreign Ministry. We showed up there, were escorted into a room, and were lectured to about the structure and function of the various bodies of the UN. The man who gave the lecture was a very good speaker, and it was interesting, but it was something that would have been more appropriate in June, not now that the kids had spent months learning about the UN. Then we left and went to the American Embassy. I was interested in this one before we got there because the embassy had been the most invested partner in this project since the beginning and I expected that they would have organized something interesting for this visit. But they took us in through all of the security only to have us go into the basement of the embassy to what looked like the snack room, where the guy in charge of visas gave us a very short and boring talk before shooing us back out onto the bus. Really disappointing. Our last stop was the UN Development Programme office, where we were met by the chief of UNICEF in Albania, who told us about their activities in Albania. We were all relieved to get back on the buses for the last time and go back up to the hotel. That night at dinner, the students were supposed to start talking about the issues to be discussed by giving each group a copy of their resolution and starting to form coalitions.

The next morning, the SC meetings began. After breakfast, we all went up to the conference room where they had set up the “Council Chamber.” The students took their places behind the appropriate flags, and the meeting began. All of the volunteers were scurrying around trying to take pictures of their teams. The first five minutes were really excruciating because no one knew what they were supposed to do, and the three chairpeople had to explain to them a few times what their options were. Eventually a girl from Bilisht stood up to talk, which broke the ice and got everything flowing. From there, things got interesting as the discussed the first topic, non-proliferation. Each team had turned in a resolution on either Iran or North Korea, and according to the SC rules, these were debated in the order in which they were given to the Chair. It took a while for them to realize that none of these resolutions was particularly strong on its own and that voting to accept or reject each one individually was not very practical. Especially once they got to the point that they were arguing over single words in one of the resolutions. Eventually they figured out that they should try and form a resolution using ideas from several of the resolutions. China took the lead in this area, which made me quite happy. While they weren’t saying much during the formal debates, they were doing all of the much more important diplomatic work outside of the chamber to form coalitions and write multi-party resolutions. Towards the end of that day, they came back with their resolution and brought it up for debate by the whole council. It was by far the easiest resolution to pass of the whole day because of all the work they had done during the day to make sure they had everyone’s agreement on it before they submitted it. You should have seen their faces when the vote passed their resolution. They were so happy!

Saturday was much the same, except that the issue discussed was the conflict between Ethiopia and Eritrea. There was an imaginary “crisis situation” where a terrorist attack happened in Ethiopia. It was really interesting because the way it was organized, the information was delivered to the council in fragments. So at first they only knew that there had been an attack. Then they started getting rumors about who had done it. During all of this, they had to discuss what to do about the situation. Another twist was that certain countries were given information that wasn’t given directly to the others. Like the US got some information from the CIA. This actually got funny because the US delegation kept saying that the CIA had given them the information, but no one else knew what the CIA was (in Albanian, they just say “sia”, not “tsuh ee ah”, so hearing C I A to them is strange. They do know what the CIA is.). The full situation had been exposed by lunch, when, once again, China took the lead in forming a resolution on what should be done to keep the peace in the area. Another funny point was that, during the debating, the kids kept referring to what they intended to be as “peacekeepers” as “peace corps,” making us all wonder if they think that we sleep with M16s under our beds.

During the final dinner, the teams were presented with awards. China obviously got the Best Coalition Builder award for all of that work that they did making everyone agree on those two resolutions. In my mind, this was the best award given at the conference because it most precisely captured the point of Model UN, which is learning about diplomacy. Diplomacy is taking many differing opinions and doing the work to have them speak in a single voice. So I was very proud of my students for winning that award. After dinner and a major photo session started the part of the trip that most of the students were probably the most excited about: karaoke and disco night. This meant that everyone had to sprint back up the hill to change out of the formal clothes they had worn for the award dinner and into their nightwear. The karaoke was understandably hilarious, and it was fun because everyone was really into it. I, unfortunately, didn’t get to sing my love song duet with Joey. I think we were next on the list when the DJ decided that it was just time to dance and turned off the karaoke. As you can imagine, the dancing was a little interesting given the male-female ratio. And it was even more interesting (excruciating?) for those of us who are teachers and were inevitably asked to dance with our students. This was particularly strange for me since all of the girls in my group are more or less supermodels. But it was a really fun night, and Kayla even danced, which she never does. The students all told me in the morning that it was strange to see me dancing, because they only ever see me standing up in the front of the class talking to them (and making them bored). They couldn’t imagine me having fun.

Now that we’ve been back, the kids have all been telling me how much they miss our meetings. At the conference, they had started asking me when we would be able to start again. Supposedly, the government wants to start another round of MUN in January, but I can’t ever seem to get a straight answer about it. So I started to think about the possibility of doing an international conference. When we got back last Monday, I went to the internet and started sort of haphazardly emailing the coordinators of various conferences. And I was surprised to find some very positive responses from almost all of them. They all offered to at least waive the fees for their conferences. But the most generous offer has come from the University of California at Berkeley, who offered to work closely with us to even find the money to bring the kids there. Together with Kayla and one of my bosses in Tirana, we have even thought of extending the trip to include not only the three day conference (which would be very short and tiring for all of us after having traveled all that way), but perhaps even to two weeks so that the kids might get to stay with host families before the conference and see more of the area while giving presentations to the university and local schools. None of this has been finalized, obviously, but everyone involved so far seems to be pretty sure that we will be going to California in March, at least for the conference, if not for longer. I put this to the kids on Saturday, and I think they were sort of shocked into submission by the thought of actually going to America. I thought I wouldn’t be able to control their excitement, but they took it very coolly. I think they took it initially as a joke, like in June when I said that we were going to go to Tirana. But slowly, over the last few days, they have started to seem more excited about the idea. Just imagine that, for them, going to America has been the dream of their lives, but they have never been led to believe that it was anything other than impossible. Then in prances this goofy red-haired guy telling them that they might get to go as easily as that. It must seem like craziness to them. But I think that after all we have been through together, they at least trust me to do my best to accomplish the things that I say.

So I have a request for any of you who read this. If you have ANY contacts in the area of Berkeley or San Francisco, would you please be so kind as to introduce this idea to them and see if they would be willing to help us find host families and arrange the sorts of things that will be necessary for this to happen. And if you feel like you want to organize a fundraiser to help us pay for this, the chances of us being able to realize this immense project will be much increased. If you can think of any ideas for things that we might do to organize this, please tell me. Just please imagine the opportunity that this represents for these nine spectacular individuals. Like I said in my last blog about them, these kids are my life here right now. They represent the generation that will change this country in the next few decades. They need and deserve these kinds of experiences to give them the skills and ideas that will help them push Albania forward. We have become like a family, even to the point where they actually call me brother and Kayla sister. I love them desperately. If you think that you can help us, please do.

Today after class Elda (the blondish one) came up to ask me if I had heard anything about the money for California. I said I hadn’t yet, but was going to keep trying. To which she replied “Brandoni është i madh,” which translates as “Brandon is big.” I’m not sure what she meant by that, but I assume that it was a compliment.

I think I ought to properly explain to you this Model United Nations thing that I keep mentioning. In January, we were approached by a representative from the American Embassy with an idea for a project. She told us that the United Nations Development Programme and the Albanian Ministry of Education were interested in starting a pilot version of the Model United Nations that take place all over the world. They wanted it to be done with groups of high school students in the second and third years under the direction of us volunteers. They wanted to start right away and have a conference in May whose centerpiece would be a simulated meeting of the Security Council.

This idea immediately caught my interest both because this was almost directly along the lines of my university degree and I had the perfect group of students in mind. In typical Albanian fashion, however, things started sliding immediately. The lady from the embassy who had been put in charge of it got transferred almost immediately, and there were no Albanians willing or capable of taking it on. So it turned out that a group of four volunteers who had done a MUN in America became the “steering committee” of the Albanian version, with constant promises from the embassy and UNDP that a project coordinator would be hired ASAP. By April, all of the interested volunteers had applied to participate along with an Albanian counterpart and initial list of students. Gramsh was assigned to represent China. The issues to be discussed were Nuclear Non-Proliferation in North Korea and Iran, the conflict between Russia and Georgia, and the conflict between Ethiopia and Eritrea. Things stagnated for a while as we were promised successive packets of information on the issues mailed from the embassy. Along came June and a meeting in Tirana with all of the volunteers where we were presented with a schedule for the teams to follow during the summer, the schedule for the conference that had been rescheduled for early September, and a big box of information that we had to lug back to our sites.

I had a difficult time getting the students to commit to any meeting before school got out. I had a few dismal meetings with two girls from 3B who came and seemed very skeptical about the whole idea, especially since there was no “team.” So I eventually set the start date for the first Monday after school finished. I spent a great deal of time organizing the information from the box, thinking about how to best organize the team so that this massive amount of information could be mastered by them. I made them calendars to help them plan and organize. I made them tip sheets for how they should proceed with the research. I got them pens, notebooks, highlighters. I essentially worked my ass off to give them every possible chance to succeed and not feel overwhelmed by the amount of paper covered with real English I was about to dump on them. During all of this, I came more and more to realize the massive task I had unwittingly set before myself and poor, unsuspecting Kayla. As I carefully considered the kinds of things that these kids would need to know to succeed at a conference like this, I realized that they had almost none of them. They would need to be trained on everything: public speaking, debate, note-taking, research, internet research and email, working as a team, planning and organization, appropriate dress and etiquette. All of this in addition to absorbing enough information about the UN and China and the issues to be able to faithfully represent that country’s position on the issues. I decided that I would have to divide everything into specialties. One group would learn strictly about China, its culture, its economy, its foreign policy. One group would focus on Nuclear Non-Proliferation, with subdivisions for North Korea and Iran. One group would focus on Russia and Georgia and another on Ethiopia and Eritrea. We would meet four days a week. One day for public speaking and debate, one for the topical information, one for internet work, and one for information about the UN.

On June 18th, I waited in my normal courses room with a giant pile of utensils and paper. The kids came. With a few comings and goings, we have settled with 9 kids. Five from 4B, three from 4A, and one who goes to school in Cërrik but is from Gramsh. They were a little shocked when I passed out all of the information, but I think that all of my preparation paid off in reassuring them that they could handle it. I was worried about them taking this seriously. Of course I knew that the end result would be enormously gratifying to them. They were going to get to go to Tirana for 5 days, stay in a nice hotel, meet diplomats from a number of countries and learn about their jobs, visit the American Embassy and UNDP offices, meet close to 100 kids from other towns in Albania, be closely observed by the media, and participate in a conference, all at no expense to them other than time and effort. In my mind, I struggled with how I could keep them motivated. I expected that they would be very reluctant to spend 8 hours a week in class, let alone all of the work that we were asking them to do at home, during their summer vacations. But they surprised us straight away by coming every day. The first day that we asked them to present what they had been reading about their specific area to the rest of the group was a little bit of a disaster, however. You could tell that they were nervous to get up and talk in front of the others, first of all. I also think that this was THE major hurdle the group had to get over because somehow it made them realize that they really needed to prepare themselves if they didn’t want to look dumb at the conference. At that point, we decided to let them start practicing debating and the processes they would have to follow at the conference by deciding absolutely everything that needed to have a decision themselves.

Things proceeded smoothly until the beginning of July, when my dad came. Right about then, the steering committee and the UNDP decided that it would be better to push the conference back to late October because it would for some reason allow the Ministry to focus more media on the event. I was worried that the students wouldn’t want to keep working once school started because they have to prepare for the exams at the end of this year to go to university. But apparently they were okay with it. I departed for a month of vacation, leaving the whole thing in Kayla’s hands. Before I left, I mapped out the process I thought would be best for the group to follow. By the beginning of August, we were supposed to have produced a position paper and resolution on the nuclear problem in North Korea. While I was in Sicily, I received an email from Kayla with their papers. It was pretty amazing that they had made them on their own. I kept reading them over and over on Laura’s brother’s computer in Trapani while Laura was trying to get me up and out to get burned again on the beach. I came back in August to enjoy the month of vacation that the kids had decided to take. We waited until September to start again. The last couple of weeks have been a little slow because I didn’t really know what had been going on before while I was gone, they had been out of it for a month, etc. We had lost our direction a little, but we got it back once Kayla and I decided along with the volunteers in Librazhd and Bilisht that we would get all of our teams together in Elbasan for a day to do some sort of preparatory exercise together. I somehow got put in charge of planning and executing this event. I decided that the best thing to do would be to practice “caucusing,” or large group informal resolution debate and formation. We did a couple practice rounds with just our team to get them thinking about how it would be different with more people.

The meeting was today (Saturday). We met in Elbasan at 10 at the university, where Frank had set up a room for us to meet in. One thing you have to remember about all of my past comments about Albania and Albanians is how unfamiliar they are with their own country. They don’t have the means or a reason to travel much outside of their own region. The result is that they have wild, unfounded opinions about people from other regions, even though they have never met anyone from there. We were a bit worried that the air would be icy in the room as these kids from distant regions eyed each other. We thought that the four boys (out of a group of 22) would be hungrily eyeing the exotic girls (which they did to some extent) and that the girls would be pretty bitchy with each other. The first thing we had planned for them was an ice-breaker exercise. Cat handed out a sheet that asked them to do things like find two other people with the same eye color as them. I think all of the Americans were pleasantly surprised that the kids all dove into this pretty eagerly. It was actually difficult to get them separated to sit down after 15 minutes.

The next exercise was the caucusing exercise. Last week, I had practiced this with my group with corruption in the schools as our subject. It was pretty rough, even though there were only nine of them. It took them more than an hour to finish. I was worried that with 22 kids it would be impossible. I told them that they were supposed to write a resolution on school uniforms in high schools in Albania, and that they had 35 minutes to do it. I pulled a desk into the middle of the room and told them to get going. Again, we were all surprised at how well they went into it. They immediately came together and started talking about what they wanted to say (all of this debate part was in Albanian, although the resolution was to be written in English). My idea was that all of the Americans should just stay away and let things go as they would because in Tirana there would be no rules regarding the caucusing sessions. All of the Americans sat off to one side looking like puffed-up soccer moms gloating over the successes of their carefully coached kids. I took particular pride in the fact that the girl I have been most carefully cultivating, Ejona, became the natural leader for the whole group. Through this particular exercise and the couple that came after it, it was pretty obvious that our group was the most prepared to participate in a complete way in all phases of the conference. Kayla doesn’t seem to understand why I feel this way, but it absolutely kills me to see those kids succeed like that. Maybe it’s because I have been seeing them two to four times a week for the last year and a half and desperately care about them. I’m crying as I write this. Seeing them do that fills me with the closest thing to pure joy that I have experienced in years. It’s like this emotional numbness that I’ve been carrying around in me for so long is thawed a little. If so, they are unwittingly giving me more than I could ever possibly give to them. I’ve wanted so desperately for so long to get rid of this awful dead feeling, and they’re helping me do it.

I have to stop before I soak the keyboard. Here’s what they produced:

Resolution on School Uniforms

Submitted by: Librazhd, Gramsh, Bilisht

WHEREAS, Albanian students have different ideas about school uniforms, because some of them use one and some don’t, and

WHEREAS, school uniforms are important for appearance, equality, and regularity, and

WHEREAS, it makes students look serious in what they represent, and

WHEREAS, wearing the school uniform shows respect for teachers and the institution, and

WHEREAS, educating the generations with professional clothes, and

WHEREAS, there is economic inequality between different students,

THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED, the schools should each form a committee to decide about the uniforms

-consult with local businesses for financial help

-resolve any other issue dealing with uniforms

-and the above would be decided together with the proposal by students

Good day.

It's come again. The day that I had been dreading even more than I did last year. It was almost like going back to middle school, the whining voice in my head was so loud on the night before.

School started again on Monday.

I suppose you could say that I felt more comfortable this second time around because I had a much better idea of what to expect. You might say that the towering pole vault bar of my mighty expectations from the first year had been knocked down to rest quietly, but comfortably, on the soft mat below. I arrived to school at about 7.30, just like last year. The teachers were all there, just like last year. But this year the Braveheart scene didn’t materialize like I had hoped (I had even brought along my camera to document the spectacle). Instead the students and the teachers both milled around in the courtyard until the opening ceremony started at 8. This involved the by-now-expected cringingly loud dance/techno music, which was followed by some songs sung by students in by-now-expected lack of clothing. Then the director appeared and gave a short speech prior to having the students line up according to their classes and filter into the school.

There have been at least three plump question marks bloating up in my mind over the last month or so since I got back from the northern trip. The whole summer, I have been going around telling anyone who asked that I was done with the high school. I had planned on cutting off completely my apparently-pointless services there and instead offering them to the three elementary schools of the town. The rejection I experienced at the hands of 3B last year (the one class that I had on my own) still lingered. But the growing presence of those question marks made me have second thoughts.

The first and smallest of the question marks had to do with the revelation that the high school would be coming under the direction of at least the fourth director it has had since the application requesting me was submitted by the school. Through my experiences last year and the experiences of all the other TEFL volunteers, I have come to realize that the atmosphere of a school is almost entirely determined by the personality of the director. (interesting note: Albania is a curious place in that the success of any given institution or undertaking almost entirely depends on the direction of a strong personality. The person who possesses this personality doesn’t necessarily need to know what he or she is doing, but his or her presence, and only his or her presence, will ensure an arrival at some sort of end result. Otherwise, the institution will wallow in inactivity and the undertaking will be left unfinished for years. There is no kind of culture of initiative or personal responsibility. Everything here flows from the top down, not the bottom up. This counts for everything from the prime minister down to the garbage collection crew in Gramsh.) Our new fearless leader, Isa, was a literature teacher and vice-director last year, a man whom I vaguely knew and whose daughter I had helped to apply (unsuccessfully) to an American junior college. I knew him to be relatively quiet and thoughtful by Albanian male standards, which is a positive quality in my mind. I showed up to school on the first day partly out of my curiosity about how the school would be run under his guidance. The contrast to the verbose ingratiation of the former director was stark. Isa gave a laconic and almost unemotional speech before disappearing back inside. Despite the commentary from the other teachers, I had a good feeling about him. In comparison to last year, the overall organization of the school seems to be good even from the start. They actually, gasp, had classes on the first day of school instead of basically taking the first week(s) off. The students (except the English students) had books. The schedule seemed to be more or less finished and set. Everything that had stunned me into numbed shock last year and made the Albanian school system lose all credibility seemed to have been addressed in at least some small way.

My general practice last year was to arrive at school right at 8 because I never had any classes to teach during the first hour, and coming then allowed me to enter the school without having to deal with any potential harassment from the students in the courtyard. This was after pointlessly showing up early every day for a month out of a naïve conviction that showing the other teachers my professionalism would have some sort of effect. On Wednesday I showed up at 7:55 to a closed front gate blocking a large group of students. This was new. The director was standing out in front of the school. He was letting in groups of about 50 or so students at a time, stopping them at the doors. He explained to them that starting next week, the gate would be closed and locked at 7:50, so they needed to be in the school by 7:45. What a novelty. The next two days, I was the first person in the school at 7:30. On Friday at 7:55, the director came into the teachers’ room and shut the door. He said, firmly, that it pained him to say it, but it was absolutely unacceptable for the teachers of the school to be coming at five minutes before classes start. How could he possibly shut the gates of the school and expect the students to come on time if there were students pushing to get through the gates right along with them? The effect on the other teachers was mostly shock. I don’t think they had ever had a director talk to them like this before. I had been meaning to meet with the director for the whole week for a number of reasons, but I immediately went down to his office to talk to him. While also telling him that I had a great desire to work with the school government this year (which they never got around to even holding elections for last year), I also told him that I completely supported what he had said and that anything I could do to help him think of a way to enforce the things that he wants to do was his for the asking. I told him what I told the director last year, too, that I am not here just for Tom, not just for English, but for the whole school and the whole community. He seemed to appreciate the fact that someone thought he had the right to be tough with the other teachers, and told me that he would insert me into the plans he was making for the school. Seeing that one of my goals if I were to return to the high school was to make a mad attempt to improve the overall atmosphere of the school, the first week has been promising and I am grateful to have found an ally in the director instead of one of a number of other possibilities.

Question mark number two, and the only one still unanswered, was Tom. One of the biggest reasons that I didn’t want to go back to the high school is because I had never been happy with the working relationship that had formed between us. I never felt like Tom considered me as someone to work with so much as someone to work instead of him. I disliked the fact that I essentially earned his teaching salary for him last year and that he was so unresponsive to my constant requests for a change in the situation. The problem was that I was caught between not being comfortable with that relationship and the commitment that I felt to the students in those three classes that we were supposed to be teaching together. So in considering whether or not to go back to the high school for this year, I formed the following compromise. In reflecting on the success I had had with 3B last year (before they kicked me out, that is), I realized that it mainly had to do with the fact that there were only 22 of them and that 18 of those were of a relatively uniform level in English. So I decided that I would offer Tom an ultimatum of sorts. I would request that the classes that we were to teach together would be split in half, roughly according to level. This would cancel the two major problems of overcrowding and vast differences in English level that are the cause of most difficulties in the classroom for us. It would also force Tom to actually do some work to earn his salary while helping the kids overall because both the higher and lower level kids could be served instead of me having to make a choice about who I was going to either impede or leave behind. Of course, the school itself doesn’t have any room to spare, so the whole arrangement would hinge on Tom’s ability to have the schedule fixed so that our classes would always coincide with a class that had PE, thus vacating their room. I offered the idea to Tom, who immediately lapsed into the predictable line of “it’s very difficult” and other equivocation. I haven’t had the balls yet to lay it on the line to him that either it happens this way or he’s going to lose my permanent assistance to the more walking-tape-recorder role that Sarah played when she was here. But I need to do it soon, because we have drawn four first year classes this year, and I find myself attracted to the sort of wild personalities that these classes seem to possess. I don’t want to get caught in the same trap as last year.

The last, and most painful, of the question marks was did I want to attempt a return to 3B (now 4B)? I don’t remember if I ever really explained what happened with this last year, how I got “kicked out.” Things with this class had been fantastic from the end of January until about the middle of May. Tom had completely abandoned me to them because it seemed like I could control that class without his presence. At the beginning, I was completely infuriated with his gall at assuming he could just leave me to teach one of his classes for him. But the change in the dynamic of the classroom once he left was striking to me. The kids relaxed immediately. They would actually laugh and ask questions sometimes. The noise level was increased somewhat, but not in a disruptive way. It’s hard to explain, but as a teacher you can sort of tell when the discussion that’s going on is in spite of you and not because of you. This class quickly became the light that, along with the course with the little girls, drew me through the depressed months of the dark winter. I spent so much time and effort hunting for extra activities and exercises and readings to help them. My devotion was strong.

