Going to the Capital

May 23, 2006

On Thursday I’ll be traveling to Tirana, the Capital of Albania, for a weekend conference and then will be moving on to Lezha for a week-long site visit in what will be my home after just three more weeks. In Tirana I will also meet my counterpart. Contrary to what the title “counterpart” suggests, this is not some Bizarro Beni, just the guy that will be my supervisor at WV once I start work there. Part of our conference in Tirana includes an anniversary celebration at the United States Embassy. We all have high hopes of this including nice food and drinks, but at the very least I plan on stealing toilet paper, towels, and an ashtray.

For the last eight weeks we’ve heard stories and talked about Tirana the way Fievel and the rest of the mice in “An American Tale” talked about coming to America.

“I’ve heard you can get real hamburgers in Tirana.”
“Hamburgers? Man, I was a talking to a guy who told me about a Chinese take-out place, Mexican food, and a place that has American coffee,…..bottomless cup dude.”
“Doritos, Combos, Pringles…I’m getting light-headed”
“Dark Beer.”
“I’m going to get so fat and drunk in that town.”
“Gjithashtu” – me to – “my friend, gjithashtu.”

That was the conversation Dave and I had last night.

As the Pistons have moved on to the Eastern Conference Finals, I have high hopes of finding some place in the capital to watch basketball – there’s got to be some place where the Embassy Marines watch American sports.

In preparation for meeting with my counterpart I’ve been assigned to transcribe my resume into Shqip (Albanian). All the “action verbs” that I had been coached to pepper my resume with – things like: “consulted, researched, analyzed, networked, oversaw” – have lead to some thorny translation issues. After slogging through this for a few days, I’ve given up on trying to write things like: “Researched and analyzed trends in philanthropy.” My resume has been pared down quite a bit, and don’t think my counterpart is going to be very impressed by the Beni he’ll see on paper. Imagine you were a prospective employer and a resume resembling the following slid across your desk:

Ben

Education:
I went to college

Experience:
I had a job before

Skills:
I can throw a Frisbee

I hope Bizarro Beni speaks English.

May 24, 2006

We had our last Shqip, (Albanian), language class today. Nancy gave each of us large wall maps of Albania, the Texan and I are both map nerds and this was very exciting. After nine weeks of language of class I feel confident in my ability to do things like order food at a restaurant and figure out which bus to take. I can have simple interactions with Albanians, but I’m still pretty helpless once we get past “what’s your name” and “what are you doing.” I tried for about an hour to write something reflective and thoughtful about our struggles and eventual successes with the language, and our whole relationship with Nancy. Instead, I opted to write about a few petty characteristics of Shqip that I find to be peculiar.

In Shqip the words “mengjes, dreke, and darke” mean morning, afternoon, and evening respectively. These words are also used for “breakfast, lunch and dinner,” Albanians have no problem with this word-consolidation, I on the other hand find this unusual. I’ve spent entirely too much time in class trying to impress upon Nancy how weird it sounds in English to say things like :“I wake up in the morning and I eat morning” and “I come home in the dinner in time to eat dinner.” These are things that Albanians say to each other every day.

Whoever is responsible for this language was not one to waste words. Now, I realize that I could probably stand to take a page out of the Shqip brevity book, but the language can seem too efficient. Think of words in English used to express any degree of satisfaction. In spoken Shqip people use “mire” (good) almost exclusively, this covers, “great, nice, awesome, cool, outstanding, alright, etc.,” as well as positive characteristics like “pretty, nice, and fun.” In Albania things are just “mire,” I need some more adjectives in my life. If an Albanian asked me about the movies Shawshank Redemption – love it – and Jerry Maguire – overall positive, though nuanced position – I want to make sure that they don’t get the impression these two are both just “mire” to me. But that’s all I’ve got to work with. What if someone wants me to expound on the Weezer albums Pinkerton and The Green Album!!! These can’t be described with the same word!!!

Moving on to a peculiar aspect that I find endearing. Double negatives are common parlance in Shqip. “Jam i lodhur” means I am tired. Now brace yourself, “NUK jam i PAlodhur” translates directly to I am not without tiredness, or I’m not not tired. Unfortunately, this is understood as someone is, in fact, not tired. I just like double negatives, though the hilarity of saying things like “I don’t not eat rice and beans every night, I’m not not kinda afraid of all the stray dogs in this country,” and “I’m not not licking frogs” is lost on any Albanian.

