Shootin' Basketballs

April 22, 2006

Earlier this week The Texan, Dave, Steve, Chris, and I met again with the Mayor of Labinot Fushe to discuss our ideas for potential community projects. A friend of Carl’s, the mayor, was also at the meeting to translate for us. We’ve had several meetings over the last two weeks – due in no small part to the fact that these meetings presented the opportunity to bring happy hour to Labinot Fushe – and had narrowed down our ideas to three.

The Texan’s host father is actually Carl’s brother, since he was a little more familiar with Carl, we decided to let The Texan give a brief summary of each of the three ideas, this proved to be short sighted as our poor translator Ervin, (“Air-Veen”), had trouble understanding the Texan slang. Carl was particularly enthusiastic about an idea to refurbish the courtyard in front of the school in Labinot Fushe, an area about half the size of an endzone with a couple of dirt paths cutting through a front lawn of cobble stones. The courtyard is the only kind of outdoor space for students, and feels more like a middle school cafeteria rather than a playground, just a place to loiter around before and after school that is very clearly segregated by gender. Coming and going from Shkolle every day, I get the same anxieties that I did in sixth grade when I walked through the half auditorium half cafeteria “Cafetorium” at Forsythe Middle School, that the whispers between the girls and the snickers amongst the boys probably have something to do with me. Why are thirteen-year-olds so disarming?

The courtyard’s cobblestone surface is in need of repair, right now it looks like a cobblestone street with a lot of pot holes. This was an idea that amongst the three of us we had decided was not feasible. We don’t know where to get the rocks and other materials, we don’t have any sources of funding, with only eight weeks left in Labinot Fushe it seems like time might be an issue, plus, we agreed that refurbishing a cobblestone school yard would include a lot digging and stuff, we’re all more “ideas men.” To our less than pleasant surprise, Carl assured us that we could coordinate with the Director of the Shkolle to get the students to collect rocks – if this guy can get middle school kids to pick up rocks all day, then I want him facilitating negotiations in Iraq – there were people in the village that could provide technical knowledge in how to lay the stones as well as some labor, and the Commune government could cover any funding that was necessary.

So the meeting was a success. We walked out with a clear idea of what our project will be for the next eight weeks, and Carl gave us some leads as to potential resources in the community. My hope of centering our community project around a drive to get the local café to subscribe to DirecTV in time for the NBA playoffs met with little support. Instead I’ll be stuck with the European Champions League soccer playoffs and the World Cup, wheeeeeee! Go Pistons!

April 23, 2006
8:00 a.m.

Get your maps out, on Friday I received my permanent site placement. After our final eight weeks of training I will move to the city of Lezha (Lay-Jsha), and will work for an NGO. The organization’s initiatives include education, poverty reduction, infrastructure improvement, and the environment. The NGO is, I think, the largest in Albania, and a fairly big name internationally, I’m going to withhold the name of the NGO for now, I’ll call it WV. WV’s primary projects in Lezha are currently the reconstruction of several schools, implementation of social programs for local children, mobilization of local parents into a kind of PTO group, and a program to increase the involvement of women in local affairs and raise awareness of the potential of women – I would characterize this last project as an attempt to move a mountain. My site assignment describes my role as a “capacity building” volunteer. I will assist in the implementation of community development initiatives and provide capacity building support to the staff. So I have no idea what any of that means.

Lezha is a city of about 30,000, just inland from the Adriatic Sea on the Northern coast, maybe twenty miles from the border of Montenegro. The literature I have on Lezha is pretty cursory; the place is really old – around 2,500 years – and its biggest claim to fame is that is the site of the tomb of Skanderberg, the national hero of Albania. The Albanian version of Braveheart, Skanderberg’s place in history is due to him having united the disparate clans of Northern Albania, who spent most of their time fighting each other, and focus on fighting the Ottoman invaders. Quite miraculously, the Albanian clans managed to hold the Ottomans at bay for 34 years until 1466 when they were finally forced to surrender, allowing the Ottomans to continue their spread across the lower right hand corner of the Risk board game. Lezha is the site where Skanderberg initially brought together the clan chieftains and convinced them to come together, I think he may have died in Lezha as well.