From the beginning, I attempted to construct and enforce an admittedly clumsy set of rules. I was walking the jagged line between what I as an American believed to be fair and correct in a school system and what they had experienced and could understand from theirs. The basic foundation of the rules I made was equality between me and them. I would never ask them to do anything that I didn’t demand of myself or treat them in a way in which I wouldn’t want them to treat me. Luckily, I never really had to use any of the behavior-related rules. The biggest problems came from my conception of the grading policy. I have said before that the Albanian grading system is completely arbitrary and influenced by moods and personal ties, not to mention money. I asserted that all grades would be based on points and presentable productions (homeworks, essays, etc.). They seemed okay with this at first. But when the first test came around and the few girls who normally take 10s (perfect) got 9s, the “explosive” mud hit the fan. Slowly over a number of weeks, this tense aura of dissatisfaction grew in the room. I fought constantly the urge to just do what they wanted me to do and give them all the grades that they had been getting before I took over. In reality, no one’s grades in this country really reflect their ability or knowledge, and if these kids need a 9.999 average to get into their desired faculty at university, was it worth hurting them to enforce my American sense of grading justice? They were really good students, and I kept telling myself that I was not trained as a teacher and perhaps the tests I was making were too difficult. Furthermore, I was never supposed to be giving grades or writing in the register in the first place, so if one of the kids were to complain to somebody, Tom (and maybe even my boss) could find themselves the target of some nastiness. In the end, I had worried for nothing, because in the middle of May a group of the students went to Tom and asked if he could come back as the teacher. My soul was crushed. What had I not tried to do for the benefit of these kids? I had worked at least 2 hours outside of class for every hour in class. My life had been revolving around that one room for months, and I had been suddenly cast out of my orbit to spin off into the voids of depression. I was angry. I never went back.

But by some stroke of fate, the Model United Nations group (see the Big, Smiling, MUN blog for an explanation) that formed at the beginning of the summer somehow brought together the very set of students from 3B who were the most unsatisfied with my grading, along with a few of the more problematic elements from the other good class of the third year, 3A (now 4A), where I had made several abortive attempts at teaching. During the course of the summer and many hours spent together, all of our attitudes and understandings have changed. Not that I ever disliked these kids, but I felt like they had unfairly hurt me. They have since become perhaps the best group of friends that I have had in a long while. So I had this nagging sense that I wanted to get back into their classrooms this year.

4B was easy because of the size of the class. 4A was a little different, though. They had one of the other English teachers last year, that young lady that had absolutely no idea what she was doing and didn’t teach even one hour of English the whole year, I think. The few times that I tried to go in there were because I felt so bad that they were being robbed of a year of English. There were a lot of really good students in there, and they deserved better. So I tried to go in and work with them the same way as I had with the other class. It was a disaster, mostly because of what they had been allowed to get away with with the other teacher, but also because there were more of them and about 10 of the 36 had almost no English and no interest in listening to me. A few of the good ones kept coming up to me in school and asking me to come teach them. I always said that I would be glad to if they would take it upon themselves to help me keep the bad ones under control. Which they never did when I went in. Luckily, this year the teacher who had been on maternity leave came back to retake her position from the useless bimbo. This is the sister-in-law of the woman that Kayla lived with here, so I know her pretty well. I told her about my idea of splitting the class, and she seemed to like it. So we went the first day and had all of the kids who had gotten 9s and 10s last year (about 17 in all) stand up and go with me to one of the empty rooms (lucky draw with the PE schedule). The first day I offered them the choice of working with me or with Ela, and they said they wanted to work with me.

I learned from the Model UN (MUN) that the kids were willing and capable of making and enforcing realistic rules for themselves. The first day, I told them that they needed to think about how they wanted to make those rules and we would talk about them the next time. On Thursday, I went in and divided them into two groups, one to talk about what they wanted to expect from me and one to talk about what I should be able to expect from them. I made sure that there was at least one MUNer in each group to direct the discussion since it closely resembled the “caucusing” things we had been doing. I was impressed at how seriously they took it and what they produced. Among the things that they expected from me was to be a good listener, to have friendly relationships with them, to be on time, and to be exactly like I am. I was really surprised by the rules that they made for themselves, which were much stricter than anything I had tried to present them with last year. I was a bit nervous to go into 4B again because I hadn’t seen most of the kids since they kicked me out. We talked a little about what happened last year. They seemed surprised when I told them that I had stopped coming last year because I felt like they hadn’t wanted me anymore. They also produced a set of rules for themselves. My favorite is that when someone is being noisy, he or she will have to go up in front of the class, stand on one foot, and sing a love song in English. It has yet to be seen whether this will work out in the end and whether we can avoid the grading problems that were the source of the tension. I am slowly coming to the realization that the fourth year English classes are not going to be provided with books this year. That could be interesting.

After making the rules, I introduced to both classes a game I that used to dominate at in elementary school: Around the World. We always did it with math, but I adapted it to help them review the various forms of the irregular verbs. It took a little while to get them used to how it worked, but once we got it going, the end result was perhaps the best day I’ve had in the school since I’ve been here. They got so into the game, everyone was glued to the process, they laughed, I almost cried. I love these freaking kids.

So maybe “battle lines” is an inappropriate metaphor for what this school year will bring. Maybe that jagged line that I walked last year in my relationship with the students will dissolve completely and leave us as just colleagues and good friends. Let’s drop the maybes and just say that it already has.

I just got back the other day from a short loop into an area of this country that even most Albanians wouldn’t care to visit: Ghegeria; the North. Up until this trip, I had never been further north than Tirana, which is to say not very far. I always have to remind myself of how small this country really is. As I stare across at the map of Albania that I recently bought in Italy and installed on the wall opposite my well-worn couch perch, it is easy to maintain the illusion that Albania is limitless. It looks so big when it fills up that big piece of paper without any other reference as to its size in comparison with the rest of the world. This comes especially from considering how long it takes to get from one place to another. Albania is not a whole lot bigger than Sicily, but by car you could loop the entire circumference of Sicily in a little more than a day, while it would take you close to a week to do the same thing in Albania (remember that the entire eastern portion of Albania is pretty rugged). I remember learning about the history of political systems in university and hearing about how in the feudal systems of medieval Europe functioned easily because most people never really knew anything beyond seeing distance of the spot they were born in. It was difficult for me to understand then how such a thing was possible, but now I think I can grasp it. Even in the 21st century, Albania isn’t terribly different. The resulting isolation of one valley from the next for so long is bound to produce some striking contrasts. Even with this in mind, it is difficult to predict the vast differences that become evident as one proceeds from south to north in this tiny, tiny country.

I made this odyssey with four of my favorite compatriots. We were four young men and one young lady who vowed to become masculine for the duration of the trip, like some of the northern women. For those of you have never heard of this particularly grizzly bit of Albanian history (not entirely historical in all corners of the north), the north was once (until the middle of the 20th century) riddled with a unique version of vendetta regulated by a document written centuries before called the Kanun. This document provides detailed rules that guide behavior in virtually all aspects of life. It is founded on the twin concepts of honor and blood. The most famous rules regard killing and revenge. In the event that a member of one family was to kill a male member of another family, the victim’s family would then be required to (not merely given the right to) take blood from a male member of the family of the offender. Once that requirement was fulfilled, the family of the original offender would then be required to take blood once again from the family of the original victim. And so on. You can see the sort of ugly spiral that is bound to develop from such a system. There are accounts of blood feuds that have gone on for more than a hundred years and eaten up numerous generations. A result of this is that there are a large number of towers in the north that were built expressly for the purpose of protecting male family members. There have been towns in the north where it was impossible to see an adult male outside ever because they were all locked inside these towers to protect them from being killed by members of opposing families. Only women were to be seen outside, working in the fields and attending to the needs of life. (Throw in satellite TV and it’s not completely different from the modern situation.) In the likely event that all male members of a given family were made to pay a blood debt, there were two options for the unfortunate family. The first, and much less honorable, was to invite a council of elders to mediate and offer a monetary settlement in place of blood. The other option was a rare ritual by which a female family member would become male. This woman would dress as a man, act as a man, work as a man. She would not be allowed to marry or have children, but her blood would become legal payment in the feud. I recently saw such a woman interviewed on television, so this is by no means a forgotten bit of history. Anyone interested in a fantastic Albanian literary interpretation of the feuds of the north should read Broken April by Ismail Kadare.

Our first destination was Pukë. The place has a strange-looking name (pronounced Pookuh for those of you who were about to perform its English homonym), but is one of the most promising places I have seen in Albania. Pukë is a small mountain town of several thousand inhabitants that is on the current main road from Tirana to Kosovo. It is close to a number of lakes and encased in an incredible knot of mountains that become especially breath-taking in the burning colors of the sunset from the sweaty top of a nearby hill while cradling an empty 1.5 liter brown plastic bottle of Pukë beer. This is a place that has almost unlimited potential for tourism. Its astounding natural beauty will undoubtedly serve this town quite well in the near future. But the amazing state of nature was dulled in comparison to the unexpected friendliness of the people. This was to become a trend throughout or trip through the north: the much-maligned people of the north are incredibly friendly. Walking down the street, if you greet a complete stranger, that person will invariably not only greet you in return, but will almost always stop to chat with you. The same situation in Gramsh generally provokes blank stares and, not uncommonly, negative reactions or comments. Another fascinating detail about this particular spot in the north is the traditional dress of the women. In my region, it is common for women aged 50 and above to wear what we call the gjysha costume that I have described before (white head scarf, etc.). But even women of the younger generations around Pukë wear a costume that is entirely unique. They wear a pair of white pants under a poofy white lacy sort of skirt that reaches to about mid-calf. Then there is a white lacy shirt topped with a very small black vest embroidered at the edges. Around their waists is a similar black belt that dangles from the hip. On their heads in place of the white, loose scarf of the women of the central region is a tight black piece of cloth that closely resembles the doo-rags that American rappers wear. In addition to the head scarf, these women also often have what appear to be fake lengths of braided hair that they either wrap up with the scarf or allow to hang loose. I’m not sure what those lengths of hair are intended to do or represent, but they are striking in their appearance. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to take a picture of any of these women, so you’ll have to settle for my sad description of this unless I can find someone else who has a picture.

We stayed the night with our friend who lives and works there. He gave us the skinny on the next portion of our adventure. This was the whole reason that I came on this trip. The missionary in Gramsh had told Kayla and me about this amazing ferry trip that you can do in the north. I had been itching to try it out for months, but one of our friends had told us right as we were leaving that it wouldn’t be possible in this period because there were too many traveling Kosovars plugging up the system: they were turning people away at the ferry. So we began our trip thinking that we were going to miss out on this. But our friend in Pukë had just done it a few days before and reassured us that they weren’t turning anyone away, and indeed would never do so before the boat was ready to capsize. Comforting info for those of us whose Olympic Doggy-Paddle is a little out of form. Early the next morning, we got up and staggered down (remember the brown bottles of beer?) to the bus that would take us back in the direction of Tirana so we could eventually get back to the point where the ferry starts. After one of the famous Albanian roadside-café bus changes we were loaded into two different furgons that started on the extremely bumpy track to the dam. An hour of scary switchbacks and amazing views later, we approached the bottom of the dam. When we finally wound our way down to the bottom of the valley, we crossed a bridge that was inexplicably lined from one side to the other with parked cars, the occupants of which were all disembarked and roaming the area listlessly. To our confusion, our furgon continued past these people and up the other side of the valley. What were these people doing? Why were we allowed to go on? We passed briefly by the bottom of the concrete dam and witnessed a herd of goats out on the extreme slope grazing on the grass growing from the cracks, with their bored herder sitting by and smoking. Our furgon then made a wild turn and drilled itself into an unsuspected tunnel bored out of the raw rock. To the semi-amusement of the Albanian passengers, the four Americans in the back of the vehicle began humming the theme song for “Indiana Jones”, half-expecting a giant round rock to come rolling around the corner in front of us.

We emerged just as unsuspectedly into the bright daylight and what can only be described as a major Albanian cluster fuck. Picture this. A slab of concrete not much bigger than a basketball court extending out into the water of the lake, bordered on two sides by water and on a third by a restaurant. On this concrete slab were no fewer than twenty furgons and other cars all desperately struggling to turn around at the same time. In classic Albanian fashion, the new furgons emerging from the tunnel didn’t allow time and space for the earlier ones to turn around. The drivers instead charged into the fray like brazened cavalry officers, so confusing everything even further. The situation rapidly became something resembling that brain exercise where you have to slide the red plastic cars back and forth on the board to eventually get the blue one out of the parking lot. So all of these furgons were shuffling and honking and scraping as they eventually got turned around and parked with their rears to the water. Amazingly, no one died or drowned. Laughing at this classically-Albanian exercise, we descended from our fearless steed. While we waited for the ferry to arrive from the other end of the lake, we explored the chaos of the area: a wad of unidentifiably foreign teenage girl scouts sitting on backpacks along with their pedophile-mustachioed man-boss; scattered groups of either very young or very old Albanian women standing and waiting while their men soaked up a raki at the watering hole; roving toothless boys and their fathers hawking plastic crates filled with bee-swarming figs and baggies filled with salt and a few peanuts mixed in.

After a lengthy wait, the ancient metal hulk that appeared to be the ferry came belching around the bend. You should remember that I have only ever been on Italian ferries as I describe this next scene to you. I don’t know why I ever expected this ferry to look or behave in an even remotely similar way, but in any case I was much mistaken. From a distance, the ancient boat obviously listed back and to the right. As it curved in towards us, I started to wonder where and how they were going to park it: it didn’t seem to be making a straight heading for any of the slanted ramps cut into the concrete slab. The bottom deck was completely packed with cars and furgons with only inches to spare between each vehicle. I could see drivers crawling through windows to get back into their vehicles. The top deck was completely filled with people gathered at the near rail to watch the coming spectacle. At each end of the boat was a ramp operated by cables and pulleys that could be raised and lowered onto the dock to allow passengers and vehicles on and off the boat. As the monstrosity approached the dock (always at an angle), the nearest ramp began to descend. It was only then that I noticed that they actually park cars even on these ramps during the journey. The ramp is raised to roughly a 30 degree angle and the cars are kept in place by the undeniable security of a rock under one wheel. The drivers of the two cars on this side were already in place with their engines running, ready to go. The boat was now inching up to the dock and the ramp was over the concrete. At this point they allowed the ramp to come down onto the concrete, even though they obviously had at least 5 more feet of backing to do to get the ramp up to the top to meet the six inch lip in the concrete. Nevertheless, they let the ramp down from the very beginning, possibly as a brake, and let it crunch and squeal its way up the concrete. Safety was obviously not a primary concern as waiting passengers walked back and forth in front of the approaching ramp and I was standing no further than two feet away filming the whole show with my camera and laughing. The ramp kept dragging up the slope and eventually came flush with the concrete lip as the boat banged against the concrete wall and only then straightened itself into a perpendicular position. I guess I was crazy to doubt that they had it all carefully planned out all along. The next step was to get everyone and everything off of the boat so we could all get on. The main problem was that all of the furgons from before were blocking the entire area so that the vehicles on the boat couldn’t get off. So we had to wait while all of the passengers without vehicles from the top decks squeezed or climbed their way through or over all of the cars to get out and fill the waiting furgons which then vacated the area. Of course, there was much honking and yelling from windows as the drivers on the boat made it known that they were ready to go. Finally, enough space had cleared on the boat and the guys in charge gave the signal that we were allowed to come on. The unavoidable Albanian mad dash began like we were fleeing from Saigon. Once on board and having staked out five seats on the top deck, we began the interminable process of loading the cars onto the boat. I now understood why all those cars had been parked down below before. There was no place to put them up here, so they had been waiting in remarkable and uncharacteristic order until all of the cars on the boat got out of the way, then came up to be loaded on. After more than an hour and a half, we were ready and pulled out into the lake.

We putted along, propelled by what appeared to be two World War II vintage submarine engines spewing black exhaust into the air behind us. This was going to turn out to be a three hour journey that should have been no more than an hour had we been in a more modern boat. The slow pace was acceptable, however, because of the incredible landscape that we were passing through. This lake rivaled Lago di Como in the spectacular mountains and cliffs that fell directly into the water. Instead of the celebrity villas that line the coast of the Italian lake, this coast was sprinkled with small and obviously poor villages which could only be accessed by boat. Even the Albanians onboard seemed to be uncharacteristically appreciative of the beauty we were passing through. And yet, they somehow displayed absolutely no compunction about throwing any and all trash over the side into the water. This is still something that I still haven’t gotten over. They complain constantly about there being trash everywhere and are freakishly paranoid about being Dirty, but they don’t see it as their responsibility to not add to the problem. They instead complain that the government is useless because they should be the ones keeping everything clean. (Eyes roll)

By the end of the three-hour ride in the blazing sun on the top deck of a metal ferry, I was pretty well ready to be off. I could feel that my forehead was on the crispy side of burnt. We had found our ride to our next destination with one of the furgons on the boat, so we eventually went to sit in it for the last half-hour or so. The driver had his engine running and the air (not cold) blowing, which was still better than outside. The docking on this end seemed to be slightly less chaotic, and we didn’t have to wait too long before we were rolling once again on a bumpy road. We passed the next dam which contained another lake. This system of lakes was built under Communism and, at that time, produced enough electricity for the entire country and even some excess energy that was sold abroad. There is a series of three dams and three lakes on this one river. We had just come up the middle lake, Lake Koman. If it had been functioning, we could have taken another ferry from the next dam up Lake Fierzë to Kukës. We passed through Fierzë and saw the boundary marking the beginning of the Forbidden Zone, Tropoja. We are not allowed to enter any of the regions that border Montenegro and Kosovo, nor are we allowed to go into Kosovo. As far as I know, we have never been given any official whys regarding this rule, but we assume that it’s because those regions are still too dangerous. But the road that we were on ran right up to that “Welcome to Tropoja” sign then curved quickly away. So close.

The road to Kukës was bumpy and beautiful, like all of the roads up there. We stopped a couple of times, once in a village and another in the middle of nowhere. We approached Kukës from above the lake that runs from the dam at Fierzë right up to the town. Kukës was the town most affected by the enormous influx of refugees that Albania experienced during the crisis in Kosovo. The refugees were initially accepted warmly by the inhabitants of Kukës. They filled all available floor space in every house and ate food mass-prepared on giant stoves installed in people’s gardens. The situation eventually turned ugly when new refugees who couldn’t find room began to offer families money in return for space in their houses, thus transforming the whole thing from a display of human decency into a regrettably-harsh profit-seeking business. Once down and across the bridge into the town, the furgon driver let us off right in front of the hotel that we were going to stay in. We had lunch and later met the Americans who had recently been sent to this town. We took a short tour of the town, which wasn’t very long since there wasn’t much to see. Despite its small size, I can say with conviction that if I were forced to choose a town in Albania in which to live for the rest of my life, Kukës is in the top three. What little there was there was pretty nice, and the natural surroundings couldn’t be beaten. The town is also on the verge of receiving a major upgrade, as Prishtina and Tirana are soon to be linked by a modern highway that will pass through Kukës. We walked out on a long, thin peninsula to the old Tourism hotel, which is currently in pretty sad shape and is not used. We watched the sunset from there and then walked back into town. We went to a fish restaurant for dinner where they serve fish from the lake. I had a salad. Afterwards most of us went to a bar for cocktails, but Joey, Katie, and I went with Tienmu to visit his host family. This turned out to be a fantastic choice because that family was simply incredible. I think we had planned on the usual short visit for coffee and then out, but we ended up staying there for about four hours until midnight. This family was so talkative and interested in us, and we sang in English and Albanian and danced the vallë Kukësi, Joey fell in love with the 40-ish unmarried aunt, and we were invited back anytime that we wanted. It was definitely more fun than sitting around drinking a beer. After that, we went back to the hotel to rest up for what would turn out to be the best part of the whole trip, if you can believe it.

We woke up and went down to the furgon stop to try and catch a ride over the mountain to Peshkopi. This is one of those roads that you hear a lot about, one of the ones that everyone says was one of the scariest experiences of their lives but also one of the most breathtaking. Approaching the furgon area, the normal scramble for the foreigners ensued, one guy even ate shit in the middle of the street he was in such a hurry to sink his teeth into us. After battling with a few guys who wanted to charge us between 50 and 100 euros for the trip, we decided to sit down and have a coffee to let them think about things for a while. We spotted a furgon with Peshkopi plates, and Ryan and James darted off to see what he was charging. They came back and said that in half an hour we could meet him on the corner and he would take us for 800 lekë each (~6 euros x 5 = 30). So after coffee and a byrek we sauntered over to the corner to wait for our guy. We were immediately set upon by this toothless old gentleman who had apparently contracted the ride along with Ryan and James. He was extremely agitated; asking where we had been, why we were so late, the driver had already left and wasn’t coming back. Joey told him that half and hour in Albania normally means one hour, or more. The guy smiled but just kept saying that we were too late. Then we were approached again by a number of the earlier vultures. I told one of them that we had agreed on 800 lekë with the other guy, so the only way that we were going to go with him was if he charged less. He agreed to 700 and we walked down to his rig, followed by Old Toothy, still mumbling about our tardiness. It was immediately apparent that this was a low-quality furgon, and it even came equipped with genuine bullet holes in the back doors. We cautiously climbed in and the driver attempted, unsuccessfully, to start his engine. Just then our original driver pulled up and stopped next to us, looking rather unhappy. We immediately abandoned ship and piled into his much nicer vehicle. Old Toothy once again tagged along and climbed into the front seat. He immediately set into the driver telling him in the extreme decibels of the normal Albanian conversational voice that he had told us to wait, but we had demanded to leave with the other guy. Basically he was just spewing a bunch of bull about how dumb we were. We kept chipping in rude comments directed at Old Toothy, but he was too involved in his denunciations to notice. The driver seemed pretty cool about the whole thing and just set about driving. We went somewhere in the middle of town and stopped in a small street. The driver said that we would wait for a few minutes; for another passenger to join us, I assumed. Suddenly, he put the thing in reverse and we backed quickly into a sort of courtyard and a large metal gate was closed in front of us. We were all suddenly gripped by the fear that we were about to be robbed and killed. “Police check!” yelled O.T. happily, giggling at his wit. The vehicle was approached by a group of young toughs who opened another door and disappeared inside this thing that resembled a trailer, maybe to get their torture tools. They emerged carrying cases of “Bik Bull,” the rip-off of a rip-off of Red Bull, and proceeded to load them into the back of the van. And they just kept coming. With jumpy nerves, we estimated that about a thousand bottles of this stuff had been loaded in behind us. We finally left the enclosure and met a pair of young guys on another street. The driver pulled a big wad of euros out of his shirt pocket and he handed them 700 euros for the drinks that we had just loaded up. Apparently we were not the most valuable cargo on board.