Last is a minor gripe to be sure. This would be how an adjective or any kind of descriptor comes after a noun. I’ve taken German 1 at least a half-dozen times in middle school through college, I’m pretty sure that this is the way it is in that language, and probably in French, Spanish, Polish, Chinese, and any language but English. But I just can’t wrap my brain around things being called “sandwich ham, water with bottle, book long,” and “aspect annoying.”

That’ll do for tonight, off to Tirana tomorrow.

Schoolyard Rocks

May 14, 2006

Happy Mother’s Day!

The NGO that I’ll be working with in Lezha, also operates in Elbasan, I spent four days this week shadowing another American at the Elbasan office, his name was Nick. Like myself, Nick is a volunteer, he’s been in Albania for just over a year, my role with the NGO in Lezha should be pretty comparable to what Nick’s is with the organization’s office in Elbasan. Each day I accompanied the NGO’s staff on site visits to small surrounding villages, observing community meetings with citizens and local governments and touring completed school rehabilitation, water, and infrastructure projects. Much to my delight, the NGO has a small fleet of the stereotypical international aid organization white LandRovers with the logo on the side. Riding in these trucks, I definitely had the “well-meaning, humanitarian American, who has a cool ride” vibe going.

On Tuesday I tagged along on a site visit the village of Paper (pronounced “Popper”). I was told that Paper was one of the poorest villages in the Elbasan area, this became evident in just the way the kids were dressed, most did not have shoes. On this day the NGO was there to begin work on a fundraising initiative to raise money for the reconstruction of the local elementary school. I don’t know if Albania is what would be considered a Third World Country, it is still Europe, but the conditions of the school in Paper were about as poor as I could imagine. A two-story concrete building that was literally crumbling, 150 or so kids were crammed in the four or five classrooms in the school that were still the slightest bit hospitable. The rest of the rooms were covered in litter and other debris from the disintegrating ceiling, many were under water which has seeped in through the porous walls. The entire second floor was closed off due to the probability that the floor would collapse.

A large part of the fundraising campaign is directed at individual donors from the United States and Western Europe. The most effective mechanism has proven to be “Sponsor a Child” campaigns. We’re all familiar with the brochures and commercials asking for something like twenty dollars a year to sponsor a specific child. In the case of this NGO, children aren’t actually receiving twenty-dollars, the money that is donated is reinvested into schools, road projects, water and sanitation, and other similar projects in communities. On this day we were in Paper to take photographs of the impoverished kids that will be the faces of the donor campaign. I sat and recorded the names and ages of the terrified Kindergarten through fourth grade kids as they filed through for their mug shots.

On to lighter talk.

For the sake of exercise, the Texan and I try to go on two to three “strenuous” short hikes a week, the criteria is that we want to be sweaty and tired when we’re done. The idea of walking, let along something as radical as jogging, just for the sake of exercise is a foreign concept. Without fail, any Albanian that we bump into on our hikes is very interested to know what exactly we are doing and where we’re going. I’ll transcribe a typical conversation into English.

“Hey, Americans, what are you two doing? You look tired.”
“Yes, we are Americans, we are out walking today.”
“Yes, I can see that, but where are you going? This is a long road, here comes a furgon, let me flag it down for you.”
“No thankyou. We are just walking today.”
“Yes, but why? Do you live in the village down there?”
“No, we live in Labinot Fushe.”
“Well, I hate to break it to you, but Labinot Fushe is back the other way. You poor Americans, you’ve been walking the wrong direction. Let me call my brother-in-law, he’ll give you a ride back to Labinot Fushe.”
“No thankyou. We like very much to walk this way, then we will return to Labinot Fushe.”
“Why?”

The conversation inevitably leads to this question; why exactly are we out walking for no good reason, only to turn around and return from where we started. Further complicating the matter is that there doesn’t seem to be verb in Albanian for “exercise” or “work-out.” The words “ushtrime, detyra,” and “stervitje” all mean exercise in the sense of “Please complete exercise four in the workbook for homework.” There are words for “fitness,” and “athletic” and things like that, but nothing really useful to describe why you may be out hiking just for the sake of hiking.