Aside from the whole Skanderberg thing, I believe there’s an eighteenth century Illyrian castle in town, some nice beaches and fish restaurants in the nearby port city of Shengjin, and a national park with what my guidebook describes as a “large and varied population of seabirds.” I found a few photos of Lezha on-line, it looks like, ….pretty much what the rest of Albania looks like. It seems to me that the name “Skanderberg” offers tremendous marketing opportunities for the city of Lezha. In the last ten minutes I’ve already thought of two possible names for food shops, “SkanderBurger,” and better yet “SkanderBagel.” I say to Lezha, take a page out of Philadelphia’s book, when you’ve got a historical big name associated with your city just roll with it – Philadelphians are probably wondering if I mean Benjamin Franklin or Rocky. Name and rename everything in the city after Skanderberg, create museums around the guy, dig up some kind of anniversary every month to celebrate that you can attach to Skanderberg. Whatever it takes to convince people that your city is not just a poor man’s Boston, or this case I guess I poor man’s Shkodra?

I’m heading off to a nearby village this afternoon, there are rumors of a pick up basketball game in this town on Sundays. It’s been awhile since I’ve shot hoops, but Dave and I are confident we’re better than any Albanian, and we spent yesterday harassing Nancy about how to talk trash in Albanian. I going to drop “i ndyre” all over the place, it means “nasty.”

10:00 p.m.

Back from hoopin’ in Librazhd. The staring in Labinot Fushe had begun to subside in the last week, until today when I strolled through town in basketball shorts, a T-shirt, and sneakers, I felt like I was either naked or wearing a spacesuit.

There was a nice turnout today. Along with Dave and I, three other Americans showed up. We played at an indoor gym at a local school, when we showed up there were a handful of guys awkwardly shooting around with a soccer ball, everyone was very impressed with the basketball that we brought. We anticipated the usual gang of eleven year-old gawkers that tail me just about everywhere I’ve been in this country, but were completely unprepared for the attention that five Americans playing basketball in one place brought. Everyone came out of the woodwork and demanded to play basketball with the Americans – I’m pretty sure we played with every man, woman, and child in Librazhd today. It’s been over four weeks since I really exercised, I walk a lot but it’s not the same, and after four games of basketball I was gassed – then we played what seemed like sixty-seven more games, we could not get a breather all afternoon. We played for about four hours, after the first five games we were ready to wrap things up and head down to a local café, but more people kept appearing eager to run around with us. When we realized that offering the court to other people wasn’t going to work – no one really wants to play basketball – we thought we’d just stop trying to win – actively trying to lose actually – and get booted from the game. Waiting for the Albanians to score eleven points also proved to be futile, and only resulted in one excruciatingly long game. We weren’t going to be able to go anywhere until we played EVERYONE.

As we expected, Albanians seem to be truly dreadful at basketball. It’s a game that no one in the country has ever really played, and that was exactly what it was like to play against these Albanian guys; generally fun, a little too easy, and absolutely maddening when one of their ridiculous shots actually goes in. My favorite opponent of the afternoon was a squat little guy named Orgent – he also had pretty good English and must’ve seen the NBA on T.V., he would say things like “No-Theen but nayt.” Orgent showed up in a mismatched three-piece suit, when he came in the game all he did was lose his jacket and played the whole game in loafers, a vest, and a tie. He shot the ball with two hands, releasing it behind his head, like a soccer player would execute a throw-in. It wasn’t the smoothest shot, most of Orgent’s bullets would ricochet severely off the backboard, rim, or wall and fly back to about mid-court. He wasn’t gun-shy either, as soon as he got the ball he’d get a head steam going, barrel his way down court dribbling the ball at about eye-level, lose track of where he was, get about three feet from the hoop and fire away while everyone else in the vicinity would dive for cover. Truly hazardous

We finally managed to talk people into letting us leave, and just in time, after hour five Dave suggested the following:

Dave: Man, I think we could just make a run for it to the furgon stop.
Ryan: Too risky, we don’t know when those things come. We need a quick and reliable getaway.
Me: (gasping for air) Does anyone have a cigarette?

As I’m writing this I’m remembering that this was a really fun afternoon. I felt like I was suprememly good at basketball today, and the ongoing challenges from the Albanians had nothing to do with a desire to beat Americans at something. I felt like it was out of genuine desire to do something with us – like being a camp counselor when your eighteen, you pick up a stick and start whacking a pine cone and all of a sudden forty kids want to do the same thing. I also have aches in my body that I’ve never had in my twenty-five previous years.

April 25, 2006

Last Saturday instead of the usual morning language class we all gathered in Elbasan for “The Assimilation Station” – which was quickly twisted into the “Imagination Vacation, Assasination Probabtion, Stimulation Inspiration,” and so forth – Language Experience

For the afternoon we were spilt into small groups and were given a list of tasks we had to do around Elbasan, sort of like a scavenger hunt. Groups had to do things like buy groceries, inquire about prices of food and sizes of clothes at the bazaar, ask about movie times, things like that. Every group had an Albanian language teacher with them to bail us out if some merchant got particularly annoyed, but they would only speak to us in Albanian, we were pretty much on our own. After four weeks I felt pretty confident about being able to ask simple questions and navigate a bazaar, but several mitigating factors made for a frustrating afternoon.