Finally we began the ascent out of town. O.T. wouldn’t stop repeating his bullshit story about us trying to screw the driver over, about how he had tried to stop us but we insisted on having coffee. He even said that he had had coffee with us. On and on, over and over, he repeated the same thing. We were all pretty ready to push him out of the van over the next cliff we passed. Luckily, he was only with us for about a third of the trip, as he got out in the middle of nowhere. He took several minutes to confirm with the driver a dozen times that he would be picked up again on the way back at 11 the next morning. We waved goodbye to our new friend with our middle fingers and evil thoughts. Up till then, I had been desperately trying to take pictures through the dirty windows of the furgon, so when our buddy finally vacated his spot at the front, I asked the driver if I could move up into the front. This was actually much more comfortable and I could lean out of the window to take clearer, if not blur-free, pictures. Once I had shifted up to the front, the driver became pretty chatty, much to the distress of Katie, a flatlander from Minnesota who isn’t used to mountain roads. During the course of our multi-hour on-and-off chat, I explained to him what exactly had happened with Old Toothy. He seemed to believe my (true) story more than the other guy’s and proceeded to tell me how “low” the people from Kukës are. Sad to say, but I wouldn’t be surprised if O.T. found himself without a ride the next day.

About halfway into the trip, we picked up a small family standing by the side of the road. As usual, they were completely baffled by our presence in this unlikely place for foreigners. After they heard me conversing with the driver in Albanian, they tried out my friends in the back. These people turned out to be high-quality villagers (as most Albanian villagers are), who took us under their wing for their portion of the trip. We later stopped in a village called Kala e Dodës for lunch. The driver made us get out while he unloaded a portion of the Bik Bull into the single depressing watering hole in the small cluster of buildings. We eventually filtered into this place in search of beverages and encountered a serial killer-looking but English-speaking barkeep. Joey found that the only version of a cold drink in town was a can of Amstel, while the father of the family traveling with us offered me a cigarette. I accepted, as I always do when a villager makes a gesture of acceptance like this to me. His wife stood quietly behind him and looked at the floor while his son plied Joey for the donation of his digital camera. Everyone else ended up in the small restaurant sampling village lamb while I took a surprising call from Anders, from whom I hadn’t heard since Christmas. Imagine that he was able to get a hold of me while I was in the middle of nowhere but had tried unsuccessfully for months to reach me while I was in the relative civilization of Gramsh.

After filling up on lamb and raki, our driver decided that it was time to move on. Shortly after leaving Kala, we came across the wildest, happiest wedding party I have ever seen in this country. When the family of the groom goes to pick up the bride at her house, they then drive back to the groom’s house honking their horns. In the towns, this becomes a constant element of summer life as it seems hundreds of couples get married and the drone of car horns becomes never-ending. Usually, though, this seems to be more of an obligation necessary for the wedding video than a happy event. The people in the cars normally don’t seem to be very happy as they drive around behind the lead car with the cameraman leaning out of the window. This unexpected wedding party in the middle of nothing, however, was entirely different. We saw a lot of people, mostly young girls, dressed in traditional costumes and leaning out of the windows of the many cars and furgons waving scarves. Everyone was happy and laughing and jiving to the music coming from a truck transporting a village band. A blue Mercedes even whipped a few donuts in an open space below us before rejoining the procession. Shortly after, our traveling companions took leave, allowing me to photograph them before we shook hands and wished each other goodbye. We passed a few small but lovely villages on the way down, as well as a few fine examples of village life.

I was a bit disappointed to finish this leg of our journey and arrive in Peshkopi. I think that before I came to Albania, I had expected my entire two years to be more or less a version of this trip. I thought that I would get no effective work done but have a lot of crazy but significant interactions with extremely genuine people. When I was sharing a cigarette and talking to that father, I could tell from looking into his eyes that he wasn’t expecting anything from me, that he was simply intrigued at meeting and talking to someone not from his area, let alone an American who could speak Albanian. He never in his wildest dreams could have imagined that morning that he would run across five singing, Albanian-speaking Americans along that empty road. But he was happy for the fact that this unexpected thing had happened. Conversely, people in Gramsh seem to lose interest in me once they realize that I can’t get them any money or a job. But the villagers of this country are completely unassuming. Maybe that is why I feel cheated in a way by my experience here so far: I feel like even though I constantly give everything I can to the people of Gramsh, I can never give them what they want, so they never seem to appreciate what I am trying to do. They simply don’t see the value in what I can give them, either personally or in terms of skills. I can realize that they are disillusioned with their country and their lives, that to them what I am trying to do seems pointless, but that doesn’t make it any easier for me continue struggling against their hopelessness and apathy.

But here is an undeniable declaration: foreign aid and donations have completely ruined Albania and broken the souls of the Albanian people. Since the country opened up in the early 1990s, the only positive developments that have taken place have been at the hands of Western well-wishers. As a result, the Albanians have come to rely on Western influences to fix all the bads of Albania, in fact they demand that the West make all of the bad things go away. They don’t seem to feel any personal responsibility, or indeed any personal ability, to solve their problems on their own. All of that free money and free stuff came pouring into this country and taught them a million and one bad habits about “capitalism.” Almost no one tried to tell them how to use all of those things to build a sustainable future. Instead, a hit-and-run was conducted which left Albania with a large, but temporary, cache of wealth, and then the do-gooders ran off to save the next world crisis. The eventual result was the blind trust and frivolous investment in the pyramid schemes, the failure of which dragged this country into a civil war and completely destroyed all of the high hopes they had built upon their illusions of democracy and capitalism after they had finally banished communism. Yes, in a sense they did it to themselves. But they had no idea what was going on. Under communism, the state had always provided them with rationed amounts of things that they were then intended to use up until the next ration came. How were they supposed to know that under capitalism you are expected to produce your own rations, that there wasn’t going to be another distribution? Now, all of the places (read: not-villages) which enjoyed the sudden relative wealth of the early 1990s are poignantly feeling its absence, and the inhabitants of these towns were the most-affected victims of the loss of hope in 1997. These are the empty, colorless eyes that watch me daily in the streets in Gramsh. I have said from the beginning that I somehow feel a closer bond with people from the villages in this country, and I am only now beginning to find the ability to put it into words. The villages are mostly unchanged. In the long and turbulent history of this country, no one has ever been able to effectively rule the truly remote areas of Albania. Life just goes on there, superficially affected by the things happening in the towns, but not substantially. Communism came and went, and Hoxha never really controlled them. The wealth of the donations in the 1990s never reached them, so the war and loss of hope in the towns wasn’t a factor in their lives. Their lives are certainly difficult and they are desperately poor, but their inexperience with anything different keeps them from feeling resentful. They don’t know anything different. This state of affairs may finally be changing, however, as almost all families in the country have televisions and are constantly faced with the fantasies of life abroad and even in Tirana. The smaller towns, such as Gramsh, are now experiencing a constant cycle in which the slightly more well-off families move out, destined for larger cities where there is “more opportunity.” They vacate houses that are then filled by families from the nearest villages who have been watching Italian TV for long enough to know that they are very poor. They hope that Gramsh will some day and some how prove as a stepping stone to Tirana. The inevitable frustration of those hopes becomes the aggression that I experience daily.

Coming down off of that box, I can tell you that Peshkopi was nothing special. It felt oddly chaotic for no visible reason. In the morning, Joey and I tried to contract a ride from there over the mountain to Librazhd, but the driver wanted $150 to do it in his Land Rover, so we declined. We instead went with the others to the furgons for Tirana, beginning a ride that would extend for five dismal hours. I arrived in Tirana too late and missed the last bus for Gramsh, so I had to pay for another night in Tirana. It wasn’t all bad, though, because I was able to meet one of Katie’s friends who works for the left-wing Albanian political organization Mjaft. This is an American girl of very obviously pure Italian descent from New York. She told me about a project she was trying to get funded for a small town in the north that I had just passed through that morning. The project was for a community center that would teach local people, mostly women, how to create handmade crafts that they could then sell online via a group of internet sites that specialize in this sort of thing. She and her Tirana-born Albanian friend asked for my advice on a number of logistical items. It became brutally apparent that neither of these girls had spent much time outside of Tirana and had very little idea of what they were getting into. They intended to move to this town and guide the center through its first couple of years. They hadn’t even considered things as fundamental as “the roads leading out of there are pretty bad, so transporting your stuff from there to Rinas or Durrës to get them out of the country might cost a little more than you think.” Granted, they were in the concept phase of the project, but you’d think the Albanian girl would be well-aware of these kinds of obstacles.

I have come back to Gramsh from this trip in a better frame of mind concerning Albania than I have had since the end of last summer. The beginning of September will bring a whole lot of work and one particularly promising project with the Bashkia. Work will officially begin on the puppet theater, and the kids on our Model United Nations team will be back under my whip. I’m actually looking forward to it.

Finally, after months of monotony, I have another awesome first that I feel is fit to share with my demanding audience. As I think I’ve told you before, the ceiling in my apartment is in a state of slow and crumbling decay. In the bathroom, one corner of the bedroom, above the wood stove in the “kitchen,” and especially in the hallway, there are patches where the plaster has fallen away and the concrete is slowly but surely disintegrating. I assume that this is from water seepage since I am on the top floor of this building, but I don’t really know. It could also be the age of the building. In any case, I have to sweep every couple of days in the hallway where little patches of concrete dust have gathered. Between the bed and the wall in the bedroom, there is a nice little pile of fallen plaster. One of my nightly rituals has become to brush the dust and chunks off of the bed into the corner as the damage has slowly edged out from the corner. Luckily, in the bedroom it is still only the plaster that is suffering and not the concrete itself. Yet. One interesting fact about Albanians is that they are nuts about keeping the rugs in their houses clean. One of the most solid memories of my time here will be the almost constant sound of rug-beating. It seems like almost every day they will take all of the rugs out of their house into the stairwell, unroll them so they hang down the side of the building, and whack the crap out of them with these big fly-swatter looking things. And I mean WHACK THE CRAP out of them. If you can imagine, in a concrete building those powerful strokes cause a good deal of reverberation. Especially at these times, but even if I lay quietly in my bed at night, I can hear intermittent little patters of bits falling down in the hallway onto the linoleum below. The owners of the apartment have promised that they will fix this problem eventually. I don’t really know what that will involve, but I assume it means that I will be homeless for a few days or possibly even weeks when it does happen. Of course, the ultimate fear is that the ceiling will fall down on me, and this has become a sort of running joke among the other volunteers. I am relatively sure of the fact that I will be able to finish my two years here without having to deal with that, barring any major events. Last Monday morning, I was doing my normal Monday thing. I didn’t have class in the high school until the last hour of the day, so I was at home working on the cursed teacher’s book for the third year English book. If you remember the description I gave you of my apartment, you may remember that I have a half-size Soviet refrigerator at the end of one of my couches. Being old and Soviet, the poor thing does a good deal of gyrating when the motor switches on and off. It also does not always sound very happy with life. At shortly after 9 in the morning, the refrigerator groaned and came on. A couple of minutes later, the couch I was sitting on began to wiggle a little. This is normal, as the fridge’s gyrations normally cause a little shake in the couch. This time, though, the shaking was more than normal. I thought, “this is it, poor Smolenski is about to go down!” Soon, though, the shaking seemed to be more than could ever be expected out of a dying Ruski appliance. My next thought was that a truck or something had run into the building. Then I heard a large rumble and boom and things falling. Now I knew what it was. The ceiling had fallen in in the hallway. When the falling noises stopped, so did the shaking. With trepidation, I crept to the door of the living room and opened it, expecting to see sunshine where there shouldn’t be any. But the hallway was fine. Then I heard the running water. So I went to the bathroom, again expecting to see sunshine. What I saw was not sunshine, however, but a large white can lying on the floor of the bathroom and water spraying from the wall. The water heater had fallen off the wall, and the intake tube was spraying. So I ran in and turned the thankfully-existent valve to shut it off. I then heard Nena from next door come out of her apartment and go down the stairs faster than I’ve ever heard her do before. “Great, I scared the crap out of the old lady next door,” I thought. So I went to the door and opened it to see her standing down on the landing looking out into the alley between our building and the next. “Nena,” I said, “don’t worry, it was in here. There’s no problem.” She turned around and said a few things that I didn’t quite get, then turned around to look out again. She turned to me once more, and I asked her what it was. “Earthquake, boy! Earthquake!” Ah, yes. Things seemed to make much more sense. So I went back inside and stood staring at the cruelty Fate had just stuck me with. Not that I need to have the hot water heater, having one at all is amazing given the lifestyle that is normally associated with the organization I’m working for. But I started to see the disaster this would become when I told my landlords about it. They would have to come see. There would be a whole load of “Oh Boh Boh”s. They would want to have it fixed as soon as possible, which would mean trying to coordinate being at home with the coming of all of the fixers, which could involve concrete workers, plumbers, electricians, etc. There is no such thing as an appointment here. The only good part of the whole thing seemed to be that the stupid thing did not appear to be broken. There was a dent on the top where it landed, but all of the water was still inside of it, so it appeared to still be workable. Then I started to think about how lucky it was that it didn’t go through the floor. I tried to lift it, move it even, which proved impossible. This thing weighs a few hundred pounds with all of that water in it, and it fell from about 6 feet off of the floor. I couldn’t even see a mark on the floor where it hit. Didn’t even crack the tile, apparently. I have since found where it hit. It landed right on the front edge of my Turkish toilet, on the lip of tile there. There is a small chunk of tile missing from there and a few hairline fractures radiating out. More distressing, I have found that there is a hardly noticeable crack straight down the center of my poor Turk. Hopefully it stays that way or I could have another, more disgusting story to tell you sometime soon. So that was my first experience with an earthquake. I had absolutely no idea what was going on until it was over, which was probably good. I met Nena in the stairs a few hours later as I was leaving for school, and she said that it was the worst earthquake they’ve had in almost a decade, which is somewhat comforting, I guess. At least there probably won’t be another one like it until after I leave. But I have since had all of these horror scenarios going through my head. The worst comes from the realization that the building I’m living in is one of the oldest in Gramsh, and from the outside seems to have a minor lean to it. I have no way of knowing about any repairs or maintenance that it has received since it was built. So I get these pictures of falling bricks and general disaster. Thank Dio that I did not happen to be visiting the Turk at the time of the event. Can you imagine the call that would have had to be made to Colorado? How did Brandon die? He was CRUSHED…into his toilet…by a giant falling can of scalding hot water. Unfortunately, parts of him may never be found as the can broke open, effectively flushing the toilet. The rest has been burned beyond recognition by the heat of the water. We’re sorry for your loss. What a way to go.

I had an interesting experience a couple of months ago that I realized I had told you last night when I was talking to my mom on the phone. It’s definitely worth telling.

I have an afternoon English class with a group of ten 8-11 year old girls that meets twice a week at 2 pm. This class has been the highlight of my life here since it started because these girls are the cutest, hardest-working, most energetic bunch of students that I have. I think that they feel about the same way about the class, because they regularly line up outside the locked door of the center half an hour early and wait impatiently for me to arrive and let them in. They always position a scout to watch for my approach, and they jitter with anticipation when they spot me. Other than the class that I teach on my own with the third year class in the high school, this is the only class that I spend a lot of time planning and doing a lot of extra work for. We play English games regularly, and they LOVE it. We recently had a hilarious rendition of Simon Says after learning the body parts, where the favorites were touch your elbow and your hand (try it) and touch your knee with your head.

Sometime during the fall, I received a package from Mom that contained a book of little circular stickers. I assume that she intended them for Lidia in Librazhd, but I decided that they could be used more profitably in this class. So I went the next day with my stickers and told the girls that I was going to check their homework every day and if it was all done, I would give them a sticker. When they got to ten stickers, I would give them a treat. I then went around and asked them what their favorite sweet was. They answered unanimously: cake. They seemed pretty enthusiastic about this plan. No hints.

And so the class went on, and the girls accrued their stickers. This is another point of great anticipation for them. I now have to let them into the room at least five minutes early in order to get the sticker distribution over with and allow them enough time to compare stickers. Right around the time of my birthday, they were all very close to having ten stickers. One of my other classes, the one with the elementary school teachers and the director of the culture center, was kind enough to get me a cake for my birthday. The thing is that I really don’t like the cake here. It’s a sad attempt at imitating the kinds of cakes I assume that they have seen in Italy. But the bread is dry and plastic-tasting, and there is way too much whipped cream. So I decided to use the cake for the girls. I took it home and smeared my name off of the top, collected the napkins and forks, and giggled to myself at the thought of their little faces when I unveiled this surprise to them.

Class went as usual the next day. I stopped about fifteen minutes early and told them that they had been doing very well (which is no lie, they are about to be the first class that I have with kids that has finished a book) and I had brought a surprise for them since they were almost all very close to having ten stickers. This was received coolly. I brought out the cake and showed it to them with a great amount of flair. The response was extremely puzzling. Instead of joyous laughter and glee, you would have thought I had just told them that their houses had been blown up. Sullen, expressionless, little faces. Not understanding at all, I went ahead and had the two oldest girls distribute the forks and napkins. I then went around and gave them each a piece of cake. When I finished and looked up, they were all just looking at me, still with the weird expressions. Not a single one had even tasted a crumb. Puzzled, I offered them the Albanian equivalent of buon appetite, “ju befte mire!” Nothing. I told them that they could eat it. Finally, they started to pick at the cake. But by the way they did it and the looks on their faces, it seemed like I had just told them to eat poison. I had absolutely no idea what was going on. After an excruciating minute or two, I had to just leave the room and stand outside of the center. Only then did I hear them begin to talk and laugh. When the hour had finished, I went back in, and they had all eaten the cake. I dismissed them without really saying anything else because I was still so much in shock. The delightful scene I had pictured in my head had withered and blown away in the weird wind.

I still have no idea what that was all about. It stands as the seminal event among a large number in my experience here that defies all of my attempts to find any explanation. They came back to the class the next time just like they always were before. There was no noticeable change in them from pre-cake to post-cake. They still go nuts for the stickers, but I’m not sure that I’m ready to try out another cake on them when they fulfill another ten. I’m not sure that they would care. I think they just like the stickers.

I’m not convinced that this is related, but it’s still fun to tell. Last Thursday during the class, the girls were working on an exercise. I was going around the room like I normally do, checking their progress and giving them help where needed. After I had helped one particular girl, Enxhi, she turned to me and asked in an “I’m very sneaky” tone, “O Prossor. If you were going to get a gift, what kind of a gift would you like?” Ten little faces turn to me with ten little smiles. I answered in my own very sneaky tone, “I don’t know. Why do you ask?” They all turned back to work as Enxhi said, “Oh nothing. But you think about it, cause we’re going to ask again next Tuesday.” I can think of three causes for this question. One: now, two months after the cake incident, they have finally realized that I wasn’t trying to poison them with the cake and want to reciprocate. Two: March 7th is Teacher’s Day and March 14th is Summer’s Day here, and they want to give their teacher something. Three: Their parents have decided that they need to give me some kind of payment for teaching their children for free for six months. In any case, I will do my best to evade this for as long as I can.

I have gotten some recent nagging for the lack of blogging that I have been doing in the last few months. I SERIOUSLY have nothing of interest to talk about, unless you really want to hear about how I just spent half an hour peeling and cutting carrots by candlelight because the power is out. For some strange reason, now that I am creeping up on almost a year of being here, riding on a bus next to the guy with three live chickens and a young goat in a sack on the floor doesn’t seem so novel. I have completely settled into the daily working routine that most likely isn’t strikingly different from all of yours.

But it seems that I am letting some people down by not writing. So I am now making it official: I will accept and answer all requests for discussion on whatever subjects you would like, whether they concern what I'm doing here or how I feel about the fashion sense of wearing daisy yellow sundresses in March. I really don’t know what it is that you want to know about what I’m doing here since it all seems so normal to me by now, so please feel free to ask me about things that you’re curious about. I certainly have enough free time to answer you. I probably have no idea of the gaps in information that I have given you up until now, so I need some help to fill those gaps.

Mom asked me to describe my living situation again. I live in an apartment on the last floor of a three story building. The building is fairly old, so there are a few issues that come with that. The apartment is what is called here a “2 plus 1”, meaning that there are two larger rooms plus a small alcove in one of the rooms that functions as a kitchen, as well as a separate bathroom. The bathroom is the most interesting place in the joint, since there are some strange things in there. Of course, there is my beloved Turkish toilet, above which is the faucet that I use for showers, so I get to stand above the toilet to shower, adding a whole new and private dimension to the phrase “don’t drop the soap”, which I have fortunately not done yet. There is a sink in there, as well. My favorite part is how there are three tubes that emerge from the wall just above my Turk that lead from the kitchen sink, bathroom sink, and washing machine. The tile is a pleasant light green, and the door is quite ancient, so you have to use a special technique to open and close it.

Since the winter started, I spend virtually all of my time in the “living room”, using the bedroom only as a closet and morning wakeup as I run in there and dance around from the cold while I jump into my long johns and school clothes. The living room is furnished with two pretty old couches, the backs of which fold down so that they become beds. They are a little rickety, but I like them. There is a small table in the middle, extremely rickety and colored to look like green marble with gold trim. The kitchen has a small sink with a faucet made of green garden hose, virtually no counters other than two small squares beside the sink, no cupboards whatsoever, and two stoves, one a Swedish electric and the other a wood-burning stove. Opposite the kitchen alcove are the doors to the balcony. This is the key to the comfort of my apartment right now because the doors face south and they keep the room warm, as well as allow my clothes to dry quickly when I put them out there. Yes, I am living in a solar oven. They could cause trouble in the summer, though, when I don’t want the sun the to shine in. Above these doors and above the alcove opening are some shining examples of Albanian home decor: dark gold colored satin-looking curtains. I forgot to mention the “new” fridge that I got from my landlords and wrote about before. To the extent of my limited Russian, it appears that this fridge hails from Smolensk. But I don’t need any Russian to know that it makes some really interesting noises when the motor stops and starts.