The Texan and I have had mixed success with saying “we are walking, and we like to be healthy/fit/athletic/etc.” Sometimes this is accepted, but usually this leads to a response like:

“Well then why on Earth are you out here walking!? This isn’t good for your health, my grandmother has a terrible back because she walked around too much. Please, come to my house and my wife will make you lunch. This will make you healthy.”

Granted, the people that we run into on our hikes are usually traversing the same trail as we are with a load of firewood, hay, babies, chickens, and a gomar, (donkey), loaded with stuff. Walking – or what we call hiking, another verb that doesn’t exist in Albanian – is not a leisure activity. Albanians go on an “ekskursion ne kembe,” – literally an “excursion by foot” – when they have to carry something from one place to another. These are not fun trips.

Thus far the Texan and I have been able to negotiate our way out of any offers for rides – by car or gomar – or invitations for lunch.

May 17, 2006

I had already written the post mortem for our community project. Four weeks ago, after a meeting with the Krjetar (mayor) of Labinot Fushe, we had decided that we would repair the cobblestone courtyard in front of the village school. Since that initial meeting nothing had happened, not in the way of planning, gathering materials, recruiting people to help, nothing. Myself, the Texan, Dave, Chris, and Kevin would occasionally discuss how exactly this was going to happen, but would come around to the same “yeah, we’ll have to get to that tomorrow” resolution.

On Monday we cornered the Drejtor, (director), of the School at the local café, and with the help of Nancy we talked through the project and how we could try to get this thing to happen in the next week. A round little guy with gray hair and a Spartacus chin cleft, the Drejtor began by explaining that he could get the students to gather rocks anytime, but he was waiting for us to show up with the tools and cement that the Krjetar had said he would provide. We replied that we thought the kids were going to get the rocks first, and asked if he and the mayor had met personally about this project. “We don’t have to meet,” Nancy translated, “we already know what we need to do, I just need you to show up with the supplies and the students will go get the rocks.

As we were on the midst of our chat the Krjetar pulled into town with my host Father, Steve, they were riding in Steve’s furgon. The Texan ran out of the café, corralled Steve and the Krjetar and herded them into the café to join our meeting with the Drejtor. The two of them sat across from each other, with Nancy at the head of the table between them. Nancy began: “Projekt ne shkolle me vullnetaret Amerikan…”

She was cut off abruptly by the Drejtor. This began a rapid fire exchange between him and the Krjetar. They went back and forth for about ten minutes, constantly interrupting, and the level and intensity of their voices raising. Nancy seemed to be moderating the discussion to some degree, we had no chance of following the discussion, our heads just moved back forth following the tennis match in front of us.

Steve sat at the end of the table near me, he pulled out his new cell phone and held it out to me for approval. Steve’s new phone is very small, and seems rather petite for man of Steve’s broadness. The delicate phone in his hands reminded me of an SNL skit with Will Ferrel where he drives around in a motorized cart and has some microscopic cell phone. I gave Steve a “shume mire” and a thumbs-up on the new toy.

The meeting came to a close. The five of us were tired from just trying to follow the discourse. Nancy summarized the terms that were agreed upon: tomorrow the Drejtor was going to get the male students at the school to collect rocks; the Krjetar had committed to bring over tools and cement from the Commune Office; and, there would be a couple of eighth grade boys help us with the labor. I was skeptical about the prospect of the students collecting rocks – they like to throw them, but collecting and sorting them I couldn’t envision – and the plan of having eighth grade boys help with the labor seemed particularly dubious. I’m sure middle school-aged boys can’t operate something as sophisticated as a wheelbarrow, and am also certain that a shovel in their hands would just be hazardous.

Two days after our talk with the Drejtor, to our general astonishment, there were rocks piled high in the schoolyard, tools and cement had arrived, and work commenced on the project. After language class we gathered in the schoolyard, the Drejtor rounded up a few guys that looked to be about fourteen, pointed at the spots he wanted to get filled in with new rocks, and then had to leave town for the day to get to a “funeral.” We had two wooden wheelbarrows, a pick axe, a couple hammers like the one that Andy Dufresne used to tunnel out of Shawshank, a railroad tie – and I was worried about shovels in the hands of fourteen-year-olds! – and two shovels that seemed a lot flatter than I remember shovels being, they were more like big spatulas.

