UNDP meeting for re-development of Industrial area. Mayor Mark is in foreground, and that is Nik behind him. The rest are staff and UNDP staff with me looking really interested!

Female pensionsits (that is the word in Albanian) they are waiting for government assistance at the post office. Check out the Mirditore clothing. We call them Ninja Gjushes (grandmothers)

Seth and I checking the sharpness of the knife before the slaughter.

Me and Seth after the first kill. It was raining so don't mind my awesome poncho.

Alex, Lesley (my site mate) and I after a grueling hike where we followed a sheep herding dog who got us lost and then we had to traverse a mountainside where there was a fire last year. People in town were asking if we got in a fight or if we were mechanics!

Rubik Christmas tree, put up by the crazy guy who lives in my building!

View from my office during the snow!

I really hope killing a lady bug is not bad luck because if it is, I am S.O.L.!!! My building has a problem. I probably killed somewhere between 10-15 lady bugs, or some sort of creature that looks like a lady bug, every night for the week following my trip to Turkey, we have had quite the problem. I realize that I am in no way, shape or form in danger from sharing living quarters with these bugs but they are everywhere. Call me what you will, my site mate Lesley said, “shame on you!” O’well, what can she say, she doesn’t have these things all over the place. I told her I don’t feel guilty because they are uninvited and they don’t pay rent! Alright, so following my trip to Turkey and Greece I tried my best to get right back into work. As I have written here before, I received a Small Project Assistance grant back in May or June. The project has been a bit of a head ache ever since. First, the Peace Corps and I had a paper work problem. The problem was their mistake and my actual problem. Without going into too much detail, I did not receive the funds for my project for over three months following the approval date. Issue one! The second problem or series of issues came with the municipality. As part of the SPA agreement, the agency requesting the funds (in my case the municipality, I may also call it the Shqip word, Bashkia) is responsible for 10% of the budget in cash and 15% in what is referred to as in-kind (something the agency already has access to, for example a current staff member, unused office space or electricity). Although the project was approved and the funding was in route, the staff of the Bashkia failed to take the initiative. I shouldn’t say initiative because I was constantly bothering one Director or another to do something. I waited patiently from June until November for something to happen. The only part of the project that was completed on time is a survey. On one of the rare occasions that every member of my Directorate was in the building I made sure we at least did the one thing that did not require any other office’s help. Sander (my counterpart and the director of the Office I work in) has always been one of the only employees of the city who actually does work, and he does good work. There are three other fairly young women who work in my office. Just to understand one of the problems that exists in Albania keep this in mind. Communism ended about twenty years ago and the education system in the country has never recovered. First, people who were educated during communism are now teachers and professors. They are also the leaders of the country in government, business, and the NGO sector. The communist education system in Albania, like in many other countries, was not all bad. Math, science, trades, and related areas were taught extremely efficiently from what I have been told and read. The problem comes with critical thinking. If you are not told what to do and how to do it, it simply does not get done. This is the same issue that troubles many, not all, of the youth currently. They are taught to regurgitate information and are never questioned why this? or why that?. I have had many conversations with the four most open minded and intelligent Albanians I work with (Mark the mayor, Sander my counterpart, his wife Bardhe, and Nik the Vice-director of the High School and director of the NGO) and they emphatically agree. Mark even went as far as to higher two new young women in their mid and late twenties to begin work in my office in an effort to shake up the work a bit. This outcome was not achieved but we are all working on it. Back to the point. So we sat down to write this survey that would be given to 65 total people in the community among all three of our neighborhoods and a few of the villages. The survey would not be perfect of course but I wanted to make sure that the three women in my office and Sander understood what the goal of the survey was. My job in Albania is to develop the capacity of the people I work with. So I try to make an effort whenever I can to not do the work but to lead the people I am with to do the work themselves, facilitate you know! First I explained to them this exact point. I am the second volunteer one of the girls has worked with and the first for the other two. I initially attempted to find out what they knew of a survey and if they understood what the goal of our survey was. Ow, by the way we were trying to determine the quality of information dissemination throughout the community and then see if that quality is changed once the Information office is opened in February. Also by the way, I have never actually written a survey of any type before. I first started by asking them what kind of questions. This was a mistake. Nothing was happening. We sat there in silence for a bit. Then I decided, okay, I guess it would be better to start with answers. After discussing it, mostly me talking them out of things, I led them to decide 5 possible generic answers and one comments space. You know poor, fair, good, better than good, and excellent. This was in shqip so “better than good” sounds a lot better. This lasted about half an hour. We decided that the minimum amount of questions would be 10, and one of them would ask what the type of employment was. This question is not really important for the project but I was curious, hahaha. For the next hour we maybe got through 4 questions. Even though we had earlier established that all the questions, baring the one about employment, would have one of 5 responses the girls could only come up with yes or no questions. This was an easy problem to fix but I was baffled at the…um I don’t want to stay stupidity because I really just think it is a problem with the lack of critical thinking about anything. For example, they would give me a question in Shqip that was something like, “Are you informed about information related to the Bashkia’s budget?” A yes, no, or maybe question right? So then it would take another 10 minutes and some wrestling to realize that the question was good at the core, we just needed to reword it to fit our established answers. “How would you describe your knowledge about budgeting in the Bashkia?” A side note, this is a simple survey and there is a good chance that a handful of the people being surveyed would not know how to read or write well. Not to beat this horse any more but I think you get the idea. This process took us almost three hours to come up with ten questions, translate what I had typed from English to Shqip and then to proper Shqip with no spelling or grammar errors. I have found it easier to drive and take directions when working with Albanian colleagues (I type and control the computer while facilitating the discussion why they focus on discussing things and the task, plus I can understand Shqip better than I speak it so I find it more productive this way). After the three hours were over one of the girls told me I was a mean teacher, in ENGLISH! She is probably right, well slightly. Ah, good day I thought. Something was accomplished and I think the girls all left that day having learned something. Then I thought, oh great, now we have to distribute the thing. The next morning I had a café with Nik and discussed my frustrations with the project. He assured me he would talk to Mark and we would get things figured out. Then when I got to work I was greeted with a surprise. Without any one asking him to do so and without even thinking of this issue yet myself, Sander had sent around a memo to every directorate in the building requesting them to send any relevant information to us by the beginning of the next week. He had also made plans to distribute the surveys by that time. I was pumped, now that that was out of the way we were sailing straight. Monday came around and to the disgust of Sander, not one person in the building had given him anything. Sander however did distribute all of the surveys and put the results in a spread sheet. 50% is not bad I guess. That night, Nik called me and said Mark had requested my help with something at the Bashkia. It was about 7pm so I kinda figured this was not a work related matter. I was half right. The owner of the best winery in Albania, my opinion of course, is one of Mark’s good friends and was at the Bashkia. We spent much of the night drinking his fantastic wine and eating meat in the Bashkia café while discussing various topics, one of which was the SPA project. We also discussed some other things that I have a problem with at the Bashkia. I am a really lucky volunteer in a few ways. I have friends in other municipalities throughout the country who have met their mayors maybe once or twice. I also have friends whose mayors refuse to take them seriously and in one case even worked to have the volunteer removed from the town. Mark is not perfect but I know he respects my opinion and has truly become a great friend. He really is a good Mayor as well. Having said that, we talked for a good while about the problems that exist in his government and the road blocks to alleviate them. Keep in mind, here is this 52 year old man who is at the end of his second term as mayor and is listening to advice from a 24 year old fresh out of college foreigner! The best part is he listened, but I will get to that in a minute. After the serious talk, we started to discuss the expansion into the States of Fran’s wine and he gave me a few bottles to take home. At the end of the evening, Mark assured me that the Information office was a high priority of his and that he “guaranteed” that the project would be completed. The next week Mark would be off in Switzerland for a conference related to the competition we won during the summer. The week Mark was gone; absolutely no work was done on the office or come to think of it in general. I am also very lucky in the quality of my counterparts. Sander is my official counterpart but I also do a lot of work with Nik. Sander felt awful of the disrespect the Bashkia had shown by not turning in any information for the project and that we had not bought any of the materials yet, these are his words not mine. I didn’t see it as a disrespect but just laziness and incompetence. In Albania, most actions can be reduced to a show of respect. That week, Sander and I went to Tirana and bought the computer and other materials that needed to be purchased in Tirana. I was happy that we finally got the materials but I was a little nervous that we would have spent the money that SPA provided while not fulfilling the Bashkia’s side of the agreement. Fast forward a few weeks and Mark calls me into his office. It is the Tuesday before Thanksgiving and for the 3rd or 4th time I bring up my concerns about the office not being completed and the work that still needs to be done. At this point I was extremely unhappy and unsure if the project that Sander and I had fought for would proceed. Mark told me again that he guaranteed the offices completion. The previous times I had discussed the project with Mark we never set down a specific date. He knew that the final report is due in February but we never discussed any completion date. In my frustration during that particular meeting I asked Mark what exact day the office would be done by. Due to the holiday season he said he would like to complete the project following the new year but I explained that we have already waited too long and that if the Bashkia’s portion of the project was not completed before January, I would have to return the items purchased and the funds from SPA. Total lie, I would have asked for an extension. He conceded that the office could be ready by December 17th and that we would inaugurate it officially on January 17th. I had heard statements like this before so I asked him if it would be alright to invite my Peace Corps bosses (the country director and my program director). While still in the meeting I called them and got confirmation from both on their attendance. Now if the office is not finished it would be turp (shame) for both of us. Now that the office was in order, I headed for Tirana on Thursday morning to celebrate Thanksgiving. Every year the various American ex-patriots who work in Tirana for the Embassy, Peace Corps, and USAID invite PCVs into their homes for Thanksgiving. Alex, James, Jenifer, 4 other volunteers and I were invited to the Albanian Defense Attaché for America’s home. He is basically the highest ranking American Military Officer in Albania. His wife is also a Embassy staffer and although she is overqualified for her position as the Integration Officer (not her actual title but how she described it to us) she took it so she would not be without work while her husband was stationed in Albania. In fact they were both Officers in the United States Air Force and actually met while in Helicopter school. They had an awesome house and it was excellent to spend a night in an atmosphere that was the most similar to home that I had experienced in almost two years. They had NFL on in the living room, a Butterball in the oven, A&W in the refrigerator and Ethan Allen furniture. This was maybe the first thing I noticed, not that I have the slightest sense of what Ethan Allen furniture looks like or anything but it was obvious that this was not Albanian furniture. It was comfortable and excessive in the best possible ways. Apparently the US Government has some deal with Ethan Allen to supply all American Government staff oversees with their digs. We had an excellent time and I got to talk with my family back home as well. The food was absolutely fantastic but the highlight of the evening was a tie. I can’t decide if I was happier with the NFL on TV (which I hadn’t watched for two years) or the pillow top oversized bed I got to sleep in! The next morning we awoke to brewed coffee (coffee made with a filter is also something we don’t really have) and leftovers. We thanked the family profusely and then headed to Burrell for our second Thanksgiving. The idea was for Seth and I to arrive in Burrell before the sun went down so we could slaughter the two turkeys that Rachel had bought. We arrived in Burrell on time but it was raining pretty hard and the power kept on going out. We elected that if we were going to be cold as hell, wet, and in the dark we better wait until we had a little courage in us. So we had a few cocktails and then decided it was time. I killed one turkey while Seth held the body and then we switched for the second turkey. I think because we gave Seth so much guff last year about his spastic nature he was well prepared this year and the killing went off without a hitch. The next day we prepared the turkeys but one of them was slightly dry. We had an issue with electricity and the oven shut off a few times during the cooking process. I joked that it was because Rachel was a vegetarian. She cooked one of the turkeys and I cooked the other at a separate house. Ya, that is right mom, I cooked a turkey, I am becoming quite domesticated. The night was a lot of fun. We had about 18 Peace Corps Volunteers, 4 Albanians, and 2 Welsh guests. It was a lot of fun to get together with the rest of the PCVs to talk about work and to not talk about work, hahaha. This is a good time of year if you don’t want to work but a bad time if you do. I do. This is my last few months as a PCV and I haven’t done as much as is possible, or at least it feels that way. So, Thursday and Friday were holidays for Americans and Monday and Tuesday were holidays for Albanians. When I returned to work on Wednesday Sander handed me a memo that said there would be a Bashkia staff meeting on Friday and one of the topics listed were projects related to our office. This was only the 4th staff meeting that has been called since I have been working at the municipality. Two of these staff meeting were called to present my family both when my Mom and Uncle visited and the other when my Dad, Laurel, and her mother came. I knew what to expect for this meeting, or at least I thought I did. I knew it was basically a yell fest in which blame would be rationed out to all the staff members. What I didn’t realize is that some of the yelling would be over things I had mentioned and projects I had done. Not in a negative way. It’s not like I ratted anyone out or anything it was just things I had discussed with Mark or Sander that were brought up, using my name of course. I sat there in silence for three hours while occasionally adding my Po or Jo (yes or no) to the heated discussion, only about 1.5 hours of this was dedicated to issues relating to the information office, the foreign language lab, and a DLDP project that I am involved in. It even got to the point of name calling, “Fshatare,” “Rrenacak,” “Kot” (villager, liar, and worthless to name a few). By the end of the meeting it obvious that Mark, Sander, and I were not in least happy with the performance of the staff, who cares if I am happy or not I am just a volunteer. But apparently it matters. Then at the end Mark asks if there is any other business that needs to be addressed. Sander stood up and said that he would like to nominate me for “Qytetar pёr viten 2010,” (Citizen of the year for 2010). They all voted and of course, yes, I am the man of the year for Rubik and will receive a plaque and a gift on Christmas Eve during the annual concert at the cultural center. After the meeting Mark kept me after and apologized for the yelling and that they are all friends, but this is work. I don’t really understand the logic there but okay. Friday, December 17th came just last week. This was the day that the physical office was supposed to be finished so we could move in the materials purchased and begin training of the staff member who would work in the office. I arrived to work as I often do sometime between 9:30 and 10:30am and no changes had occurred to the office from the day of the staff meeting a week before. Needless to say I was not very happy. The power had been going in and out so Sander and I had a coffee in the Bashkia café. During the coffee Nik dropped in so we had another coffee and talked for a bit. He was on his way to Tirana so after he left Sander, two of the other girls who work in my office, and myself were called into Mark’s office. We were there to discuss several things which started as usual with the problems with the 9-year school and the foreign language lab. We called in the Director of the school and arranged a meeting for me to go to the school and work out some schedule with the teachers to begin implementing the lab. Something that should have been done half a year ago, hahaha. After the director left we started working on a project proposal that is due in just a week or so. Perfect time to begin writing it huh? The project is a doosey as well, almost 80,000Euros! It is a program called Decentralization Local Development Program (DLDP) from the Swiss equivalent of USAID, the difference being that in Albania, DLDP has there ducks in a very nice and clean row. This has been the most important work I have done as a PCV. I am doing exactly what it says in the Peace Corps Act. Instead of leading the project and doing most of the work, I am helping them to write the project while teaching them how a project is written. We were cruising along and everyone was working together and submitting ideas, while helping each other decipher what I was trying to explain in Albanian, when Mark got a phone call about three hours into the process. Nik’s father had died just an hour before. This was awful news and Nik is a close friend to all of us and a former Professor of the two girls that work in my office. There would be no more work to do that day. I called Nik right away and expressed my condolences. I didn’t know what to say. Nik speaks English but I still wouldn’t know what to say. I asked Sander and Mark to be sure to call me if there was anything they were going to attend; I know that as soon as someone dies the house of the deceased is open for several days following. Sander said he would call me the next day and we would go together. On the way downstairs Mark, for reasons I don’t know didn’t tell me, but surprised me with a brand new door, window, and walk-up window in the Information Office installed and lookin nice! This was good news. The next day, Saturday, Sander called me and said we would go to Lezhe to visit Nik and have coffee. During the furgon ride out to Lezhe, I asked Sander if there was anything I should now, culture wise before we got there. He told me that he would instruct me whom to shake hands with and he also told me something that I have heard before during training. We came into the apartment and Sander immediately told me who to shake hands with and told them who I was. We saw Nik and I gave him a hug and told him an Albanian phrase Sander had told me. He was really pleased and his Uncle was also surprised I knew the phrase. I was told where to sit in the living room, which had been set up with long benches and table for the occasion. A young male relative, the room had only males in it, came and brought Sander and I a Turkish coffee and a raki. I then cheered Nik a phrase I had learned a long time ago and the Uncle went on a speech for a few minutes on the respect it showed to Nik’s dad that a foreigner who had never met him would value his life and the respect I brought to their family. It was really sad to see Nik so unhappy, he would speak that his dad was more like his best friend. Don’t really know what else to say about it except it was a really sad and interesting cultural experience. That brings me pretty much up to today. It has been really cold in Rubik and it even snowed for two days straight. It was so beautiful but then rain came and washed it all away. I have been freezing but it is great. Washing my clothes is a bit of a problem though. It takes a while for them to dry and even longer if they freeze! Alright, everyone have a good Christmas.

Awesome way to have a meal, choose what looks good from a huge selection. The police eat there so it must be good, right

Marathon expo with some sort of weird mascot. James, Jenifer in the armpit and myself.

The "Blue Mosque" and the sultan himself!

Gearing up for the big race, you can see the bridge across the Bosphorus Strait behind us. Jenifer, Alex, and myself.

Before the race with some of the other PCV's (Peace Corps Volunteers).

Kristen, Alex, Erwin, Me, James, and Jenifer.

After the race finished. Notice the change in color of my shirt. I wasn't really standing on my own at this point!!

Turkish Viagra at the Spice Bazaar. Thing was huge, the spice bazaar that is.

Spice Bazaar, this place was awesome. So many free samples, i even bought some Apple tea and some tea for an Albanian friend.

Turkish ice cream. Stuff is like cold bathroom caulk but actually tastes good.

Eating dinner on the Asian side of Istanbul. They must not get too many Americans cause they put this on our table when we arrived.

Sultanahmet Mosque, Istanbul.

Aristotle Square, Thessaloniki.

White Tower, Thessaloniki.

