First Days in Burrell

So in the first couple of weeks that I’ve been here, I’ve been trying to find structure and potential project ideas as I meet a ton of new people and put my roots down. I’ve had more coffees than can be imagined (and thank goodness “coffee” doesn’t mean I actually have to drink coffee…just the act of going is “coffee” and I can drink juice or water if I want to….or else I prob would have had a heart attack from the record 6 coffees I managed to go to in 1 day). I am working partially at an alternative school and partially at the Bashkia (Albanian version of city hall). Surprisingly, I find myself teaching A LOT more English than I ever would have expected. I am teaching about 7 classes now, and it will be 10 once I start English classes at the Bashkia. And I’m also teaching 4 computer classes a week at the alternative school. While I don’t feel fully equipped to teach English (not what my training was in for the last 3 months), it is good for me now to have structure and something to do in the summer when everyone else sort of takes a big break from work. Though none of the classes will continue in August because I think the whole country goes on pushime (“break”).

The alternative school is like a vocational school and is an alternative to the high school. Since students aren’t required to attend high school, they can go to the alternative school and learn a useful skill such as cooking or sewing. The school is part of a larger NGO based in Tirana that is called Useful to Albanian Women. My first week here I got to go to their first graduation which included a fashion show. The students made both traditional Albanian and modern Albanian clothes. This gave me a chance to see the cultural palace (insert your own air quotes since it’s a great rendition of communist architecture), which I’m hoping will be a potential venue for many projects and community events and hopefully provide an opportunity for me to teach some dance classes in the future.

Otherwise it’s been kind of crazy for the election that is coming up on June 28th. My city is definitely majority Democratic which is in support of Sali Berisha (current Prime Minister). The other dominant party is the Socialist party under the leadership of Edi Rama (current mayor of Tirana). It’s kind of typical election hype…both Berisha and Rama have made it to Burrell in the last week. And almost every day there’s a DP for the PD (my abbreviation for “dance party” for the “party democratic”). Everyone always asks what party I support and I don’t support any since I’m supposed to be non-political in the Peace Corps. …though I am considering revising this to “I support anyone who is of the dance party.” But I honestly don’t know enough about Albanian politics anyways to make an informed decision. It’s just frustrating because neither party really has a party platform except “change for Albania” but no other major divisive issues or obvious differences. And both parties blatantly use America to garner support when America doesn’t officially support either party (seriously…American flags are flown alongside the Albanian one and the EU flag). It’s also frustrating when people ask me if I’m a democrat in America and I say yes because here the democrats are more like the Republicans in the U.S. and the socialists more like the American democrats (but people here don’t understand that).

It’s been fun getting to explore the city…which mainly means staking out grocery stores and good coffee spots. Me and my site mate Kristen (who is an English teacher) have been cooking wonderful meals since we’ve been here! We both LOVE to cook and we’ve already had some interesting experiments with food! I’ve also gotten the chance to make chocolate chip cookies, cherry cardamom scones, pesto grilled cheese, and soynut butter and banana sandwiches for my office (they didn’t quite understand the last one…they don’t do bananas on sandwiches here). I’m hoping to also teach the cooking kids at the alternative school how to make various ethnic foods…Mexican, Indian, Thai, etc. in the future.

Time is already flying by and I can only imagine that these 2 years will pass like nothing.

Swearing In and Leaving Host Family

After the busyness of traveling to Tirana and my future site, taking final language exams, and preparing to leave my host family, the last week with my family flew by!! I couldn’t even mention leaving to my host sister Eliza or else she would start to cry. Somehow I ended up volunteering myself to be 1 of 2 people to give a speech in Albanian at our swearing-in ceremony where we officially became volunteers. I haven’t given many speeches in my life…let alone in a language I’ve only been speaking for 3 months. But it ended up being really fun…and hopefully I got some of the humor across to the audience (which included host family members, Peace Corps staff, mayors of various towns, and the U.S. Ambassador). They did laugh at the places that were supposed to be funny…so I guess that’s good! The other guy who spoke actually went to William and Mary as well. Way to represent Tribe Pride!! At some point it will probably be on YouTube (I’ll post the link when it is)…but until then, if you want a copy (in English, of course!) let me know and I’ll send it to you! We also ended up being in the national news that night! …as we were walking back into our favorite bar in Gostime all dressed up in our finest, right as we were walking in the news spot about Peace Corps came on TV. …impeccable timing!