The five of us were left to coordinate the project with the students that wanted to help. We started out with a labor force of what seemed like seventy kids. It was chaos, but I loved their enthusiasm, with only five tools and a railroad tie to go around the kids just started digging away and moving rocks by hand. Cement was poured into the sections we excavated and the rocks were placed and tapped down one-by-one. After about five minutes of moving rocks from one pile to another most of the kids moved on to the much more entertaining activity of playing keep away from Dave with the frisbee they stole from his bag. The project came to resemble the union jobs I have seen around Philadelphia, with the four of us – Dave was chasing frisbee thieves all over the village – and two other kids who remained committed to the task working, and about fifteen to twenty “supervisors.”

The work continued to move along, in two hours we were out of cement and had picked through the good rocks, bringing the project to a close. While we lost most of our workers early on, the many elementary-aged spectators did offer constant advice. I had exchanges along the lines of the following with about nine different kids, with approximate English translation.

Kid: Hey Beni, here’s a really nice looking big rock. You guys should use this one.
Me: You’re right, can you put that in the wheelbarrow, how about help us carry these over there?
Kid: Oh, no I can’t.
Me: Why not?
Kid: Hey look! I’m going to go play with that Frisbee!

My favorite was a little guy named Andi. He’s probably ten or eleven and part of the usual gang of kids that always seem to be hanging around whenever we walk through town. Andi comes up and talks to us just like all the other kids, but not in the same admirative way that most young kids do, his is obviously a mocking tone. On this day he was a particular menace. He would do things like come sprinting right up to the edge of the wet concrete, we would all be waving our arms, pleading with Andy not to run across the concrete, and would stop about a centimeter short, and then double-over in laughter. I asked him several times, “Andy, pse ti nuk punon?” – Andi, why aren’t you working – he would motion apologetically at a small scrape on his arm, as if to say: “oh, you know I would, but I’ve got this scrape on my arm, and I’m just not physically up to it.” He would then snatch Dave’s frisbee and scurry up a tree faster than I think a squirrel could. Hurt arm my ass.

Just as we finished the job the kids were called back for after school activities. We realized that had we waited a couple of hours, the kids would have cleared out, we had decided to do this over the two hours in the afternoon when the kids had a break and were loitering around, and able to harass us. I didn’t mind all the spectators, some pitched in a little bit. Dave on the other hand described the atmosphere we had worked in, with a hundred or so fourth through eighth grade Albanian boys running around with his frisbee, as “Hobbesian.” I don’t know what that’s supposed to mean, I called Dave on it, guessing he had just heard it once and wanted to flash his vocabulary.

“It’s like, when something, or a situation, is…chaotic,….no order, ….and ahh,” Dave trailed off. “I don’t know, those kids are just crazy, and they stole my Frisbee, I call that Hobbesian.”

I guess.

May 18, 2006

It seems the world of Detroit sports has been turned on its head. Today at the internet café I let out a fairly loud “ohh, what the f----” when I checked up on the Pistons only to find out that, after winning the first two games of their series with Cleveland, they have lost three games in a row and will face elimination from the playoffs tomorrow. This prompted a few heads to turn my way. I attracted yet more attention when I exclaimed: “NO F----ING WAY?!!” after seeing that, one month into the season, the Detroit Tigers possessed the best record in baseball. Most eyes in the café were now one me. In an effort to take my vibe down from “loud, obnoxious American” to “just excited about the Tigers,” I attempted to show the girl sitting next to me that I was just looking at the standings of American baseball teams. I was met with a vacant stare.

May 20, 2006

Unable to find a way to watch the Pistons last night - or this morning as the case would have been - I made a bee line for the internet cafe today. Big sense of relief today to find out that they came away with the game six win.

A Meeting with Merlin

May 4, 2006

It’s 9:00 p.m.; the power has been out for about five hours. This is a fact of life in Albania, nowhere is there electricity for twenty-four hours a day. I don’t know why, but the Elbasan area in particular suffers from lack of electricity, the city has the capacity to provide electricity for only about eight hours a day. During the better part of the daytime there is no power, surprisingly, it’s not that disruptive of daily life. People simply open their windows to the daylight, most businesses have independent generators, and things like traffic lights aren’t really obeyed anyway. I had not even noticed the lack of electricity during the day until Nancy explained to me last week why all these generators were running all day. My experience over the last six weeks has been that the power reliably kicks in around 6:00 p.m., this is the first time we’ve been without electricity this late into the evening.