I have two favorite quirks in my apartment. One comes from the age of the building that I mentioned before. This is that the sky is falling. In just about every corner in the apartment, the ceiling is slowly but surely crumbling. Especially when it rains, you can hear little patters here and there in the hallway as plaster and concrete falls to the linoleum below. This doesn’t really inconvenience me much beyond the fact that I have to sweep the stuff up every few days. I assume that someday it will become a much larger problem, one requiring you to wear your raincoat in the hallway and bathroom, but I think that that day will come after I am gone, so it’s not too troubling to me. The owners know about the problem and have promised to fix it, but of course they haven’t yet.

The other cool quirk to my apartment is my ghost mouse. I see him scurry by every once in a while, usually by the bathroom while I’m brushing my teeth or across the kitchen alcove while I’m typing on the computer. But every time that I try to corner him underneath the washing machine or one of the stoves, he just disappears somehow. I’ve had as many as two people here to help me watch and make sure he doesn’t slip out when I’m not looking, but that doesn’t matter. He still vanishes. I’ve now warmed up to the thought of having a phantom mouse living with me. Gives me someone to talk to when the lights are out and I’m bored.

That’s all I’ve got for now. The lights just came back on and I need to make some beans for dinner. Once again, send me your requests for things you want me to tell you about.

Almost three weeks ago now, we had a small gathering of Americans come to Gramsh and Kayla and I hosted a slightly early version of Thanksgiving lovingly dubbed “Fakesgiving”. We had obtained a turkey from the office in Tirana, and Kayla’s over-generous family had gone a little nuts and sent her something like 8 packages in 2 weeks, all bursting with everything from 4 boxes of StoveTop stuffing to pumpkin pie filling and corn syrup. Of course, with me being the culinary superior of the Gramsh staff, I was put in charge of the centerpiece of the meal, the turkey. And yet, with me never having cooked a turkey before or really even closely observed the process beyond drooling, this had major potential to end up a disaster.

So on the day before the big day, I decided to search out some help from the big M. And in classic style, that was the one day when a lasting phone connection simply could not be established despite all efforts; the critical motherly advice was incomplete and only partially understood. I went to sleep that Friday night with mild dread in my heart concerning the great weight to be placed on me the next day to deliver this “rooster of the sea” (literal translation of the Albanian word) in juice-dripping and mouth-tingling goodness.

I woke up at 5 o’clock to make it over to Kayla’s early enough to start this beast cooking so that it might finish before the expected 10 am power outage which has become the norm recently (at least the morning outage is scheduled. There is now a trend to an unscheduled evening outage, as well, as just now when the power went out from 7:30 to 8:30). When I arrived, I found Cat (health worker, Bilisht), with her hand in my sea rooster’s backside, thankfully taking care of the part that I really didn’t want to do. So the first thing that I really had to do was attempt to smear rock solid village butter on the outside of this bird, which didn’t work out as well as you might imagine. Then (thanks to some modern products!) I attempted to construct a tent of aluminiumium for my dear darling to sleep in. It wasn’t as easy as you would expect, and I was a bit skeptical of this contraption by the time I got the bird in the oven at around 7 am. I spent the next 2 and a half hours fretting in front of the oven, trying to discern if the bird was producing the expected gushing amounts of liquid. But this bird just wouldn’t leak. At the 1:40 mark, I stressed out and tossed a glass of water in the bottom of the pan so that at least that would steam and hopefully keep the turkey moist. At 9:45 am, I couldn’t take it anymore and, after dumping another half a glass of water in the pan, came home to try and take a nap. When I got home, the power was out at my place, and I feared for the turkey, but when I called Kayla, everything was still on at her place, so it was lucky we were doing it at her house and not mine.

I got back to Kayla’s at about 12 to check on the bird. It looked brownish, but the skin still felt a bit dry to me. But I had no other solution than to wait. At one, with a houseful of guests that had shown up in the meantime, I removed the beast from its layer and started poking around to see if it was at least not-pink inside. It looked done, so I started trying to cut it up, again having absolutely no idea what I was doing. My first taste was really surprising: full, juicy, turkey flavor. Suddenly my little chest started swelling up and there were manly grunts of success issuing on all sides. But then I had to start scrambling to make the gravy, since I had somehow been abandoned on the stove while everyone else shot the breeze. So I was doing an incredible number of heel turns spinning between the bird on the table and the gravy on the stove, trying to keep either from going awry. I must have looked like a figure skater, without the tight costume and marvelously muscular legs.

It was actually a very impressive meal. Our local American missionary lady brought a huge pot of fabulous mashed potatoes (she is a domestic miracle and power mom) and homemade corn bread. Kayla and Cat had spent the morning making vegetable plates with spinach and onion dips, as well as a number of pies and different kinds of cookies. Katy from Librazhd had arrived a bit earlier and made a spinach loaf and a pot of brown sugar carrots. There was also a salad with good dressing.

Unfortunately, right when everything and everyone was ready to start eating, I had to leave to go to my class with the women’s center people. I contemplated just getting there and telling them to come eat with us, but when I got there, they seemed particularly excited to do English, despite most of them knowing about what we had been up to that day. So I waited until the end of class to invite them. We walked over to Kayla’s from the Youth Center, and I could sense the Fear creeping up in them, just like it did for the Italians when we had Thanksgiving in Perugia. By the time that we got in the door, there was palpable worry in the air. I opened the door into the living room/kitchen, and the Albanians bunched up in the entryway; no one could work up the courage to be first into the Den of English speakers. Monda, my favorite, finally did it, and came in and said hello to everyone. The others eventually came in and spread out. Places to sit were scarce, but everyone squeezed together to make room. A few of the female Albanians attached themselves immediately to the oldest-looking American in the room, Chris, and started chatting him up, much to the annoyance of Cat, his lady. The others generally avoided English conversation, which was too bad, since this was a real opportunity for them to practice what I’d been teaching for the last 4 months. I started to have them come up to try the food, which was pretty amusing. None of them had any idea what any of that stuff was, and took things like a fork’s worth of turkey, a little spoon of potatoes with a drop of gravy on top, and one of them went so far as to massively overcompensate with the only thing she could recognize and loaded her plate almost entirely with peppers and cheese and carrots from the vegetable trays. Afterwards, they tried little slabs of pumpkin and pecan pie with whipped cream on top and the real horror of horrors, American Coffee. With most of their coffees half drunk (or less), the Albanians decided that it was time to use the late hour (about 6 pm) to escape the madness. I used the release as an excuse to finally eat and sit in the corner with my personal bottle of wine.

The next day, I had another class with those same Albanians. Marjana, the fireball of the group (and one of Chris’ attackers), came out in the end and told me her impression of the dinner. She didn’t like the fact that no one shook their hands or even stood up when they came in. Monda seconded that, if in a slightly more humorous way. She said that when she came in and looked around, her initial reaction was to search for hands to shake, and the absence of them completely threw her off. I’m not sure that they really understood what I meant when I tried to explain to them that in that situation, they were not walking into anything resembling Albania apart from the house. They were more walking into a room filled with America, and they were treated like Americans. We are much less formal with guests then Albanians, for better or worse. We don’t like to have our guests feel like they are imposing on us, so we are much more hands-off with them. I also tried to explain that it is still uncomfortable for me when I go into an Albanian house and even if I honestly don’t want anything to drink, they will make me have something; not to mention having to fight off offers for everything from raki to cigarettes to a big side of lamb. In any case, they got to have a taste of what they may face if they go to America, and for me, it meant gorging on a pretty good rendition of my favorite meal. Even if a lot of it was made by me.

At the end of my last entry, I apparently forgot to include the finale of the dreaded arrival of my first houseguests:

After cleaning for most of the afternoon in anticipation of this event, I sat anxiously on my couch waiting for the phone call telling me they were coming. When it finally came, I got up and started pacing around the house. Eventually, I heard a car drive up and park somewhere below my apartment, and I knew it was them. So I rolled up the carpet in the hallway and opened the door onto the stairs. My cute if slightly spacey landlady came first up the stairs, followed by her husband and two men struggling with the guest of honor. They carried the thing through the door and followed my landlord around while he tried to decide where would be the best place to put it, as apparently my indications toward the spot where I had put the broken one before, as close to the kitchen nook as possible, were not satisfactory. But in the end he decided to do as the weird American wanted, and instead of putting it in the bedroom, let it be put near the kitchen. Once we had gotten it set up on its special wooden stand and tested to demonstrate its functionality, the moment I had been dreading had arrived. But I think that in this case, my gender actually saved me. I began to offer them coffee and juice and raki, but they immediately deflected those offers in preference of inviting me out for a coffee. Obviously I would not be able to efficiently deliver drinks to them because I am a man (he probably doesn’t even know how to turn on the stove!). So instead of having to suffer through the qeras process with them, we all went down and piled into the car to drive the one block down to the town’s fashionable caffe (for the parent generation) and have a coffee or tea there. So that was the big finale to that story. Fascinating, huh?

A better story concerning house etiquette is this one. Since leaving for our own houses, Kayla and I have been trying to go back to Sose’s house once a week on Tuesday to make them dinner and give Sose something of a break. This all seems like a great idea until you come to the realization that Sose’s house is obviously cursed for Americans. Kayla was always making a mess in that house when she lived there, and now I have become the latest home wrecker of note. The first incident came on the first week that we went over there. I was going to try and make some kind of Mexican-ish thing using qofte, a creepy slab of meat slightly resembling breakfast sausage, but of highly questionable meat origins. This was to include rice, but I am certainly not experienced in the art of rice making, so I asked Sose if she could take care of that for me. Somehow my intentions were not communicated, as I expected her to be completely in charge of the rice, and so I didn’t pay any attention to it. Sometime during the process of making the qofte/onion/pepper/tomato sauce, I started to notice that there seemed to be a lot of smoke rolling around up by the ceiling. I couldn’t see or smell anything other than steam coming from the stove, so I didn’t think it was me. I showed the smoke to Alda, who told Sose, who started running around looking for the source of the smoke, even going over and getting grandma, a rather salty old gjyshe. The culprit could not be discovered, until eventually I lifted the lid on the rice for the tenth time since the hunt began and started trying to stir it and discovered a large wad of caked blackness in the bottom. The search was over, and the look of “of course it was him, he can’t cook” that washed over grandma’s face was a bit dissatisfying. Of course, Sose didn’t say anything bad, but she hovered behind me, watching, until I was finished cooking, offering little pieces of advice like “are you sure that isn’t turned up too high?”, “make sure you keep stirring it”, etc.

That was a fun night, but this one is even better. A couple days after the Fakesgiving thing, Kayla decided that we would take the remains of the turkey carcass over to make them some kind of stew. I was pretty relieved by this idea, since I was extremely tired, really only wanted to go to bed and didn’t intend to stay for more than ten minutes, and it meant that I could play a secondary role in the cooking and not be directly responsible for any hiccups. Everything went as desired, Kayla cut up all the vegetables and put them into the pressure cooker that she had found in her house and brought over to speed things up. She put the whole mixture onto the stove and latched the lid on. After about ten minutes, the thing was making quite a bit of noise as the pressure built up. She said that she was getting a bit worried about it and asked me what to do. I told her that I didn’t really know that much about pressure cookers, since I had never used one before, but that perhaps she should at least take it off of the heat to keep the pressure from building any more. We waited a few minutes, and with the noise still issuing, she asked me to help her figure the thing out. Now I knew more or less that we needed to find the pressure release valve and drain all of that out before we opened the lid. So I inspected the thing and found what I expected to be the valve. I used a fork and started letting the pressure out. But I had absolutely no idea how much needed to be let out or if it would ever stop shooting steam and making noise. So after about 3 minutes, I thought I would try to open the latch. I did so, and the lid stayed glued against the lip. Now retardedly (I admit it, one of the dumbest things I’ve ever done. There I said it), I didn’t reseal the latch but started letting the pressure out through the valve again. Not much more of this and there was a sudden boom as the lid succumbed to the pressure and turkey soup blew all over the stove, wall, and my pants. Now, overlooking the fact that I was extremely lucky to not have been severely burned or even burned at all by this explosion of scalding liquid, the following chaos was extremely embarrassing for me. Sose immediately shot into action, with “no problem, Brandon. No problem! Just your pants. Loli, take him in the bathroom and take his pants off.” I was more or less mortified by the whole thing, as she forced me away from the stove, went and got the mop and started cleaning. Of course, by now the only thing I could think was that I hadn’t even wanted to stay and that all I wanted to do was leave. But of course leaving at that point was impossible, they wouldn’t let me leave thinking that I was so merzitur (sad). So I was forced to hang around and fight off their attempts at cleaning my pants, feel humiliated, and eat the remains of that freaking soup. And it even tasted pretty good.

What will happen this week, I wonder? Especially now that the lights are going out for a large portion of the evening hours, so we’ll be cooking in the dark. The major problem will be that, as always, the more careful you try to be, the more likely you are to make some kind of mistake. I’m sure I’ll be back again with some new, better disaster to recount. I’m actually kind of surprised that Sose is still willing to let me into her house with the intention of being anywhere near the stove.

There is still a large degree of disbelief in this town regarding my ability to care for myself in any way. On my way home the other night (by night I mean 5 pm, by which time it is now pitch black and the streets more or less deserted) I was stopped by a group of small boys asking me the usual questions, half in Italian and half in broken English. They were amazed when I told them that I live alone and that my parents live in America. “Even your mommy?” “Even my mommy.” “But who makes your gjelle?” I could only laugh at this cute question, since his only conception of food was the ubiquitous, yet slightly varied, sort of stew referred to collectively by this term. Albanians always laugh when they ask me how I like the food here and I respond by telling them that they eat a lot of gjelle.

In some ways, this disbelief pays off because anytime that I express a need for anything, I get a large mommy response out of a surprisingly large number of people. Even out of the men. When I expressed a need for an extension cord for my new refrigerator, instead of explaining to me where to get one, what it’s called, and how much it should cost like I asked, I got a posse of male teachers escorting me to the correct place and making sure that I wasn’t overcharged. Of course, my most devoted helper is the ever-amazing Sose, a woman whose maternal instincts apparently have absolutely no boundaries. Kayla has been having problems with her housing situation, since the dream house that she was supposed to move into fell through, and Sose has thrown herself into a maternal frenzy trying to find something else for Kayla. Apparently, (I’ve never been present for this) when Kayla and Sose go to look at a house, Sose is almost brutally demanding of the landlord regarding lowering the rent and supplying the furniture. Pushy to the point that Kayla has decided that she can’t go with Sose anymore because she gets too worked up about it.

The weather is definitely on the hard slide into winter. I had initially thought that I would be able to go the winter without any heating at all, like I did in Italy. But last weekend when the temperature dropped close to freezing, I decided that that might not be the most fun way to go. I could definitely do it, but it would be mildly miserable, and I decided that of all places, I should not be miserable at home while I’m here, since this is the only place where I can feel completely in control and relaxed. To illustrate this statement, I can tell about bringing in the refrigerator the other night. I have been living without one for this first part in the apartment, either not buying anything that needs refrigeration, or using it quickly, or, lately, using the balcony concrete as a cooling system, where “I share my milk with the birds” (my admission of this last to a class that included my beloved Alda sparked a five minute bout of tearful 12 year old laughter). My landlords were busy looking for a functioning, used half-size unit that they could provide me with, and last week the good news finally came. And the night before last they decided that they were coming. This was actually the first time that an Albanian would be setting foot into this apartment since I had taken up residence, and I had been rushing to prepare since I had heard that they found a fridge. This included finding a way to re-mount the curtains that had fallen from the ceiling during my weekend in Pogradec, as well as finally getting the necessary stuff to perform qeras, which had been my main reason for not inviting anyone over. So I finally went down and got a pack of candy and a box of juice and a bag of napkins. I also had to make sure that things were distinctly clean, etc., something that I’ve been doing extraordinarily well with overall, but that sometimes falls a little behind. When the phone call finally came that said they were coming, I started to get really antsy about it. I was all worried about doing everything right and basically about having them come into my sanctuary. And that feeling of discomfort in the area that is supposed to be mine is what I have decided to try and avoid regarding the cold.

So with a feeling of need and some mild apprehension, I asked Sose a couple of weeks ago if she would know where I might obtain some wood for my wood stove. I asked her because she works in a village, and had set Kayla up with a village woman who will eventually bring her milk and eggs, etc. So I thought that Sose would be the logical person to ask about getting wood, since it is all brought from the village. And I was right. So after our class on Tuesday, she took me to this woman who was apparently going to be selling me the wood. In a strange twist of luck, it happened to be the mother of the fat little boy who is a total ass with me and asks me forcefully every time I see him if I “wanna fight with knives”. She told me that I needed to come back the next morning before 8 to find the guy who would bring it to me. When I showed up that morning, in true Albanian fashion, she told me to come back after school. So I came back at about an hour before school ends, just in case, since I don’t have that much time between school and my afternoon classes. Of course, the guy wasn’t there, but this silent little woman led me wordlessly around the pazaar looking for him, and found a guy who could call him for us. She then told me to wait while he came from wherever he was. So I waited for a half an hour, still innocently expecting that I was only going to meet the guy, decide on a price, and tell him, or at most show him, where I needed to have the wood delivered. So at about one this guy rolled up in one of the hilariously cool three wheeled blue mini-trucks that were everywhere in Italy and are making their way into Albania now, too, second hand. We agreed on the price, and then he got me into the passenger seat, I assumed, to show him where I live. And right away I have to say that this little blue truck was well on in years and had a few issues. The most important to me was that the passenger door was held closed by a sliding bolt like you would find in a bathroom. Not something that I have a difficulty negotiating. But in true “this is how you open a cupboard door” form, this guy would not believe that I could do it on my own and forced me to bend over double in the seat while he reached over me to do it every time. This kind of stuff makes me crazy! And off we went. But we turned away from the center of town and towards the road to the villages. As we got a little further away, I started to get worried that we were actually going to the village to get my wood right then, which I didn’t have time for. I asked him such, telling him that I had a class at 2. “No problem, it’s only 1:10,” he said. Right. It turned out that we weren’t going to a village, but to a small yard at the edge of town where this guy had a stack of wood and an ingenious wooden box he uses to measure the wood by the cubic meter. We threw my wooden box-full into the back of his vehicle, me working like a maniac because of the time constraint. We set off once again in the excruciatingly slow three-wheely and putt-putt-putted over to my apartment building. He dumped the wood at the desired spot and took my money and off he went. During this noisy process, I attracted an eager audience of little kids screaming “O Italian!” and curious, perplexed knitting Nenas. I went upstairs and changed quickly out of my teacher’s clothes and into work clothes to begin my speed transfer of 1 cubic meter of wood from ground to third floor balcony in: 28 minutes. I got back down to the spectacle, and luckily the kids had all lost interest already, but there was still an interested Nena there who had to quiz me about whether I live alone here and how much I earn and pay for rent, etc. I worked through that as quickly as possible and started sprinting up and down the stairs with armfuls of wood. Eventually, I realized that I was being watched by a lot of old eyes and being discussed, since once when I went down I heard a couple of unseen old women saying, “if he’s paying rent there, they should really provide the wood to him.” And I actually met the old man next door, the husband of the cute “O Nena, mire Nena” woman, for the first time with a load of wood in my hands, breathing heavily and sweating. I asked how he was, and he looked startled and said, “gotcherself a bit o’ wood, huh?” And that was all. I passed him again on the way down and asked him where he was going, and he said that he was going out for a bit with this good weather. I brought up the last armload at 1:55, and had time only to change shirts and wash my hands and face before jetting off to class and still getting there at 2:05, which doesn’t look good to the class that I’m always ragging on about being on time. Oops.

The other funny part to this story is that I am yet to succeed in lighting the blessed fire. I will have to provide a picture of this contraption sometime, but this wood stove has dimensions that I have never had to negotiate before. The place where you actually burn the wood is about 5 inches square and a foot deep, with a grate in the bottom that lets the ashes drop through into this pan. And I have absolutely no idea how to arrange the wood to get it to catch, plus the nagging suspicion that the wood isn’t the driest stuff available. So I have struggled a couple of times to get something going, and have ended up frustrated each time, let alone the fact that I have run completely through the supply of scrap paper that I have been accumulating since I got here. I am on the verge of asking “O Nena, mire Nena” to come show me the secret, since there has to be one. I remember Arjana just tossing some wood into the stove in LB and adding a piece of paper and it catching right away. I don’t think asking the old lady would be a problem, since I went out the other day and met her spinning wool on the sidewalk. I sat down with her for a minute, and when I shook her hand, she freaked out because my hand was “so cold!” The fact was that I had just washed the dishes, and there being no hot water tap in the kitchen, that means that I always come away with blue hands when I’m done. But she didn’t believe me when I told her that and that I normally have unusually warm hands, and started to tell me over and over that I need to light the fire. And so I think that she would be more than happy to come over and help me light my fire if I ask her. In fact, I’m sure that most of the town would come to help me if I asked.

Today has been the first real taste of winter that we’ve had so far. I’m going to estimate that we were in the upper 30’s (about 5 C) this morning. It was funny to see the other teachers this morning. They were all shivering and commenting on the cold. I showed up in a normal sweater and everyone gaped at me in awe. “Aren’t you cold? You’re going to get sick!” They can’t really seem to fully comprehend when I tell them that where I come from the average elevation is only slightly lower than the mighty mountain Tomorr that can be seem from anywhere in Gramsh. I also tell them that in that fabled land of Colorado it snowed (if only a little) a couple of weeks ago, they just cringe. But it’s snowing here, too. I just got a phone call telling me that it has snowed in Puke in the north and that my friend there was on his way out to build a snowman.