Thessaloniki

Friday October 15, 2010 I headed to Istanbul, Turkey for the 32nd annual Intercontinental Marathon. I of course did not participate in the full marathon but instead opted to run the 15km race. Fellow PCV’s Alex, James, Jenifer, Erwin, Katharine (age 53), and Kristen also participated in the 15km race while Katie, Carrie Anne, and Chris ran the full and arduous marathon. In case you don’t care about the history of torturous activities that crazy people partake in for fun I will enlighten you. The marathon is a 42.2Km race (26miles) that originates from a story of a messenger who ran 22 miles from Marathon to Athens with news of the Athenian victory over the Persians, only to collapse dead upon arrival after delivering the message. Ya, sign me up for that, sounds like a great idea!? In all seriousness I really do respect, envy, and for some reason distrust anyone who can complete a ridiculously unnecessary distance like a marathon. I thought I was going to pass out after I ran about a third of the marathon distance, but we will get to that later. We started the trip out of Tirana International (A.K.A. why would we fly anywhere but international) Airport on the somewhat deceivingly nice Albanian Airways. On first glance of the airplane I was honestly a little intimidated. I am not the biggest fan of flying to begin with and this thing looked like a furgon with wings. I could not have been more struck by “don’t judge a book by its cover.” The inside of the plane, the staff, and the comfort of the ride was up to par with any other line I have flown. We even got a sandwich on the 1.5hour long trip which was great. We arrived in Istanbul without a hitch except that when we arrived Alex and I remembered that we had no money except for Albanian lek, otherwise worthless outside of Albania. The fee for a Turkish tourism visa is $20 and between the two of us we had 15euro. Lucky for us there was a non-functioning ATM machine at the gate of the visa window. We had to roam the hall of the airport for 3 hours looking for some gracious person to transfer our lek into Euros, Dollars or Turkish Lira. Totally kidding, although this may seem like something that would happen to me while travelling unprepared, our friend Katharine just let us each borrow the visa fee out of the oddly large amount of USD she brought with her, you know just in case some idiot may need USD. Although we were not prepared financially we had, surprisingly enough and against my usual travel etiquette, already secured a hostel. We really lucked out. Although James and Jenifer were not entirely thrilled with the conditions of our temporary living quarters (a 6 bed dorm room that smelled like a locker room in an apperantly clean hostel with a clueless staff), I was absolutely smitten with the area the hostel was located in. As far as a traveler is concerned, accommodations are not as important as location and the area we stayed in was perfect. Just to be specific and a bit pompous, I am not a tourist. One, I don’t spend any money that helps the economy so I don’t affect the tourism industry, hahaha. And two, a tourist is someone who travels to other places in order to claim that they have been there and of course to see some famous shit. While a traveler is someone who travels to other places in order to experience culture, something outside their normal environment or activity, and of course, to see some cool shit. Like some leprechaun once said, “There is no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. The only pot of gold is the rainbow itself. So leave us the fuck alone!” Taksim Square appeared to not have many tourists; in fact I don’t believe we ran into any other English speakers except a particularly amusing encounter that I will touch on later. The area, called Taksim Square, was vibrant and teeming with people but as far as I could tell by their interaction with wait staff and shop keepers they all seemed to be Turkish. The first thing we did following checking into our hostel, as any real traveler would, was to engage in the local fare. Albania is not known for being a culinary capital of the world and frankly the food is good, but fairly repetitive and boring. Turkey was not. It did not take us long to find the first feeding ground. Many of the eateries in Turkey have items displayed in the window to entice passing onlookers. We were suckers to such a brilliant marketing tactic. The first cafeteria we walked by, I’ll add a photo, reeled us in and the food was awesome, inexpensive too. I can’t exactly say what we ate but I split a number of items with James, who salivates at the very thought of new food. When travelling with a group of people larger than two, I tend to take the easy way out. When it comes to choosing refection, I don’t make too many decisions, or even participate in the decision making process. I have come to learn over my days that my indifference can sometimes appear as annoyance, but I really and truly do not care where I eat most of the time. On any menu throughout the world I am 82% sure that I would be able to find something palatable. My parents know this fact all too well. Even on occasions that are designed for my benefit, I often respond to the question of what I want to eat as “I don’t care.” Seriously, I am just happy to be out of my usual routine. On the other hand, people I tend to travel with have extremely particular eating habits and preferences. For example, I traveled through Europe with my man Pat. Dude is picky as picky comes. He doesn’t eat tomatoes, or anything new for that matter. Really, tomatoes. Unless they are in a sauce or ketchup the dude will not have it. How does a guy of 24 not eat tomatoes, ow the puzzle that is Patrick. Anyway, my current company was a mix between two vegetarians and a guy who gets distracted by the slightest of culinary savvy, a trait that makes him incredible to hang out with but a bit of a pain to pick something to eat. Kid wants to eat everything he sees. Thankfully, since I was so hungry after our extremely long flight (kidding of course but I am usually hungry) we ran into this cafeteria with all kinds of traditional items for everyone. After our first feast we headed straight to the Marathon expo. The expo is where we would gather our t-shirt, bib number, and electronic chip that would calculate our times. Alex had participated in a half marathon in Maine before and informed us that there would probably be some free shwag at the expo as well. They must do something a bit differently in Turkey because there was no free stuff, just a handful of vendors attempting to sell things. We did however get a pasta meal because we were participating in the run. This was good because I was already hungry again. Following the expo, it was time for some real Turkish culture. I had observed along our journey from Taksim square to the expo (a marathon shuttle had picked us up at the square) that everywhere I looked there were Turks drinking these small transparent glasses of tea and smoking nargile. Turkey was a place with a culture I could easily get used to. The food was great and it didn’t seem like anyone was in too much of a hurry to get anywhere special. You could just sit, drink a tiny cup of tea and smoke a fruit flavored tobacco that came out of a really gorgeous pipe for hours while chatting with friends, or in our case a waiter who seemed to enjoy our company (most likely because of the American girls). The next day we woke, ate of course, and searched out a tour of some sort in order to gain our bearings on this new and exciting city. We decided to take one of these “hop-on-hop-off” tours. I had taken them before and really enjoyed it in the past. You are able to get a pretty good grasp on the layout of the major attractions of the city without becoming lost. Istanbul is a city saturated in history. As the capital city for two empires, the city is a palimpsest. Everywhere we walked, minarets of historic mosques, old city walls, or hamams could be seen. One of the main tourist areas of the city is a section of attractions which include the Basilica Cistern, Sultanahmet Mosque, and Hagia Sophia. We of course went to all of these places, but if you want to know what it was like you are going to have to make the trip, or look it up on the internet I suppose. Sunday was the race so we tried our best to make it back to the hostel early enough to get to bed at a decent hour.

The Race We woke at around 6:30 Sunday morning so we could make it to the location where the shuttles would pick us up at 7:30. After getting dressed we headed to the main square and as soon as we got there, James of course realized he had forgotten his electronic chip which would record his time. Alex and I decided to go on without him while Jenifer went back with him to make sure he didn’t get lost on the way, a fate which often finds James. We didn’t see the dastardly duo again until about 15 minutes before the race started. I was honestly a little nervous during the minutes before the race began. Although I wasn’t running a full marathon, I had been having trouble with my knee so I hadn’t really prepared enough. I had hurt my knee in a biking accident during my final year of college and it periodically gave me trouble, but lucky for me it was only a problem during the last 5km of the race. When the race started it really was an amazing feeling. Here I was in a beautiful and historic city with thousands of other people from around the world about to run across a bridge that separates two continents! I have never enjoyed a run so much. Seeing the city via a 15km route, that was of course closed to traffic, with people cheering you on as you went was something special. Towards the end of the race however I was getting extremely tired. I had never run that far in my life and the last 5km were a little rough. It got even worse after we passed the golden horn. I knew that the race would finish at the Sultanahmet Mosque (aka the Blue Mosque) which is famous for its 6 minarets. Every mosque I saw I grew increasingly hopeful that it was the finish. I must have run past 5 mosques, it actually made the time go by quicker because I was so preoccupied with counting all of the minarets! I had split up from the rest of my PCV friends during the first minutes of the race but I would sporadically pass one of them or in one case be passed. Alex and James were a ways ahead of me the entire race and there is a point in the 15km route when you loop back and see all the people who you are ahead of. This is towards the end when I was running along trying not to cry, and heard some crazy blonde girl yelling from across the barrier. Kidding about the crying part, I was really enjoying myself. This was also the motivation I needed. Alex was a good ten or fifteen minutes ahead of me so I started to kick it into high gear, well that was until I saw the sign that we still had 3km to go! Around this time of my motivating competitiveness, I passed another girl in our group named Kristen. I was pretty happy about this because she had run the full marathon in Athens the year before, this did not last long. As soon as I saw the sign displaying the length remaining in the race she passed me. I did my best to catch up to her for the rest of the race but was unsuccessful. This would have been fine except that at one point towards the last 700meters the race starts uphill. I can see Kristen in the distance, about 20 meters ahead of me, and she is power walking! I was trying nearly as hard as I could to catch up and this girl was walking! This only lasted for a few minutes and then she picked up the pace again. I asked her after the race if she was just mocking me the whole time which she denied. I finished the race in 1hour and 30min, 8.5 minutes after Alex, 12 minutes behind James, 1 minute behind Kristen and thankfully ahead of the rest.

Darken pa Mayton Following the race we basically just hung out and did the tourist thing. One night however Alex and I went out for dinner without the other two. We were having a great time with the other two, don’t be mistaken. We decided to replicate our operational procedure that worked so well in our Balkan tour. We would go to several places to eat and just split something, in order to spend less money but get a taste of many different places and cuisine. We started with sushi, moved on to a greasy bar platter, and finished with illegal Turkish street food, drinking Turkish beer along the way. Just a note on our choices; we chose sushi because the one place that serves it in the capital of Albania is way too expensive and the bar food because you just can’t get that stuff in Albania. The final course was actually something we had seen on a downloaded copy of “No Reservations.” If you aren’t familiar it is a travel show where this dude cruises around to different cities around the world and eats. In Istanbul there are these guys everywhere in the more popular areas of the city who sell muscles that are stuffed with rice and spices and then drizzled in lemon. I forget why the “No Reservations” guy said they were illegal but it had something to do with how the muscles are procured and the informal nature of their sale. There may be a small issue with health code also but it wasn’t like we bought these from a guy who hid them in his pockets and then we found a dark corner to gorge on them. They were sold out in the open, and they were goooooooood. They were served cold but I didn’t get sick, did I mention they were cheap as hell, 1lira for two. After we finished with our muscles, we decided we would check out one of the many establishments that seemed to have live rock music. The area we stayed in had a plethora of bars, cafes, and restaurants. The two bars we went to and listened to music were excellent and we had a fantastic time.The Turkish Bath The day after the “Mayton free evening,” the four of us headed to a hamam to do the Turkish bath thing. I honestly am not into getting a rub down or massage from anyone but I had to experience it once. I mean it would be against my nature to travel to a place and not indulge in what the city is famous for. We asked around and found a cheap hamam that was coed. Coed in the sense that it catered to both men and women, not in the sense that we were all in the same room. James and I were given a small dressing room and instructed in barely audible, broken English to disrobe and don a small towel. We were then led to our respected hamam, or bath. The room had three sections. One held a large marble slab that and the area where the attendants worked on the guests. The other two rooms were areas where the guests could lay down and pour warm water over themselves while they waited for their turn. The entire area was marble floors and basins with domed ceilings. James and I immediately went to one of the “waiting” rooms and laid down on the floor, for no other reason but because we saw some older German gentleman do the same. After a ten or so minutes waiting and discussing how strange it was to just lay on the floor next to other sweaty foreigners in a steamy room, a large, hairy Turkish man came into the room wearing a similar style towel as the guest but in a different color. He didn’t speak English but kind of motioned and gestured his way around. He motioned for me to sit down near a basin and brutishly moved my body into the positions that he required to begin the first phase of my “bath.” In case those reading this do not know what a Turkish bath encompasses I will explain. They start with a cloth scrub that is placed over their hand, one side of which is extremely coarse and intended to remove all dead skin (and possible the first live layer). I imagine this would not be a good experience for a germa-phobe because the cloth was visibly dirty, but I didn’t care. It was like having someone scratch your entire body, I tried not to focus on the fact that the person doing the scratching was a giant Turkish man. After the exfoliating, he began to wash me with soap and water, including a shampoo job, hahaha kinda weird to be honest. I should mention that this is not a gentle wash; he was basically stretching my limbs and roughing me up a little. The second phase of the experience was a bubble massage. He guided me over to the large marble slab in the middle of the room, adjusted my towel so he could work and my nuts weren’t hanging out, and then began the beat down that is a bubble massage. He started out with a large towel that had wooden balls in it and was extremely bubbly, then he used the towel and his enormous weight to crack most of the joints in my body. It was a strange and awkward experience that I would probably never do again but “when in Rome.” When he was done he motioned for me to return to the original waiting room and rinse myself off, now it was James’ turn. After I sat and rinsed myself off for a bit and contemplated what had just happened, I realized I did feel a lot better. My muscles that were sore from the race were feeling loose and I felt fluid. The attendant then pointed at a towel that was hanging in the corner before you exited the room and made a motion for me to use it. I thought it was to dry myself but after I futilely attempted to dry myself with this coarse thin material he motioned that I was to change into the fresh dressing. Not knowing what was custom, I dropped the old and wrapped myself up in the new towel, apparently there is a method in taking off the old towel and putting on a new one that requires a lot less exposure because the attendant shot me a whistle and laughed. If the experience wasn’t strange enough I left being made fun of, o’well. In the lounge area of the hamam I was given another towel, one that is meant to dry yourself with, and a hot apple tea. I sat there waiting for the others and thinking that although this was an interesting and slightly rejuvenating experience, I had just spent about $40 for someone else to bath me!! Don’t get me wrong, if anyone reading this is headed or ends up in Istanbul, go to a hamam. It was an interesting and mostly enjoyable experience, I however prefer the type of bath we went to in Budapest.

Thessaloniki, Greece We stayed a total of 5 nights in Istanbul and then Alex and I took an overnight train to Thessaloniki, Greece. We shared a berth that was really awesome, two beds bunk style and a sink. It was the best way to travel. You go to sleep in Turkey and you wake in the morning to the Greek landscape flowing past you through a large window. I have also travelled on overnight ferries which was a comparable experience. I was not overwhelmed with excitement about going to Thessaloniki. We had heard that it was an okay place to spend a day but was nothing to write home about. I have found that taking other people travel experiences to heart is usually a poor decision. I really enjoyed the city and didn’t realize what a historical place it is. The food was also excellent and we stayed at an inexpensive but charming hotel close to most of the attractions. I have never seen so many bakeries per square mile in my life, so needless to say we had a pastry or two while we were there. We spent one night in Thessaloniki but because we arrived before noon and left on a night bus around 8pm we saw most of what was to offer in the town, although we discussed staying an extra night. Then it was back to Albania, it was funny, they have about 5 bus operators who go between Albania and Thessaloniki. All of the carriers leave at the same time, have shops located in the same block, offer the same price and service, and are of Albanian nationality. We hadn’t even left Greece and where already speaking Albanian. My fellow PCV friends like to call me “old man bait.” Men in this country seem to love me. As soon as these men waiting to leave Greece heard me speak shqip I was arm and arm with some old dude telling him about why I live and speak shqip, Alex thought this was particularly funny. Jenifer calls me a Chameleon. In this part of the world, I can pretty much blend in. When we were in Turkey I was asked several times for directions by both Turks and foreigners. Many of the waiters also thought I was a translator and would look to me to order for the table, even though I don’t speak a lick of Turkish. Most Albanians I meet also think I am a native. They often ask me, “what is your origin” which I always respond to as “I am American.” Often I get the response, “but your parents are Albanian, right!” This works in our benefit most of the time, instead of the foreigner price for things I always get the Albanian price. This included our taxi trip from Durres to the Airport before we left for Turkey. Jen had walked around the day before trying to figure out what was the best method to get to the Airport. All the taxis she inquired upon instructed her that the price was 2500lek to the Airport and she would not find a cheaper price. The next morning we went to the first taxi we saw and I told the rest that I would handle it since I had done so in the past many times. The driver told us that the price was in fact 2500lek, then in Albanian he said, “for you it will be 2000.” This may not seem like a big decrease in cost but we get about 700lek per day as a Peace Corps Volunteer. Okay, I see this is getting a bit long, as usual. I will try to be better and update about the holiday season following its completion of course. Happy Holidays to anyone who actually got this far to read the greeting!

Chuck (his last few days in Albania), Sarah (her last week in Albania), myself, and Nik (who has worked with all of us and is also a great friend.) We are in the local cell phone shop making copies, nice paint job huh?

Learning how to read maps, why marking the trails is important to tourism, and an introduction to GPS.

Learning how to properly mark trails.

Making a fire at our campsite.

My group of boys (the only badly behaved group on the trip by the way) cleaning up the Valbona River.

James, Edi (Albanian student), Erwin, Myself, Alex, and Jen. Valbona trail development Project.

Foreign Language Lab, 9-Year School Rubik. Thank you French Embassy!

Dad, Myself, and Laurel somewhere in the Achilles tendon area of Italy.

Seth standing next to a village house in the mountains east of Librazhd. The white bag is making cheese. We were hiking and camping for a few days in a new National Park.

Inside the villagers summer home, on the table is a hot pale of milk served with spoons like soup. I don't like the goat milk but the Raki was great! We also ate fresh bread.

Shepard just outside of the shack we were hanging at. Notice the shotgun, they have a healthy population of wolves out where we were hiking!

My Kitchen, with the sink full of dishes, I was on a water schedule, give me a break!

My bathroom, the beer bottles are full of water, the damn water schedule again. That hole in the ground is the only external drain in the place, this is also where I shower and evacuate, and the blue bucket is my laundry "machine" and how I flush.

This is my main room, I took this from the kitchen. Thanks for the Flag dad!

Pavjo and Don with Rubik in the Background.

Home of the villagers who gave us directions

Pavjo checking out the GPS.

During the last weekend of August, I planned to a hike from Rubik to Rreshen. Rreshen is the primary city in the region I live in. Think of Tucson and Pima County. The city is about half an hour away by furgon and is located directly east of my town over a few small mountains, really just big ass hills. The volunteer who recently finished her service introduced me to a fresh graduate of the high school and suggested we have a coffee. I have been friends with Sarah, the PCV from above, for the past year and she waited until the week before she left to introduce me to this kid. Just a little background, there is maybe one guy in Rubik who speaks enough English and is not a d-bag (aka high school dropout and unemployed, the ones who do graduate usually go onto college and therefore leave Rubik). But unfortunately, this particular Bik is not interested in hanging out with an American. Needless to say, after almost a year and a half spending Monday thru Friday sitting with men more than twice my age it was a nice change to hang out with a Albanian my age who is actually interesting. Sarah called it a bro-mance, hahaha. Anyways, after I had a coffee with Pavjo, I invited him to come on a hike with me that following Sunday. He showed up around 9am with a friend of his whom I had met once or twice before named Eladon, or Don for short. They were both very happy to be out of their normal routine and out in the wild. None of us knew exactly where we were going but I did have my Garmin GPS for mapping tourism trails and we knew that we were bearing east. After about an hour we realized that the trail we had originally begun on was, um, not a trail anymore. Before we knew it we were knee deep in thorns, bushes, and some particularly itchy plants! At one point we were scaling the side of a fairly steep rock embankment. This continued on for about three hours until we fell upon a house which appeared to be abandoned. After calling for “Zoti Shpias” or man of house, we came to the conclusion that the broken down home was abandoned. After two or three minutes a hunched over woman with a stance resembling the bell keeper in Notre Dame with a face of a weathered grandmother came out of a house parallel to the one we were examining. We didn’t even see that house there due to the overgrowth around it. We exchanged the normal 3-5 Albanian introductions, “Si jeni? Si a kolut? Je fortё? Shёndet, mirё?.” This is just another thing I love about the hospitality of Albania. This woman was just going about her Sunday business caring for her land when three boys suddenly appeared in her front yard atop a secluded mountain. She was not fazed at all. Her son, who lives in Rubik and was up for a visit and to assist his widowed, elderly mother came out from the house and took over the conversation. We asked him for directions and he offered us some water from a continually running spring. We talked and cleaned our many wounds for a bit and then headed on our way. We had walked maybe a kilometer when the elderly mother popped out from behind a rock, nimble as a puma with a hoe over her shoulder. She told us we were going the wrong way, directed us to the correct path, and disappeared again into the brush. Even Don and Pavjo thought this was a bit strange. This woman was out doing all the work while her son stayed back at the house. We were having a bit of trouble hiking around on these paths and this woman wasn’t even using a path. She was also caring water and yard tools not to mention she kept appearing and disappearing without a trace.