To begin with while my simple inquiries seemed to be understood, I was unprepared for the responses, which were nothing like the neat dialogues we’ve been studying in class. “Sa kushton molla?” – how mush does this apple cost – I would say confidently, ready for the stock answer of “nyezet leke” – twenty cents.

“eshte guopa dhbme kupton nyezet e pese, afer erdhe ti kam nuk molle kam ju jibber jabber, jibber, jabber, jibbe, jabber, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” Would be the response.

Buried somewhere in that was a price, I think, but after a monologue like that I was helpless. I would come back with: “A mund te paguaj nje molle?” – can I buy an apple.

“Po, ju vishe leke dhe shkoj ne stilolaps hengra i darke kembe qen katerquind paguaj.”

After another slap in the face like that I was demoralized and resolved that I really didn’t want an apple that bad anyway.

To compound the confusion even further is the whole concept of “old leke” and “new leke.” The Albanian currency, the leke, is easy to convert into dollars, one-hundred leke equals one U.S. dollar. A coffee costs thirty leke (30 cents), a sandwich costs one-hundred leke (one dollar), a very decadent meal might run about five-hundred to six-hundred leke ( five or six dollars). These prices are all in “new leke,” as opposed to “old leke” where the conversion was one-thousand leke equals one U.S. dollar. New leke came into to play sometime in the nineties, when the Albanians revalued their currency. However, while prices were appropriately adjusted, it seems that when quoting a price or talking about how much something costs people still talk about prices in old leke.

For instance, when a guy says that a loaf of bread costs one-thousand leke, it actually costs one-hundred leke. The seller knows it costs one-hundred leke, he doesn’t expect anything more than one-hundred leke, he just says that it costs one-thousand leke, just because. This would be like asking “how much does this beer cost?”

“Forty dollars.”
“Cool, here’s five, keep the change.”
“Thanks, have a good night.”

People just quote prices this way. No one can explain it, its just the way it is. Worse yet, sometimes people will quote prices in new leke when they know they’re talking to a foreigner, but only sometimes. Hardly being able to understand what is said in response to my simple questions about prices, let alone the challenge that mathematical pose, have left me with no other option than to pay for everything with ten-thousand leke bills and hope that the seller is honest and gives me correct change. I really have no idea how much I should be getting back. It would be like only paying with one-hundred dollar bills for packs of gum, shoelaces, pencils, etc.

By the end of the assimilation extravaganza our group had successfully accomplished every task on the list, but language skills hardly had anything to do with it. The universal hand gestures and expressions that we’ve all had to employ in non-English speaking countries were the most effective means of communication, much to the chagrin of our language teachers.

I’m on a roll right now, one last story before I wrap up.

There is one other American from my group who will be placed in Lezha along with me. His name is John, he’s about my age and will be working in health education, John is also Asian, Korean-American to be exact. After four weeks John and I hardly knew each other, but with both of us assigned to the same city for the next two years our solidarity formed quickly last week. As an Asian, John’s experiences over the last four weeks have been what he and I both find to be hilarious. His name isn’t really John, so I think its okay to write about a story that he told me – of course he is probably the only Asian person in Albania. I doubt it will be too hard to trace this back to the Asian twenty-something living in Elbasan, it’s not embarrassing or anything, just amusing.

When John first was dropped off at his host family’s house there apparently were some question as to why instead of an American there would be a “Chinese” person living with them. Not at all unlike my experience, John was helpless in trying to converse with his host family, let alone describe that: one, his parents were Korean; two, he was born and raised in Rochester, New York; and three; he is in fact and American. A translator attempted to convey this to John’s host family, but he’s pretty sure that they didn’t buy it, and have just come to terms that through some mix-up they were sent a Chinese kid rather than an American. He gets daily questions about what life is like in China. He described typical dinner conversations as going something like:

Host family member: What is China like?
John: I’ve actually never been to China, I’m from Rochester, New York.
Another host family member: Can you speak some Chinese for us?
John: I have no idea how to speak Chinese, I’ve lived my whole life in America.
Third host family member: Do you live in The Great Wall of China?
John: Yes, I do actually. I also know karate.
Entire host family: (Stunned silence).

I was rolling on the ground when John told me this story, I had to share, sorry John.