For my part, I am loving the cold. Everything feels cleaner and I feel more alert than usual. The downside is that I think I’m getting sick; who knows if that has anything to do with my sweater like they say. I guess I could assume it is and go ahead and rub some raki on my back to cure myself like they want me to. But I think that I’ve done pretty well health-wise here. I’ve only been sick that once in Librazhd, which in comparison with my once every three weeks in Italy is a miracle. It might have something to do with the diet and lifestyle that I have taken on here. Not going out every night (or ever?) like in Italy.

Last weekend we were all 38 (we’ve lost 2 now :’ ( ) in the eastern border lake town of Pogradec for a language training. It was really nice to see all of those people that I had completely lost track of since we split up in June (since I’m not traveling as much as others of us), but that was more or less where the good part stopped. I’ve definitely been sinking into some “culture shock” lately, and have been finding myself withdrawing from almost everything Albanian. Supposedly that’s part of their rationale in scheduling this event when they do. They know more or less the cycles that we go through here, and try to give us support at the critical times. So more or less everyone was feeling pretty negative about work and life when we met there in Pogradec, and I was happy to find that I’m actually one of the least upset people in our group. Our next scheduled depression is in January, and I assume that that has something to do with it being the dead of winter.

Needless to say, being forced to participate in language sessions talking about things like Skenderbeg and folk songs was not what I was really looking forward to when I went to this gig. There were a few good parts to the training, like talking about problems that we’re having at work (in Albanian, of course) and learning a really good poem. But the part that really drove me nuts was that at least 3 of the activities were about “love and relationships”. That’s all nice, but for those of us that don’t have access to either of these at the moment (of course there are some of us that have linked up intra-nationality since arrival), it was infuriatingly frustrating. My group consisted of 6 males, and since all of the language teachers are female, it was even worse. Imagine being an attractive, single, young female teacher trying to get 6 guys to explain their beliefs about love in front of one another in English, let alone in Albanian. I felt bad for the teachers because it must have been torture for them to try and lead us on these discussions, but it wasn’t fun for us, either.

The best part was, of course, after class. We got to eat and socialize with whole groups of English speakers and kind of pretend that we were somewhere else for awhile. And, of course, we got to celebrate a slightly early Halloween. From our lakeside hotel room, my roommate Joey and I spied an interesting circular boat moored close by with the words “DISKO MATEO” in huge white letters painted on the side. We decided that this would have to be investigated, and on the night before the party we sent a few scouts over to see what this place was, and how safe it could be to have 40 plus people piled on a circular boat. When we arrived on the scout night, the boat was deserted, and it looked like the staff had just sat down to dinner. But the main waiter guy let us in, and we sat down. He disappeared somewhere and reappeared in a spiffy white sailor suit complete with cap. He went into the “music box”, where we could see his little head bobbing to the music through a porthole in the wall, and started up the music. To get out to the music box, he had to go through the main doors, which were two sliding glass doors that met in the middle of the opening, and he always had to go through them both; he couldn't open just one, he had to open both. And he always had the funniest look on his face as he closed the doors together behind his back. Like he felt like a Jedi or something. The light was a dim fluorescent blue, which reflected nicely in the glasses of raki.

In short, we decided that this place was just dive-y enough to make a perfect venue for the next night. On Saturday, everyone was abuzz with who was going to wear what. I had absolutely no plans, since my experience at CU was always that the best costumes are completely improvisational. We had a pirate, a whole load of soccer players, a “chun” (Albanian word for a boy, used among us in a purely pejorative sense), some unidentifiable things with wigs and glasses, etc. What came of my improvisational skills? Somehow my North Face jacket ended up on my legs (with a face-painted wad of plastic bags stuffed into the hood) and my Carhartt pants ended up over my head and a pair of someone else’s shoes went on my feet and I spent the night being led around running into things because Carhartts are a little too thick to see through. Miraculously, I made it across the gangplank and into the boat instead of into the lake and didn’t fall down too much once the boat got rocking pretty good from the dancing and the “soccer team” taking laps around the outside deck.

Coming back to Gramsh and work was a little bit of a downer. I had had a week and a half off, with all of the holidays we had plus the five days in Pogradec, so Monday was a bit of a reality check with 5 hours of school and 5 hours of courses in the afternoon. The other big reality check was the time change. We went back to standard time on Sunday, so the sun is currently hitting the horizon at about 4:30, and it is dark by 5:30. That makes the temperature drop quickly, but it also turns Gramsh into a ghost town by 7. Even my class of full-grown women at the women’s center has been telling me that we now need to change the schedule for that class because they can’t stay out so late anymore. On Tuesday, after making dinner for Sose and family after class, I walked home at maybe 8 and was a bit afraid that there was about to be some sort of disaster since the streets were deserted. It’s kind of a weird feeling, because just last week the streets were packed with xhiro at that hour. But I guess that this is the reality for the winter months. I now understand a little better why they go so crazy spending as much time as possible strutting around town in the summer, because in the winter no one leaves the house at all. They have to get their public visibility in as much as they can in the 5 months of summer.

A new piece of news is that I will be making my second grand return to Italy at the end of this month. My marathon training has completely fallen apart due to knee issues, but there are still two of us that are planning to do it. We had planned originally to go to Athens to do it, but now we’ve switched it to Florence. So on November 23rd, Joey, John, Ben, and I will fly from Tirana to Pisa to spend 8 days in Italy. I am extra happy about this because it will give me a chance to see my beloveds in Perugia again (twice in the same year!), where I think we will be spending most of our time since lodging would be free there. On the 26th we will be in Florence so John and Ben can run the marathon, and my duty there is to document it as much as I can with my camera. That way, when we come back, we can develop a presentation concerning involvement in sports and basically just being active that we can give to schools and youth groups, etc., around Albania to hopefully stimulate some sports activity among the youth here, who generally spend their afternoons doing nothing. If we are really lucky, we may get a few of those kids to commit to training for a marathon and somehow find a way to get them to Florence (aka find travel money and get them visas) for the same thing next year. That would be the ultimate goal, but that’s a ways off yet.

And that’s how life is going at the moment. I’m working a whole lot, which is good. Speaking of which, it’s time for my Friday afternoon classes!

PS- On my way home from class I saw what I consider to be the best use a blue plastic bag. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this bane of Albania yet, but I’ll say it again if I already have. The blue plastic bag is a ubiquitous aspect of life here in Albania. You could almost get away with calling Albania the “Land of Bunkers and Blue Bags”. Everything you buy here will be handed to you in a blue bag, to the point where you become swamped in them in the course of a week’s grocery shopping. I’ve been looking for a couple of canvas bags or something similar that I can use to carry my groceries in so that I can deny their bags. I can only imagine the confusion that will ensue the first time I try to say that I’ll put my potatoes in a bag I brought with me and will use again. I’m sure that they will try to put it in a blue bag that I can then put in my canvas bag. Anyway, since so many of them can be accrued so easily, the normal course of disposal here is leaving them everywhere, usually on the ground. But sometimes they get put to imaginative uses. For example, in Pogradec, we had to do a beach cleanup as part of the weekend’s activities. I kept pulling blue bags full of sand out of the ground and couldn’t figure out how they got so nicely buried, so I asked one of the language teachers, who told me that the fishermen anchor their boats to the shore by burying a bag and tying the boat’s rope to it. Which is pretty clever, if not environmentally friendly. But I just saw the best use yet. A bunch of kids outside in the road, dressed like Eskimos for the not-quite-freezing weather had gathered a bunch of these bags and tied them on the ends of some sticks with string and were using them as sort of low-elevation kites slash bird-fishing poles. I wish I could have gotten a picture of that, but the power had finally come back on, so getting back inside and finishing my freaking byrek for lunch was more important. The power has been off all afternoon, which means that there was no cooking going on (haven’t gotten any wood for my wood-cooking stove yet), and I didn’t eat lunch. I am really hungry.

The last two weeks have been very busy for me, as I have been dividing my time between the hectic world that rages daily within the walls of the high school, and the fight for survival outside of those walls.

School has been improving very slowly as time goes on, and I think that I am feeling more secure in my confidence that I will stick it out now than I did after the first week. This new strength is based mostly on some instinctual survival decisions that I made over that first weekend of despair. And those were all based on two beliefs: I will never make it through this if I don't take the steps I see as necessary to ensure my own sanity; while I am technically working for a program with defined goals, the basic fact is that I am a volunteer and no one can really force me to do anything, and my effectiveness is going to mostly revolve around me focusing my personal strengths and talents onto projects and goals that I enjoy and can accomplish. And so my new plan of action (at least regarding life in the high school) was developed during the dark times of the end of week one:

I will not allow anyone to force me into going to the new teacher's classes. I will agree to go only to those classes that she can keep under control and actually accomplish something. Until she can figure out a way to get a grip on the other classes, I will not go to them with her. I offered to help her design a set of rules and to enforce them, with Tomorr's approval, but she denied that offer, so she is on her own now. I will go to Tom's classes, but I will not let him force me into being the main teacher, at least yet. I may offer to him to let me take one of his classes on my own, but that is dependent on me being in complete control of the register (grade book) for that class, which isn't very likely at this point. I am finding that the real authority of the teachers here is in that register, and that having the students see me writing grades or absences in that book in pen would put a little more of the Fear into them. But the main truth is that he is still being payed to be a teacher, while I am not, and we are supposed to be working as a team, so there is no reason for me to be teaching all of his classes all of the time, or creating and typing the curriculum for his classes all on my own, as I did today while he read the newspaper. The main point of my being here is to build the capacity of the English teachers in the high school, so if I take over all of his classes, that does nothing for anyone that extends beyond my two years here. Especially since I hear repeatedly how good of a teacher Tom is, and I don't believe that I am that good of a teacher, especially in front of a large class like that. So my taking over his classes would probably cost a lot of the kids a better education. They would hear a better accent on the English, but lose so much more in everything else. I would ask to take one of his classes for my own only as a testing ground for the methods that I would want to introduce to him and the other teachers, so they could hopefully come eventually and see if they like any of the methods that I would use. But I see that as being a ways in the future.

So the last two weeks have been a little more relaxed than the first. I still feel pretty uncomfortable most of the time walking into and out of the school when the courtyard is full of students, and even at times while walking around in the town. Last week, there began to be this new term that I would hear fly around whenever I passed by, but that I couldn't really understand, other than it ended with "kuq" (red), so I was pretty sure that it was intended for me (there aren't too many Albanians with red hair). Knowing high school students everywhere, not just in Albania, I figured that it was something dirty or insulting. This was reinforced when, on two occasions, I heard it behind me while walking in the street and turned around to ask the kid who said it what he had said and got "Nothin'" in reply. And so in these last two weeks, something that I had found annoying before has grown to drive me nuts, and that is that the boys, and kids in general, here will never ever say anything to you when you are looking at them. I first noticed this in Librazhd, when a group of little kids would all stop playing and stand in a bunch on the side of the road as I walked by, staring. Only when I had passed by and gone on a little ways would I suddenly get this barrage of "Hello!" "How are you!" "What's your name!" "Come Stai!" "Italiano!", etc. But when I would turn around to respond or go back to talk to them because they were little kids and terribly cute, they would usually disperse at a run. And these were not aberrations of young child-dom: it seems to be universal in all the people here that are likely to want to say something at or about you in the road. There has never been a time when I have had something said toward me in the street by people that I don't know when they were within my visual field. They will stare unblinkingly at you until the instant they pass out of your peripheral vision, and then all of the comments start coming. Most of them are entirely innocent, like the ones above. But I could never determine if they were doing it because they were bored, or because they really wanted my attention. There were a couple of times when some boys would go "Oh, American," from behind me, and I would stop and say "What?" "Nothing." "Then why did you call me?" "I don't know." The best that I can figure is that they mostly wanted to see if I could speak Albanian, but that is normally accomplished by people asking me ninety times if I know the time. I eventually made a rule with myself that I would never respond to these attempts for attention unless they originated when I was facing the person. I explained this a couple of times to some groups of boys, but they either didn't get it or didn't really want to talk to me, since they continued to call after me only to my back. The other half of this phenomenon that I really love is the whistling. It is common practice for Albanians to get each other's attention over small and large distances by whistling. In general, this doesn't bother me and seems pretty normal, other than for the fact that they always seem to know when someone is whistling for them and not the hundreds of other people on the street. But for some reason, this whistling has begun to drive me absolutely insane when I know that it is directed at me. To the best that I can determine, I think it bothers me because I sort of feel like a circus animal a lot of the time when I'm around in town, and the fact that in America we only really whistle like that at dogs and other animals (or to be rude to waiters...maybe it's the flashbacks to Pappadeaux that make me cringe) just intensifies that feeling of not being human when they direct it at me here, even though I know perfectly well that they don't intend it that way. Especially since I know that if I respond to those whistles by looking around or stopping, the response will be either laughing or empty responses like what I described above. The feeling of being an equal with them, even on a simply human level, just doesn't get across to me, for some reason.

In any case, the new thrill of the school seems to be calling me "kokekuq", translating as: redhead. And according to my inquiries, there is absolutely no stigma associated with having red hair in Albanian culture. So they are simply calling me that as a statement of fact, it seems. This reinforces to me once again the general innocence of these people. Here these kids think that they are being really defiant and causing serious trouble and they are calling me redhead. I haven't had the chance yet to try responding to this with "brownhead" since that's what most of them are. Will they find that terribly offensive? To be seen. I was faced with more penetrating taunts when I was in first grade. So I don't feel too badly about them calling me that, anymore. It could be a lot worse. They could be calling me "flat-butt" like my arch-enemy Candace in the first grade. (side note: also true).

So I have been spending roughly five hours a day at school. But that's only half of the marathon. School gets out at 1:10 pm, and I then have to power walk home to attempt to get something to eat very quickly before I leave again to begin my afternoon classes at 2 pm. I now have 4 courses with kids in the afternoons, each two times a week for an hour, 2 on Monday and Wednesday and the other 2 on Tuesday and Thursday. Unsurprisingly, it has been a struggle trying to get the kids to actually show up at all, much less on time and prepared, despite several weeks' preparatory notification. So I spent a few hours last week alone in the Youth Center where I will be having classes, reading and looking out the window and being slightly annoyed. But I'm happy with the kids who have shown up. They seem to be really eager to learn. Then I have between 2 and 3 hours more with adults, which are both slightly more frustrating and more rewarding than the ones with the students. Rewarding because I feel like I am really teaching them something and can see their progress because I've been with them for longer, and more frustrating because the pace can be excruciatingly slow. They have a real drive to learn, but like most adults they all have a lot of other responsibilities in their lives. Especially since most of them are married mothers, and are thus expected to do all of the housework and childcare, even if they work outside of the home, as well. They are very busy people, so expecting them to put in an hour every day outside of class to learn vocabulary or whatever is not realistic. Plus, there's the lame excuse concerning how old people can't learn languages (it's international, Mom!). They kind of just squirm when I tell them about the 72 year old volunteer we have in Berat that has learned their language. My favorite class has been and still is the class at the Women's Center. They have mushroomed now from about 5 to about 10 people (all women except for one woman's fiance). I think that I enjoy it so much simply because it has become the closest thing I have to a social life here. They are all slightly older than me, but we are all at least in our 20's, so we are in a similar age group. Most of the women are current or previous employees of the center, so they are all on the progressive edge of this relatively progressive (at least with respect to gender) town. So we usually go out after class and have a coffee, and I can be comfortable in the fact that no one is expecting a wedding out of me later. That could be as much from the fact that they are all older than me as that they are progressive. But most of them are pushing 30 and are unmarried, which makes them hard on the line of being old maids in this country, and it shows, often quite humorously, at least for me. One especially, Lucia (name changed to protect her dignity), is on the verge of being desperate. She is a pistol of a woman, and tries to override everyone in the class. We have developed a running joke of me ribbing her about being old and unmarried and she makes fun of my Albanian. At the post-class coffee sessions, she likes to quiz me about any unmarried male friends or relations that may be coming to visit me, how they are and what jobs they have, as she is not only desperate to find a husband, but to find a foreign husband. I think I'm pretty safe, though, as none of them seem to be viewing me as prey. In a sense it makes me wonder what's wrong with me (Am I not an acceptable foreign target?), but I'm glad that I don't have to worry about that with them. But the point is that it gives me about 6 hours a week that I can actually look forward to, and every ounce of that that I can get helps.

I just got back from my first non-Albanian weekend in a long time. I went to Korce again to spend some time with other volunteers. It's the first time that I've seen most of them since July, so it was good to see what's happening in their sites. It mostly made me realize that I either have one of the weirdest sites or that I am the most over-reactive person in our group. They all seemed amazed by my description of what my school and students are like. No one else is having the kind of semi-bad experience that I am having. That's not to say that it's been easy for them, but they don't feel the same kind of apprehension to walk through a mass of the students that I have. And while I've started to doubt this now, I generally tend to be one of the more even-keeled people in our group as far as not letting things get to me or complaining about trivial stuff, maybe I have somehow become over-sensitized in the last few months and am letting these kids get the best of me for nothing. The weather here has started showing its winter colors. The last couple of weeks have been pretty warm here in Gramsh. And while I knew the reputation of Korce for being quite a bit colder, the warmth in Gramsh prompted me to only take my hoody with me. Major Gabim (mistake). It started to rain directly after I stepped out of the furgon in Korce, and didn't stop until yesterday when the bus passed Librazhd. The walk to the bus stop this morning in Korce resulted in a wet Brandon sitting next to the not-even-close-to-being-sealed door in the bus and shivering for the first few hours, to the point where I was actually glad to accept another body in the seat next me, despite the B.O. The weather back here in Gramsh is not too different from Korce. The first chill of the year is on, I think, and I am sitting on the couch wearing my wool socks and a sweater. I think that I will probably learn how to use that wood-burning oven in my new house pretty quickly when the time comes for that. But I really need to get an umbrella. How I have gone 7 months here without one is baffling, and it needs to stop.

I'm going to briefly open this one with an admission. There are certian moments, and some days they come more frequently than others, when I will stop dead in my tracks in surprise with the thought "Am I really in Albania?... I'm in frickin' Albania." Then I will start going again and inevitably sort of chuckle to myself and ask myself sarcastically "What the hell am I doing in this country? How did I get here?" I can only imagine the strange look on my face at those moments.

Main topic of conversation this edition: the first week of school. Single descriptor: horrifying. There have been a number of complications that have added up to this effect. The main one is that there is a new English teacher at our school. This poor young female soul just finished university this last year, and this is her first job of any kind, not just teaching. Another is that the director of the school has changed from last year, and was changed only a few days before school started. The last director had been described to me by several people as a "dictator", a man who was good for the school because he focused a lot on the discipline of the students, something that to me is perhaps the most daunting challenge to the Albanian school system. I would never apply that term to this new director. I would more likely use the term "Santa Claus" when referring to him. He is a very jolly, friendly-looking man, and I don't think he really strikes fear into the students like the last director did. Another complication is that my main partner, Tomor, has been nominated as vice-director, a position that he has held before, and I think he's a good man for that job, but that also means that his teaching hours have been drastically cut. Another is that the school system here is slightly unorganized, and even as the first day came and went, they did not have the students divided into their classes very efficiently. Apparently there were cases of kids put into the wrong year, or not put into the correct "focus" (in the third year, the students are divided into "social" and "natural" tracks, depending on whether they want to study more natural or social sciences), and some classes were filled with 35 boys and 4 girls or vice versa. So for the first few days, the teachers and even the students were confused and scrambling trying to get this straightened out. Also, apparently the two book stores in town didn't have any of the books required for the students to really start school, so there wasn't a whole lot that anyone could do in class, anyway.

I spent Wednesday going to class with the new teacher, a small,intelligent, good-looking, sweet-natured young woman. My current intentions are to attempt to observe every English teacher in Gramsh for a couple of weeks to get an idea of how they teach and hopefully get their opinions and form my own about what kind of help or improvements could be made to how they teach. But following her that day was miserable. Every class we went to was completely out of control. The students would not give her one ounce of respect and hardly a second to speak. They constantly insulted her, as well as me, for an hour in every class. She spent every hour struggling to get them to be quiet, mostly by way of begging, which only egged them on. I'm relatively sure that she went home that day and cried; at least that's the way she looked. I came home, and while I didn't cry (and maybe it would have been better if I had), sat on my bed with my face in my hands for an hour wondering if this was going to be my life for the next year and a half: getting morally and emotionally destroyed by 15 year-olds every day. I have a class with some women at the Women's Center, and almost all of them have been teachers before. I asked their advice about this, and, almost universally, their response was that that is how teaching is here. That there isn't much to be done about it.

The next couple of days weren't as bad, mostly because I spent them with Tomor, and his classes are dead silent. But I'm still generally undecided about how effective my time in classat school is going to be. I told Tomor that maybe it would be better if I tried to focus solely on developing materials for them, such as a teacher's edition for the texts that they use, and keep my teaching time only for the courses that I have in the afternoon. I'm still of that persuasion, but I'm not entirely convinced about how excited he is about that. But I do know that spending 2 years standing and being insulted alongside the new teacher is a useless endeavor and a waste of time.

My other major development of recent times was that I went back to Librazhd for the long-awaited wedding last weekend. And much to my surprise, it wasn't quite as un-fun as I had predicted. In fact, it was really fun. I got to Librazhd at about 9 in the morning last Saturday. I met Cimi and was immediately introduced to his brothers, Azizi and Hysni, the oldest and youngest of his brothers. I was left with them since Cimi was busy finalizing certain things for the wedding. We had a coffee and talked for a little while. I was surprised at how much they knew about me and how they seriously seemed to refer to me as their brother. The younger, Hysni, is the same age as me, was, in fact, born 6 days after me, so that formed a kind of bond for us. Then we went up to the house, where they had gotten everything set up for the wedding. The room that I had stayed in had been converted into the reception room for the long stream of people who visit during weddings. I met Nena, who latched onto me and kissed me and patted my cheek and hugged me repeatedly for about 5 minutes, and then directed me into the room. I was given the mandatory coffee and sweets for qeras, and met a few more members of the family. It was immensely interesting for me to finally meet all of these people who live and work outside Albania that I had heard about quite often during my stay in Librazhd. Namely, the youngest sister and her husband and their two children who live and work in Philadelphia were fun to talk to. They have been there for about 9 years, and speak English perfectly, and it was really interesting to get their perspective on America and Americans and how their perception of Albania has changed during that time. A recurring part of my future story entered and left sometime during this coffee thing. That is, this extremely tall, skinny, strikingly beautiful brunette came and went once. When she had left, Hysni leaned over to me and told me that she was his fiance. I said "good work" because I didn't really know what else to say.