We followed the trail that she directed us to for a few more kilometers until we found a water spring to fill our bottles. We decided we would look for a good spot with a cool view to have lunch. Pavjo and Don had not gone on many hikes in their lives and I was supposed to be the experienced one. But, I forgot to pack a lunch. I suppose I thought that the hike would not last that long but I was wrong. In true Albanian fashion, both of the boys had packed food specifically to share with me!! We ate a typical Albanian meal; tomatoes, cucumber, bread, white cheese (which I don’t like), and sausage. I was actually really hungry by now and I have never tasted better tomatoes. When I lived in the states I never really enjoyed fresh tomatoes very much. I ate them and they were good of course but I never saw a tomato and thought “owww, that looks so good right now.” The produce in this country is so fresh and free of any manipulation, it really is delicious. After lunch we headed to a peak where we could see Rreshen clearly. The rest of the hike took about three hours and in route we stopped for a bit to pick Thanё (a red berry that kind of dries out your mouth and eventually gives you a bit of a stomach ache, but for some reason intrigues you to eat way too many.) They also make an ass flavored Raki out of Thanё in some of the poorer villages. After about 6 hours of hiking we emerged into Rreshen with bloody legs and smiles on our faces. It was really interesting to talk to Pavjo and Don. Both of them had been to America at least once for a theater camp in Texas. The trip was organized by a Peace Corps Volunteer four years ago and a group from Rreshen has gone for all but this year (they had trouble finding funding). It was fun to talk about how Texas has its own culture and is actually made fun of by the rest of the country. Come to think of it, Texas is a lot like Mirdita (the region we live in). The people are really proud of the area but folks from other parts of the country make fun of how they speak, that they have less culture, and that they are a bit wild. I will post a few pictures of the hike and I will also post the trail on our Bunker Trails website as soon as I get around to processing it.

Girls shootout, Rubik won of course!!

Girls group in Traditional clothing, our spokesmodels!!

Huddle up! Boys team preparing for championship match.

Two boys from Berdicё team who I convinced to pose for a Photo. They are holding the Ball Puma Peace sent me to promote the matches.

September 21st was international Peace Day. The day was unanimously adopted by the United Nations in 2001 and is intended to promote a day of ceasefire and non-violence in all United Nations member states. The organization Peace One Day along with Puma Peace sponsor futbol (soccer) games throughout the world in order to support Peace. The event is called "One Day One Goal." This year I was contacted by an organizer who had read about my service on this very blog. After he explained what the event was all about and that Albania had never participated in the event before, i thought what an Idea. Another Volunteer in Shkoder who is part of the new group also expressed interest once i sent out a Volunteer wide email to gather interested Peace Corps Volunteers. We began to organize the event with a organization I had met in Shkoder the year before, "NN The Door" and its Manager, Kastriotti. Terry, the Volunteer in Shkoder, met up with Kastriotti and together organized a Peace Cup on September 25th, "Kupa e Paqes." The village of Berdicё, Shkoder agreed to host the event and after contacting other municipalities the Cup hosted 4 boys teams and 4 girls teams. Rubik, my current home, sent a girls team who won the tournament. I posted a picture of our girls in a victorious shootout. Although the weather did not corropurate, we managed to attract a sizeable crowd. I rode down to the event with a journalist I know who agreed to film the event, interveiw Kastriotti and show the footage on the National News station along with a local news station. The day was a huge success. Peace!!!

Memorial to G.W. Bush!!

Women area.

Teuta's nephew dressed in traditional Muslim clothing.

September 9, 2010 was Baijram e Madhe in Albania and much of the former Ottoman Empire whom still practice Islam. The holiday marks the end of fasting for the month of Ramazan. Rubik and Mirdite as a whole are 98% Catholic in a 98% Muslim country, so I travelled to Fushe Kruje to experience the holiday. Alex used to be the volunteer in F.K. but has since been moved to Durres due to issues with the Mayor who is a sack of $h1?. USAID, which is the United States Government, tax paid, aide organization is even going to pull out of the city due to complications with the mayor. Anyways, while in F.K., Alex had a quasi host family situation for a few weeks with a woman who I have written about before. (if you care you can look back two entries) Teuta and her family are practicing Muslims and observed the fast and since I expressed interest in experiencing the ceremony she invited me to celebrate with her family. For those of you who do not know, practicing Muslims strictly fast from sunrise to sunset during the entire month of Ramazan which falls in the summer (Ramadan in non Turkish influenced regions of the world). In Albania, during the entire month you can hear Roma people (gypsies) roam the streets playing drums after sunset and before sunrise to let people know that they can either eat or not eat soon. The community usually gives the neighborhood drummer a tip for his services on the final day. Since the ceremony for Baijram e Madhe starts at sunrise I arrived in F.K. the night before and had dinner at Teuta’s house. This is always an interesting experience. Teuta had to work at her small shop until 8 so Alex and I made her family dinner. I have mentioned before that this is not something that is done be men in Albania. Her family is fairly socially progressive but Çimi, her husband, still likes to give me a hard time. Teuta is a good woman and a riot to hang out with but she can also be negative about her country at times. She has every right to be critical of her country which has made countless mistakes over the years. She also lives in a suburb of the capital city. This means there are many transient people and criminals. Alex and I try our best to keep things positive when we talk about politics and culture in Albania. Alex has even taught her the popular “glass half full” philosophy that some smart and positive person has been saying for decades. Teuta has a very bright daughter and the hope for any parent, especially an economically and socially depressed parent, is for your child to have a better life than you have had. This is a concept that is difficult to explain to Albanians. My people I talk to on public transportation or cafes seem to think that everyone in America has it easy. I always admit things are easier in some ways in America and there are opportunities for advancement, but you for many nothing is given to you and you must keep a positive attitude. I like to tell them that their country is fairly new! This is always cause for arguments. Albanians have one of the oldest cultures in Europe. They are descended from the Illyrians, who are said to be older than the Greeks. I try to explain that although their people have inhabited this part of the world for a hell of a long time, their country is in fact new. The Republic of Albania was created in 1912, I think, after the withdrawal of the Ottomans. The country then experienced a short monarchy, King Zog, and then occupation from the Italians and Germans during WWII. Following the war, the communist party took over and continued to run the country into the ground until 1985 when Dictator for Life Enver Hoxha died. His successor, Alia, over the course of about 6 years allowed more and more freedoms and eventual a second political party was formed and in 1991 the “people’s party” was no longer in office. The country began to develop as a democracy until in 1997 the economy completely collapsed thanks to a country wide ponzi scheme. Much confidence in the new government was lost at this time and has had a difficult time regaining. So, basically the country is young! Albanians love to compare their country to America so when I tell them how people lived when our country was a baby, I hope things are put in perspective. Things here are very similar to times when America was in the same stage of development. Okay, I rambled a lil there, but this is a conversation we always have with Teuta because she loves to say, “you so lucky you born in America, I no, I born in Albania.” So back to the celebration. I slept at Teuta’s house and we woke around 6am and headed down to where the ceremony was being held. Last year, according to Alex the prayer was held in the city center but his year there is a fairly hilarious construction project in F.K. In 2007, President George W. Bush and the first lady made a trip to Albania and due to its proximity to the airport stopped in Fushe Kruje. This is F.K. claim to fame since all American presidents are worshipped in Albania. The Mayor, in all his wisdom has decided to use the fledgling budget of the city to build a memorial for the event that will feature benches, trees, and a statue of the world’s favorite American leader. Baijram e Madhe was held at a futbol field due to the construction. It was an interesting ceremony. Excluding Nezura, which is a Bektashi holiday (Bektashi is the most popular Muslim sect in Albania, mostly because you can still drink alcohol hahaha) I have never really experienced any live Muslim traditions. I have been to dinners for Jewish holidays, Hindi celebrations, and of course Christian holidays. At the entrance to the park there were of course some beggars, people are especially giving on Muslim holidays, and people with the mosque who were handing out the prayer guide and a fruit. The fruit is a traditional food to officially break the fast. People were also handed bags so they could put there footwear in them before stepping on the ceremonial rugs. Then the men and women were segregated. Men were guided to the front near the Imam and the women were placed with the children in an area farther back. Observers like me just sort of stood in the back. Alex, Teuta, and Teuta’s friend Leta did not stand near me out of respect for the tradition. The prayer took about one hour but started with the Imam, who I am told is a bit extreme (not terrorist extreme but evangelical extreme if you catch my drift) gave a spirited lecture about being a good Muslim, he then led the prayer which consists of standing, bowing, kneeling, and then touching your head to the floor a few times. I just watched. After the prayer, we were invited to café by one of Teuta’s good friends who I have met several times before. His name is Miku and he and his brothers own a few businesses in town. Really nice guys. It was about 7:30 now and this is the fashion the day kind of went in. After that café, we went to Teuta’s house where Teuta showed us how to make Byrek (a type of phylo pie that you can really put whatever you want in it). Çimi’s dad had passed away recently and it is custom to visit the homes of people who are missing a family member on the first Baijram since so he had a few visitors who we drank café with. We then went to a girl named Natasha’s house. Natasha was in Alex’s Outdoor Ambassador club and was also a youth volunteer for the project last summer. She also just graduated from high school and over the last year her family has become close friends with Alex and in turn me. Her dad is a big fisherman and promised to take me fishing in Rubik. He joked with me that a few months ago he was in Rubik and went around the town asking for me. He said he was surprised that everyone knew who I was but had a different answer on where I was that weekend. Anyways, I gave him my phone number and he is supposed to come up in a few weeks. After café with Natasha, we went back to Teuta’s for lunch. Of course we could not make it the entire 15 minute walk back without having another café, this time at Çimi’s mother’s house. We usually refrain from accepting her requests because she is mean to Teuta, but because she had lost her husband recently, it would have been rude to decline. She lives with two of her daughters and there small kids, I will post here a picture of one of the kids in the traditional holly dress for Muslim men. After we ate lunch at Teuta’s, we headed back to Rubik. I had planned to meet with my mayor to discuss several projects we need to get a move on but of course, he was M.I.A. Guess I will have to wait till next week, typical.

Secluded beach in Budva, Montenegro

Alex trying to make a decent face while eating the Raw Horse Brochette!

Turkish Bath, Outdoor Pools, Budapest

Plitvicka Jazera National Park, first water fall, Croatia

Plitvicka Jazera National Park, first water fall, Croatia. Jenifer, Alex, Myself, James.

Raw Horse Brochette, Belgrade, Serbia

Alright I am officially behind on this blog. I have decided to skip everything in April and May since I am too behind. Power has been out here from 9-4pm everyday this week. Also, we only have 6 hours of water spread out in two hour shifts per day. With all the free time since most of my colleagues are at the beach I thought I would try to update this blog. I really hate the summer! So, not much is new here. As far as work goes, I just got a grant for a couple thousand dollars to build a Public Information office at the municipality I work with. Should be good, going to try and increase government transparency, you know democracy and shit! Also, we participated in a "best practices" competition that a Swiss development agency held last week. The process started about three months ago and we submitted information about a successful project that was completed a while back. The Swiss Development Agency (SIDA) received about 54 projects and they chose about 30. The 30 that were chosen presented and answered questions about the project last Wednesday. We presented a project in collaboration with the larger municipality in my area. This is the most satisfying work I have done in a while. During our first meeting they brought me this presentation they had prepared with ridiculous colors, pictures, and only about 5 sentences. I told them to delete it and start over and it took 4 more meetings to produce a decent presentation. It was great, the Mayor of Rreshen, the other municipality, would just argue with me (in Albanian mind you) until my Mayor would just say, "We will do what Brett thinks." I think after a year of hanging out with these old dudes they are finally starting to take me seriously. We had about 4 meetings in all and when it came time to present the project...we won!!!! I gave the mayor of Rreshen, who even up to the day of the presentation was trying to change things on the presentation that I disagreed with, a "boo-yah." He of course had no idea what that meant!! The organization has, get this, 950,000 Euros to spend on these 5 municipalities over the next few years. I don't know if I can really explain how big this is, my municipality has a yearly budget of less than $200,000 which is mainly only used for administration, public services, and public assistance. Alright to other things.

I took a trip throughout the former eastern bloc in June with Alex. We started from Albania and went north to Budva, Montenegro. Place is gorgeous. The beaches were so nice and just over crowded with beautiful Serbian women. I have been a few places in Europe and by far Serbian women are the best looking. Alex and I both couldn’t believe how beautiful all the women were. Budva also had a really nice port and old city. I decided that when I own a sailboat, this is where I will probably keep it!!!! After Budva we headed to Sarajevo, Bosnia. This is the city that was under siege in the mid '90s for over two years and only came to a close after President Clinton stepped in to negotiate a peace agreement in Dayton, Ohio. So in other words they have mixed feelings about Americans in the former Yugoslavian countries. We had a great time in Sarajevo. Our hostel owner was a history graduate and was also in his early twenties during the siege. He offered to give us a walking tour of the city for about ten euro each but it rained that day so we drove it instead. He had so much insight and we both learned a lot about the tragedies his people had endured. He dropped us off at this tunnel that was used to smuggle Bosnian troops and food into the city. The tunnel was built under a house of a former Bosnian soldier and his wife. It traveled under the Airport to a neutral city. Throughout the siege the Serbians caught and tortured people in an effort to find the tunnel but never did and now the people who own the house are seen as national heroes. They have been pictured and written about in countless newspapers and our senator John McCain had even visited their house. So Alex and I didn’t realize that this house was far out in the outskirts of Sarajevo when our tour guide dropped us off. After we toured the house and tunnel we realized we had about a 3km walk to get back to a trolley station. It was still raining. As we were discussing whether to attempt hitch-hiking or just walk, the owner of the house opened up his garage. We asked him if we could call a taxi and he replied in his broken English, "I am taxi." We didn't realize who he was at first until his elderly wife came out and handed him something. Alex got a lil gitty and says, "It’s the lady, Brett, it’s the lady." The old man just laughs and mocks, "The lady the lady." This was the woman we had seen in all these news articles throughout the museum that accompanies the tunnel. She would take daily trips through the dangerous tunnel to smuggle food and even smuggled out the Bosnian president while her husband guarded the house with a Kalashnikov rifle. The old man drove us through town and to the trolley station and when he found out we were American he refused not accept any money for his trouble. This was nuts, driven around by a national hero; this would be like getting a ride from Davey Crocket and Harriet Tubman, well sort of. The next day was my birthday and we headed for Belgrade, Serbia.

We found a really cool hostel that was owned by these two guys in their late 20's. They were financed by their brothers who are lawyers and doctors in the states. They told us that they were having a bunch of friends over for the Serbia-Uruguay football game (world cup) later that night. Alex and I decided we would go get some food. All I wanted was a hamburger made from beef (I had a burger in Macedonia on new years but they translated the word literally, it was actually made from ham) they recommended a place that turned out to be excellent. After that we walked around looking for another restaurant and ended up at a place called "The Horse Shoe." We ordered a salad and some beers and asked the waitress what was good. She said all they served was HORSE MEAT, hence the name of the place. We must not have looked too enthused and after talking to her a bit she offered to bring us something to try on the house. Just a side note, this happens all the time to Alex. She is always given free shit. We tell her she lives in a bubble, but it always benefits to be around. Anyways, the waitress brings out these four thinly cut pieces of toasted bread with an almost spread looking, inch thick layer of a tan substance and a tomatoes on top. She explains that this is their RAW HORSE BRUSHETTE. The diced tan meat is actually raw horse meet. I tried one and it was actually really good once you got over the texture and knowledge of what it actually was. I was also down about three beers (beers in Europe are about .5 liter) and two birthday whiskeys from Alex. She picked it up and made a face that almost made me vomit when she bit into it. Even when we tried to take a picture of her making an enjoyable face she looked as if someone was stepping on her toes. I ate all four of the things and loved it. The waitress said it was a Serbian delicacy and that only that restaurant and a sister restaurant at the HORSE TRACK sold horse meat. After the horse shoe we went back to the hostel and the game had already started. We walked in to find about 30 drunken Serbians yelling at the flat screen. We got some beers and joined in yelling at the Asian ref who kept mucking up calls. Serbia lost but to be honest I spent a lot of time looking around the room. Like I said before, Serbian girls are gorgeous and there were also a few Swedish coeds on summer break. It is really nice to see the opposite sex out and about. In Albania the only chance I get to see girls my age that actually brush their teeth and don't smell of onions and sour yogurt is when I go to one of the bigger cities. After the game the owners caught wind that it was my birthday and before I knew it we were drinking shots of Serbian alcohol and gearing up to go to a night club. The two owners got about 4 cabs and we headed to a club that is actually a barge on the Danube River, one of the most famous rivers in Europe. The place was nuts. This is one part of Europe that even my brother would enjoy. The Serbs that brought us kept buying drinks, I think because they thought Alex and I were hilarious. It was good though, we got hassled once for being American from some D-bag and the guys that brought us came right over to make sure we were okay. Best hostel staff ever. That wasn't it. After a while the place was packed and I danced into a waiter who dropped the beer he was carrying. Only a little spilled out but he tried to make me pay for it. I refused and called him clumsy, which he didn't understand. Shortly after we finished arguing, a really nice manager came over and said that he was sorry but that I either had to pay for the half spilt beer or leave. I told him my cheap ass wanted the rest of the beer I spilt, that his waiter needed to be more careful walking around the dance floor, and gave him the money. We decided the club was getting too busy and our hosts were getting a bit toasted so we retired before the night took a downward turn. It was so much fun though. Apparently we went home early, even though it was pushing 4am. The next morning we woke up and did the tourist thing. Then we headed to Budapest, Hungary. Not too much that you would be interested in happened there. We met up with another Peace Corps volunteer who lives in the north of Albania, one of my closest friends here. Budapest was great and the nightlife is awesome not to mention I got to eat McDonalds, KFC, Subway, and Burger King...a highlight of the trip. We also spent a day at a Turkish bath. This was awesome. It had different temperature pools, saunas, mineral baths, good food and of course cold beer. The next stop was Croatia.

We went to a national park called Plitvicka Jazera. It was probably the most beautiful place I have ever set eyes on. The park is 16 lakes with hundreds of waterfalls that connect them. Amazing. We were at the park for one day and two nights and then we headed to Dubrovnik, Croatia. The beaches here are awesome too and since University was just finishing up there were people everywhere. Dubrovnik was slightly too overrun with tourists for me but the beaches were great.

We were in Dubrovnik for two nights as well and then headed back to Albania. It was really kinda funny. As soon as we crossed the border to Albania the road gets way shitty and there is a flock of sheep blocking the road. Not two minutes into the country and we were already seeing farm animals on the highway, typical. I got to say I needed the break but when I got back to Albania I was a bit bummed out to be back. The next month and a half I spent cruising around Albania and readying my applications for graduate school. This is also around the time I received a call from my mom, my grandmother had lost her nearly three year battle with lung cancer. I will miss her very much and she was a huge support in my decision to join the Peace Corps. I made an effort to return to America for her funeral but with such short notice I could not find a ticket for the amount of money I had. It was difficult speaking to my mom about it from thousands of miles away and I was honestly at a loss for words, my thoughts are with my family back home. Since then I have had little work, excluding the Best Practices competition which was in early August. That is until September. The first week of September I got a call from my counterpart. He said that after almost a year and a half, the computers for the Foreign Language Computer Lab had finally arrived. I spent a few days setting up the computers and applying administrative protections. September 6th was the first day of the school year and we inaugurated the Lab. The lab was placed in the 9-year school and because the school was brand new this year, there was a large activity. I was told that members of the French Embassy (they paid for the computers) were coming but my counterpart and the director of the school failed to let me know that others would take a look at the lab. The presentation to the French went very well. After they left I began to shut down the computers when Sander came in the room in a panic. Apparently the First Lady of Albania was about to arrive and was going to come to the lab along with the Vice Minister of Education and the Director of Education for my region. We frantically turned on the computers and set up the presentation again. Znj. Berisha (wife of Sali Berisha, the Prime Minister of Albania) came in to the room accompanied by about four dudes with video cameras for national media and a few reporters. She was also with security and administrative staff. Of course the program that I had set up would not boot!!! It was the longest minute since I have been in Albania. Finally the program started and Sander gave her the tour. My Mayor and Sander introduced me to her and she shook my hand and thanked me and Peace Corps in general for our service. It was cool; this was the first major politician I had ever met. The event was televised on all the national news stations but they must have edited out the part where we shook hands, hahahaha. I was extremely happy that after a year this project was finally done. The next things on my plate are a Peace Cup that will be held in Rubik. It is a futbol game that is held in all United Nations member states and will be the first time it ever happens in Albania. At least I hope it will happen. The other thing I am working on is a project to purchase a budgeting program for the financial office and some computers. Currently they do everything on paper and by hand. Outside of work I am also training to run a 15km race in Istanbul, Turkey in October. It isn’t a huge distance but I am super out of shape so I have been trying to train daily, easier said than done. I am also in the tedious process of applying to graduate school. Wish me luck and I hope everyone back home is well.