Otherwise, the last week I spent hanging out with the sitemates drinking beers at our favorite spots in Gostime, and spending time with my host family. If any of you come visit I will have to take you to my favorite restaurant in Gostime…the couple that owned it always made grilled vegetables especially for us and it was FABulous! There’s also another favorite guy of ours that we called the “peanut guy.” When we got beers there, he would bring free peanuts on the first round, free cheese on the 2nd round, and various things for the 3rd round including cherries, walnuts, and hard-boiled eggs that were usually an odd greenish color. Just a slight insight into the Albanian hospitality that we’ve received since we’ve been in the country. They LOVE Americans! …which can’t be said very often in other countries in the world.

The 2nd to last night in the village the site mates and I did a “pub crawl” of our favorite lokals in the village. We ended up at Seth’s host family for a little while, and per usual, his parents cooked all of us dinner and we had a dance party to follow! (his family was a trip…3 brothers + Seth to make 4….his host mom would always be jealous to find that I had a sister in America and just girls in the fam. I told her I would take Albi, the youngest brother back to America with me. And I just might…he’s an adorable 12 year old and the best dancer of the bunch!…and considering how much they all love to dance in his family, that’s a feat! …or a feet!) I do have to admit that I certainly won’t miss walking back home around 10 at night in the pitch-black street with scary dogs and large ditches on both sides of the street. However….I will miss Seth to walk me home at night….though he probably won’t miss walking me home!

The very last night I spent with my host family. The day was actually very reminiscent of my first day with my family as they sat in my room and watched me pack up all of my stuff (the very first day they sat and watched as I unpacked all of it). It ended much as I will remember most nights with my host sister Eliza. We ended up taking about an hour walk around the village talking arm-in-arm and upon returning to the house we played cards for about another 2 hours while eating a ridiculous amount of cookies. She is an amazing girl and I will definitely miss her smile and laugh and her amazing ability for charades when I had no idea what she was talking about! I’m excited to return to visit frequently and am still SO blessed that I had such an amazing family!

…on to new adventures in Burrell where I can finally call a place home for the next 2 years!!

Time for the Dipstick (a FABULOUS poop story…not for the weak stomachs)

So the first couple of days that I have been at site in Burrell my site mate Kristen has been staying with me because she doesn’t have an apartment yet. My apartment is a wonderful 5th floor walk-up in a communist block apartment complete with mostly cement floors and a Turkish toilet/shower combo (for those that do not know what a Turk is, it is a squatty potty…or a glorified hole in the floor). Since I’ve been in Albania, I haven’t had a problem with flushing toilet paper down the toilet in any circumstance. At my host family we had a Western toilet that flushed and most other places have Western toilets with power flush (meaning that you just dump a bucket of water to flush everything down…not sure exactly where the “power flush” name came from), Turks that flush, or Turk with a power flush.

So Kristen and I had been using the toilet for about 5 days and noticed that it had started draining a little slow. It’s kind of hard to tell from what…since the shower water drains into the same hole, it looked like there had been remnants of paint and plaster dumped down the toilet hole, and dumping a bucket of water down a hole to get rid of your poop really doesn’t have any “flushing” mechanism. Since neither one of us had spent a significant amount of time with a Turk, we weren’t sure if there was anything else we were supposed to do, or if it was just draining slow (since I’m on the 5th floor), etc.

So my landlord stopped by to check up on things and to bring back my refrigerator that had been broken. He asked if everything was ok, and I asked him if everything looked alright in the bathroom (without specifically mentioning the toilet). He walked into the bathroom to take a look and made sure the water heater was plugged in and the water was turned on, etc. Before I could specifically ask about the toilet, he was already headed towards the door to leave and I couldn’t think fast enough in Albanian to figure out what to ask him for the toilet.