There was a lot of coming and going during this time. Everyone from distant relatives to friends to work colleagues will come to the houses of the bride and groom during the two main days of the wedding, where they are given the coffee and sweets, and in return offer their best wishes to the family, as well as some mysteriously and ritualistically determined amount of money (aka I have no idea how they decide how much to give). I went down into town once with Cimi to gather a bunch of chairs for people to sit on during the event that was to take place that night. It was only then that I realized that they had levelled a space in the garden to be used as a dance floor. I had expected up until then that we would be going to some restaurant for that. I was wrong.

In the early evening, the band started showing up and setting their stuff up. There also appeared a young man who scaled a nearby powerpole to tap the main line to power a string of lights used to illuminate the yard. This process was performed from a ladder with a pair of simple pliers and no protection of any kind. I watched with a wince as I expected him to be shot off the pole at any instant, especially when he started asking his buddies on the ground "like this? like this?" But by some miracle he was saved, and the band started jiving. I am continually amazed by the skill and endurance of the clarinet players that play these weddings. The keyboard guy and drummer are nothing special, but these clarinet guys will simply wail these these tunes for 7 hours straight, and they're no "Hot Cross Buns" tunes, either. These guys are seriously good at their instruments. Then this stream of people started appearing. Most of them I had met before when I was up in Cimi's village and in Librazhd-Katund for the wedding there. This was the best part, was seeing all of these people again. Whenever they would introduce me someone that I hadn't met before, they would always, puff up a little and say "he's been up to our village. Yep, ah. He even walked." I have to say that I have an extremely soft spot for the villagers of Albania. They are rather simple people, both in how they live, and in how they see the world. They are extremely warm-hearted people. I don't believe that I can describe effectively how these people make me feel, but I feel it just from looking at them, and even from just thinking about them. I can just say that sitting next to Nena's sister, the crazy smoking uncle and his sister, and listening to them talk and looking at their faces, puts me at complete ease and I just feel calm. It's been a while since I've felt like that here, especially since I've been in Gramsh; that there was virtually nowhere I would rather be at that moment and very little that could make me want to leave. Almost like I was where I belonged. It feels really bizarre to say that, that I feel like I'm in my element with the villagers of Albania, the poorest people of a poor country, people that should be my virtual opposites, but that's how I feel. I never find myself worrying about what I should be doing saying around them. I think that's because I know that they have no problem just sitting quietly next to you, maybe while holding your arm. They don't feel the constant need to be babbling about useless crap like most of the rest of the world does, something that drives me totally insane. A lot of the time, when I'm with people that I don't really know that well, I find myself thinking, "when can I escape from this?" because I hate that nagging feeling that people are agitated by the fact that I don't talk a lot. Everywhere that I have ever been, I have been told that I am too quiet, like it's a bad thing for me to behave in the way that's natural to me. But to these villagers I am a "djali i mire" (good boy) because I don't "flas kot" (speak uselessly). When I just think of that group of people (and especially Nena), I almost feel like crying, I love them so much. The smiles on their faces as they tell me "shkelqyer se je i mire"... I don't know what else to say. I think you'll just have to come and meet them yourselves to get a taste of it.

When the music started, so did the dancing. I spent my time utilizing the better-than-usual lighting to take pictures and videos of the dancing and people, sitting on the porch/balcony and talking to everyone willing to not ask me the dreaded questions, and showing off my dancing skills. The best dance is one that Mirela taught us, I think it's called the Krusc or something, that Arjana loves, but that most Albanians don't seem to know. So it was hilarious when that song came on and I jumped in next to Arjana and did it (relatively) perfectly while everyone else in the circle was tripping all over themselves trying to follow us. That blew their minds, that this fool American who can't even tie his shoes can do their dance better than them. HA! The only bad part to the whole thing, the thing that I hadn't foreseen (like the constantly repeated questions) was how everyone was going to tell me "mos u merzit" (don't be bored/sad) EVERY single time I saw them. That got old really fast, and one particularly persistent little fool got unloaded upon a little when I told him that the only thing boring me was him constantly asking me if I was bored.

But the weirdest part was this stunning fiance of my new brother. When I would be sitting up on the porch talking to people, everytime that I would look down at the people dancing, this girl would be staring at me, smiling like a maniac. There was not a time that I went to dance that this girl didn't somehow end up next to me. In fact one time I was sitting on a bench on the edge of the dance-circle talking to some of the kids that I used to play with, and as the circle came around, she yanked me in next to her. I started even trying to avoid her as much as possible, only going to dance when she was nowhere in sight, but no matter how hard I tried, she would just appear there. It's not that it's illegal or shameful for me to dance next to a girl, but this is my brother's Fiance!, and he was always either dancing a few people away or standing watching. So needless to say I was a little nervous about the whole thing. I don't necessarily want to be exiled from the family because of something that I neither asked for nor was promoting in any fashion. And this girl was not one of those limp dance-partner handholders, either. She is what I call an aggressively active handholder. Most of the women that I dance next to will hold my hand like it's a dirty handkerchief. Not this nut job. She would always go for the full hand and use a good, hard grip. One time, she even went so far as to do the interlocking fingers thing. So on one, testosterone-ridden level, my mind is screaming "YES!" about this super-babe apparently desperately chasing me around. On another, more responsible level, it screams "NO!" as her engagment rings dig into the knuckles of my hand. As I looked back on the whole thing during the bus ride back the next day, I found it possible that she had been assigned by the family to keep me entertained for the evening, but I don't know how plausible that is. All I know is that I was generally confused and freaked out by the whole thing because no girl that looked like that would even talk to me in America. So who knows.

The dancing lasted until about 2 in the morning, when they shut down for the night and I was directed up to the newly (and beautifully) finished third floor of the house to sleep. I was awoken at about 6 in the morning by drums and music playing below me. More guests were coming and the build up to the coming of the bride and the final lunch had begun. I somehow managed to keep sleeping through the beating of the drums until about 8.30. Then I went down, through the pouring rain, just in time for the bride to show up. Here came Guria, the girl that I had sort of lived with for three months, all nusja-ed up. I would never in my life have recognized her if I hadn't known that she was the bride, she looked so different in the dress and under all that make-up. So I stood on the porch with everyone else and watched her be guided up the steps, sheltered by an umbrella, and trod sullenly (don't forget that brides are not supposed to be happy or smile at all) into the house, where she was immediately led into an empty room to wait to go to the lunch.

Then everyone started loading up to ride down into town to the restaurant for the lunch (my most dreaded part!). Like I said, I generally don't like this part because there are hundreds of people packed into a relatively small space, and they play the music WAY more loudly than is necessary, and this goes on for at least 5 hours. The music is so loud that you can't hardly hear yourself think, much less actually talk to someone, especially if you're a foreigner. Plus, almost every Albanian male smokes, so unless you're surrounded by women, you'll be choking on secondhand smoke and fighting to turn down endless offers for cigarettes for those five hours. Then there are the endless toasts to people across the room that require you drink a lot of beer or raki. My plan was that I would stay for maybe an hour and be able to excuse myself due to the fact that I had to be back in Gramsh that day because school would be starting the next day, and the last buses from Elbasan to Gramsh leave pretty early. When I got to the restaurant, Cimi directed me to where I should sit, where I was joined by Fadili, the old guy I described way back in April, who was a friend of Cimi's dad. He most likely chose to sit next to me because he doesn't like to talk too much, and he figured I wouldn't be chatting him up the whole time, which was right, although I did offer to take him back to America in my suitcase when I left, to which he just chuckled. I love that guy. In any case, everyone showed up quickly except the happy couple and most of the groom's family, who were running a little behind. Somehow, God's hand touched me that day and the power went out shortly after the music and dancing started. I felt bad for Cimi and the rest of the family, because not having the music effectively screwed their plans, and they tried and tried and tried to get the generator to go, but it just wouldn't catch. But the musicians had a backup, which was un-amplified music, thankfully physically limited to a certain reasonable decible level. So everyone still got to dance, but my head didn't have to explode. The lunch seems to work that the tables are carefully organized as to who sits at each one, and then the tables take turns getting up to dance. Luckily, my table's turn fell at exactly the time that I planned on leaving. So everyone got up to dance, and I grabbed my pack and started telling people that I had to go. But Nena's sister insisted that I dance once before I leave, and physically forced me into the circle between a couple of my male "cousins". So we went around a couple of times, and then Arjana, who was at the front with the scarf, started yelling for me to come take the lead. I tried to act like I didn't notice her, but then Cimi's older sister came and dragged me over to it. So I got to do the lead thing with the scarf, that requires a little more grace and beauty and control over the dance than just being in the middle of the line (can you imagine that I don't meet any of those three qualifications?). And then, would you believe, out of nowhere came the supermodel again to taunt me one last time. She took the lead from me, and I spent the next five minutes trying not to pay attention to her, because the people (especially the women) that are really good at being in the front can make it look extremely seductive. And she was good at it. When the music stopped, I grabbed my bag, and tried to quickly say goodbye to everyone that I needed to say goodbye to before I got roped into another dance. I was led out by Shkelqim and Azizi, and they gave me a warm goodbye and forced me to light a cigarette with them. And as I stepped down into the street and the rain to start my journey back to Gramsh, the power came back on.

As I always seem to say, It has been too long since the last time that I wrote. Unfortunately, the timeshare system with Kayla's computer has been highly sporadic, mostly because it's hard to find times that work for both of us for me to borrow it. Plus, the internet here in Gramsh has been down for a while and I haven't been able to get on reliably. But we're back on, so here I am able to write once again.

Then there has been the fact that there hasn't been that much to stay. I haven't been traveling as much as some of my colleagues, buyt I have been busier than most of them, as well. I have been teaching somewhere around 26 hours per week, which, believe it or not, is a pretty large load of work for Albania. They all gawk when I tell them how many hours I have been teaching, telling me that I work too much and that I'll get tired. Then, for the insiders, anyway, they get very concerned that I spend a large portion of my non-work time reading, which they invariably refer to as "learning", regardless of the reading material. And sometimes, they almost convince me that it is a lot, until I realize that I'm still falling quite short of the normal 40 hour week in the states. But somehow, I do feel quite tired at the end of each day, and almost always feel like I can't get enough sleep. I forget sometimes about the cumulative effect of the stress of always living outside of my natural element. Never being able to do anything in a natural way, always having to pay attention to how things are done here can add up and drain you. It's amazing what you take for granted in your normal life. Everything from being able to communicate without exhausing yourself to not really thinking about where you can buy the ingredients for your next meal. And as tired as I seem to be, I have been having the hardest time sleeping for the past few weeks. I force myself to wake up everyday at 7 so that I will hopefully be tired by 9 or 10. I feel SO tired during the day and want nothing but to sleep. But as soon as I lay down in bed, I'm suddenly Mr. Hyperactive. Can't stay still or keep my mind under control enough to calm down, I suddenly feel like I could run a marathon. I haven' figured out what the problem is with this yet. My running theory is the lack of iodine in the salt here, so my thyroid isn't regulated. HA.

The biggest news is that I have finally had success in finding a home of my own. So has Kayla. It's so weird that it was beginning to look hopeless, and then in the course of one day we both find places. Hers is the unarguably better score. If you remember when I told you about that first private house we looked at, forget it. This place is even better. Two stories, huge kitchen, grapes, it has it all. And somehow the lady who owns it will take the maximum rent allowed for us to pay. This is a rent that couldn't even get me a one room apartment with no kitchen and the only sink in the bathroom before. And here she is getting a 6 room house with full garden. Bizarre. Unfortunately, my contacts took me to look at the exact same place not 2 days later. We had kind of hoped that the house would be acceptable for Tirana to let us both live there, but since the two levels of the house are not divided and thus we would be living as "roommates", that is a no no. So naturally, I got a bad dose of the jealousy bug because she saw the place first, and it was hers. And she doesn't even care about the grapes! I was all excited thinking about going out there next spring and turning the dirt and spending hours tending the vines to get some good, me-produced grapes for eating and raki. I can still do that, of course, but only because otherwise the vines will just wither under her supervision. And I'd be working more as a slave.

So she had someone from Tirana come down to do the safety check for that place on Wednesday. And luckily while she was here, we got a chance to go look at another place. This was what they call a 2+1 here, meaning two rooms with a small alcove for a kitchen, a standard apartment here. It's furnished and nice and has a top floor balcony that is covered by grape vines (aka, grapes with no work). And they also are ok with the rent. So here is my new home! The Tirana woman said that it passes their criteria, so when the time comes, I am planning on moving there. And I will be happy. Not least of which because they said that there is an older couple that lives next door, so I might have a willing dominoes partner at hand.

School starts next week. How scared am I for that? I wouldn't be other than for the fact that I believe that my counterpart is more or less planning on throwing me the reins on the first day. I have the right to tell him that I am not comfortable with that, and I have been working out little scenarios in my head to explain to him my role as I see it here. But he staunchly refuses to give me any hints about what is happening next week. Maybe because he doesn't really know himself. The funny part is that a couple of weeks ago, after the school had been emprty for more than a month, they suddenly decided to replace all of the windows and paint the school. Here we stand at 3 days until school opens, and there are no windows in the joint, and only about half of it is painted. There have been a number of rumors flying, such as the start date will be postponed till october. But that is unconfirmed. Supposedly the same thing is happening in Librazhd, and there they are planning on holding school for the high school students in the afternoons in the elementary schools until the high school is finished. I can't imagine how that will work for the kids who come in from the villages, who rely on the early closing time to return home in the evening. There have also been rumors amongst the volunteers that they are thinking of either extending the school day until 4 in the afternoon or having an additional day of school on Saturday. Again, these are unconfirmed. But I hear these and think, "I really picked the wrong year to come to be a teacher in Albania!"

I am leaving tomorrow for Librazhd. Wedding Time! Cimi's brother and the finally-identified Guria are being joined in matrimony, and I am going for the ride. In one sense I am terrified of going to this wedding, an Albanian tradition which has its extremely enjoyable parts and some rather noisome parts, but in general has lost its initial appeal for me. This could turn out to be one long weekend filled with endless circle dancing and over-played music. But I am also excited about it because supposedly every family member (at least on the grrom's side) has been collected from all over the world for this event. And Cimi has sent me several messages saying that they need their 9th sibling to get his ass up there from Gramsh, since all the brothers and sisters from America and Germany and Greece are already there. So it will be interesting to see what this giant Hysa clan is like in collectivity. And so I am willing to face the extremely redundant questions regarding who I am and what I'm doing here and being lectured about all those same things regarding Albania that I've heard a hundred times before. I've been considering making a pamphlet with all of my info and a list of topics that I have been informed on that I could distribute this weekend in order to circumvent all that. But I guess I'll do it the old-fashioned way.

I have, in the course of only a few days, somehow become the magical cooking elf of Gramsh; as well as probably earned a reputation that I have since dubbed American ManWoman. This all started when host mom started roaming around the house again with the same old quickstep, though there's a little less noise now that she only has one hand and is thus only capable of half as much. My dedication to doing the dishes every day after I finish my courses has suddenly mushroomed into me being her other hand. Yesterday I was doing the dishes while she was trying to boil the milk. As I watched her, she tried to lift the hot pot off of the stove with a brilliantly dangerous hand-cast maneuver that threatened to cause an Albanian mom-fire, which prompted me to jump over and do it for her. "This is marvelous," I could almost hear her beady eye whisper. She immediately told me that we were going to be making pastice (pasta mixed around with cheese, milk, and eggs and then baked. Very good) for lunch, without really asking if I wanted to help or even if I wanted to eat it at all. And so "we" start making it, with her directing and me doing. It went pretty ok up to the point where she produced the cheese. With her out of commision, the food has not been rotating through the house like it did before, so the cheese definitely looked a little old. The kind of cheese, kackavall, is usually something like a salty version of gouda, but this specimen looked more like a block of parmesan. She told me to take a knife (like in Italy, a "knife" here is something of a cross between a butter knife and a paper napkin) and cut this piece of cheese into small chunks. I tried it carefully (cutting boards aren't very popular here, so all cutting takes place in your hand, which is mildly uncomfortable for me. I like my fingers.), and the knife protested by nearly breaking in two. She laughed and told me to "give it more" and I said "the knife can't handle more." I honestly had a flash to Star Trek at this moment. So she whips out this nice blue plastic cheese grater and tells me to do it that way. I attempt to grate the way I have always done it, setting one end of the grater into a bowl and rub the cheese up and down. But, the grater being plastic, it only bends. She laughs and gives me the Captain Kirk again, and I tell her that this cheese is seriously like a rock. She has me put the grater flat on the counter and start going at it like I'm a Native American grinding flour. I worked for five minutes and worked up a major sweat while only succeeding in grinding off a minute fraction of the diamond-cheese. She gave some remark about me not being very strong, which was quickly withdrawn when I lifted up the grater to find that there were almost more little shreds of blue on the counter than cheese. The rest of the process went well, and she and I enjoyed one fine pastice for lunch.

The process was repeated somewhat today, as we made tave kosi (hard to describe, but good). This one was a little less of a job than the pastice. The good part is that these are two of the dishes that she makes that don't rely on obscene amounts of butter and oil, so I have written them down for future use. The bad part of this whole thing is how she has really decided that she likes this set-up and is totally not shy about telling me to do this and that Now. Just now, I had just finished making some coffee so I could sit down and write this lovely story for you on Kayla's computer when she declared that I would clean the dishes "right now." I said no, I am going to have my coffee and write something to my friends and family and then go to teach a course, and maybe after I would do the dishes. But I can see this just going further and further into something like "Brender, clean the toilet" which would be horrifying since the other men in the house have absolutely no conception of aim or movement of the toilet seat because they have only ever known that they could pee however they wanted and magically the yellow would be gone the next time they came in to sit down. Oh, that was a little bit of a rant!

Even more, Kayla's family has finally discovered and accepted my talent as a ManWoman. Sose has been having some problems with her stomach lately, so she hasn't been cooking things that she wants, but what her kids and Kayla want. Apparently, she's tired of asking Kayla what she wants to eat, and told her yesterday to make whatever she wanted for dinner. Kayla then asked me if I could make my cream-pepper pasta for them. I said "yes, as long as you stay a long way away from the counter so they know that I did everything myself." And so we did it. They watched me while I cooked and seemed to be pretty skeptical of this strange concoction, since pasta for them all falls under the category of Makarone and is eaten plain or perhaps with a dash of salt, so going to all that work to make something to put on pasta seemed like madness. So I was surprised when I served them all little samples and they all, even Sose, ended up taking second and third plates. Sose, with a totally serious face told me that next week I was going to make 4 packs of spaghetti (instead of 1 1/3) so that everyone next door (her late husband's family) could have some, as well, and she would watch to learn how to do it. I guess that is as close as a ManWoman can get to receiving a "damn, that was good!" from an Albanian woman. But this morning in our English course, Sose's daughter, Alda, told all of the other kids that I cook better than her mother, and they all looked at me strangely.

I received a package from mom about 2 weeks ago that contained, among other things, a couple of American footballs and a frisbee, and I have since been going out almost every day to play with some kids in the field by the high school. I decided that I would try to turn going out to play with the kids in to some kind of "life skills" thing. It's never ceased to amaze me how quickly the kids here will turn to hitting each other or actually throwing large rocks at each other. It seems like the smallest provocation can turn into that. So I wrote a small list of rules regarding how when we are playing with my toys, we will not hit each other, but talk about our problems. I read this to them and checked their understanding, and things have been going pretty well with it. There was one boy that hit a smaller boy, and when I talked to him about it, I could see that he was really thinking about it. So hopefully the "play nice" trend will continue. We did have one incident this week when one little boy kept asking me if he could buy one of the balls. I kept saying that I needed to keep them so that everyone could play with them, because if he took one, only he and his friends would play with it. But there are three toys and roughly 20 kids playing, so I can't keep an eye on everything at once. On Sunday when I was getting ready to leave, I couldn't find one of the footballs. I asked around, and these two kids and this old lady said that this one boy ran off with it. I told the two boys to go get it from him, and then talked to the old lady about it, and it turned out that the kids was her grandson. To make this short, we had a few comings and goings of the searcher kids, who seemed to grow in number every time. During all of this, grandma was getting visibly more embarrassed that her grandson had "stolen" something from this foreign guy. Every time that the posse came back to report that they hadn't found the ball, she would organize them to go search somewhere else, and they would all split off and go in different directions. Eventually she said that she would get the ball back and bring it to Sose's house later and we said goodbye. It was just funny to see how organized they could get about something so small as a football!

The strain of living with a family has been getting ever more difficult to bear. Especially now that I have been cooking more (even under suspiscious eyes), I get more and more visions of living alone and having a little more control over myself. The other novelty for this week was that when we were in my favorite store buying the panna for the dinner, we met a lady working there who is not the normal lady. She immediately asked us if we were perhaps looking for a place to stay. She said that her daughter had started university in Tirana and that the whole family had moved there to support her, and that they were looking for a foreigner to stay in their private house here in Gramsh to care for it. She was extremely kind and excited and I agreed to come back later to go see the house since she was leaving to go back to Tirana the next day. So we met at 10 and walked to her house. As we got closer, I got really excited, because it really was a private house (not an apartment. unlike LB, Gramsh consists almost entirely of apartment buildings and has almost no "houses") surrounded by a garden filled with grapevines. The house was big and had everything in it that you would need. She said that behind the house was a piece of land filled with peach trees, apple trees, plum trees, more grapes, etc. I started to get these magical visions of living in this house and being able to go out and pick grapes off of the vine for lunch and collect peaches for dessert. Then we got to the tricky subject of money. I told her how much we are allowed to pay for housing as dictated by the rules passed to us from the office in Tirana. Unfortunately, our maximum was only about half of the price that she expected that her husband would accept. There was a visible deflation in the room as her hopes to get her house taken care of and my visions of frolicking in liberated pastoral delight vanished. I told her that would double check with Tirana, but I didn't think that anything would change, and left. I had a hard time getting to sleep last night for the emotional loss I experienced in the evening's roller coaster ride of elation and crushing frustration.