Bob doing his part to keep the beaches in Albania clean!

Lunch at Kaon with Rachel, Alex, James, Jen, and me giving Bob the traditional head rub to chest!

Mom and I in front of Kishe e Shelbuemit, the catholic church of Ascension in Rubik, 1166.

Dinner at Sander’s and the remainder of Mom/Bob’s trip:

I am still trying to play catch up for the months I have neglected to write so I am going to try and keep this short and brief. Today is Tuesday July 13, 2010 and it is hot, hot, hot. I last left off having returned from Fushe Kruja during my Mom’s trip. After we arrived back to my apartment after a three hour ride from F.K. we took a short hour or so nap and then headed to my counterpart’s house, Sander Ndoj. This was the third dinner my Mom and Uncle had been to over the course of four nights and the final. Sander is married to the English teacher at the 9-year school in Rubik. His wife, Bardhe, is also the counterpart of the TEFL volunteer in Rubik (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) and an excellent English speaker and woman. The Ndoj family are great hosts and treated my Mom and Uncle as if they were part of the family. Sander has two young boys, one is ten and the other is twelve, who both stick up for the bumbling idiot who fumbles through their language while speaking to their father. Sander likes to give me a hard time for not being the best speaker of Albanian and is always kept in check by his two sons. Bardhe and my mom talked like old friends and I translated Sander’s perception on the history of his country to my Uncle. Bardhe also spoke about her education and love for education that was acquired during communism. Bardhe’s mother spent years 3-10 of her childhood in a communist “re-education” prison. Her grandparents were not in the communist party and were seen as agitators. After their release from prison they moved from the village of Rubik (Rubik didn’t become a city until the communist industry was brought to the area in the ‘60s) to the top of a small mountain to the east of Rubik. Her family remained in the house at the top of the mountain to avoid further persecution from the communist party which they were still blacklisted from. Just to explain basically, during communist Albania under Enver Hoxha, ever person had what is called a Biografi (biography). This was a document that stated every basic thing about the person and their family. Bardhe’s family had negative biografis. In the document it even listed that her mother lived in the prison and that her grandmother was anti-government. During her childhood this was not a secret among the people of Rubik and her family was in turn extremely poor. Bardhe showed my mom the house that she grew up in. You can see the house where her parents still live from most places in Rubik, sitting at the top of the small mountain looking over the town. Bardhe told my Mom and Uncle stories I had heard a few times before but are still surprising. Bardhe has an older sister and during communism her sister would go to school in the morning and Bardhe would go in the second session during the afternoon in order to balance chores and farming. The family was so poor that Bardhe and her sister shared one pair of shoes which her sister would hand off to Bardhe half way to school each day. The walk from Rubik to the house takes about one hour and remains a small trail unsuitable for motorized transportation. I think it is a remarkable thing that Bardhe has become the woman she is. Her family was ostracized for a large portion of her life and still she remains a smart independent mother. Her kids are some of the best behaved boys I have ever met and smart as hell. Fabien is 13 years old and knows English, German, and of course Albanian fluently. She also remains a critic of the government who is not afraid to speak her mind. She is however careful who she speaks her mind to, her and Sander are public employees and if they lost their jobs it would be difficult to find other work in Rubik, which has an unofficial unemployment rate of 57%. Think about that for a minute. Although it is difficult to officially gage unemployment rates in Albania due to the amount of informal work, migrant workers, and people who actually seek out work the unemployment rate in the country sits at about 30%. Now try to complain about not being able to find a job. Things could be worse!

Back to dinner. It is custom in Albania to badger your guests to eat lots of food and drink lots of liquor. Sander is really good at this. He instructed me to make sure that my Mom and Uncle had enough to eat and drink at all times. I actually did a good job at this but Sander thought otherwise. He believed that if the guests did not consistently have something in their mouths they were not being treated like proper guests. My family was severely “plot” (gorged) but Sander continued to tell me how bad a waiter I am and that I needed to fill my Mom’s glass or give my Uncle another piece of chicken. They both adamantly refused but Sander continued to tease me. He has a, um, we will say entertaining sense of humor. After a four-five hour dinner/lunch, we left Sander’s house and headed to a locali (bar/café) in order to have a coffee with another close friend of mine named Nik Nikolli.

Nik runs the NGO in Rubik and I have written about him a few times in previous entries. Bob and I of course drank a raki with Nik and my mom had water. After about an hour we retired to my apartment and got some rest. We left Rubik the next day and I will not write too much about the next week of the trip. From Rubik we travelled to Tirana in order to rent a car. After we rented the car we drove and spent the night in Fier. In Fier we, or more correctly my family, treated my friend Chris who is the volunteer in Fier to dinner. The next morning we headed to Appalonia which is a Greek/Roman ruin (Greek first and then Roman, I think, look it up if you really want to). We spent all day at the Archeological site and ate at a really good restaurant that overlooks the park. A protected site in Albania is far from what you would expect from a national treasure. There is still trash, little signage, and of course a café sits in the center of the historic area. After our late lunch we headed to Vlore and my friend Amy set us up with a beautiful hotel on the water. Amy is an awesome girl and a good friend who has a really great outlook on life. I have never had such a view from the balcony of a hotel, I will post a picture. I guess I will mention that for one room with three beds was only $35! The next morning we had coffee at the restaurant in the hotel, enjoyed the great view of the Adriatic Sea, and then left for a scenic drive down the Albanian “Riviera.” This is a gorgeous drive on a fairly new road. I will also post a picture. Our next stop was Sirande that afternoon. There are two volunteers in Sirande who are married. Before we had dinner with Ben and Lauren, they also fixed us up with a similarly priced hotel with a seaside view. The next morning we headed to Corfu, a Greek island about 30min ferry ride from Sirande. This being my first and only trip so far to Greece I can say naively that Greek culture is all too similar to Albanian. As soon as we got off the ferry at the port of Corfu the similarities were evident. Bob, eager to eat and see the island, was first in line for customs. My mom and I however were trailing behind and were placed last in the queue. It took maybe 3 minutes of aggressive maneuvering by our fellow arrivals for Bob to join us in the rear of the line. I thought this was hilarious, but I am not sure Bob shared my point of view. I think he was a little taken aback due to the utter lack of “line etiquette” and how it was possible that a 95 pound elderly woman with more bags than I could possibly navigate snuck her way past my towering Uncle. This was not it. Similar to a situation I would expect in Albania, after we made it through customs we waited in a room for about twenty minutes unaware of the reasoning. My Uncle made friends with one of the customs officers and it turned out that they didn’t know who had the key to the door that led out of the building. They eventually tracked down the culprit with the key to our freedom and we were officially in Greece.

Corfu was a great time. As soon as we arrived we searched out a hotel. This was my first trip to Greece and it was really nice to get out of Albania, even if only for one night. As we were looking for a reasonably priced hotel we were coerced into a restaurant in the old town by a very convincing Greek man. Without even really knowing what was going on this sly restaurateur had delivered a three course meal and a bottle of wine. We had such a good time and it was such a funny experience with this guy that I don’t think my Uncle even minded the outrageous bill, the price of which I will leave to your imagination. We soon found a relatively cheap hotel after the dinner and then spent the night perusing the old town and enjoying its many cafes. The next morning we returned to Sirande and then headed straight away to Butrint. I won’t get into the details of Butrint other than it was mentioned in Homer’s The Odyssey. After a day at the historical park we headed straight away to Gjirokaster, an interesting city with many Ottoman era homes.

On the way to Gjiro we ran into our first and only vehicle issue. On a winding road we turned a corner and were introduced to one of Albania’s many potholes. Slam…flat tire. Not a huge problem but it was a cultural experience; of course I think everything is a cultural experience. We drove on a doughnut about 30KM to a Gomesteri (tire shop) that looked reasonable. A side note: in my experience if you get a flat tire in the states it takes anywhere from 1-3 hours for it to be changed, patched, or whatever. Usually you sit in a room drinking from a paper water cooler cup waiting anxiously for your car to even make it into the garage. This was a completely different experience. We pulled up to a beat down concrete building overflowing with used, new, and broken tires. The tire guy was working on another car with a group of about 5 people just watching him. He asked me what I needed so I told him we had a flat tire and needed a new one. Then, of course, he asked me where I was from, why I live in Albania, how I speak shqip, and why I don’t come live in Gjirokaster. The usual small talk with Albanians. He then stopped his work on the other car a retrieved a brand new tire for us. I told him that we had a rental car and he said, “Oup, then I will give you a bad tire.” He went a grabbed a less expensive tire and within 15 minutes we were back on the road. That night we slept in a cheap hostel that my friend Seth had recommended to us. The place really wasn’t that bad for my standards but Mom and Bob did not enjoy themselves. I think my Mom said, “It was a…good experience, but I would never do it again.” The building had no heat and little in the way of blankets. I think my guests put on all the clean clothing they had before they went to sleep. I slept like a rock! The next morning we headed for Tirana where we slept at my friend Charlie’s house because he was out. The next day we saw a few sights in Tirana and had lunch with a group of my Peace Corps friends. My family left at 3am. I was fairly bummed out to see them go but to be honest I needed a vacation after they left. I am sure they would say the same thing. We traveled over good part of the country and I was translating and guiding for 10 days. It was exhausting.

Me, Bob, Bebe, Teuta, Alex, Teuta's nephew, Teuta's cousin, and Cimi at dinner.

Bob and I in Kruja market.

Bob, Mom, and Sander in my office.

Ow man, am I behind on this blog. Good thing only my family, if anyone, reads this thing! So I had to break out my barely legible notes on my calendar to even remember what to write on this entry. So after IST, which was sometime in January, I came back to Rubik super motivated to do some work. IST was a huge stimulus and a good break from life in Rubik. The first thing I did on the Monday morning following the conference while I had my morning makiato at Mariani’s café was make a list of things I was going to do that week, or more realistically, that month! Out of 26 professional/personal objectives I completed only 16. Not bad considering how work goes here in Albania. Out of the 26 goals I had for the month the top few were: Finish the Foreign language lab; fill out applications for the Mayor and Nik for Budva, Montenegro environmental conference; plan/clean house for Mom’s trip; and meet with the Mayor and Nik about future projects. Results???? First of all the project we have been working on, I guess the more accurate phrase would be, the project we have been waiting on for the past 9 months is the foreign language lab. Chuck and I wrote the abstract and the budget for this project back in May and it was approved by the French Embassy in August. Since then nothing has been done! Today is May 17, 2010 and we finally bought the computers this morning. Just to be mindful of anyone who is actually reading this, the next paragraph is out of chronological order. I will get back to the exciting months between February and April in a bit but I am so happy we finally finished this project I need to write about it. I am trying to keep all of this blog in order, you know for my memoirs, totally kidding. Okay so in the past 4 months I have been tersely and periodically meeting with the Mayor and my counterpart Sander. Mark, who is our Mayor, was out of town for the entire month of March. When he returned I presented him with the offers that Sander and I had gotten from pretty much every computer store in the capital city. He then replied, “It looks like we are ready.” No shit, we have been ready for the past 6 months. So he asks me, “When would you like to go to Tirana to buy the computers?” I reply, “Tomorrow.” In true Albanian nonchalant style he says to me, “Si te dukesh,” or “How you like.” I tell him, “Okay so we will go tomorrow, what time?” Again he repeats, “Si te dukesh.” I reply, “10 am.” Guess what he tells me, “Si te dukesh.” This phrase along with a few others drives me insane. You can ask my brother, sister, mother, and father what my response was during my first 21 years when I was asked what I wanted to eat or to do…”Si te dukesh” or more accurately, “I don’t care, you decide!” When I answered this way it was to avoid the ensuing argument that would come from deciding where to eat or go in a family of four, the dreaded even number with no tie breaker. My tactic as a minor was just to put up with whatever the rest decided and make the best of their decision. This is not the proper tactic of a government official! I did not catch on to this fact quickly. It took me four separate occasions and four months to realize that my mayor needed a bit of a push to get this project completed. After the fourth failed attempt to buy the computers, meaning the fourth time Mark said we were going to Tirana, me showing up to work early, and none of the members of the project commission (we have to have 5 members of the staff/community and myself agree on the computers and the day we buy them for the purchase to be legal, or so I have come to understand) showing up…I got a little pissed. I started off by talking to my counterpart, who has a small stake in the project, it is a terrible thing and shameful (I use the word shameful because this is the multi-tool word that Albanians use for shame, embarrassment, stain, shyness, and about 15 other meanings) to the municipality that we have been awarded money but have not finished the project yet. He took the high road of course and started teaching me words to describe the Mayor, who is not at work this particular day but a fairly good friend of mine. A few weeks later we had a meeting in Rreshen about a project on behalf of the Swiss development agency. The project is a funding opportunity for the region of Lezhe and Shkoder which incorporates our Bashkia. This meeting was to explain the process of evaluation of every municipality in the region and Sander (my official counterpart) chose this time to quiz me on the words I had learned about Mark. At a coffee with the Swiss official, his co-workers, and all the mayors in my region (minus Mark and the mayor of Rreshen), Sander asked me what he said about mark, in shqip “What did we say about mark, what was the word.” I responded by throwing my hands up and saying, “I have no words for Mark.” Sander just laughed but I knew he was going to do something dumb. The next week at work I come into the office to work on a grant with the NGO director Nik, who is also my good friend. When I come in to the office the whole floor erupts in yelling. Mark comes into my office and starts yelling at Sander who responds with curse words and a bunch of phrases that would not translate to English for example, “you have gone for hair!”, an insult that means you have become a Neanderthal or an idiot. Mark then leaves the office in a huff. Sander and Mark then begin to yell at each other through the wall we share at the municipal building. Sander then goes to the Mayor’s office and starts yelling, which I can hear through the wall we share. Sander returns to our office and the Mayor follows shortly thereafter. This process repeats for about 30 minutes until Mark comes back to my office, strangely calm, and says he is ready to talk about some business I have with him, this work is unrelated. I will talk about the business we had later but the week after this little melt down between friends was a holiday that only Rubik and another small community celebrate. So, as you may guess on your own we didn’t go to purchase the computers that week either. We did however buy them today, May 17th, it was funny, a task that only required one three hour trip to Tirana with myself and the Director of Finances for the municipality actually took one year to come to fruition and a two car caravan of 8 people…the “foreign language lab commission.” I guess this is how things are done here, I am just happy the first project I have been a part of is finally in the closing stages!!! I will add however that the trip to purchase the computers was done in true Albanian fashion. I was woken up at about 8:30 in a daze this morning by a call from my counterpart. Sander says in Shqip, “Good morning Bretli. Where are you?” I tell him as I always do when he wakes me up in the morning for some inane reason, “I am in bed what do you want?” This is a lot less rude in Albanian by the way. He tells me to hurry to work because we are going to buy the computers this morning, of course he takes a few seconds to tease me about his suspicion that I am still in bed because of a girl. Dirty old men in this city, but they are great. This is when I rush to work excited, optimistic, and groggy. I get to work expecting that they are waiting for me from Sander’s tone, but instead sit in a car for twenty min with the rest of the “Commission” talking about…well basically nothing. There was a small fire in town that day, no one was hurt and little property was damaged, but this little morsel of gossip was stretched much too long. Alright, enough of the computers!!! Back to February thru Today. Howah, what happened between the months of February and May 17? Seasons changed, my Mom and Uncle came to visit, funding was approved, I probably had a little bit of fun, and almost certainly I did some sort of work! Well, first off my wonderful Mother and Uncle Bob came to visit me in March. The weather had been utterly retched for the two months before they arrived. It was raining everyday and we hadn’t seen a dry day for more than a fortnight. It was wonderful. I think I have mentioned this before but I will repeat myself, I am weary of the sun. Spending my first 22 years in the Sonora Desert where the sun shines something ridiculous, I have grown to have an aversion to perpetual light. Not to say I loathe the sun or anything, the sun brings life and all that crap. I would just like to spend a few years in a place where it rains as much as the sun is out in Tucson! Anyhow, the day my mom and uncle arrived they ruined our streak of awesome (or miserable depending on whom you ask) weather. They flew in on the first sunny day we had experienced in weeks. My mayor was out of town for the month visiting his family in America, I wrote about his family status in preceding entries. Before he left he did insist on having my family picked up by the municipal driver, who drives the Mayor’s car. Martin, the driver and a pretty nice dude, and I picked my mom and uncle up at Mother Teresa International Airport in Rinas, which is 30 minutes outside of Tirana. It was really great to see both of them and we started the 1 and a half hour drive to Rubik for the first stop on their Albanian tour!!! Mom and Bob Come to Visit!!! We started off the trip in Rubik with a tour of my abode. Of course they were impressed with my doorman, the high tech lift, my spacious bathroom, and the all appliance included flat. Just kidding of course, my place is a borderline dump depending on who you ask, I think it is cozy. My friend Peter, who is finishing his Peace Corps service in June, came by to return the backpack that he had borrowed from me so naturally we had a café. My family had been in country for about two hours and already were experiencing Albanian culture. They were picked up in a municipal car and were now engaging in the highest of Albanian social interaction…the café (we had a raki with it of course). After Peter headed back to Lezhe, we started down the main street (one of three streets in Rubik) and were shortly invited to another café. We ran into my friend Artan who is a police officer for the region of Lezhe (I guess this is equivalent to a county sheriff). We sat with Artan for about an hour and to my own amazement I was able to translate the conversation reasonably well. After café with Artan we went to my favorite restaurant in Rubik, okay one of only two actual restaurants in Rubik. They were both feeling tired from the flight so we headed back to my palati (apartment which actually translates to palace). My mom and I went out alone around 8 pm to find some dinner because Bob was still tired. We, well I, decided to go to the place that serves rotisserie chicken and my mom just loved it. The chicken of course was fresh never frozen village chicken. Just a side note, that place has since stopped selling chicken because the owner is a poor business man, and a bit of a douche! The next morning was a riot and a true representation of the hospitality Albania is…or should be…famous for. We woke up and headed down to Pashk’s market because it was raining a little bit and I had recently lost my umbrellas, the only day it rained the entire trip. We crossed the street and bumped into about 5 employees/friends of the Bashkia. I presented my Mom and Uncle to all of them and the 4 women all had kisses on each cheek for my mom. Then in the middle of all this European greetings, which is slightly overwhelming at first, this older woman who is a bit of a nutcase ran up to us. This woman is extremely sweet and always makes an effort to say hello to me and thank me for what I do. This day was no difference and in the middle of presenting her to my mom (keep in mind there are now 6 Albanians standing around my Mom and Uncle on the street doing the standard 3-5 greetings) she runs into the middle of the street and out from under a moving vehicle runs a huge rat, looked more like a small cat! The slightly crazed woman winds up and with an umpf kicks this cat sized rat across the road in the air. The rat smacks against a wall about two feet above the ground and lands in a drainage ditch. Like nothing at all happened she returns to finish kissing my Mom on the cheeks. I think I can speak for my guests when I say this was a bit of a culture shock. First morning in a town and you are accosted by a handful of extremely nice although direct people can be a little awe-inspiring. The fun didn’t end there. We went to my usual morning location, Mariani’s café where my Mom and Uncle were treated to a café by a friend of mine. If anyone is counting that is 3 cafes in less than 24 hours which were gifts from a population that is slightly indigent. After the regulatory morning café, we headed to buy some byrek from my favorite byrek lady in Albania and then headed for the municipality. There are two types of byrek (pronounced boo-rek, if you say b-rek it means ladies underwear) that are sold in Rubik, onion or gjiz (pronounced jeez or jiz…kinda funny right, Bob thought so). I don’t like gjiz, not because of its name but because it is a real funky cheese. When we arrived at the municipality we snuck straight to my office and sat with Sander. He did the usual greetings, “Thank you for coming to my office, how is your health, how do you like Albanian, how do you like Rubik, are the people nice” and then continued to talk about the work I have done, how I am a member of his family and told stories of his sons sticking up for me when Sander was teasing me for my language ability. Sander has two sons, one is 8 and the other is 11. Both understand English and the 11 year old, Fabien, speaks excellent English and German. Sander’s wife is the counterpart of the TEFL volunteer in Rubik and the English teacher at the 9-year school. I am translating all these stories and phrases and I think my mom is impressed, what she doesn’t know is that these are stories that Sander always tells so I have had practice translating them in my head over and over. After about ten minutes of talking with Sander, his wife arrives at the office. Apparently, due to the distinguished guests who had come to visit the Bashkia, Bardha was called away from her classroom in order to properly translate for the vise-mayor. Sander then escorts my guests and I into the Mayor’s office where Pjeter (the vise-mayor) and about 20 staff members have congregated. Pjeter had called a staff meeting and a translator so he could properly introduce my family, commend my work, and thank my Mom and Uncle for visiting their city. After the 15 minute meeting we, of course, headed to the café that is in the bottom floor of the Municipality. Sander, Pjeter, Bob, and myself all had a café and a raki (9am) and my mom had a tea. They talked more about stories we have had together and then they asked where my guests were staying. I told Pjeter and Sander that they were sleeping at my apartment. This was not taken lightly. They began to say what a bad person I was for not telling the municipality to put them in the only hotel in Rubik and then began to insist that they stay in the hotel on the Bashkia’s dime. Keep in mind the municipality does not have the money to put them up in a hotel, so most likely they would just tell the hotel to host them. After about ten minutes of giving me shit and me denying the offer they decided to just invite us to dinner at their respective houses instead. That night we would eat at Pjeter’s and Saturday we would eat at Sander’s. We spent the rest of the day in Rubik checking out the various spots I loiter and the Rubik Church. It takes about 15 minutes to walk from each edge of town so we drank a lot of cafés and met with some of my old man friends. That night we ate at Pjeter Malshi’s house, the vice-mayor. Pjeter is a large jovial man who looks like (and probably can) eat an entire cow. I have a bit of a difficult time understanding what Pjeter says because he speaks a dialect I am having trouble picking up. I had never been to Pjeter’s house before but when we arrived around 18:00 the night began like many other experiences I have had at Albanian homes. We were all served drinks and a candy as soon as we sat down. My mom drank wine while Bob and I had raki. Pjeter declared that we could not leave his home until the three of us finished the liter of raki!! We stayed at his house talking and eating and drinking for about four hours. My Uncle has an interesting sense of humor and is actually really funny. The problem comes when he tells jokes or a comment that would be hit or miss in America to Albanians. This happened several times that Bob would say something and my friends would say, “Ç’ thot” or “what did he say.” I would have no idea where to even start to translate some of these comments and would usually just make something up like, “he said you have a nice house” or “My Uncle would like another raki.” After a while I just told Bob, “No more jokes, you killing me.” One particularly awkward moment was when Bob asked what the word is for nephew. Okay, no problem, I can say this. So I ask Pjeter and he replies, “Nipi.” The way he said it sounded like nipple and Bob and I start giggling like 12 year old boys. Pjeter asks “what is funny.” I spent about 15 minutes trying to explain to him that the word sounds like something in English that is kind of comical. I was trying my best to do hand gestures and describe it (I don’t know what nipple is in shqip) without offending his wife. After some time I just gave up. Towards the end of the night I was so tired, and a little drunk, that I was giving up on translating. Pjeter would say something in Albanian and I would turn to my guests and say “Now I am not too sure what Pjeter said but just smile and laugh a little.” They would and this is how the last hour transpired. We were getting tired and were gearing up to leave when Pjeter’s wife disappeared out the front door and Pjeter left the room as well. Pjeter returned with a bottle of raki, (homemade of course) for my uncle (they tend to reuse bottles and Pjeter used a bottle from a knock-off Irish cream, it was called Lover’s Cream, needless to say this was a running joke the rest of the trip) and his wife returned with a bag full of fresh fruit. This is how hospitality should be. Someone comes to your house, nothing is expected from the guest except to eat, drink, and basically consume as much as possible. Awesome!! The next morning we headed for Kruje in the first experience of public transportation for my guests!! We decided to take a bus that travels from Rreshen through Rubik and then to Tirana via Fushe Kruja. It was one of the nicer ones so my guests were gradually introduced to public transit in Albania. When we arrived in F. Kruje we flagged down a furgon (mini-bus) that was headed up the hill to Kruja. Kruja has a real nice ethnographic museum, a castle, and the museum for the national hero, Gjergji Kastroti Skanderbeu, or Skanderbeg in English. If you are interested in what we did here you can look it up on the internet. After we hung out all day in Kruja we headed back to F. Kruje to meet with my good friend and a truly amazing woman named Teuta. Teuta was the host mother for the previous volunteer in F.K. and is also a great help to the current volunteer Alex. She is a completely selfless woman who does not have very much money, works 6 days a week from 8am-8pm, and continues to give. She is a Muslim woman with an extremely nice husband, Çimi, and a daughter, Bebe. I didn’t have much of a choice to bring my family to Teuta’s house for dinner. When I first told her my Mom and Uncle was coming to Albania, the first thing she said in her broken English was, “You bring to my house.” I told her that I would if we had time and she replied how she normally does when we refuse her hospitable offers, “You bring to my home, I kill you Brett.” I really wanted my Mom and Uncle to meet Teuta and hear what she has to say about her country and her life. We all talked about social issues in Albania and I think my Mom and Uncle just sat and listened most of the meal, about 3 hours. Teuta talked about the flak her and Çimi received when they hosted the previous volunteer. People would call Teuta a slut for having café with the volunteer whom she refers to as “Brother Bill” and would ask Çimi why he lets his wife sit with this foreigner. Çimi is a great Albanian man and could not give a crap what people say, a rare quality in Albania. She also told my guests about when she took in 18 Kosovar refugees for two weeks during the war. Teuta lives in a small two bedroom flat and took in 18 REFUGEES THAT SHE HAD NEVER MET FOR TWO WEEKS. She fed and housed these strangers for no reason other that they needed help. We had a great time, took many pictures, and ate a lot of food. Teuta speaks decent English so it was a relatively low energy dinner for me. We then spent the night at Alex’s house and returned to Rubik the next morning. This was a more Albanian trip than the trip to F. Kruje. We had missed the autobus that leaves Tirana in the morning so instead we just stood on the side of the national highway and waited for a furgon to a transfer city called Laç. Laç is a very dirty, ugly city and from there we got another furgon to Rubik via Rreshen. This was a typical ride, lots of people slammed in a small vehicle all staring at the strange looking foreign people. The driver also had a dead chicken next to his seat, the day was Sunday and many people go to market, or Bazar. We got back to Rubik and relaxed for a few hours at my house and then left for Sander’s house for yet another dinner! I am gonna go ahead and post this because who knows when I will finish the rest of this story. The remainder will be coming shortly. Today is Friday June 18, 2010 and I am heading on vacation for two weeks. I am going to be traveling to Montenegro, Bosnia, Serbia, Croatia, and Hungary. It will probably take me like 6 months to catch up on this blog but I will try. Peace.