Luckily, he returned after an hour to check to make sure the refrigerator was cooling correctly. This time I made sure to specifically mention that the toilet was really REALLY slow and the water was getting really close to the rim of the hole. I’m not sure if Turks can overflow, but I certainly didn’t want that happening! He took a peek down the hole and started groaning Albanian style (which basically sounds like “oh ba ba” repeatedly, followed by fake spitting sounds), and saying “shume gabim”…meaning “really big mistake!” Apparently, we were not supposed to be putting any toilet paper down the toilet. No one mentioned this to me when I moved in at the beginning and since I had used Turks with a bucket flush before and had no problems putting toilet paper down, I didn’t think anything of it. My landlord went into my extra bedroom where there is a bunch of stuff from the previous renter and found a metal rod that he used as a poop stick. If you don’t know what a poop stick is, you have never lived with my college roommates. It’s a stick used to give your poop a boost to help ease it on down the toilet in case of a big poop and lack of good plumbing combo. However, since I think the hole of my toilet is basically a straight shot down and there’s really no way to get a poop stick that long (there’s no such thing as go-go-gadget poop stick), he started pulling toilet paper out of my toilet with the stick and putting it in a plastic bag.

Now to picture this fully, my landlord is a 65-year-old white-haired Albanian man who is retired and wears the typical Albanian sports jacket with a newsy cap who is squatting over my Turk with a metal rod pulling poopy toilet paper out. I forgot to mention that that morning I had taken a ginormous poop due to 2 nights of Mexican food. I asked him if he wanted me to do it instead, and he said no. So I retreated to the living room with Kristen because there’s nothing more awkward than watching your landlord pull your poop out of your own toilet. We couldn’t help ourselves from giggling uncontrollably (silently, of course) as we heard various noises and splashes coming from the bathroom accompanied by the groans of my landlord and the aroma of poop slowly wafting into the living room.

To make things better, during training in Elbasan our training manager had always given us these brief little check-ups at the end of long days when we were all ready to leave our training site and return to our villages. They were always at inopportune moments and we all hated doing them, but every time she would hand them out she would say “it’s time for the dipstick!” So as my landlord is bringing new meaning to the poop stick, Kristen says “it’s time for the dipstick!” …this phrase now has a new fabulous meaning!

To make things EVEN better, apparently that night after my landlord left (he didn’t fix the situation, but made it worse and there was poopy toilet water sitting in my Turk and we couldn’t use the bathroom at all that night), he called my Albanian counterpart at the bashkia. He told him that there was a big problem, but he couldn’t tell him over the phone and they would have to meet for coffee the next morning. So when I got into the bashkia the next morning, George said that he had heard about my problem from the landlord. He said he thought of me as his little sister and wanted to help me get things figured out and not piss off my landlord. But apparently my landlord had told him that he was pulling things out of the toilet that shouldn’t have been down there (…not sure why poop AND toilet paper don’t belong in a toilet). So nothing like knowing that my landlord and my boss were talking about my poop over coffee. And apparently George told the other girls that work in my office about the situation.

So…everyone at the town hall knows about my big poops and my dummy American sense of putting toilet paper down a toilet. I told George that things like this happen to me all the time. However, he thought I meant that I clog up toilets all the time and he looked shocked that this is what he was going to have to deal with for the next 2 years while I’m here. I clarified though, telling him that what I meant was ridiculous things like this happen to me all the time…as all of you can attest. …and not just to me, but I think to all members of my family.

The toilet got fixed the next day (by a plumber who literally brought this small bag that looked like a purse with one rusty instrument in it that didn’t look very big or powerful and took him 5 minutes). My landlord bought me a trash can to put my toilet paper in…and literally went into my bathroom, sat the trash can next to the Turk, and motioned via charades that after I poop, to throw the toilet paper in the trash can…3 times he repeated it.

For those of you that know my affinity for poop stories, you can only imagine that this cross-cultural poop experience made my day! …only because I wasn’t the one scooping it out of the toilet with a dipstick did I enjoy laughing about it…and will continue to laugh about it for the next 2 years!