Right now the light of my laptop is all I’ve got in the house. I had dinner by candlelight, very romantic indeed, and had no idea what I was eating – not for the usual reason of not being able to identify what was in the stew, tonight was because I literally could not see what was in the bowl. I just went to the bathroom, I’m about sixty-percent sure I hit the Turkish toilet.

My candle’s getting down to the wick, I guess it’s almost bedtime. Real quick, I heard a funny story from the other Asian person in our group, a girl named Lisa. Lisa, a Vietnamese-American, has had an experience similar to John’s, general confusion as to why she insists on calling herself an American. In the village that she is living in she is simply known as “Mulan,” probably the only depiction of Asian people that Albanians are familiar with. Lisa isn’t sure if the people in her village call her this in a joking way, or if they’ve decided that she, clearly, must be The Mulan of Disney cartoon fame.

My cell phone died about an hour ago. I hope I’m able to charge it in time for the weekly Sunday call from Mom and Dad.

May 7, 2006

As we try to get things in order for our school-yard repair project we’ve been trying to meet with people that we’ve picked out as the “mover-and-shakers” of Labinot Fushe – the school director, the mayor, teachers, anyone with a wheelbarrow or tools – and enlist their help. It seems to be a roundly popular idea with people, but we haven’t gotten the “yeah I can help, I’ll be there tomorrow with forty men, tools, cement, rocks, and a blueprint for the project” response that we’ve been hoping for. In a conversation with my host father, Steve, last week he mentioned someone in the village called the “Kryeplaku,” and that we should talk to him about our project. I looked up “Kryeplaku” in my dictionary, the translation was rather mysterious, the word means “Village Elder.”

It took a couple of days of asking around about the Kryeplaku before word got back to him that the Americans wanted to talk to him. He showed up last Friday at the café when we were having our usual afternoon coffee. At first we had no idea who this Albanian guy was that sidled up to our table, introduced himself, and looked at us expectantly – this type of thing does happen nearly everyday. Thankfully, Nancy was with us and introduced the stranger as the Kryeplaku. The five of us released a collective “Ahhhhohhhh” as the light bulbs switched on.

We talked to the Village Elder – a much more interesting title than “alderman,” I think I’ll call him Merlin – for about an hour, mostly about what exactly he is, and briefly about our school-yard project. Disappointingly, Merlin isn’t some kind of oracle or yoda figure that the townspeople come to for advice or approval as the name “village elder” implies, and as I had a hoped he would be. He’s actually just an alderman of sorts, he hears issues from people and brings them to the mayor and the commune council on their behalf, BORING. Obi-Wan Kenobi also wasn’t that old, probably in his forties. He was a big guy, full head of black hair, and the standard kind of Greek/Southern Italian look to him – which I guess is really the Albanian look.

The Great Owl – Secret of Nimh anyone? – liked our project plan –We also learned that he has a daughter living in the United States. At first when I asked where she lived Gandalf replied that it was a “secret.” None of us were sure what this meant, – I figured she must be in the country illegally – after some prying the Wizard revealed that his daughter lived in Atlantic City. He had been there himself, “Atlantic City, shume bukur, po” – very beautiful, yes he offered. I’ve been to Atlantic city, there are a lot of phrases I’d use to describe the place, “shume bukur” is not one of them. Apparently under a spell cast be the Witchdoctor, we nodded and declared in agreement that Atlantic City was, indeed, “shume, shume, bukur.”

“Wow, I must go this Atlantic City,” Nancy said after our meeting with Nastradamus.
“Actually, what I meant by ‘shume bukur’ was ‘sewer-like,’” I said.
“It’s on the coast, there are some beaches that are ok, but it’s really dirty, and unless you gamble there’s not much to do there,” Chris added.
“This place, it sounds like Albania,” Nancy deadpanned.

Ba-doom-ching Nancy!