Donkey cart!

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

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

First of all I wrote this in the middle of February but I plan to cover the last two months! My life here is, well, honestly pretty laid back. My day basically starts when I decide to get my butt out of bed. During the summer I was at work earlier but that is only because it was easier to get up, now it is so damn cold I need to pep myself up every morning to face my freezing apartment. Literally, tomatoes froze in my kitchen the other night! After I get up I usually have a bowl of cereal (I eat a German cereal called “shocko flakes,” which are like chocolate corn flakes and the only cereal they sell in Rubik), get dressed and then head down to café Mёriani (who is the rather fat, jovial, crossed eyed man who owns the café, and a really great guy). Almost every morning I have a makiato (a shot of espresso with a tablespoon of steamed milk) and sit either alone reading or with an Albanian, who is almost guaranteed to be an old man. I usually arrive to the Bashkia, unless I have a meeting, any time between 9am and 10:30am. The Bashkia opens at 8am and closes at 3:30pm every weekday but it is really hard to actually get any work done while I am there. There is no information office or person to tell the residents of the municipality where to find people or information so often people just barge into our office looking for someone. Also, the staff members of the municipality are constantly asking me to help them with some problem with their computers or on the internet. Don’t get me wrong, I am not complaining about this and I work at the Bashkia to help the staff learn about changes in technology, but if I have something I need to write, research, or just complete I don’t want to be interrupted every twenty minutes. On occasion, usually about two days a week, few staff members of the municipality are even in their offices so I can actually get work done while in the building. Usually my day starts with routine, but no day since I have been working at the municipality has gone the way I planned it. Some days I go in with a plan but end up in a meeting, helping on a project, working on a computer problem, or drinking raki with staff members. Someone had asked me what I do on a day to day basis; this is really the best I could come up with. The weeks before Christmas were difficult. I was starting to get a little home sick and work was not what I expected it to be like when I first arrived to Albania in March, wow almost a year ago! I was kind of bummed that none of the projects I had been working on were moving ahead swiftly. At that time I was still waiting to hear back from the proposal I had written for BRASH (the environmental NGO in Rubik) and the other grants we wanted to apply for didn’t leave us enough time before they closed. This is only the second time in the last year that I have felt homesick, the other time I had a bit of a fever and my host family was not helping. They wanted me to get out of my warm bed and go into the other room where the wood stove is and where they all watch TV, while I just wanted to sleep in peace. They also fed me three greasy fried eggs with a mug of tea that had enough sugar in it to bake a cake! Needless to say, in the poor state of my stomach I think my host mom is the one who ended up suffering due to that meal choice, I won’t get into detail. Anyways, I was pretty homesick and I still wasn’t sure what my plans for Christmas and New Years were. It ended up that about two days before Christmas I went into to my Mayor’s office to wish him a happy Christmas and he invited me to spend Christmas Eve and day with him. On Christmas eve he called me around 4pm and told me he would pick me up at 6pm and that I should wear something nice because we were going to a house in Rasfik (a village in the Municipalities jurisdiction) and then to Mass. Mark is really hard to understand and even my program manager who is an Albania can’t understand his Shqip so the night started out a little weird. I honestly understood little about what he said on the phone except “brbrbrbrbrbr mass brbrbrbrbrbr nice clothes brbrbrbrbr Rasfik,” so I was relieved when I understood him and he picked me up. Mark’s daughter and wife live in Connecticut and Mark actually has a Green card. His daughter goes to college in America and he visits about once a year to keep his green card valid but doesn’t plan to move there until he is ready to retire. I thought this was strange at first, but I realized he is a mayor in Albania and an important figure in the Democratic Party. If he moved to America to be with his family he would have little choice for work and it definitely wouldn’t be as good of a job. Anyway, this is why we weren’t having dinner at his house. We went to a friend of his and ate a huge dinner, large plates of meat and locally grown and produced vegetables. I heard somewhere that it is tradition in this part of the world to have fish for Christmas Eve and that is just what we had. After about three hours of eating and drinking Raki we departed to head back to Rubik where Mass was being held at the 900 year old church that overlooks Rubik on a cliff. The community I live in is 98% Catholic and the only region in Albania that was never governed by Turkish law during the Ottoman Empire’s 500 some odd years that they occupied Albania. So, needless to say Christmas is a big deal in Rubik, second only to Dite e Shelbuemit (day of the ascension of Christ, 40 days after Easter, I think, not a theology scholar). Anyways, Mark and I are running a little late so he calls the nuns who live in our community and tells them to please wait until we arrive before they start the service. I thought this was just hilarious, because Mark and I were drinking Raki at his buddy’s house is reason for a religious event to be postponed twenty minutes, thankfully the nuns are some of the few people who don’t listen to Mark’s requests. When we arrive at the Church Mark, being the egomaniac he is, proceeds to pull all the way against the Church gate. I should be more specific, the Church sits atop a natural stone altar which acts as sort of a podium where the Church can view the entire city. The road that weaves its way up to the Church gate on this night is just bumper to bumper parked cars of people from around the area who actually made it to the service on time. Mark decided that since he was Mayor he would just navigate his way through all these cars until he was as close as mechanically possible to the church, I might had that he is also quite the portly man and loses his breath while eating too fast. When we finally park the car, we are now twenty minutes late, the service has already begun and there are people standing outside of the Church listening to the service from one speaker that is placed outside for this purpose. The Church itself was wall to wall people and most of them were standing due to the lack of seats. This does not stop Mark of course. He busts into the Church and with a wave of his finger has told two people to scoot over causing one older woman to stand in the aisle so Mark and I have a place to sit. I felt so bad but could not insist she remained seated due to the disturbance we had already caused. Just a side story, this has happened to me once before. The second month I lived in Rubik I went to Tirana for some R&R and grabbed a bus from Rubik that was just packed with people. The driver, who is from Rubik, noticed who I was and told a middle aged woman to give up her seat for me “out of respect for the American” he said. I adamantly refused the chair, the ride is two hours to Tirana and I am a young dude who would have no problem standing. She insisted and ended up grabbing the back of my arm and forcing me into the chair, she had obviously milked a few cows in her day because she almost broke my arm with her G.I. Joe Kung Fu grip. The women in this country are ridiculously strong! I of course was emasculated by this experience; firstly because growing up you are always told woman and elderly first and second because she literally tossed me into the seat and was about a foot shorter than me. Back to Christmas Eve, the service lasted a good hour and one half, that is of course after we decided to arrive. I had never in my life been to a mid-night mass for Christmas in any language. Also, this was only my 3 Church service that I had ever experienced so I had no idea what was going on. The service was really beautiful and there was lots of singing, candles, standing, sitting, kneeling, and then standing again. When the service ended Mark and I stood around for a little while saying Happy Christmas and New Year to people and then walked back to his awkwardly parked car. This was nuts, everyone else was leaving at the same time and Mark just decided to honk his way through the traffic until we were free. I could have walked home faster. I should also add that Rubik can be walked end to end in less than 15 minutes at a slow pace. Why so many people drove to this service is beyond me. Albanians were not permitted to own or operate private motor vehicles until the fall of communism in the early 90’s, so this may be a reason people drive pretty much everywhere. Mark then dropped me off at my apartment but I did not go home. I noticed that almost the entire community was out walking, blowing off fireworks, and drinking in the cafes and locales. I decided I would have a beer to celebrate my first Christmas away from Tucson so I went to one of my favorite places, sat outside alone, and ordered a beer. When the waiter brought it out he said that one of the guys inside had bought it for me. I looked in and not recognizing the person thanked him and wished him a happy Christmas, (Gezuar Krishtlindjet). I sat there enjoying my beer, watching and eavesdropping on conversations around me, and just thinking how crazy it was that I just experienced something that only a handful of other westerns had ever experienced. When I finished my beer I got up to leave but was invited by a group of young men to sit and have another with. It turned out that they were all the same age as me but none were employed or in school. There were about 8 of them and most had worked in Greece or Italy as immigrant laborers to make their money and now were wasting it on me. I had a great time talking to these guys but realized really quickly why I spend most of my time hanging out with men two to three times my own age, maturity. I am not the most mature person. I get a good laugh from bathroom humor and still occasionally watch a cartoon or two. A huge problem in Albania right now is the education and lifestyle of its youth. Many kids do not take school seriously and for good reason. Imagine busting your ass for years to go to a college. Now imagine that college degree was only good in Albania were the unemployment rate is pushing 35%, last time I heard. Now you have spent all this time and effort with what to show for it, maybe a job serving coffee or possibly doing labor in a neighboring country. This is not to say that there are not well educated and motivated people in Albania, it is just getting less and less common, and some blame it on the new government, democracy. I am not giving an opinion or anything; this is just an observation of the country. Anyways I ended up staying up late with these guys discussing various issues with two of them who were actually fairly bright and ended up getting to bed around 5am. This is insane by the way, 5am in Rubik! This is the latest I have ever stayed out here, in America it is a different story on a weekend night, but my usual Albanian bedtime is around 8:30!!!! Going to bed so late and well lubricated I ended up sleeping through my dinner plans with Mark. I woke up around 4:30 in the afternoon on Christmas Day and was supposed to meet Mark to travel to another friend’s house for dinner around 4pm. O’well, I decided I would rather just stay home anyways and ended up eating Hormel Chilly that my mom had sent me in the last package for Christmas Dinner, it was actually awesome. Since this time of year is pretty popular in Albania, of course no one showed up at the Bashkia. I decided I would head south to Elbasan and celebrate Seth’s birthday with him. On that note I am going to skip the next two weeks! (don’t worry, nothing bad just nothing interesting either) Towards the end of January my group had its IST. (I am in group 12, the 32 people who came to Albania on March 17, 2009 and IST is In Service Training) To be honest I was not excited for IST. The last conference we had was the language refresher and that turned out to be a complete waste of time. About 5 days before I was going to leave for Durres where the IST was going to be held I received a phone call from my program director, Diana who is a really intelligent and kind Albanian woman. She asked me if I had finished my presentation that I was going to give during IST. I asked her “What presentation?” Apparently I had gotten an email about two weeks before this conversation asking me to prepare a presentation on GIS and issues pertaining to cartography in Albania. James, who is our Volunteer Action Committee representative for my sector had said that I would do it but like my director had only contacted me by internet. The internet in Rubik has been down since the middle of December. No problem though, this is Albania and sometimes things happen and you just have to deal with it. So I prepared a presentation, although half assed and from information a learned and tried to remember for college classes. The presentation actually turned out really good and my colleagues seemed to get a lot out of it so I will give it again to the incoming group. The rest of the conference went really well and we all learned a lot and shared ideas and information. After the IST a group of us went to Fushe Kruje for Alex’s birthday. Her quasi host family was throwing her a party and since I am good friends with the woman who was throwing the party, Teuta, I was asked to help. This is fine cause I actually do enjoy cooking and I get a kick out of Teuta and her family (çimi, her husband, and Bebe her daughter). Men in Albania do not help in the kitchen so çimi was teasing me while I helped slice vegetable and cook the two women. He was actually pretty funny. He doesn’t speak English and speaks a dialect that I am starting to understand. He kept saying that he was American because we had convinced him to smoke outside and other things that wouldn’t make since if I wrote them here. The night was really fun and we ate a boat load of food and drank a freight load of wine. Ow, right…during IST I also learned that my proposal for an Environmental Awareness campaign in Rubik was denied. Kind of a bummer, but such is life, things are up and down, cyclical!! It is a bit difficult finding funds for such a small community but we are going to look other places and possible send the same proposal again in May. Well it is not the end of March so I have effectively been writing this one entry for two months. It is getting harder and harder to think of interesting things to write as my service progresses. Every day things seem less and less weird to me, that is not to say things are still not weird. Everyday has its surprises and is exciting in its own. Okay, I am going to post this as soon as I can.First of all I wrote this in the middle of February but I plan to cover the last two months! My life here is, well, honestly pretty laid back. My day basically starts when I decide to get my butt out of bed. During the summer I was at work earlier but that is only because it was easier to get up, now it is so damn cold I need to pep myself up every morning to face my freezing apartment. Literally, tomatoes froze in my kitchen the other night! After I get up I usually have a bowl of cereal (I eat a German cereal called “shocko flakes,” which are like chocolate corn flakes and the only cereal they sell in Rubik), get dressed and then head down to café Mёriani (who is the rather fat, jovial, crossed eyed man who owns the café, and a really great guy). Almost every morning I have a makiato (a shot of espresso with a tablespoon of steamed milk) and sit either alone reading or with an Albanian, who is almost guaranteed to be an old man. I usually arrive to the Bashkia, unless I have a meeting, any time between 9am and 10:30am. The Bashkia opens at 8am and closes at 3:30pm every weekday but it is really hard to actually get any work done while I am there. There is no information office or person to tell the residents of the municipality where to find people or information so often people just barge into our office looking for someone. Also, the staff members of the municipality are constantly asking me to help them with some problem with their computers or on the internet. Don’t get me wrong, I am not complaining about this and I work at the Bashkia to help the staff learn about changes in technology, but if I have something I need to write, research, or just complete I don’t want to be interrupted every twenty minutes. On occasion, usually about two days a week, few staff members of the municipality are even in their offices so I can actually get work done while in the building. Usually my day starts with routine, but no day since I have been working at the municipality has gone the way I planned it. Some days I go in with a plan but end up in a meeting, helping on a project, working on a computer problem, or drinking raki with staff members. Someone had asked me what I do on a day to day basis; this is really the best I could come up with.