Conference in Tirana/Site Visit in Burrell

The week after our community project we all headed to Tirana (capital of Albania) to have our counterpart conference. Our counterparts are Albanians who are assigned to work with us at our host organization. Having not really spent too much time in Tirana since I’ve been in Albania, I was a little disappointed that our conference ended up being at a hotel that was outside the city center. The conference was centered around us getting to know our counterparts and talk about what Peace Corps is and how we fit into our prospective communities. My “official” counterpart couldn’t actually come, so another girl from the tax department at the municipality came. The couple of days were filled with meetings, swimming in the pool, and Albanian dancing…nothing too eventful or exciting except getting to hang out with all of the other volunteers.
After the conference we all headed to our future sites. My site is in the middle of nowhere…it’s literally in a region that even Hoxha (former Communist dictator) must have deemed to be insignificant based on the lack of bunkers in the region (the whole of Albania is studded with concrete bunkers that Hoxha built during Communism in case of an attack/bombing from Western nations…there’s some ridiculous statistic that I think says that for every bunker built, a family of 4 could have been housed). The surrounding area is certainly beautiful and filled with lakes/rivers/gorges and mountains. But it’s a long, winding and BUMPY road that leads to Burrell and not for the weak-stomached. It’s not uncommon on the trip here to see some car pulled over to the side of the road with someone squatting on the side of the road vomiting. And since the current Prime Minister Berisha is completing a road from the city of Durres to the city of Kukes across the northern part of the country into Kosovo, it is unlikely that the roads around us will be fixed since this new road bypasses us by a slight margin. But still…YOU SHOULD COME VISIT ME NO MATTER WHAT THE ROAD CONDITIONS!

My site mate is another volunteer Kristen who is from New Mexico and is teaching English at the high school. We arrived in Burrell and after hearing pretty negative things about the city from both volunteers and Albanians, we were pleasantly surprised by the warm greeting and reception that we received from the people here. And side note—just another example that I am taking everything here with a grain of salt. Albanians sometimes haven’t even traveled that much around the country to give an informed opinion on how a city is…and most people don’t consider a city worth visiting unless it’s on the coast with the Adriatic. Burrell is the major city in one of the poorest regions of the country and we are pretty isolated because of poor road conditions. It’s about 2 hours away from another volunteer and about 3 hours from Tirana. Considering that Albania is about the size of Maryland, it still amazes me that traveling in this country can take up to 10 hours to get from top to bottom.

I ended up staying with one of my colleagues that works at the Bashkia for the few days I was in Burrell. Surprisingly, there are quite a few single women in their late-20s here (a rarity in wedding-crazed Albania). We had some interesting discussions and she certainly wasn’t shy about asking many questions about Americans. We talked a lot about cultural differences, which was great—part of the reason why I’m here. I also met my official counterpart who is head of the Development and Communications department at the Bashkia. He’s an interesting guy who has lived in Germany for a few years, England for about 4 years, met his wife who is Brazilian while living in London, lived in Spain for 2 years, and then came back to Albania to take care of his parents (always the job of the youngest son once the parents get older). His birthday also happens to be the day before mine! He’s a little counter-cultural (clearly, marrying a Brazilian!), or at least can view his culture from a different perspective and loves to joke! I also love his wife!! She works at a center for disadvantaged and Roma children that provides free lunches and teaches a few classes and I already know we’re going to be great friends!

Probably my favorite story from the few days was during one of the many coffees that I had meeting new people in the workplace and around town. I was being introduced to the director of the tax department at the municipality and when he said his name I repeated it back to him to make sure that I had heard it correctly. My other co-workers laughed a little bit, but I just assumed that was because I was butchering the language and mispronounced it so badly that it sounded awful. Later that evening when I was staying with Ilda, my co-worker, she mentioned the situation and asked if I remembered it happening. She said “Rachel…earlier today when you said the name of the man….you called him what happens when a man and a woman have a baby and they’re not married.” You can imagine my shock when I discovered that somehow without even knowing the word beforehand in Albanian, I managed to call my colleague a bastard!! I REALLY had not even heard this word in Shqip, let alone used it!!! So who knew…in trying to repeat a name I managed to say “copille” which is bastard in Albanian! The even funnier part of the story is that apparently the man I called a bastard is the guy known at the bashkia who tells dirty jokes and uses all of the cuss words…so everyone else was laughing that I had called him a name he uses frequently. I guess karma’s a bitch! …he probably never expected to be called a bastard by some American girl he’d just met! …leave it to me!