May 8, 2006

Last Saturday we gathered at the Ministry of Culture Building in the nearby village of Peqin for Culture Day. The Mayor of Peqin invited us to attend the event, which was being held in recognition of “Heroes Day” in Albania, the equivalent of Memorial Day. We filed into an auditorium – in which the seats offered slightly less leg room than the Dumbo ride at Disney World – along with a sizeable crowd of townsfolk for a morning of traditional Albanian music and LOTS of circle dancing. Many of our language teachers were on hand, decked out in dresses and gowns that I have a hard time describing, but if you saw the outfits you would immediately associate them with the Balkans. Lots of fabric, simple, bright colors, kind of heavy-looking, attractive, but not in a light and graceful way. That probably doesn’t help.

The dancers were backed up by the five-piece house band, playing instruments that looked like – but were all called something completely different – a fiddle, a rounder version of a guitar, a recorder, a giant tambourine, and an accordion. The men wore pirate shirts, small red-wool vests, and baggy pants that were tight around the ankles, kind of Riverdance looking but not as shiny. The Music was also hard to give a good explanation of, but when I heard it, it definitely sounded Albanian. The band’s set was one ninety-minute song. Three different guys came out and yodeled along with the music, while the dancers performed an endless circle dance, which I thought looked like a combination of belly-dancing, the hokey pokey, and the robot, in a kind of circular conga line. As I feared the circle dancing turned into a forced participatory activity for all the Americans in attendance.

My favorite musical performer was a guy who played a very small version of a recorder, about the size of kazoo, purely because the musician weighed about three-hundred pounds. When the big guy stepped up to the mic I was expecting him to belt out another yodel song. Instead he pulled out his little recorder, it looked like a normal-sized person playing a toothpick. This little thing could play about three or four notes, and it was incredibly loud. It sounded like someone was playing the bagpipes about a foot away from me. I think it’s a Daffy Duck and Marvin the Martian cartoon where Daffy gets his hands on some huge laser-gun and Marvin just has this little pea-shooter, but it’s really powerful and blows the feathers off of Daffy. That’s what this little kazoo/recorder thing made me think of.

After the song and dance we were ushered through different tables that had been set-up throughout the Ministry of Culture Building, each with a different cultural theme; literature, history, arts and crafts, food, and so on. The tables were all manned by townspeople who were very eager to show off their wares, and it all was very cool. I particularly enjoyed the table with backgammon and dominoes – similar to marbles, before coming here I didn’t know that there was actually a game you played with dominoes. They’re actually not just for lining up and knocking over. I played with a grizzled old guy who probably played a lot of dominoes back when television, music, books, magazines, pictures, pencils, and paper weren’t allowed. He took it easy on me the first game as I figured out the game, and then schooled me as any good domino-shark would.

The Food table was another big hit. Another American, who will remain nameless, asked what I thought was particularly tasty. “Ooo, I’d have to say that kind of lemony custard thing,” I replied.

“Oh, really? I thought that was just okay.”
“What did you like?”
“Oh, I don’t know. To be honest I think the food is better back in the U.S.”

1) We’re at Culture Day; 2) The food is good; 3) I almost decked this guy. And as I’m writing this I’ve decided I don’t want to protect his anonymity. Eric Anthony. There, I feel better now.

May 9, 2006

There’s an office supply and computer store in Elbasan with the regrettable name “Hard and Soft.” I think they’re trying to emphasize that they sell computer hardware and software, and I’m sure it’s only my American friends and I that snicker whenever we walk by the place, but still. Maybe the Mormon missionaries around town share our middle-school sense of humor, but I doubt it.

So, I realized the other day that Hard and Soft had a Visa / MasterCard sticker in their window. This was exciting, I could now purchase the prohibitively expensive D batteries I’ve needed for my radio, and have my financial manager – my Dad – back in the U.S. arrange for payment. In nearly seven weeks this was the only store, restaurant, hotel, furgon, or little girl selling apples that I had seen that would accept a credit card. Even though Hard and Soft would only allow me to spend beyond of my “walk-around stipend” – which literally provides enough money to walk around, and not much else – at an office supply store, I was looking forward to splurging on pens, notebooks, binders, watercolor paints, and of course batteries.