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

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

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

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

Well I am going to attempt to cover what I have been doing since Halloween, abridged. I am writing the majority of this entry on December 29, 2009. Following Halloween things at work really began to slow down. I was so excited to start doing some actual projects but between Halloween and Thanksgiving I didn’t do too much. It is actually hard to remember since time seems to go by so quickly here. Basically I spent my days going into the office, helping here and there with computer questions, and then on Tuesdays and Thursdays I teach a computer class at the cultural center to about 8 students from ages 14-40, but with patience comes opportunity! A few days before Thanksgiving I received a call from the director of the high school in Rreshen (Rreshen is about twenty minutes north-east of Rubik and is the prominent city in Mirdita) and is also the director of the only Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) in Rubik. I had met him several times before and he acted as the host family for the previous Volunteer in Rubik, Chuck. The next day we met for coffee which developed into a three hour brainstorming session. It turned out that Nik had recently resigned from the director of the High School in Rreshen in order to pursue ventures with his NGO, Regional Environmental Board of Albania or Bordi Rajonal Ambjentist Shqiptare. He was ready to start working on projects immediately so following our meeting where he described and showed me some of the projects he had already completed in Rubik, I went to the office so I could start looking for possible funders for some of the projects we had in mind. In case who ever may be reading this isn’t aware of what an NGO is I will explain. Most NGOs receive their funding from donors, either regularly or irregularly. Some NGOs have a consistent donor or receive funds from one source periodically that they apply for on a regular basis, say every other year. Other NGOs receive funds based on specific projects and are constantly looking for the next possible donor. Nik’s NGO would be in the later category. Anyway, I found several funding opportunities from Peace Corps resources, contacts I have made (see just sitting around at cafes and talking in Albania is useful at some point), and websites. Then I just had to adapt the ideas that I already had to fit the specific format and sector the grant was for. It took another week before I saw Nik, such are things in Albania. I will get back to describing actual work in a bit, but I figure I should keep this thing as chronological as possible, mostly for my own benefit. We decided to spend Thanksgiving in Fushe Kruje, where Alex lives and is about 30min outside of Tirane. The embassy and other American families who live in the capital also host volunteers at their homes for Thanksgiving but I personally rather spend a holiday that is important to my family back home with close friends. So about 15 people, 11 PCVs and a family of 4 Albanians, planned on going to Alex’s house. We began preparing for Thanksgiving far ahead of time so we could ask our families back home to send ingredients that cannot be found in Albania such as; brown sugar, yams, Stove-Top Stuffing, cranberry sauce, pumpkin pie mix, and several other things. I wasn’t interested in any of this because I assigned myself to acquiring and preparing the live Turkey. So on Wednesday morning after vigorous studies of how to kill and gut a live turkey I traveled to Tirane to purchase the fowl. Chuck lives in Tirane currently so I had him find a merchant. We met and had a café and then went to the Tirane market where we met the guy who raises turkeys. We both had no idea what we were looking for when buying a turkey but I had seen other people buy chickens and I remembered what they did to inspect the thing. Of course I didn’t know what I was looking for I went through the motions in hopes of not getting ripped off. I blew on the feathers to look at the skin, no weird looking fungus so I figured it was good. I then held the thing by the feet and bobbed it up and down like I really knew how heavy 8.5 kilos feels like, inspected the feet, head, wings, and yes the pooper. We decided to buy it but were both nervous on how many people this thing would feed and if the guy meant 8.5 kilos of meat or actual weight. So we bought it, 5500 lek (about 55 usd), sounds expensive right. So Chuck went back to finish up on some work he was doing and I walked the twenty minutes back to the F. Kruje furgon station. On the way I passed several Albanians who asked me how much I paid and where I bought the fowl. I would say about half of them said I paid too much but in Albania everyone has an opinion and when it is about price they always say you paid too much. When I got to the furgons, the driver who is an off duty police officer told me that I got a good bird for a good price and the 8 old men standing around the area agreed. That is one of the things I really enjoy about this country, every experience is interesting. I have never bought something in America where I was stopped on the street more than 10 times, in the capital city of nearly 1 million people mind you, by complete strangers to inquire about my purchase. During the ride back to FK the driver proceeded to tell everyone in the van that I was an American who was celebrating thanksgiving and that I bought a turkey and was going to kill it myself. Everyone, about 12 people cram into one of these furgons, had advice or a relative that lived abroad that they wanted to tell me about. That is something that gets slightly old after a while. I realize that I am from abroad, but that doesn’t mean that I care that some stranger who I sit next to on a bus has a relative who lives in Holland or Greece. Sometimes people even ask me if I know their son who lives in Detroit. It is pretty funny. Albania is a small country and it is not uncommon to know friends of friends and it is hard to explain how truly large and vast America is. Anyway, I got back to FK where we waited for everyone to arrive back from gathering supplies or from their respected sites who wanted to observe the slaughter. Of course we all needed a bit of lubrication before we slaughter a living creature. Following adequate, um, preparation we put the pot of water on to boil and gathered the supplies outside. Rachel, Alex, and Jenifer readied their cameras and cocktails while I gave Seth directions and retrieved the Turkey. We set up a chopping block a.k.a. a piece of fire wood and Seth held the body of the good girl while I held the head with one hand and the archaic meat cleaver with the other. Supposedly the person we had borrowed the knife from had just sharpened it before they dropped it off but I have my suspicions. With the first strike I came down as hard as I could but didn’t make it through the neck bone, at the first sound of the knife hitting the body Seth spazed out and released the body of the not quite dead turkey. The body of the fowl began to flail like a, well, a turkey with half its head cut off! I still had the turkey’s head in one hand and quickly dropped the knife so I could get a hold of the body. After a few choice words, none of which I would ever write on something my mom reads, and more directions directed at Seth we got the bird back in position. During this little debacle, Alex’s Albanian neighbors were watching us with distained amusement while Alex, Jenifer, and Rachel were making distraught noises, filming, and taking pictures. Just a little side note, in Albania a man would not be caught dead doing women’s work like slaughtering something as small as a bird, especially while women just watched. This must have been quite the spectacle for our audience. Back to the slaughter, I instructed Seth not to let go of the bird until I said it was okay and then, with warning, I struck the bird not once, twice, or three times, but five more times as hard as I could to finally get the head off! Then, as I had read on the internet, I held the bird by the legs and let the blood drain from its body. This took about a minute and a half for the bird to quit flapping its wings and flailing about. The water wasn’t done boiling yet so we made fun of Seth for freaking out and inquired to the Albanian onlookers for my performance evaluation. During this I realized that in the excitement I had cut my thumb, not bad but I didn’t realize it right away due to the copious amounts of blood on my hands, jeans, and shoes. Jenifer, being the health volunteer that she is, was recruited to bandage me up but due to the trauma of the turkey death and all the blood, the usual vegetarian, could not complete the task so Alex took care of my hand. This was a hilarious twenty minute span that started with Jenifer having no problem and ended in her crying in remorse for the turkey. I will repeat, Rachel and Jenifer are vegetarians on every other day but since I was actually killing the turkey they renounced for the occasion. The rest I relatively uneventful, the water that was put onto boil earlier was now brought outside. I took the turkey and lightly scolded the skin for a second or two on each side. This, I read online, is so the feathers are easily removed and sure enough they were. This is where the internet isn’t too good on describing what to do next. All of the feathers were no removed and I had lit a small fire and burnt the remaining small hairs from the body and it was now time to clean out the internals of the turkey. We sat there in Alex’s front yard discussing what we thought the best method was, I had read online that we should be extra careful not to break a gland near the anus that would release a substance! After a few minutes of discussion the neighbor came over to see what all the laughing was about and possibly to see why I kept saying “anus gland” over and over again, although she doesn’t speak a lick of English. She came over and explained it to me and said our knife wasn’t good enough so she went and got her own. She then observed my first attempt and with obvious discontent, took the knife and began to clean the turkey. She had no hesitation and was talking to us the whole time barely looking at what she was doing, she didn’t even take off her wedding ring, I think she had done it before! It was really interesting how she did it and I will have no problem next year. I insisted that I wanted to take out the heart and lungs so I dug in and it was really weird pulling a warm heart, stomach, and lungs from a newly dead animal. The stomach still had food inside of it. That night we bade a brine to marinate the turkey in from oranges, lemons and spices which we soaked the bird in overnight. Thanksgiving morning Seth, James, and I traveled to Tirane for the embassy flag football game. That was really fun. I hadn’t ran for some time and it was great to go and network with U.S. mission in Albania workers (embassy employees, Peace Corps volunteers, Marines, and USAID staff). We played for about two hours and I was exhausted at the end of the game, I didn’t realize how much I missed running around and playing football. After the game we went back to Fushe Kruje and I helped finish preparing food, gathering beer and wine at various places (there were 15 of us and finding enough drinks is difficult so we had to go to several stores), and meeting people at the autostrada in order to show them where Alex lives. After everyone arrived we ate! No offense to my Grandmother, Mom, and Aunts who usually prepare our turkey but this was the best tasting bird I have ever had in my life! It must have been because the thing was never frozen and really couldn’t get much fresher. It is amazing what difference I naturally grown and slaughtered turkey can have on flavor. The thing was so juicy and tender, aw, it was amazing. Everyone agreed that it was one of the best meals we had had since arriving in Albania and by far the best turkey we had ever tasted. The night was great. Since small bajram was on the same weekend, the country was on vacation as well so I didn’t have to go to work for a week! I spent most of the time in Fushe Kruje and when I got back to Rubik I immediately began work on a grant that I was writing on behalf of Nik and his NGO. Nik and I met on the Tuesday following Thanksgiving and began hammering out the game plan for the grant, budget, timeline, list of activities, etc. Since the grant had to be submitted in English, I wrote it. This is the first time I had ever written a project (we wrote a project in PST but it wasn’t ever going to be submitted to anyone and was just for practice) and it was not the easiest format. The grant took me about a week and a half to gather information and write and the day before the proposal was due I met Nik in Tirane to finish the details for the budget. Nik is an excellent collaborator but he is still Albanian and their unofficial motto that Nik likes to joke about is “if you wait till the last minute to complete something, it only takes a minute to complete.” Not my philosophy in the least when it comes to something I am passionate about. The budget and final details took us almost 7 hours to complete and just as I was reviewing the plan I asked Nik for the documents I had asked him to gather for submission (tax documents, NGO registration, bank information, and his CV). He only had about half of the documents and said it would take him a few days to get all of the information. My stomach dropped, I had spent the last two weeks working on this project and worrying about what I was missing or if I had worded it correctly and he had forgotten to get documents that were required for submission of the proposal! Good thing I had spoken to the Albanian director of the foundation where we were submitting the proposal and Nik called him and told him the situation. Luckily they weren’t actually sending the documents to the U.K. until the end of the week for the committee to review them so he said we could turn in the project by the due date, the next day, and the NGO documents could be submitted by Thursday. Phew! This is how Albania works sometimes. I could never imagine that in a developed country that if you didn’t turn in all required information to be considered for funding, it is a competition, that they would not just throw out your proposal. I really hope that is not what they did but I will not find out until April 15 at the latest. Thankfully, Nik and I went to an Environmental conference on Thursday of that week so we were already in town and Nik submitted the documents no problem. The conference was also really interesting although it was all in Shqip and I understood about half of it, I had a chance to meet some influential people in the sector. Ow, I’d rather not talk anymore about the grant or what I even wrote it for until I receive the results, don’t want to jinx it, I will say it is an environmental education, cleanup, and tree planting project that had a relatively low budget of about 8,000 Euros. The Friday after the conference I headed up to Kukes, northern Albania, to visit the Maytons (James and Jennifer) and Erwin. It had snowed a few days before up there and the road was nuts. I took a bus cause I figured it may be safer and the normally 4 hour trip took about 6 hours. The road was covered in snow and was slightly scary but it was a beautiful ride and I made it no problem, the ride home was a little different. My plan on the way home was to leave Kukes on the 7am bus and arrive in Lezhe in order to find a fugon to Rubik around 2pm or so. About two hours out of Kukes we were stopped for about two hours. I truck from Turkey, everyone blamed his bad driving because he was a “Turk,” had taken a turn to tight and the cargo area of his semi had fallen halfway off of the turn. Another truck had attempted to pass him and ran out of room on the front side of the Turk and was stuck up against the mountain incline in mud and snow. The first hour was passed by various onlookers coming from both directions getting out of their cars and giving the group of men already gathered their two cents about what to do to alleviate the problem. I just stood there and watched the comedic scene in front of me, there was a group of about 25 men who didn’t know each other and were just bystanders but felt they could somehow help. They argued for an hour before someone who was there the entire time unloaded a back hoe from a truck and just pushed the second truck out of the way. He then proceeded to widen the road on his own! He just took out huge portions of the mountain, and flattened it until there was enough room for one lane of traffic to drive around the Turkish vehicle. I was cracking up, who just makes their own widened road, no police ever came or road workers. Aw, I love this country! We eventually made our way around the accident and I arrived in Lezhe around 4pm. I had a significant problem though. My battery on my phone had died and I had two choices; continue on the bus to Tirane and stay at Chuck’s house where I have a key, or stop in Lezhe and try to get the last furgon back to Rubik. I decided on the latter, probably a bad decision but o’well. I couldn’t get a ride to Rubik so I went to a café to asses my options. I had forgotten where all three of the Lezhe volunteers lived so I asked a group of kids if I could use the battery in their phone, there are basically only two to three different batteries for phones in Albania. I called Peter and ended up staying with him that night. Travel in Albania, I was exhausted but only slightly worried about the situation. Even when you are stranded there is always an option. My second choice would have been to go to the bar where I know the owners brother and ask if I could stay with them for the night, not a weird request in Albania by the way and they would be happy to host an American friend who lives in Rubik! I have not been very good about updating this blog but my internet was out for the second half of December and the first half of January. I currently have internet, although it isn’t working well. I will hopefully post a new blog soon about what I did for Christmas, the New Year, In Service Training and good/bad news about projects. Hope everyone I well and Happy New Year.

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

Turkey: No head.

Seth holding the turkey before he spazed out!

Turkey: with head, 8.5 kilos

Desert Rat, not anymore! I have never seen so much rain, wait…let me rephrase, water in my entire 23 years. Not to say that 23 years is a long time or that I have had much experience (more precisely, zero experience) living in climates other than the Sonoran Desert, but it rains a $h!t ton in Albania! I know most people who read this realize my situation but for those of you are just perusing the interwebs, I am from Tucson, Arizona where rainfall is a seasonal “phenomenon” we call monsoons and only lasts, if we are lucky, up to three months. I have never owned an umbrella before I came to Albania and I am almost positive no one in my immediate family even knows where to buy such a contraption. Anyways, it rains a lot here and I just love it. I am tired of the sun, blasphemy I know, and couldn’t be happier about the Mediterranean weather in winter. There are a few drawbacks to such fantastic weather. First, I wash my clothes by hand so I can only bring myself to expend enough effort for about one load per day (which translates to about half of a one gallon bucket). In the rainy season (which I am told lasts from about mid-October until the end of February) it takes my clothes about 5 days to dry completely. This means that I haven’t been washing my clothes frequently. Not a huge problem (and understand I live in a less-developed country) because I wear most of what I own until the garment can move on its own, excluding socks and skibies of course. I am mostly kidding here by the way, mostly kidding! Second, I have had basically a consistent cold. I enjoy the weather so much that at first I naively refused to wear adequate clothing. I hate being hot, so when the weather first started getting cold in Albania I was still in shorts and T-shirts. This has since changed because I got a wicked fever and missed a week of work. The third and final drawback to the cold and wet weather is travel. I first assumed that since the weather was getting cooler, that furgon (mini-bus or basically a big van) and bus travel would get more tolerable. I figured people would smell better, the heat and subsequent sweaty ass syndrome would cease to exist, and the roads would be safer due to less traffic. Boy did I hypothesis that incorrectly. Instead, people are too cold to shower and in turn smell worse. Compound this with the fact that the vehicle is now void of fresh air because it is cold and wet and they refuse to roll down a window, the result being an incubator for transmission of sickness and smells worse than a football locker room after an Arizona summer practice. I exaggerate a bit but you get the basic idea. I no longer generate symptoms of sweaty ass syndrome but the roads are definitely not safer. They may actually be safer statistically, but I don’t feel safer. Driving methods do not change in the wet weather. There is less tourist traffic but no regard to the possibility of ice on the road or reservations when it comes to puddles or flooded streets. Other than these minor factors of inconvenience, travel is better. Walking long distances across towns or cities in order to find the next mode of transportation is easier now due to better (colder) weather, although other PCVs (Peace Corps Volunteers) may protest this statement. Enough about the glorious weather, now let’s hear about the work situation. Last month I started to get really excited about the prospects for work in the coming months. This has faded recently. The Bashkia, with my help, is working on creating a Foreign Language Computer Lab at the local 9-year school (this is years 1-9). I came into the project during the initial stage and before really knowing what was going on I assisted in writing a budget with Chuck (the previous Rubik COD PCV, maybe I will write an acronym guide because a bureaucratic entity like Peace Corps uses a lot) that was sent to the French Embassy in hopes of funding. Now that the project has been partially funded by the French, I cannot for the life of me find computer programs for teaching Albanian speakers foreign languages. The original plan was this; we went to a language computer lab in Tirana who teaches students English with computer programs and an instructor with knowledge in the English language, they agreed to provide us with the program names and supplier that they use, we were then going to purchase the programs and computers, and then I was going to set up the lab, network the computers to a server, and teach the two foreign language teachers at the 9-year school how to operate and administer the lab. The problem has materialized this week. The two contacts in Tirana who said they would help us acquire the language programs, French and English, have not been helpful. The French institute now claims that they only teach with books and knowledgeable teachers, and the English institute gave me inadequate information and now fails to return my emails. I went to Tirana last week to drop in on the English teaching facility and the two contacts I have there were, reportedly, unavailable. There are plenty of English and French teaching computer programs out in the world but I can’t seem to find any that cater to native Albanian speakers. Not a big deal, I will find something and everything will work out, I just thought the purchasing part of this project would be over by now…oh Albania. Other work related news is not too good. Today I was informed that the only English speaker and the Bashkia’s only translator got a job in Tirana with an American law firm and is quitting. The best part is that she is tight with the Mayor so he agreed not to replace her until her probationary period with her new job is over. That means that the Bashkia will not even begin looking for a replacement until January. Great!!!! Guess I will have to kick my Shqip into high gear or I will have nothing to do at work, or at least I won’t understand anything they give me to do, for a while. Also, the ideas I have to present to the Mayor about improving the transparency and efficiency of the Municipality will have to wait until I can accurately articulate them in Shqip. That could be quite a while, considering how I can barely speak my own native language, hahahaha. Other than that I have a few things in the works right now but I’d rather not jinks myself quite yet so I am just going to keep those things close. I am also teaching an information technology class at the community center, which is actually going well considering that my students range from ages 17-52 and none of them speak English. Outside of work, I had the pleasure and relief of leaving the country. Macedonia is also a Peace Corps country but things are much different there. They have a good road network, intellectual property rights enforcement (which meant I got to eat a Big Mac), and…get this…a bus system with schedules and actual bus stations! Although it was really nice to get out of the country and see a little of the Balkans, I really missed the culture of Albania. The first night we were in Macedonia, we couldn’t find our hostel. We kept on asking people, taxi drivers, and various hotels for directions or even to point us in the right direction. Either the taxi drivers would quote us some ridiculous amount of money or people would just say they didn’t know and continue on their way. If this were to happen in Albania you would get a hand on the back of your arm or a forceful “hajde” and the Albanian would either guide you to the door of the place you were looking for or would find someone who would. The people in this country really know how to treat other people , especially foreign people. When we finally arrived at our hostel in Shkopje, the capital of Macedonia, we were greeted by an excellent proprietor. He first made sure that we weren’t over charged for the taxi we eventually had to take and then asked us about ourselves. We told him about what we did in Albania and instead of charging us per person like in all hostels; he reduced the price and just charged us per room. He then set us up with a similar deal in Ohrid, which is where we were headed next. Macedonia is an extremely pretty country and we had a great time. We spent most of our time just enjoying the break from Albania and the nice atmosphere, so we didn’t really see too many of the sites, there is always next time. I will keep the rest short. After Macedonia we went straight to the Language Refresher, which is a Peace Corps conference that takes place for all volunteers during the first 6 months of service. I honestly think it is a bit of a waste of time and money. It may be a great conference for some, but in my particular situation, learning how they speak in the central and southern portions of the country is not a real big help. Dialect and accent are such a big deal where I am from that I didn’t get much from the conference. It is also a huge bureaucratically organized event. After the conference I headed to Elbasan where we did our Pre-Service training for the Halloween party at a group 11 volunteers house. I was surprised, dude has an awesome place, I say surprised but I mean jealous. The party was pretty fun; people have to make all of their costumes so it was interesting. I went as my Turkish toilet, printed out a picture of the thing and attached it to my shirt, also made a shower head that I wore from my hat. Well I am way behind on posting to this thing so I will leave it at that. Hopefully I will be able to write something about Thanksgiving and the turkey slaughter soon!