Right now I am sitting in the usual internet cafe, and I have just sent to most of you the article on Tirana. There are a number of young men sitting next to me that decided that it would be fun to read the same thing and somehow copied the address off of my screen and are now struggling to translate it into albanian. There is apparently one of them that can speak enough English to get the gist.

It's again super hot here, and I have been mostly alone in the apartment for the last week. By mostly I mean that Dad is still around and comes home every once in a while. He's at least figured out that I can indeed feed myself when put to it, although it took a few days of demanding that I go down to the restaurant before he finally resigned to the fact that I was eating on my own. He, meanwhile, was eating mostly at the restaurant, I believe, or was otherwise subsisting solely on the bowls of yoghurt that would show up in the sink. Then came the day when he saw me cleaning the dishes, which amused him somewhat. But he stopped insisting that I eat outside the house, and really has not said much to me since then. Mom comes back on Sunday, but I won't be here, because I am going to Librazhd for the weekend to see my old family, whom I have been missing dearly in this last month.

I have been spending a lot of time reading various materials that I have obtained on student governments and anti-trafficking, etc. Tomorrow afternoon I will go to Elbasan to meet an Italian man who works for an organization that does a lot on anti-trafficking of humans. I hope to help another organization here in Gramsh do more onthis subject by linking them with other organization that work on the same subject. Other than that, it has been more of the same. I keep adding students to my courses and am up to roughly 15 hours a week of teaching by now, which feels like a lot, but as that is really the only work-style thing I do, I feel like a slacker when compared to a 40 hour week. But I have been coming more to the realization that the 24/7 volunteer thing that they tell us about is not really a recommendation about how we shuold behave, but a description of a reality. It is really taxing mentally just to BE here, sometimes. Always speaking in another language, being confronted with challenging situations like what I should do when young boys gather around me to spout all of the English curse words that they know, and constantly pondering all of these grandiose ideas I have for programs that I have extreme desire to enact but have no idea how to do so, simply caring about these people and their dreams so much and facing how little I can really do to better that for them can be extremely tiring. I've decided that, as difficult as it can be sometimes just to be out and around, just my presence here in the community as a male who does not sit around and drink alcohol all day or smoke or do drugs, etc., can be a positive thing, if minimally. Especially with the kids. Last week at the camp, this little boy decided that I was his for the day, and held my hand whenever we walked somewhere and latched onto my leg when we were stationary. I hope being a caring male that he can get positive affection from is something that helps him somehow. These are the things that I've been thinking about this week.

Then came the hair battle. As some of you know, I have been cutting my hair on my own for several years with electric clippers. I decided this week that I would try to find some of those here since my hair has been getting kind of long. So on Monday I went searching. On my way, I met Mario (Skender), who told me that he has some at his house, and that he would take me there to show them to me. So I went to Mario's house. As you know, he lives alone. In case you don't know, there are very few Albanians that I have met that do not have at least one family member outside of the country working and sending money home. Mario is one of them, only his whole family is away in Greece. His two sons work construction there, and his wife went with them in order to care for them, because they have tiring work and need someone to help them with housework (this is Mario's explanation). So he is sacrificing for his family and living alone in order to help his children. Mario's house is a large apartment. He explained to me several times that he is like a bachelor now and that I shouldn't look around the house. He brought out the requisite drinks for guests and we talked for a while. Then he brought out the clippers and showed them to me. They looked ok. He told me that I could have them, as a gift, because he doesn't use them. I told him thank you. Then he started showing me all of the things that he does in his spare time. He brought the little Albanian lute-like instrument and played me a little song. Then he brought out an Albanian pipe and played me a little song. Then he startled me by showing me a large stack of poetry that he has written for his family since they have been gone. He read me one, and from what I could understand, it seemed pretty lovely. Finally, he informed me that he would be coming to a number of my classes with his video camera to film them so we can make a tape to mail to my mother, who surely misses me. I have gained such an appreciation for this lonely, unique, caring guy. I don't really know what I can do for him to help him other than be his friend, but I need to figure it out.

I want to be brief this week, just because last week was so brutally long! Nothing really exciting has been happening. I started two new classes this week with kids. One is with really little kids who are starting from the very beginning. They learn really fast and don't seem to get bored as easily as the older kids. They were joined today by a girl in the eigth grade, who also learned really fast, but who was a little less willing to participate in the class as the younger three, either because she was embarassed to be in a class with kids 5 and 6 years younger than her, or because she's a 13 year old girl. The other class I started for Sose's (Kayla's host mom) 16 year old son, Loli. He's going to be in the thrid year in the high school this year, and knows quite a bit of English, but he's not exactly motivated to do the class in the summer. I think he's only coming because Sose wants him to.

Sose herself has also started coming to the classes for the nurses. She is extremely motivated to learn English, if only to show her kids that she can learn faster than them (they are a very competitive family). Maybe I need to describe this family a little more, since they have become more or less my surrogate family here by now. Sose is a widow in her mid 40's. She always wears black since she's a widow; her husband died a few years ago as a result of a car accident. She is a teacher in an elementary school in a village that is about one hour away from Gramsh. She is hilariously funny and a great mother. She makes fun of her two teenage children constantly, yet is a very sincere and strong woman. She always says "oops" now when she drops something, which is hilarious. They are used to how weird Americans can be because Sara lived with them before. Loli is sixteen and one of the nicest boys that I have met here in Gramsh. He suffers a little bit from the syndrome common to teenage boys (I too was guilty) of being a know it all mom hater and generally emotionally bizarre, but I think that once that wears off he'll be a great guy. He's struggling hard to grow a little mustach and always wears NBA basketball jerseys because he likes rap music. Alda is the thirteen year old daughter, and she is in my second level class. She is tall and extremely skinny, and an absolute riot. She's one of those girls who tries to be so serious that it's funny, and plus the way she talks is just funny, if only for us as outsiders. She has a much more rounded way of saying words than most Albanians, and tends to stress some words extremely hard at weird times. And she has an extremely expressive face and can work her eyebrows into the most amazing positions. I'm sure that she thinks Kayla and I are crazy because we are always laughing when she talks.

So that's that family. My family is gone for ten days to Durres, so I cam all alone in the house. They are very concerned that I will not be eating for the next ten days, but not so concerned as to not go. They told me to go down to this one restaurant, and when I told mom that I can cook for myself, she said that the things to cook with won't be in the house. I said okay, I can go to the store. She just looked at me. I don't think she believes that I can shop and cook. So they will be amazed when they come home and ask at the restaurant and find out that I haven't been there once! Where will he have been eating the whole week?!

My favorite student, lovingly dubbed Mario and now known as Skender, as suddenly become quite a major fixture for me here in Gramsh. On Monday I went and sat with him and his friend while they ate ice cream and takled. It turns out that Mario is all alone ehre in Gramsh, with his three sons and wife abroad in Greece. I told him that I was all alone, too, and suddenly we bonded. I have now become his unofficial son (so he says) and he has offered to have me come live with him. He also tells me that any problems I have should be brought to him immediately. So every time I see him now, we have to go for a coffee. I have a soft spot for him because he looks like my favorite video game character and because he is genuinely sad about being alone and gets really happy to treat me like his son. I am happy to have such a good connection here in Gramsh, and to have a Cimi character suddenly spring up for me since my new host father did not fill that void. Mario is an X-ray technician at the hospital here in Gramsh.

That's about it for this week. I told you that there wasn'tthat much excitement to tell!

It has been a little bit since I have let you all know what was happening, but I can explain. I am trying to try out a new system of emailing with Kayla, which involves me borrowing her laptop (an accursed Apple, no less. The shame) once a week and writing my blogs and emails on it before saving them on my usb chip and taking the chip into the internet center and spending only 10 minutes or so transferring the documents onto the internet for 20 leke instead of spending an hour and 150 leke. A minor boost to the budget, if you will.

But we have had a little trouble coordinating the new effort, which has resulted in the delay. My apologies. Also for the lunker that this low cost blog may turn into.

So what has it been, about three weeks? I think I wrote last right before we went to Korce, so I will start there. Two weekends ago we took the “short” road to Korce, which is a city widely known to be the Paris of Albania, I think because a lot of French soldiers were there during World War I, and they left something of an impression on the city, mainly that you can get crepes in one restaurant there. And we did.

The short road to Korce from Gramsh is more or less a goat track adapted to bus usage. It is maybe 1.5 centimeters wider than the bus itself, unpaved and thus quite rough, and chiseled into a beautiful granite cliff that you can barely see the top of for the overhang, and that provides you with a splendid view of the Devoll river some hundreds of meters below. And the best part is the Albanian drivers, who tend to be somewhat carefree in their driving style, except in carefully sounding the horn a few times before taking blind corners at full speed. I don’t really know what would have happened if we had met another vehicle coming in the other direction. This is a road that is truly unsuited for those uninitiated in mountain-road travel, and even so, it can be a bit stressful. The trick is to not pay attention to the ride so much, if you can distract yourself from the bone jarring quality of the road, and to take in the absolutely breathtaking views that you get in reward.

Korce itself is quite nice. It has almost anything that you could possibly want, including stores where you can find such mysteries as syrup and packaged ground beef. It has a number of very nice churches that almost remind you of Western Europe, except for the fact that they are mostly Orthodox. It is quite close to Greece, which is another plus for those volunteers that can take advantage of it. The buildings really reminded me of Italy, a sentiment that I kept to myself, since I have learned by now that everyone is quite tired of any comparisons I may make between Italy and here.

We stayed with Chris, who has been there for a year, and we met a lot of our friends from around the south there. Chris made us an excellent pasta dinner the first night, which was like heaven after 3 months of good, but decidedly repetitious, Albanian food. It was really nice to see some of our friends again, even if it had only been two weeks. The realization that the real thing has really started and that what we are facing in our sites is going to be our life for the next two years made those first weeks much more of a reality check than the visit three weeks earlier had been. Then, it was more of a vacation from training than a brief exposure to our futures. So we had a lot to talk about and vent, which seems to be the main pastime of volunteers, venting. That and passing rumors about other volunteers. The next day we spent exploring Korce and trying three times to go see a movie at the movie theater, but of course the times displayed meant nothing in reality, and when the place did finally open, we were told that the movie they had had had been sent to Shkoder, but that we could go back the next day to see X Men 3. That alone was even more disappointing, because I really want to see that movie, but had to leave the next day. Spitefully happy, I found out this week that everyone else didn’t get to see it either because it didn’t really arrive. HA HA.

I came back on Sunday by the “long” route, which means going through Librazhd, in order to see Cimi. Which I did. I met him in our usual coffee spot, and we talked for a long time about what had been happening in the short time that we had been apart. Unfortunately, I needed to leave pretty fast because the buses to Gramsh from Elbasan don’t run very late, but he insisted on buying me lunch. So he did. And I missed the bus. Which resulted in me being absolutely drenched in a freak deluge on the walk from the bus stop to the taxi stop in Elbasan. Where I was forced to pay 700 leke (7 dollars) to take a taxi to Gramsh. So I was tired and in a bad mood when I finally got back.

I’ll get to Gramsh and work in a while. First, I have to tell about the next, this last, weekend. It was our first un-chaperoned trip to the capitol. And the official reason for the trip was to go the the fourth of July party at the ambassador’s residence. Which we did, and it was miraculous. First, the surreal experience of walking through a heavily guarded gate into what is essentially a Virginian suburb. We’re talking 2 story houses with manicured lawns, paved driveways with basketball hoops, SUV’s in the driveway, and non-fruit-bearing trees (an absolutely incomprehensible thing to plant and exert energy on for an Albanian) in the yard. If you took a picture of this scene, you would never know that you weren’t in America except for the Albanian license plates. It’s just kind of shocking to walk from the semi-controlled chaos of Tirana into this weird American microcosm. Try to imagine. Second, and better. As many/much hamburgers, hotdogs, potato salad, homemade ice cream, potato chips, soda, beer, etc that you could handle was available. Which equaled me downing 5 burgers, 4 brownies, a plate of good pasta, a big bowl of ice cream, and an undisclosed number beers before collapsing in a giant bellied mass on the ambassador’s lawn along with all the other Mormons (sans beer and a few other things), ex-pats, and diplomatic personnel. Generally a good time. Followed by more good times as we were led around The Block, Tirana’s night life center, by a few veteran volunteers. Tirana is scary in the sense that parts of it could seriously be in almost any other capitol in Europe. Which makes the prospect of emerging again a little difficult. But it has to be done.

We stayed in Tirana for two nights, which may have been enough for one excursion. And now back to Gramsh. Things here have been a little up and down for me. I’ve started two English courses, and the one that I have with the kids keeps growing slowly, which is nice. I now have about 8 kids that come, but almost never all at once. I have that class in the high school every Tuesday and Thursday mornings for an hour at 9 in the morning, before it gets too hot. This class is really fun because of the kids. They seem to have quite a bit of fun with everything, and they don’t get bored very easily. It’s kind of hard to plan for the classes, though, because they wanted to start with the very beginning of the book that they have been using for a while, and they have the whole thing filled out already, which means that we can’t do any of the exercises in them because they already have all of the answers. But that will change soon, because tomorrow we are finishing the part that they have already done.

The other class that we have started (I say we because Kayla organized it, though I have been teaching it all so far) is for some of the doctors and nurses that work in the hospital. We have that on Tuesday and Thursday for two hours at 6 in the evening. We had so many people come to the first class (totally unexpected!) that we had to split it into two classes. These classes are also fun because they are adults, at the very beginning of the language, and are not afraid to laugh at themselves. My favorite student so far is an 50’s-ish x-ray technician in the second class who, if you gave him a blue shirt and a pair of red overalls, could honestly be Mario, that’s how great his mustache is (working on the picture, Kate). He’s just so jolly all the time. He was really nervous about speaking last week, but I saw him this morning at coffee, and I told him that he had better come tomorrow because he’s my favorite student, and he smiled really big and said thank you, so maybe I’ve convinced him to keep coming.

The unexpected downturn work-wise has been with the kids’ camp. While there are a lot of good kids there, I was disappointed to find that I seemed to attract the group of boys between 11 and 13 years old that are in the phase of trying to prove to everyone how tough they are. So they like to stand around and ask me things in Albanian that I can’t understand and laugh when I tell them that I don’t understand (and I’m sure that they are innocent comments, as well). Then they like to ask me over and over and over and over to give them this and that, especially money. Then they like to ask me about various matters regarding sex, mainly whether there are prostitutes and whore houses in America. Then they like to spout whatever bad English words that they have learned from Eminem and the like. One kid that was maybe 12 told me that Americans are selfish fools when I told him that I didn’t have any money to give him. I don’t think he expected me to understand, because when I asked him why Americans are selfish, he immediately asked me if I wanted to “eat rocks”, which I took to be the Albanian equivalent of fighting words. And now that these boys know who I am, they tend to swarm me on the streets and relentlessly hound me for money, no matter whether I tell them repeatedly that I’m not being paid to be here and thus have no money to give, ignore them, or tell them to buzz off. I may have discovered last night that learning their names is the secret to taming them, as I greeted two of the worse ones by name and they just said hello and moved on.

And so I’ve been coming ever closer to the conclusion that making friends here in Gramsh with the Albanians will be a difficult proposition. I can explain this in detail in an email to anyone who is interested, but I don’t think that I should use this space to do that. But I’ve been feeling a little bad about that for the last few days, as well as about some other things. Life with the family is more or less the same. I don’t see them very often, and really only interact with the mother around meal times. For some reason the main topic of conversation with her is about whether or not I ate breakfast in the morning, even though the fact that I did eat breakfast has not varied in the near month that I have been here. Then she always wants to know where I have been in the morning, when I have almost always been either teaching or at the shady café reading and studying. She always wants to know where this shifty café is, even though I don’t believe that it moves that much from day to day.

I have been reading prolifically (for me, anyway) since we’ve been here, which has meant that I have been squirreling books every chance I get, and returned from both Korce and Tirana with my bag mostly full of them. I believe that I am in the lead in the group with more than 20 books down since we landed in Tirana, though I have no way of confirming that. I have been averaging about 2 a week since we came to Gramsh, and most recently finished Life of Pi, which I highly recommend to everyone, in two days. I am starting now on Paradise Lost, so I may slow down in the density of that book. Unfortunately, the accordion playing has been going down recently. I blame it on the hot weather, as clinging a large mass of plastic and leather to your chest and working hard to pull and squeeze is slightly uncomfortable when you’re sweating like mad. But I have been continuing my training for the marathon, and I believe that yesterday I ran somewhere close to 12 km, or a little over an hour. I still get weird stares from the farmers out cutting their hay with scythes at 5 in the morning, but a good number of them at least wave now, as well. These hard working people have a hard time understanding, much like the non fruit trees, why anyone would want to put themselves into any kind of strenuous physical activity that has no chance of producing any kind of outcome beneficial to their economic existence. So they find my running something of a spectacle.

And now I’ll end this monster before I completely lose all of you to boredom, especially after that rousing recounting of my daily life. I received a postcard from my good friend Emily last week (THANK YOU PICCOLINA), so feel free to send anything you want, packages, letters, etc., to the Gramsh address!

I just have a few things to add to what I've been writing. Somehow, on Tuesday, Kayla and I have managed to get ourselves almost overbooked with things to do. On Tuesday morning I began my first summer English course. I only got four kids to come, and they were all somehow related to Kayla's host family, but it was actually really fun and I'm glad that I have that to do for at least a couple of hours every week. It's a little weird right now because the kids said that they wanted to do the first part of the same book that they have been doing over again. So I can't really have them do any of the exercises in the book because they already have all of them filled out. So the class so far has been really unstructured. I just kind of look at what they should have learned already and then ask them questions and do little activities on the board until I com across something that it seems like they don't know. Then I explain it and hope that they get my explanation. So far it seems to be working, but I don't really know if they are retaining what I'm giving them. I guess we'll see about that later. But these are all really good kids, and they are right in the age group that I would prefer to teach, if I have to teach. Alda, Kayla's host sister, is the oldest, and she's 13. The youngest is 9. So the boys there are still relatively normal and haven't started to rebel yet. Plus, they like it when you make learning fun and joke around a little.

Next, Kayla has finally gotten the director of the hospital to put together his mystical list of hostpital employees who are going to attend nighttime English courses at the hospital. The only problem is that he doesn't want us to have the people get a book to learn from. They want us to teach them everything from the book that we have, which I find rather challenging, especially since I'm neither a trained or gifted teacher. We also may be challenged to find a blackboard or other writing surface into the room. I suggested that we have the classes in the high school, which is at least equipped for basic teaching, but I was told that "We are doctors and nurses, we have finished our work in the school. Now we work in the hospital." So we have to find some way to do it with limited space and materials and possibly no blackboard. But now we will have that class twice a week for two hours a class, which gives us something else to do.

Last, but most certainly not least, we have managed to attach ourselves to the wonderfully motivated women that work in the Women's and Children's Center. We had been up there once before to talk to them, when they spilled their entire program and doings on us, and more or less overwhelmed us with Albanian for about 10 minutes. So we decided that we would probably have to go up there a number of times, even just to say hi, to let them know that we really are here to stay and that we are interested in working with them. So on Tuesday we went up there to talk to them again. They told us that they were going to start a children's day camp next week that would last for a month. This is the fourth year that they have had the camp, and it more or less involves 150 kids, some area set up in a village near here, and going every weekday from 2pm to 8pm to play in the river, play games, and do arts and crafts. When they told us about this on the first trip up there, I asked if there was any whay that we could help with it, and they kind of just looked at each other. But this time I asked if we could help, and they said yes. So now I can go to the center every day that I don't have anything else to do and get on the bus with them and go play with a bunch of kids for 6 hours, which is totally my kind of thing. And the best part is that just going and helping these women out with something simple and enjoyable for me might help build our credibility with them and make them more willing to work with us on other projects. Those women that work there are by far the most motivated people that we've met, as well as the most open to our presence and our help. So I think that we will be working a lot with them.

And that's how I've gone from wandering aimlessly in the street during the day to maybe having too much to do in under 3 days. Fun, huh? Oh, BTW, I've finally gotten some pictures up (for real this time!), here is the address http://pictures.jmkc.net/album18 since I am not sure if I will be able to change it on my central site's link from this computer. Enjoy!

Oh, how exciting! I drank so many coffees, read so much, and watching SO many World Cup soccer games this week. My life has more or less been planned around those ever important soccer games because they are one of the few things that are in English on TV and that I can understand all of. There is no cultural confusion going on with soccer. I cried when Sweden lost, and I will be dancing around the apartment for Italy's game against Australia today.

But really, there's not much going on so far, other than a lot of sweating. I've been trying to organize a summer course for English with any kid I come across who will talk to me and knows any English. Their response has been less than dazzling. Of course, I know it's impossible to get an Albanian to commit to any plan further in advance than 30 minutes, but it's still a bit frustrating. The parents, on the other hand, are more than enthusiastic about the course. Any adult that I tell about the course automatically tells me about his or her son or daughter that WILL be there. So tomorrow when I show up in front of the high school at 9 am to talk about what book we will use and when we will meet, I doubt that I will be met by a smiling, eager group of youths thrilled about learning English from a real live American. No. I expect to be met by a meager band of tormented wish-they-were-orphans kids who have been forced to go to school in the summer. But, damn it, I will have a summer course. And it will be good. It's also supposedly one of the best ways to integrate into the community, as after I begin teaching, I will be stopped often by parents in the street whose children I have been teaching. I hope that that's true, because I've been having a hard time meeting new people so far.

So other than wandering around town every morning looking longingly around for someone who will ask me to coffee and give me another contact to document, I have been reading a lot and spending a lot of time with Kayla and her family. I am on my third book since I've been here, and it's a whopper. Milton's Paradise Lost. That should keep me busy for a while. And yesterday I began learning Swedish for the third time, and flew through the first lesson while babbling away to myself in the empty apartment.

On Saturday Kayla and I went to Elbasan to meet her friend Katy from Georgia. I followed them around for part of the day, then went to the market and found a pair of running shoes that may or may not be adidas, though they say adidas on them. This is actually something exciting to tell. I've begun training to run a marathon in November. The marathon is in Athens, and there are about 20 or so of us that hope to get in shape to go down and run it together. So I've been waking up very early and going running for roughly an hour a day recently to try and get my legs back into shape, then I'll begin the slow crawl towards 18 miles that is the target training distance that I should be able to do before we really head down there for the full 26.2 mile adventure. The best part about this running in the morning thing is the looks that you get from people that you past. They will stop dead in their tracks to see this spectacle that is unwarranted physical activity. And the thing that will really shock them is if you say "Good Morning" to them as you pass. That breaks the trance, and they will sort of flinch and then very quickly go back to what they were doing before. I can foresee that shortly, I will be seeing these same people every day for a while, and they will start waving at the crazy american who runs by every morning.