Community Project Day

So I know I haven’t written in a while, but I will try to update you by the order of events that have happened. A few weeks ago the other volunteers at my site and I did the third part of our community project in our village. We had been playing games with the kids in our village every Sunday at the church as a way of meeting kids and forming relationships. …we spent much time trying to explain Ultimate Frisbee and found out that apparently Albanians LOVE freeze tag! (just for future reference in case any of you ever end up working in youth development in Albania in your near future)

The second part of our project was to teach typing classes at the local high school. We went in 3 days a week and took the kids through a typing course that actually got them in the computer lab and typing on an actual computer (instead of the “keyboarding” class they’d been using out of a textbook). We had been forewarned that it’d be impossible to hold the attention of Albanian students in a classroom, but I think they were so fascinated with actually using a computer that we didn’t have any problems. Our biggest problem was trying to translate random words like “home row” and “space bar” and “index finger” into Albanian. Luckily the teachers at the school were super helpful and helped us the first few classes with the Shqip translations. We were also able to teach the teachers how to use the program since it was in English.

After hearing various good and bad things about working at/with schools in this country, I have to say that our overall experience was great! The director was super supportive and willing to help in any way he could, the teachers were great and would take turns stopping in to make sure that we weren’t having any translation problems, and the students were super focused and really excited to have class with the Americans.

A side note on Albanian schools—students in this country are required to attend the 8-year school [the government actually just changed this law to require that students attend school until the 9th year]. After this students may or may not attend the gymnasium (equivalent of high school in the US). Many of the boys in the country leave after the 8-year school to work in either Greece or Italy (usually in the construction or restaurant industry). And occasionally, girls don’t attend the gymnaz because they stay at home and do housework (though this is VERY rare…though one of the other volunteer’s had a host sister that wasn’t allowed to attend high school). Sometimes the directors of different schools in a village might be of a different political party from each other or the mayor. This causes tension if a school wants to do something and has to get approval from the mayor…or if you’re a naïve volunteer and don’t follow the hierarchy in who to ask to get a project started/completed.

Anyways…long side note…but we luckily didn’t run into any of these problems and our interactions with the schools in our village were great!

So after meeting kids through play days on Sundays, teaching at the high school, and attending school at the 8-year school for our language classes, we knew a TON of kids in our village. So our final community event that we decided to do was a digital photo scavenger hunt around our village that ended in a viewing of the pictures from the day and a dance party! …my former InterVarsity kids out there, I am sure you will be happy to know that the digital photo scavenger hunt we always did with Freshman around William and Mary campus was a success across cultures!! Perhaps I haven’t mentioned it, but people here LOVE photos! They love taking and looking at pictures and one of the first things I did the first day I was here with my host sister was to look at all of her pictures of her and her friends and she of course wanted to see all of mine.

We probably had about 70 kids under the age of 12 show up to participate and about 70 more that were teenagers. However, the teenagers weren’t too interested in participating in a scavenger hunt, so they started the dance party while the rest of us ran around the village taking ridiculous pictures. Some of the highlights included taking pictures while milking a cow, of your team doing wheelbarrow races, jumping in potato sacks, dressed in traditional attire, of the entire team on a concrete bunker, doing a pyramid, doing cartwheels in front of the school, of the entire team in a donkey cart, and of course, someone on the team riding a motorcycle with an umbrella. I ended up on a team with about 10 10-year old boys who wanted to run everywhere. It was kind of ridiculous and all of the older people and parents in the village were wondering what was going on with a bunch of kids running everywhere.

It ended up being a FABulous day and after that weekend I literally couldn’t walk down the streets of Gostime without recognizing every kid that passed me. Good times had by all!