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

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

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

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

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

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

River near Shpella e Pёllumbas, absolutely GORGEOUS!

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

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

Hello everyone, it has been quite a long time since I have written in this so I guess I will have to consult my calendar to remember just what the hell I have been doing with my time. It has been a busy month and pushime is officially over which is great. Recently I have been working on several projects, with and without my primary agency.

Work with the Bashkia: This month my Bashkia sent in the report for our familiar tourism project. Rubik is surrounded by 11 villages that are incorporated within the Bashkia’s jurisdiction. My counterpart started an initiative to increase the economic base in two of these villages by housing foreign tourists with villagers. We have been visiting, evaluating, and discussing with these families on their capacity to house and entertain tourists. We are currently building relationships and getting the proper documentation to write grants for guest homes for several of these families, so far we have established 3 families which I have mapped their location and evaluated their homes. The evaluation part was my favorite. Since I am the only foreigner that the Bashkia has access to, I was taken to the three homes two months ago to have lunch at each home, meet the families, and evaluate the accommodations. I wrote about this experience a few entries ago but at the time I didn’t fully grasp what I was doing there. My language is slowly getting better but I still have constant misunderstandings.

I am also working with my Bashkia on a project for a Foreign language lab that would be located in the 9 year school here in Rubik. Some of you may recall me sending out an email about this. If anyone would like information on how you can assist the municipality of Rubik with this project please contact me at monsbm@gmail.com. Ow, I guess I better explain this. So, in order to gain entry into a University in Albania you must speak a foreign language proficiently. I am a little fuzzy on the details because we haven’t actually started writing the project yet since we are still looking for funds but, I know that in order to get into a public university in Albania, which means it is free, you must pass an English language exam. This is huge for youth in Rubik. We only have one English teacher for the first 9 years and one teacher for the last 3 years of school for the entire town and the 11 villages which accounts for about 7,000 people…I am not sure how many students that is at the time, one more thing to add to the list of information to gather. Anyway, with my site mate and myself added, the town only has 4 people that are qualified to teach English and since that is not my primary or secondary interest in Rubik I have yet to teach a student. The goal of a foreign language computer lab is to prepare the youth of Rubik for the language exams they will have to take to get into college. The lab will be complete with language programs for English, German, French, Italian, Greek, and possibly Spanish (the number of languages depends on funding). These programs will be paired with headsets that are capable of instructing the youth on speaking and comprehension. I have seen the programs work at a private training center in Tirana, but the courses are far away and cost too much money. I won’t bore you anymore with the details of the project but we are looking for possible fundraisers back in the states. If anyone is involved with a philanthropic organization or knows someone who would be willing to donate please let me know and I can have the appropriate materials sent to them. Part of the process is to generate interest so contacting me will not result in expectations on my part of participation. Enough talking about that.

Secondary work: I still occupying my free time with Geographic Information Systems (GIS) work. We are still meeting contact from the previous volunteer who ran the project and this week Tauscha (a group 11 PCV) and myself will be meeting with a University class to explain the project, which will hopefully result in me teaching a class in how the process works and a hike with the students. PC is all about building the capacity of host country agencies and people so the eventual goal is to hand this entire project over to Albanians, the University is a great place to recruit interested parties. We are also meeting with a Director of Environmental and Geographic studies at a European university, a Minister of tourism for the National government, and a guy who has a Geographic consulting company. I am really excited. This is all within the same days as a COD (community and organization development) conference; this is the sector of PC that I am in. The other work I have been doing is consulting the Qarku of Kukes, Qarku is the regional council (Albania has 12 regions) on their process of drawing property rights to be put in a digital data base. I am in no shape or form qualified to do this type of work in the United States but here I am helpful to a country that is experiencing a slight brain drain (educated people can make more money abroad, so they leave). It is a little overwhelming but the people that I am helping in the Qarku are extremely bright and hard working.

Per qejf (for pleasure): This month has been great. Three weeks ago we went camping on a lake created by two damns that were built by the Chinese a few decades ago. The lake is called Shkopeti. We made camp on the other side of the lake from the road to Burrell, near a small collection of homes belonging to subsistent villagers. In order to get to the camp we crossed an awesome “Indiana Jones” type bridge that was mostly made of wood and had several missing planks, it was great…especially when some friends I went with got half way across and then had a near breakdown!!!

I also went to a Folk festival in Gjirokaster that is only held every four years. This was awesome. Two of the PCVs in Kukes, James and his wife Jen, got us a ride to Gjiro on a bus with the Kukes folk band, the ride to Gjiro round trip costs about three days worth of allowance so it was great to get a ride, and plus they played music and sang for the entire 8 hour drive. In Albania, people aren’t really used to driving long distances and the roads tend to be winding and rough, so the drivers often stop every hour or so for a café break, and for the young people to throw up!!! This was pretty fun cause at one place where we stopped, the band got out and played for twenty minutes while the kids, who are also part of the group, did the dance they were going to perform at the festival. Albanians are probably the most hospitable people I have ever met. The director of culture in Kukes insisted on paying for everything. For the whole trip, both ways, we must have stopped at least 10 times to have a café (which is always accompanied with a raki), a beer, or lunch. Albanians take great offense if you try to pay for your own drink or food if they invite you. Even if you invite them for a café they take great offense if you pay for it so I have learned not to even try, I have even been told not to thank them. Just yesterday I had some friends come up for a hike that got rained out. When Alex arrived I met her at a locale because we were on our way to meet Seth, Tauschia and the others up the hill. It had been raining all day so furgon traffic was slow but a driver who was going to Lezhe, about an hour and a half west of Rubik decided to drive Alex to Rubik…for free…just because she is American (and partly because she is a girl). I insisted on paying for the drinks (Alex paid me back of course but it is shume torpe, very shameful, for a female to pay for things) and he had a bit of a hissy fit, little of which I understood, which mostly consisted of him yelling at me about respect. I love this country. Where else is it an insult to buy a drink for a guy who just drove an hour and a half out of his way, during working hours, for free. Fantastic!!

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

Wedding in Miredite (Rubik Tourism Day)

View from Beach camp

Wedding in Miredite

Rubik, My site

Staff of Youth Volunteerism Project

July 17-September 1, 2009

Pushime is the all encompassing word for a nap, a weekend, vacation, or basically anything that requires no work. Albanians love it and take it extremely seriously; I think this is a good thing in a certain respect. I will start with the end of my last blog. The last time I wrote on this thing I had just finished visiting a small village that is very old (hence the name katund i vjeter, old village) and was actually on a main trading route during the Middle Ages. The next day after my trip to Katund i Vjeter I was given several documents that had been prepared by my counterpart and were then translated by the one English speaker in my Bashkia who is the English translator. Schools in Albania do not teach students how to write professionally, critically, or even creatively. I have met countless Shqiptares who have finished three to five years (they call it the Belgian system, I don’t really know what that means) and have never written a paper with entirely self generated content. The longest paper that a person with a “master’s degree” had written was 7 pages long and she admittedly had taken a good portion of it from resources. Plagiarism is also a huge issue in the schools here. Anyway, the documents required a large amount of, I will say, adjustment before they were sent out. The documents were invitations and itineraries for foreign guests at a Tourism Day the Bashkia of Rubik was planning for the following weekend. The event was funded by the French embassy in order to stimulate and advertise touristic amenities in the municipality of Rubik (that’s where I live if you don’t remember). The documents that I was to “adjust” were given to me on Thursday, July 16 and I returned them to my counterpart on Friday. The invitations for the event were sent out via only email on Monday, July 20th for an event that was taking place on Saturday, July 25th. If you follow, that means that during the summer in Albania, during the first weeks of serious pushime, my bashkia sent out invitations for an event that had been in planning since before I was in Albania 5 days before the event took place. This is a great example of Albanian culture in the workplace, especially in government. We sent an invitation to various international entities including the French, Dutch, Swiss, Austrian, and American embassies, along with the Peace Corps. SDC (the Swiss equivalent of USAID) was the only foreign organization that came to the event. The rest of the participants were people from the area and surrounding areas, not the point of the event. The French, who paid for the day, did not even come to the event. This is just one small problem that occurred during the planning of the event that I hope not allow to happen next year when I will hopefully have a bigger hand in the process. Other than a long list of suggestions that I have for the Bashkia the day was excellent. The day included visiting various points of interest in the Municipality including Vele; a beautiful and natural looking village with a interesting church, Rubik; which consisted of driving through the main street and then riding up to the 950yr old church, then giving a briefing on its history and significance, and finally finishing in Katund i Vjeter for a lunch and mach Mirditan (I live in the region of Mirdita) wedding. The drive is on village roads so we took a caravan of “Relly Albania” (pronounced Rally) 4x4 vehicles which was great and the participants really enjoyed it. The lunch was fantastic and the wedding was also great, although I had problems that I will discuss with the Bashkia about the presentation of these items to foreigners. The day after the event I traveled south to Pogradec, a city on Lake Ohrid near the border with Macedonia, for Connie’s 60th birthday. Connie was in my training group and I think I have mentioned that during the training my group became fairly close. I met Alex and Rachel (also in my training group, Seth canceled last minute due to a bowel issue) in Pogradec and we went to the beach, cooked Connie dinner and then took her out for music and dancing. Pogradec is beautiful, and during the summer it is fairly crowded with tourists from Macedonia and Albanians who normally live in other places in the world. We met and made friends with many Albanians who currently live in the United States and are home for the summer to visit family. The weekend was great except for one incident with a middle aged Albanian man that I won’t get into. I returned to Rubik where work was even slower than before I had left. My counterpart and Mayor were basically M.I.A. for the remainder of the month and all of August. In fact I just saw my counterpart today, he just returned from France where he participated in a Cultural integration event with various other countries, who told me that I am off for the rest of August and that I can choose whether to come to the office or not but he will not be there. Luckily I am still working a couple of days a week on a Youth volunteerism project with World Vision, UNV, CAAP, and Ndrryshimi Fillon Nga Ty (translates to change begins with you, it is a NGO started by the 2008 winner of Big Brother Albania named Arber who used his winnings to start a non-profit to encourage youth to volunteer throughout Albania). The goal of the project is to recruit several groups of youth in three regions in northern Albania and training the youth on what volunteering is, the benefits, the costs, and finally how to change their community through a project. The youth will be assisted in writing a proposal for funding that will be presented to a panel of their peers during a “Grant Event” that we are also in the process of planning. The project is a great idea and is concentrated on three regions; Shkoder, which is the 3rd or 4th largest city in the country depending on who you ask, Lezhe, which is also a fairly large city on the beach, and the region I am helping with which is Kurbin and consists mostly of small villages and a few towns. The youth groups I have been helping to arrange and train are in Milot and Frushe Kruje, about a 20min and 45min ride, respectively, from my town. My primary group is in Milot and we had one of our last meetings before the event yesterday where we planned to decide on a project and begin writing the proposal. I had prepared methods on how to engage the youth and determine which project would be best for their community and the available budget, I had also called Arber (who is a big celebrity in Albania) to join the meeting, youth are usually more motivated and focused when he is around and he would translate for me. We waited an hour and a half drinking coffee with Arber and his father (who is a former Albanian Ambassador to Cuba, Mexico, and Italy) and no one showed up, one week before the event and no group, at least I am not a complete failure, I did help with the planning of the project and grant event (I will also attend the grant event as staff). After Pogradec, I hung out in my site for a while but became very bored. During the summer months Rubik is even more less-populous than it normally is. This town is smaller than the High School I graduated from. Due to the utter lack of work we planned to go camping at a beach. Chuck, the guy who I took over for and who has decided he likes Albania so much that he extended a third year, Alex and Myself went camping on a beach north of Shingjin and south of Velipoja. The place was absolutely gorgeous except for the trash that had washed up on the shore (the beach was in between two rivers that both flow from northern cities and carry trash with them). We were almost alone during the day and completely isolated during the night. I will try to attach pictures to this entry. We sat there on the beach and thought, so this is Peace Corps huh? Don’t get me wrong there are a great many of difficulties that we all face each day but this is not what I thought it was going to be like, no better and no worse, just different. So I am convinced that many people in Rubik think I am quite strange. I cook for myself, wash my clothes in a bucket (almost everyone here has a washing machine but no dryer), enjoy running and sometimes walk great distances just to sleep outside on the ground. My favorite part about living in such a small town and being one of two distinguishable outsiders is the rumors. Due to the difficulties of traveling in this county and the restrictions put on PCVs for safety reasons we all sleep on the couch of fellow volunteers fairly frequently. Combined with the fact that I have a female site mate some people in my town have come to the conclusion that I am sleeping with all of them. Not necessarily a bad thing as far as culture for a male to be accused of, but still extremely false and ridiculous. Chuck had heard from a neighbor of mine that I stay up very late at night, he mentioned I wasn’t loud or disruptive just that he had noticed. Why would you tell someone that? Who cares? About a week ago I was having a drink with an Albanian friend and another PCV at a locale on the opposite side of town from me, about a 4 min walk, and after we departed we decided to have one more beer before we went to bed at another locale next to my palati (apartment). My Albanian friend somehow heard that we were at this locale after we had left him and he proceeded to interrogate me on why we didn’t want to drink that other beer with him. It was nothing against him, we just thought the night was over, 9pm, but decided last minute when we saw another locale was still open. How he heard about this is beyond me, but this is a small place and I kind of stand out. There have been things recently that either reminds me how much I love this country or how happy I am that I am only here for two years! Korça Beer Fest. I guess it was two weeks ago, we went south to Korça for their third annual beer festival. The festivities started on Thursday and lasted until Sunday but I only stayed until Saturday because I had a meeting with my youth in Milot (who didn’t show up by the way). The festival is like a mini-October fest with music, food, and yes BEER. Korça brewery makes two kinds of beer; i bardh and i zeze (blonde and dark) and is by far the best quality beer in the country. They had live bands that played mostly covered American pop music from the 90’s and before, IT WAS GREAT. The PCVs from the group before mine had a mid-service training in Korça that same week so it was really good to get to know other PCVs that were not in training with me and talk about projects (failed and successful) that they have done in their first year. The first two nights of the fest I slept on the floor of a volunteer’s hotel room and the third night about 5 people in my group camped on a hill behind the fest. Although it seems like I have very little work to do, most of the group 11 volunteers say they didn’t have any work their first six months, none. After the fest I headed back to Rubik for a night and then to Milot the next day where no one showed up for our meeting, this is when I had coffee with Arber and his father. This was a Monday and I made some calls to support in the area who arranged another meeting with different youth from before for that Friday, only three guys showed up. Due to the fact that only three young men were slightly interested and the proposal would have been due in two days we decided to thank them and scrap Milot from the project. It was a huge bummer and a shame for the community who really could have used the money and the rest of the benefits that go along with volunteers. The Gant Event. Tuesday was the Grant Event. Even though I didn’t have a group who would be presenting I did help with the planning of the project as a whole and I was helping to chaperon the 150 youth that attended, so I went to the event. The day was great and I wasn’t completely useless. One of the presentations from Lezhe could not load their presentation properly and no one could figure out why their pictures would not load either. So, with about 15min before the presentations started I got everything in order and their presentation turned out to be one of the most logically organized of the group. The presentations were in the morning, then we took a bus up the coast to Shingjin were there was to be a beach party and the award presentations. We had lunch and then some activities for the youth to participate in. Albanians can dance for hours and have the best time doing it. I danced for a little while and then noticed some of the younger boys were not interested at all, possibly a little shy, so along with another PCV we took them to the beach and played futbol (soccer). The day was a lot of fun and considering that we had 150 youth participate and only about 20 people for staff on a crowded beach, the day went extremely well. We decided in preliminary meetings that we would operate the tutorials in a way that it would seem that the money would be given only to groups that presented a well organized and thought out proposal but in reality we planned to fund all projects in a TBD (money wise) sort of way. What I mean, is that on Tuesday of next week we are going to meet again to look at the proposals and try to shave off some of the budget in each proposal for things that they either don’t need or could possibly find somewhere else, limiting each project to about $1500. Other than that I am still just working on the Bunker Trails project and we are slowly putting things together to make the site more functional and increase the inventory of hikes, which only has one posted so far. We now have a tentative agenda on hikes that we are going to do in the next two months. This weekend I am going on a camping trip with a fairly large group of PCVs, they do it every year in Puke (pronounced pook-ah) and it is kind of the end of summer trip. Hopefully work will start to flow in within a few weeks. Hope everyone is doing fine and feel free to shoot me an e-mail anytime, I love to hear from the other side of the world. Owe and HAPPY BIRTHDAY MOM (Urime Ditelindje)! Shi femi!