It continues to be sweltering hot every day here. It becomes almost unbearble after 11. And I have no SHORTS other than the swimming trunks that I have been using to run in. I keep telling myself that today I WILL go down to the market and get some shorts to wear, even if they are all horrible looking because I cannot stand wearing these jeans and Carhartts every day and sweating like crazy. But then I get all discouraged at the prospect of having to haggle with the market people unless I have an Albanian with me. Because these people don't know yet that I don't make a ton of money because they don't know who I am. To them I still look like the rich foreign tourist, so I get the rich foreign tourist price on everything. I need to have an Albanian with me to tell them to stop fooling around or tell me that the price is normal. So I have been suffering on, stoicly, with my sweaty jeans.

Which reminds me that it's almost 11 and I need to find shade and cool drink soon where I can sit and enjoy my godly book for a while before scampering home through the heat for "lunch".

And it's finally happened. I've finally been dispatched to the life that will be mine for the next two years. I can't say that I'm entirely comfortable with that at this current moment, but we'll get to that shortly.

Two days ago, I found myself on the stage inside of a theater house in Elbasan, wearing my nicest set of clothes. Strangely enough, the president of Albania, Alfred Moisiu, was there, as well. I had my right hand in the air and I was saying some words that I thought I would never say again. And when that was done, I had apparently earned the real title of Volunteer. There was a fair amount of Albanian press present, given the high profile guests that we had attracted, and I got to see myself on a national TV newscast for what will probably be the only time in my life. If this whole thing is starting to sound a little surreal, you might be getting a little idea of how things are looking to me, right now.

The ceremony was actually really nice. It was pretty short, with everyone, including the president and the American ambassador keeping their comments pretty brief. We had two representatives of us give a short speech in Albanian, as well (go Andrew!), and Andrew was subjected to the horror of a personal interview (on camera) in Albanian when the ceremony ended. We all had to stand up and say the oath at the end, and then we had to survive a massive picture-taking ordeal while all 40 of us fought to have the pictures we wanted taken of our site groups and language teachers taken. Afterwards, we were expected to begin dispersing to our permanent sites. For a lot of us, that meant spending a night in Elbasan celebrating the end of our training. I can say that Elbasan at night almost seems like some other places in Europe, at least the place that we went to dance seemed like I could have walked out of it into Perugia or a number of other places.

And now I find myself seated in the internet cafe in Gramsh. I arrived back in town yesterday afternoon. I went back to my new home and spent a little while unpacking the extraordinary amounts of paper that had been piled on us in the last two weeks, then ventured outside with Kayla for the first evening of more than 700 that I will pass in this town. It feels so weird to go from Librazhd and relative recognition from the community to this new place where everyone looks at you again with a general WTF expression. It's not quite so bad since we're not roving around in a pack of 6 like in Librazhd, but at the same time that comfort in numbers thing is gone as well. And I find myself giving myself my own version of WTF. What the hell am I going to be doing here, at least for the next 3 months? School's out, so I don't have anywhere to go tomorrow, while Kayla at least gets to go to the hospital. I don't know anyone here, and I'm not the most outgoing person, so just thrusting myself into the community and meeting a few thousand new people isn't necessarily possible. In short, what in the world is involved with this being a volunteer thing?

Leaving Librazhd was not the easiest thing that I've ever done. The family ended up being so sweet to me when I was leaving. They bought me a cake the last night and gave me this really beautiful stone bust of Skenderbeg, the Albanian national hero. Cimi came to the ceremony the next morning and seemed really proud to have taken part in something that eventually drew the president to its final ceremony. He has professed his home's perpetual openness, which I believe I will be utilizing quite often given my new living situation. Strangely, grandma seemed the most sad to see me leave. She told me over the cake that I had better invite her to my wedding, whenever that may happen. She gave me a good bear hug the morning that I left and told me that I had better be sure to wear my socks in the house in Gramsh, or I would get a cold. She also professed her continual belief that I will become "i merzitur" (sad) before long if I don't talk more to my mother, but that she is more than willing to be my surrogate mother if I can't talk more to my real mom. So that's good to know.

Gotta get back to having absolutely no idea what I'm doing.

I think I left off sometime in the middle of last week, while I was struggling a little bit in Gramsh, so I'll pick it up there. The last half of the week was a little bit better. There were still a few classes that I taught that were pretty fly-by-nothing for me, but we made it through them. Tom started warming up a little bit more to me, and it kind of felt like he was starting to take a little ownership pride in me. As we walked down the street to buy a paper on Thursday and Friday, he had a small tendency to hold on to my arm, which wasn't too bad. But when he decided that he wanted to stop and talk to someone or go a different direction, he didn't exactly give me any heads up. He just sort of turned and took me with him forcibly. Tom is kind of short, but, as he likes to say, he would have made a great American football player because "Tom was very powerful." And he's not lying.

Also, towards the end of the week the family started to kind of understand that I wasn't going to comply with their eating policy, and they started giving me a little less. On Thursday night they gave me a simple tomato salad, bread, and yogurt and I was very happy. I don't think they were overly saddened to see me go, since they made me leave my key, but at least the situation got a little more comfortable by the end.

On Friday, I was invited to go play calcetto (5 on 5 cage soccer) with Tom and a few of the other teachers. At 2.30 we met by the mosque for the ride to come pick us up. Tom's friend screeched up and we loaded into what I think used to be a meat truck and the guy took the lightning speed drive up to his establishment, with gjyshas and goats diving out of the way the trip (aka wacky driver). We got there and all of the teachers went in this room and cahnged into their short shorts and started warming up. I kind of tried to blow the cobwebs out of my soccer gears, which was not so effective. Let's make this short and just say that I got destroyed by a bunch of 50 something overweight teachers. It was embarassing. So in answer to a question from some of you (Dad), there are no gyms to speak of here, in general, but I think I will keep myself from putting on weight by getting some soccer stuff and going out each morning to the field by the high school for some skill drills. I ought to take advantage of having an ed-pro soccer player as a counterpart and try to get a little better at this game that's fun to play. As a good side note, the World Cup starts today, and I will betray country loyalty and scream loudly FORZA ITALIA!! I've already made some enemies amongst my colleagues for betraying the homeland, but that's just too bad.

The return home to Librazhd on Saturday felt like just that. The kids all screamed and mauled me as I came up the hill, and the family was almost as delighted. I met grandma first, who welcomed me nicely. I had to go down to the exchange corner in town to meet Cimi, and we had coffee and talked about Gramsh. That night, grandma told me that she "loves me a lot" because I am almost identical in age to her youngest son in Greece (6 days!). Last night I gave them the book of pictures from Colroado that I bought before coming here. I waited until now so that I could write a nice note for them in Albanian, which I did. They were extremely happy to have it, and we spent almost an hour and a half going through it and having me try to describe where all the pictures were (difficult, since I haven't been to most of those places). I made the mistake of giving it to them right before we were going to have dinner, so we ended up eating way later than usual, which I don't think grandma was too delighted about. Interestingly, the picture that they were the most interested in was a picture of a farmhouse with some wheat in front of it. Apparently they had never seen that kind of wheat before, and Cimi and grandma had a long discussion that I didn't quite follow about wheat.

In response to another question (Dad). The weather here right now is apparently quite out of the normal. It has been relatively cool and rainy, which is not normal for June. They tell me that it gets really cold in the winter and really hot in the summer. I think the cold in the winter is kind of relative because there is no indoor heating here. So it doesn't have to get that cold to feel really cold because there is no escape. They also say that it is supposed to be around 90 degrees F and very dry in Elbasan in June, and slightly less so in Gramsh and Librazhd because they are a little higher in elevation and surrounded by mountains. So if you are trying to think of the best times to come, you have to choose between a cold winter and a hot summer, with the seasons in between being more mild in temperature but more rainy. The rain will cause there to be a lot of mud everywhere, which is sometimes not so fun to deal with. I guess in general I would suggest a summer visit, despite the heat, because the modes of transportation will be more abundant and reliable at that time. The beaches in Albania are beautiful, but they will be packed with the millions of albanians who have migrated out of the country for work who return in the summer for vacation with their families, as well as thousands of kosovar and macedonian albanians. Albania has some amazing historical sites and museums, as well as some of the most beautiful landscapes you can think of. I would say that hiking would be the biggest attraction when coming here unless you want to brave the packed beaches. There are plenty of hotels to stay in, and even some of the best ones cost less than a motel 6 in the States. We can just say that for your normal vacation budget in a place like New Zealand, living in a van, you can live like a millionaire in Albania. Hope that answers your question.

The past week has been filled with daily trips to Elbasan where we have been learning about various topics from women's issues to Albanian cooking. It has been more interesting than the majority of our other sessions in Elbasan, but it has been really tiring for some reason being here all day every day for a week. We have one more week before we get done and become official volunteers, when we will disperse to our permanent sites for the 2 year service. It will be both sad and relieving to finish this. I am really intimidated to get there and finally have to start trying to do something for that community when I really don't have any idea of how or what to do. I'm scared that I'll get there and just feel really overwhelmed and not accomplish anything the whole summer. They say to not really expect to get anything real done during that first summer, but it still scares me some. Anyway, I think there has been a break in the rain, so I'm going to make a dash for the furgon station. Take care, everyone.

A lot has happened in the last week, so much that I haven't had time to really be on the internet at all. I still have to recount the play experience, as well as tell about my new site! Since it's so much to say and I have a pretty defined limit to how much I can type before I start getting a little annoyed with technology, I think that they might be a little shorter than they otherwise would have been.

I'll start with the play. By now I've almost forgotten it because I have had so many other things going on since then. But in a word, it was incredible! We actually succeeded in pulling together about 30 high school kids and got them to do a modern english adaptation of Macbeth in about 6 or 7 weeks. I don't really remember how we decided to do a play in the first place, but I think that we must have been oblivious to the time constraint, becuase we stretched that pretty thin by the end. So we first met with the students and told them about the project and that we would do some auditions the following week. Meanwhile, Elizabeth did a vast amount of work shortening and rewriting the original play into a version using manageable modern English that would take between 30 and 45 minutes to perform. Once that was done, we had the kids do the auditions and gave them their parts. The next major hurdle was tryig to find out where we could do the play. There is a theater in Librazhd, but it never seemed like anyone was there to talk to about it. So one day I went with Frank to see what we could find out, and after wandering around in the theater for a while, a lady showed up who told us that it costs $70 an hour to rent the theater. So we obviously began to think that it would be impossible for us to use the theater since we had no budget whatsoever for the play and had no hope of raising $70. So we started considering doing the play outside somewhere, but thankfully Ryan talked to the mayor and found out that productions done by high school students get to use the theater for free. YAY! The next trick was to track down someone who worked for the theater that had a key and could let us into the place for rehearsals. We went down to the theater every day for about a week with our language teachers and stood in front of the theater trying to find someone, but no one ever showed up. Finally, one day we went next door to a cafe and asked if there is anyone that works in the theater. And the guy that was sitting there said "I'm the stage manager there." He had watched us got here every day and had never taken the trouble to ask us if we needed anything. After that, everything was downhill (yeah right!). We had a key to the theater and were holding rehearsals every day. The big problem was that the kid playing Macbeth had an absence issue and was almost never there. The other kids didn't seem to be particularly interested in memorizing their lines, and the girl who was going to build the set had vanished. But eventually, people started showing up a little. The artist started fashioning Frank's beloved swords in the "sword factory". Things were moving a little, but time was going quite a bit faster.

Then came the weekend before the show. The set was still in the conceptual stage with 3 days to go. In pure Albanian fashion, things started materializing at the last second. On Saturday, suddenly 4 cuni's (aka boys) showed up and started tossing together the set, with music stands and broom sticks holding it up. The artist girl started painting bricks on the castle while trying to keep control of her absolutely wild little brother (cun). The costumes that we had been asking the actors to bring for a few weeks actually started showing up in pieces. The Americans are getting a little nervous and are starting to think that the show might happen, but with no costumes, a half built set, and scripts in hand.

Now we're at the day of the show. We have somehow managed to get the kids out of class early and we are in the theater for a last minute dress rehearsal. Magically (and as a good omen) the set has been finished and looks marvelous. All of the costumes and props are actually present. But the acting leaves something to be desired. Most of the lines are memorized, which is good, but there are still moments when they forget, and not being skilled actors, the result is empty silence. Their movements on stage are off, people exit to the wrong side, etc. Basically, I'm sitting down in front of the stage and am getting a little worried.

After lunch, we come back to prepare for the real thing. The kids are all there, in their costumes and pretty excited. Frank and I open the doors and start filtering the people who are outside. There is actually a lot of excitement for what is about to happen, but we had been told that shows in LB can be a little wild because the place fills up with cuni's that are only there to be disruptive, so we had distributed tickets to select people to hopefully keep this problem down. So Frank and I had to keep non-ticketed people from getting in. I would say that we got about 280 people who came, which is pretty good, I think. When the play started, everyone clapped a lot and they were actually quiet. And to my surprise, the kids actually did the play 99% flawlessly. Lines were perfect, they actually put some feeling into the words for once, and they moved around on stage as they were supposed to. The audience clapped after almost every scene, and they really seemed to enjoy it. Our bosses were all there to watch it and I think that they were really impressed.

After the show, you could tell that the kids were glad that it was over and that they wouldn't have to go to rehearsal for 3 hours every day anymore, but you could also tell that they were proud of what they had done. We had a little party for them with candy and soda and music and Frank danced to the remix of his favorite song, "My Heart Will Go On." I was impressed with the whole thing, and I am really proud of all of the kids for doing such a difficult project in such a short time.

So last weekend I got to go to Tirana and stay in a pretty nice hotel with amazing views of the city for the weekend. Officially, we were there to meet our Albanian work partners and to learn a little about them and what we would be doing in their organizations for the next two years. Unofficially, we were there to relax a little and spend some social time with the other Americans that we haven't really had time to see for quite a while. We met our counterparts at a hotel in downtown Tirana for a "resource fair", where we got some information from a number of NGO's that might help us in future projects. I met my new friend, Tomorr, there and we spent a few rather tense minutes walking around the fair before I asked if he wanted to get coffee. So we rounded up Kayla and her counterpart, Hyrije, and went to sit down. I tried to ask Tom a few questions to break the silence, to which he mostly replied with one liners. But I found out that he used to play soccer on the Gramsh team. I asked him if he still played a lot, and he said, "well, I'm no spring chicken anymore." (cue accent). I thought that was pretty funny, but let it slide. Later I talked to another real volunteer who had been friends with the Sara who worked with Tom before, who told me that he likes to talk a lot in idioms, and that Sara had been on the brink of insanity before because of them. So I went back to the table and told Tom (BTW, he refers to himself as Tom, and has a strange tendency to talk about himself in the third person, both in Albanian and in English. I think this stems from his profession as an English teacher, where he uses his name a lot in examples, so he gets to say "Tom does" this and that, since the 3rd person singular is the only tricky verb form in English. Just a theory.) that I was hungry, and he asked me if I was as hungry as a hunter. Kayla and I laughed about it and told him that we had never heard that before. The next day, we were doing an exercise where we were supposed to express fears and excitements about working with each other, and Tom told me that he had no fears because "Tom and Brandon will get along like a house on fire." Once again, laughter. And so on. I have about 6 other really good ones, some of which just don't make sense and some of which that are just plain obscure. But at least I have something new to document. Before I was documenting Frank's bizarre statements regarding females in my diary and now I can record Tom's weird idioms.

The best part is that he uses these idioms in class, and I would say that half of what he teaches is idiomatic. Which is fine because English is a blatantly idiomatic language, but he teaches them things that no one says. But he is a pretty good teacher. I have been going to class with him since Monday, and I am pretty impressed. The kids are quiet and respectful toward him, yet he makes a lot of jokes that they laugh at and they seem at ease with him. He has been teaching for 23 years, so he knows what he is doing and doesn't prepare or plan that much. So on Monday I just watched him teach 4 classes and during the other 2 classes that we didn't teach, we went to, naturally, have some coffee. He had me read a text in 2 of the classes, which was fine.

The next day, we didn't teach the first hour, so we went to have coffee. 5 minutes before the next class begins, Tom tells me that I will be teaching the same lesson that we did on Monday. Again, the Fear set in. I didn't know what we were teaching or really even how to teach. I don't know the kids or their level. So many thoughts went through my head. But I did it, and it wasn't as hard as I thought it was going to be. He still hasn't really told me anything about how I can be better or do differently. In class, if I ask him what to do next or something, he just says "yes, you can do it. There." But the problem is that I don't know what to do or what he would do because he doesn't talk with me about it beforehand. I would be fine with a lesson plan or at least a general idea of what to do, but I don't have that. I asked him about it today, but he kind of avoided the answer. We did the same thing today. He just handed me the book as we walked into the class and said, "Here you go!" I'm totally lost with this. I never expected to be teaching during this week, or even at all for a long time next school year! And here I am doing the real thing now. It's rough. But at least I have something to do. Kayla says that she just sits around with her counterpart and drinks coffee all morning and that today they went to the market in the morning. They kind of expected her to bring a plan with her, and don't understand that it's impossible to plan for a place that you've never been before... So at least I have something to do that seems kind of productive.

The school itself is way better than the one in LB. It has about 1,000 students and 45 teachers. It has all of its windows, there are stoves in all of the rooms, the desks and floors are nicer, pretty much everything is good. Upstairs, they even have a really nice computer lab with about 20 HP desktops (unfortunately no internet!). In Tom's "office" aka storage room, there are boxes and boxes of books with a ton of dust on them that are supposedly going to go in a library being built in the new annex. The teaching staff seems nice and pretty accepting of my presence (thank you Sara!) and I have been going to coffee with them during the breaks. I think I have even been roped into going with Tom to play calcetto (5 on 5 soccer) after class on Friday, followed by what I believe I understand to be a raki session at the "Mecca", whatever that means. The whole thing should be a disaster. But the best thing about this school is that the students are required to wear at least knee length dark pants and a long-sleeved button up gray shirt. This will save me from the discomfort of trying to avoid looking at some 15 year old girl's cleavage in class like in LB. I don't know if I would have had that problem so much since they were wearing that stuff only for Andrew (everyone in LB calls him "the beautiful one") in LB, but at least I don't ever have to worry about that.

As for Gramsh itself. This town is amazingly beautiful. It is in a river valley that is a little wider than that of LB. So the town is in more of a field and is flatter. It is quite a bit bigger than LB, and has a lot more apartment buildings instead of all the private houses that LB has. The two main roads through town are in good repair and lined with good quality sidewalks and a lot of beautiful trees. In the evening, the typical Albanian xhiro (evening stroll on the main street) is taken to the extreme and the main road is absolutely packed with people. The cool thing is that it seems like the women here are allowed out a little more than in other places, so maybe Gramsh is slightly more liberal. There is a large imbalance of men and women here, I have been told, because a large portion of the young men go abroad for work. Probably the most striking feature of this town, however, is the mountain that lies roughly to the east of the city. It literally bursts out of the ground, it has to be a volcano (hopefully inactive). I have already been promised a visit to the mountain and to numerous other places in the coming summer. As for things to do, it seems like most Gramshi people like to go hang out at the river during the summer and swim. The river bed is extremely wide and the water is shallow and slow, so maybe even I can swim there. There are some really nice cafes and parks to sit at, and of course, there is the hopping xhiro!

My new family is a major change from the Librazhd one. They are about 5 million times richer (or at least use their money more) than the family in LB. The apartment is fabulously nice and could be a high level apartment anywhere in europe or the states. The family consists of a mom, Antoneta, a father, Ramazan, and two sons, Ranedo and Iglis, who are 17 and 15. Dad owns the local bingo joint, and mom runs the ice cream shop next door. They apparently also have a hotel in Durres. This family is what I would call "hefty". Ranedo is the biggest and weighs about 130 kilos (going on 300 pounds), but is not much taller than me. The family is firmly committed to "shendosh"ing me (fattening or healthening, depending on how you interpret the word), and so toss out 5 or 6 huge plates of food in front of me every meal. I have told them that I don't eat very much, and in fact only eat 1 or at most 2 of the plates they put out. Dad doesn't seem to happy about this and they give me a lot of grief about "shendoshing", but at the same time they give Ranedo a lot of grief about his weight, so I don't really understand this dichotomy. I always tell the mom that I am fine and that I don't want anymore, but she will always put more in front of me or refill my bowl. I hope they don't care that I leave so much, because I am not going to eat as much as they want me to. This seems to be their number one concern for me, that I eat enough. I also think that they think I don't like them because I haven't been at home that much except to eat or sleep. They are having a hard time understanding that I have to go to work and that my number one job right now is to be out in the community trying to meet people and learn about what is here. But whatever.

I can say with full certainty, and for reasons that I definitely shouldn't say here, that I miss my family in Librazhd and that I will be very happy to go back to them this weekend and soak in the last two weeks of wonderful happiness and sense of belonging that they bring me. I think that I will be spending a lot of time at Kayla's house in Gramsh, as well as with Tom's family, both families that are extremely pleasant. Kayla lives with the widowed mother of two that housed Sara, the last volunteer here, so they kind of know the game. Yesterday I made byrek with them, which was fun. The son has been in my class twice so far, and he is a wonderful, shy, absolutely adorable 16 year old Albanian kid (and I really doubt that adorable gets applied to many 16 year old boys, especially by me, but that's what he is).

So Gramsh is wonderful in its scenery and its people seem very welcoming. The town will, of course, have its difficulties for me, but, in general, I think I can say that I am very excited to work here for the next two years, as long as Tom starts letting me in on the lesson plans and my new family finally decides that I don't want to be fat. Oh, BTW, you can still send mail to the training address. That mail will be forwarded to me in Gramsh once I am finally here permanently. I think Kayla and I will open a post office box together so that we can get packages and bigger mail, but we haven't done that yet. Basically, I will have a Gramsh address someday, but you can keep mailing things to Tirana until then without worrying that I'll never get them. Mire?