I wrote this on July, 14 2009 I have the best job in the world, granted I poop/shower over a glorified hole, wash my clothes in the same bucket I use to flush my toilet, don’t speak the language very well, and live on the 5th floor of a building that may crumble at the slightest tectonic plate shift…I couldn’t be happier! Of course there are plenty of days when I just want to go home, play with knuckles, hang out with family and some friends, look Sarah in her eyes, and just not be in Albania…but today was one of those days that makes “service” worthwhile. Today was fantastic. No, this entire week was fantastic. The 3 goals stated in the Peace Corps act are; to help the people of interested countries in meeting their needs for trained men and women, to help promote a better understanding of Americans on the part of the peoples served, and to help promoted a better understanding of other peoples on the part of all Americans. Any of these goals that are achieved are considered work for me, that’s right, if I just be myself around Albanians and write home with stories of my day to day, that is considered a commendable days work. I personally believe that I am doing a prodigious job at the latter two objectives. Sure I do not do work much at the actual agency (Bashkia Rubik) I am assigned to (currently, my mayor says I will have more work than I know what to do with come September), but it is also summer time in Albania and few Shqiptares do any work either! Did I mention I had a good week! I guess I will start with the beginning of my week even though today was probable the best day I have had (skip ahead if you are so busy you just cannot stand to read my ridiculously in depth description of how I spend my time) Wednesday is basically when my week started. I had a meeting in Tirana for a project I some of us in the north are helping with in association with World Vision, UNV, Vodafone, and the winner of big brother Albania (how exciting, a Shqiptare celebrity, kidding of course.) After the meeting I went to Fruse Kuja with Alex because her host family (she is one of two PCV who live with a host family because she had some problems with her first land lord 1 week into service) had invited us to go to the beach near Lezhe and I would never miss an opportunity for a free ride to the beach. Alex somehow has the luck to attach herself to excellent families. Her new host mother housed a PCV two years ago and spent 6months in England so she speaks some English. She is probably the most progressive Albanian I have ever met. She and her husband are like a teenage couple, they have been married for 20 years. This is extremely unusual in Albania, members of her community tell her that she has “shume torpe” (a lot of shame) because she holds her husband’s hand and kisses him in public, not in a gross way, but shit they are married. They don’t care and relish at the chance to hang out with Americans. I had a great time just hanging out at the beach and taking in the scenery. We went to a beach that is outside of a small village so it was basically undeveloped. Sitting there on the beach, drinking a beer and eating a nectarine, Alex and I couldn’t help but laugh about the fact that we signed up for Peace Corps in order to suffer a little bit, and here we were sitting on an awesome beach on the Adriatic Sea, what a great job!! Like I have said before things are not exactly easy here, we are thousands of miles from home in a strange country with broken infrastructure and a culture drastically different than our own. My point is that, I guess I expected something different. Sunday of that week, I was invited by the summer camp that is conducted at the culture center in front of my house to attend a field trip, to help. The field trip was to a village close by that has an artificial lake that is made possible by a communist era 1957 damn. I don’t have many details on this day, but it was great. I hung out with about 18 15year old kids playing games and swimming in the lake. Stephanie (my site mate) and I introduced the group to peanut butter, which had mixed reactions. The kids are probably the best in my town and deserved some R&R since they had been helping with the younger kids at the camp, all of them speak some English and it was great to get a chance to hang out with some really good kids. Of course most of them are girls because the boys here (quna) are treated like princes and for the most part are little bastards. In any event I think we recruited some participants for our Outdoor Ambassadors club and maybe even for my youth volunteer group. Yes, hanging out with good kids at a beautiful lake playing games and swimming in a lake counted as work for me! I am currently fixing a Shqiptares computer and that is as frustrating as dealing with French people (I like most French people but they are not very nice to foreigners, something that many people in America are starting to adapt, so the writing in this may be shit. Today was great. I had the choice of either going to Tirana (the capital city) where a fellow PCV and I had two meetings; one with a professor of Geographical Information Sciences/Systems and another with a minister in the national government about a project that was started by a now COSed (close of service) PCV who started an adventure tourism project that maps hiking tours throughout Albania using GPS and GIS software. The project is Paul’s baby, but now that he is no longer a PCV it has been left in the capable hands of Tauschia and myself (along with a few supporting PCV actors). Not to bore anyone too much, but the project in a nutshell is; we search out and take a GPS on various uncharted trails throughout the Albanian countryside that conclude at a destination (a castle, ruin, city/village, something of aesthetic/historic/cultural significance, etc.), process the data into a usable GPS trail with points of interest (water sources, views, homes of people we met, places to sleep/camp, etc.), write a description of the trail and post it on the project website for use (www.bunkertrails.org). Not to toot any type of horn but this is not easy, the best maps of Albania are hard to get and come from either the military or more likely the USSR. We work by word of mouth from local people and garner information from other PCVs in their respective sites. We are currently applying for PC committee status which would greatly improve the effectiveness of the project because we would be able to capitalize on PC committee funds, less restrictions on time we spend out of site, PC support, and the ability to better improve the capacity of Albanian counterparts who are involved in the project. Well, I just got a little excited about the topic but back to the point. I was going to attend these meetings with Tauschia because I am the GIS technician/treasurer for the committee, but I had some site specific work. This was abnormal, the one day that I really want to be involved in something I can’t because this is one of two days (in a month of service) that my host agency actually has some work they need my help on. Alright, so I didn’t get to go to Tirana and promote the project. Instead I had probably the best day thus far in Albania. I had goal 2 covered no problem today and this entry counts as goal 3, so in my opinion I have worked genuinely hard today. Having said that wait tell you hear what “work” consisted of. I woke this morning at 5:45 (I thought my counterpart had said we would meet at 6:30 but he actually said 7:30, I get the two confused, damn this language) and went to a café where I would wait and we would eventually meet. We were driven to a nearby village by an employee of the Bashkia in order to collect information for a tourist brochure (and verify possible locations for a tourism promotion day, “Rubiku Touristik 2009”) that the Bashkia is putting together with financial backing from the French Embassy (I think the French at least). I am apparently a photography and tourism expert in terms of Albanian city government so I was the authoritative figure on the trip, don’t really know what the other people on the trip were saying but when I said, “wait, this is a good spot for a picture,” or “write this down as a point of interest, westerners will love it,” they listened, a perplexed look was given because most of the time no people were in the picture, but who wants to look at a picture of a natural scene with some bloke in the way of the view. I am not an artist so if by chance anyone actually reads this blog, has some artistic knowhow, and wants to help a LDC (Less Developed Country) let me know and I will send you the pictures or the website address I am creating and you can give me some “constructive criticism.” The village is gorgeous. The area is tucked in the mountains (coming from Arizona I would consider them hills) behind Rubik which have a “clean, fresh feel, vaguely reminiscent of sheets lifted from a tumble dry,” (taken from a description of an unrelated area in Europe by Bill Bryson, but it is what I thought of instantly when I first drove into Katundi i vjeter.) As we drove through the village, I would instruct the driver to stop periodically in order to take photos of a church or a collection of homes that stood out. The goal was to collect pictures of the area and visit homes of families who had expressed interest in housing tourists who would like to visit, a way to boost the economy and attract guests to the hospitable country. Our first stop was at the home of a family which housed three generations. The property was fairly large which matched the number of its inhabitants. We were treated in true Albanian cordial fashion with coffee and raki. After a period of wandering around the property taking pictures of the various subsistence activities that were taking place, the oldest of the children in the household guided us on a hike to a plain on the top of the mountain behind his house. Keep in mind I am basically just along for the ride, I had no idea what the day had in store for me because I have an incredible time understanding my counterpart, or anyone else in Rubik for that matter (they speak a dialect in this portion of the north that people in the south can’t even understand.) We walked along a breathtaking path for about thirty minutes and soon arrived at the top, here lay an amazing plain where I could see Lezhe and Shingjin in the distance. Those are coastal citites, I had no idea I was going to be able to see the firkin beach from up there. I sat in utter aw for some time and took about 50 pictures, none of which did the site justice (I had heard of a goat trail that connected the village with Lezhe but I never realized it would be so…beautiful. We were then guided down a separate trail that led to the opposite end of the family’s property; I was surprised that this was even more of a fantastic hike. The trail led beside the family’s water source, a small creek which fed a man made reservoir. When we arrived back at their home, we were led into the back room, a modest living room with sporadic seating, a couch and a coffee table. The table was strewn with various fares that were all produced on the property. The items included the typical Albanian items, all which are fresh as can be; tomatoes, cucumber, djathe e bardhe (a white cheese that slightly resembles feta), pork, beef, garlic, pickled peppers, cabbage and onion, and of course raki (made from grapes). Unbeknownst to me, we had other places to visit and Sander (my counterpart) soon pulled me away from the feast where we said our goodbyes and were escorted back down the hill in the owners 4X4 SUV. Before I left America there was a lot of talk throughout the country and in the media about fears that America would eventually (if not already) be taken over by China, India or rising powers in South America. I am by no means an authority on the topic, but as I rode alongside this simple yet incredibly happy villager in his Ford Maverick, listening to Queen on his stereo, watching him smoke countless Winston cigarettes and taking a look at the massive scare from his triple bypass surgery done at an American hospital in Tirana, I couldn’t have been more proud to be an American. This happens to me fairly often, in daily conversation or meetings on the streets people from this post communist country who have been subjugated to many hardships, dream of life in America. No place is perfect but I am incredibly lucky to have been born where I was born and anyone back in America who thinks that the country is on a downward slope or even ashamed to go abroad and tell people you are American; travel to a LDC anywhere in the world, spend three weeks living with its people, and I guarantee you will come back with greater pride and constructive attitudes about change in the country instead of just complaining. The next three stops were at various homes where we met the owners, their families and took pictures. The last stop of the day was at a house that must have been built before the communist era. I say this because it was actually insulated and sturdy. The property had a creek that ran through the front yard with water so cold and clean, I thought I was in a different place. The day had been extremely hot and I had drank lots of raki (wouldn’t want to be rude to hospitable people of course) so I asked for some water. I usually don’t drink much of the water straight from the tap here in Albania but I was up in the mountains, it tasted great (like mountain spring water from a bottle), and I just couldn’t help myself. Then I realized that there is no sewage system up in these mountains and the water comes from various wells in the area…I will probably have giardia, great. Anyways, I was introduced to the grandma of the house who told me I reminded her of her grandchildren who all work abroad as laborers. As we sat at a table outside and sipped on raki (this time made from Thane berries) I couldn’t help but wonder at the scenery. I guess I kind of slipped into a daydream because the next thing I know there was an incredible amount of food placed out on the table (I counted ten plates heaped with food, for only three men and me). I will add a picture. After that meal I could barely move and Sander and I decided it was time to head back to Rubik and take a nap. When I arrived back in Rubik, the parnari (owner) of the duqan (small market) came running out after me and requested that I fix her computer which had shut down due to viruses she had acquired in who knows what manner since they don’t have internet available. This has so far taken me a solid three hours, but who else would do it, for free? So that is where I am now…Naten i mirё!

Gositme, Donkey Cart

U.S. Ambassador to Albania, Swearing in ceremony

Girl in Gostime

Swearing in ceremony

Celebrating swearing in at Locale with owner

Swimming in Gostime, girls don't exactly go swimming with boys...

Milking a cow

Shkoder volunteer visit, Rozafa Castle

So PST had its ups and downs but for the most part it was a great experience and we were kept busy the entire time, really busy. We were sworn in as official Peace Corps volunteers at the end of may and moved to our permanent sites on May 28th, 2009. The swearing in ceremony was a huge relief and it meant that i would no longer have to live with the restrictions of PST; no more host family, constant reporting on where i was or was going, and no more scheduling decisions made for me. My permanent site is Rubik, which is in the north central portion of Albania. The first two weeks of my service were spent with the volunteer that i would be replacing, which is uncommon the current volunteer usually leaves before the replacement arrives or the new volunteer is moving to a brand new site. I thought that spending these two weeks with a PCV who had lived there for two years prior was great. My shqip is not exactly great and he introduced me to the community and my new workplace. Rubik is a small municipality of 10,000 people which includes the 11 villages the Bashkia (city hall) serves. The town of Rubik is only about 1700 people but is located on the national highway to Kukes/Kosovo. I live in a small communist bloc apartment overlooking the river fan and the national highway, a.k.a. Rubik's main road. The apartment is not bad although i dont have many of the luxuries that are commonplace for Albanian apartments. I have a Turkish toilet, no washing machine, a small balcony, a tiny kitchen, and a bed made from what appears to be a chain link fence. I really cannot complain, when i applied to be a PCV i never thought that i would live in such a place. I pictured a hut somewhere in the middle of nowhere. Service in Eastern Europe is very different, i wouldn't think easier, than service in other parts of the world. There is about two people in my town that speak English and the rest speak a dialect of shqip that is extremely difficult to understand and is even unrecognizable by Albanians in the south. My shqip was not good in any respect after PST but i am trying, slow going but i am trying. We were told time and time again during PST that the first few months (1-9 months) would be extremely hard and slow. Albanians work in a relationship based business environment and with little knowledge of the language it is hard to get any type of work started. My counterpart and the mayor say that i must first learn the language and then, in September, they will have more work for me to do than i will be able to handle. That would be great because as of right now i feel utterly useless. I spend most of my time reading and trying to learn the language with my tutor, which is very difficult since teachers in Albania rather you memorize and regurgitate than actually learn. I have found that with this lack of work i have the time to travel and enjoy the country. Most weekends i spend out of my site with other PCVs who also have little work to speak of. So far i have traveled to beaches in Vlore and Durres,and the cities of Lushnje and Lezhe. I have had some work but it is slow in progress and takes little time overall. Rubik is currently working on a foreign language computer lab for the elementary school that i helped in witting a budget/proposal for and will implement if we get the funding. I am also helping in a youth volunteerism project through the United Nations and World Vision which will work to encourage volunteering in Albania's northern youth (ages 15-25). The project will assist several groups to develop and implement community projects in their respective regions. I hope this project is a success because if we can change the perception of giving back to the community among the youth in Albania it would be a huge accomplishment in my opinion. During communist times, less than 20 years ago, people of all ages were required to work on state run projects like planting trees or building roads/buildings and the state called this "volunteering" so the word has an extremely negative connotation. People here believe that it is up to the state to do anything about the problems they encounter like dirty streets, dilapidated schools, assistance of the elderly or disabled, misguided youth, etc. With this project we hope to inspire a new generation who's only negative experiences of volunteering are told to them by there parents. We are in the beginning stages and have only held preliminary meetings with organizers but are in the process of creating a local television advertisement and will hold our first meetings with the youth the week after next. Other projects i am involved with are pending and i don't want to jinx them by talking about it. Life here as a new volunteer is relatively good, although there are many difficulties and every day is a challenge. I don't really think anyone besides close friends and family will read this blog but if you do and want any additional information feel free to contact me. Internet for Bashkia employees is readily available so i can be contacted easily, unlike some parts and sectors of the country. Naten.

I haven't been too good at updating this thing, it has been about three months. Well what has been going on? I am now an official Peace Corps volunteer and successfully got through Pre-Service Training (PST). I now live in Rubik, Albania which is in Mirdita, the central north. PST was extremely busy, frustrating, exciting, and intense. I had classes 6 days a week for language, technical training in community and organization development, culture and government/politics. I was placed in a host family for the three months of PST in a small village outside of the city of Elbasan which is the third/fourth largest city in Albania. Twice a week during PST, all the 33 trainees in my group would travel to Elbasan where we would be briefed on Peace Corps safety/security, rules/regulations, Albanian culture/language, and sector specific technical training. The other four days of the week we would stay in our training sites and receive training in a local school with our respective training groups which consisted of 5-6 other trainees. My particular group consisted of three women, one guy, and myself; Connie, a 59 year old woman who most recently worked for OSHA in Oregon, Alex, a 23 year old international marketing graduate from Boston, Rachel, a 23 year old theatre management graduate from Virginia and Seth, a 23 year old international studies graduate from New Jersey. During PST my site mates and I became extremely close. In PST, due to the reality that everyone is going through the same difficult process people either grow close are grow to hate each other, I am really glad the latter didn't happen to us. I don't want to go into detail about everything that happened during PST because I have already sent out detailed e-mails to family and friends of my experiences but for the sake of goals two and three in the Peace Corps act I will mention the highlights. My favorite parts of PST consisted of milking a cow, traveling to Shkoder and Kruja, the Trainee camping trip, our community project and countless funny stories about my less than great host family. Part of PST in Albania is to develop and implement a community project within the 10 week period as practice for what work as a PCV (peace corps volunteer, there are all kinds of acronyms in US government work) will be like. Our community project was to teach a series of typing classes at the local high school along with weekly community youth events that consisted of fun games on the weekends and culminated in a scavenger hunt/dance party (Albanians love dance parties). We also had to write a PDM (Project Design Management proposal for the project and present it to a panel as training. My training site's project went particularly well and i would say it was the best project in our training group (our host village was Gostimё by the way). As for host family life mine was especially different, compared to the other 33 members of my group. I lived in an even smaller village than Gostimё (shtepanj) which was about a 30min walk to Gostimё but lived next door to Alex who i really got to know and am now close friends with which was lucky. My family consisted of a Father, who was 62 and spent most of my stay in Greece as a worker, a Mother, who did all of the house/farm work, a host sister (Lola), who was a 40 year old business owner in Gostim

Well i wrote an entire description of what has gone on the past two days but when i posted it didnt work and wa lost so, o well, such is life in Albania. I am slowly starting to realize but it is fairly funny. I dont have the energy to write it all again so i will abreviate. Everything is good, it snowed today, unusual for this city i am told. We havnt had a chance to really explore, i havnt taken a single picture cause we have been so busy with classes on language, rules, regulations, safety and security, life in Albania, and getting to know the other 34 PC trainees in group 12. I promise the next post will be more informative. tomorrow we move in with our respective host family in or satelite site which will be home for the next ten weeks. Ow ya, ignore the poor spelling and grammar i just dont have the focus tonight after classes all day long. well hope everything is good with everyone and shoot me an email if you like i will respond when i can.

well, this is the first and only day of staging. Tomorrow we leave for Elbasan, Albania. Everyone in my training group is very interesting and extremely interested in getting to know eachother. We spent the day learnig about our trip and what to expect when we arive in Albania. I dont know when I will get to write on this again so I will try to add every detail I have the energy and time to extend. It seams like most of the other volunteers have the same worries as I do and we are continually learning how to adapt to the intricacies of a beurocratic organization. Owe ya excuse the misspellings throughout this because I have little time and my spelling is just plain bad in general, but I guesse that doesnt matter since my new main language isnt english. After staging we all went to dinner and then for dirnks and conversation at a really cool irish pub in Philly. there are 34 of us who leave for Albania tomorrow in three different project groups: Health education, Teaching English as a Foreighn Language, and Community Organization Developement. I was worried at first that i was not quite qualified to assist in communtiy developement but after speaking to some of the other younger volunteers, we all kinda share the same anxieties. Well, i really better go to bed, tomorrow is a long day, we leave Philly at 9ish and arrive at the airport at noon, then we dont leave JFK until 6ish. the ride is about 15 hours befor we arive in Elbasan. We arrive at noon in Elbasan and then we have a welcome dinner to intoduce us to PC (Peace Corps) staff and host country staff (politicians and such), so exciting. well i better go to bed and enjoy the last bit of American TV that i can.

The contents of this blog are mine personally and do not reflect any position of the U.S. Government or the Peace Corps.

not much to say, this is the first post and I still have about a month and a half before I leave. Just arranging some things and checking out what this thing looks like.