Dave and I stopped in Hard and Soft last Sunday. The D batteries cost three hundred leke for two batteries, only about three U.S. dollars, but still about three times what the gypsies sell them for at the bazaar, and about double what I pay for lunch everyday. I filled my basket with twelve D batteries, nearly all that were on the shelf, and walked up to pay. The woman behind the register spoke a little bit of English. As has been the case in every situation I’ve been in with an Albanian that speaks just some English, rather than talk to each other in either English or Albanian, we play a game of chicken to see how far the other can get in their respective broken second language.

“Miredita, Une kam batteries. A mund te bleu me credit card?” – Good day, I have batteries, can I buy with credit card? I asked.
“Yes, always, you can even pay for things with cards of credit at here.”
“Mire, une kam dymbedhjete batteries. Sa kushton?” – Good, I have twelve batteries. How much?
“Of course, because I will add the price.” She added up the price of the batteries, confirming that each set of two did in fact cost three hundred leke. “The whole price is even one, eight, zero, zero leke. I can even take your credit card.”
“Mire.”

The transaction began to break down when she tried to run my credit card through their machine. She claimed that the machine was “not having ability to like the card.” I wasn’t entirely sure that my credit card was still active, I thought I had it squared away when I left the U.S. seven weeks ago, but I wasn’t sure and its not like I’ve had the bills sent to Albania. She handed me back my card while I had terrible thoughts of my credit rating having been ruined because of some unpaid thirteen-dollar bar tab at Arbor Brewing Company from the night before I left the country.

Dave was fairly certain that the cashier had put the card through the machine backwards, or it wasn’t turned on, or something that was not my fault.

“Yo, yo. A mund te pagoni me credit card tjeter, te lutem?” – No,no. Can you try to pay with the credit card another, please? Dave asked the cashier.
“Yes, I have tried twice, I will try even three times.” She ran my card through again, this time Dave was certain that the magnetic strip was on the wrong side.
“Yo, yo. Ju keni perdoroni nuk mire” – No, no. You have used not good.
“What are you mean?”
“Ahh, credit card, magnetic strip, backwards, turn around, kupton?” Dave mimed out the action of turning the card over. Unfortunately, the words “magnetic strip, backwards, and turn around” had left our poor saleswoman looking very scared. She replied with a slur of extremely fast Albanian, leaving us with our heads hanging and staring helplessly at the coveted D batteries I would clearly not be able to buy.

On the way home we acknowledged that Hard and Soft may have won this battle, but the war for D batteries was not over, and we would return.

May Day

April 30, 2006

I got back from a trip to Fier and Berat today. We headed South to Fier on Saturday morning, from there we rode about another forty minutes to Berat, spent the afternoon there, and then headed back to Fier to spend the night there with an American who lives in Fier – pronounced “fear,” our friend “lives in fear.” I was the only one that found this amusing. It was a long day, but a nice trip, made all the better by the pasta salad and barbecue chicken that our host made for dinner. The chicken was just boiled and then tossed around with some sauce, and pasta salad is something that I really don’t even like that much, but just a couple of different flavors made the meal quite extravagant.

Berat is another extremely old city, inhabited for the last four thousand years, and was declared a “museum city” by the government in the 1970’s. As a result the historic town center was spared from the communist urban planning and architecture that seem to characterize most cities in Albania. The big attraction in town is the citadel, sitting atop a severely steep hill in the center of town. The white brick tile-roofed houses that cling to the hillside leading up to the citadel is a pretty well-known image associated with Albania.

There aren’t any clear directions or explanations when you visit sites like the citadel in Albania, you just wander around, if a door’s open you go through it, you can climb all over things, and there’s usually a handful of chunees hanging around. Chunee is word for “boy,” but in a different, more condescending way than the other word for boy, “djale.” We’ve attached the term chunee to a specific kind of boy that the country seemed to be rife with. These would be the boys between the ages of twelve and seventeen, who spend their time loitering around, spitting sunflower seeds, and heckling people that walk by the same way people heckle opposing pitchers warming up in the bullpen. In appearance, chunnees closely resemble the “Jets” and the “Sharks” from “West Side Story,” but are quite a bit less threatening.

I believe that the citadel as it looks today – very fortified and castle-like, kind of like Fort Mackinac on Mackinac Island – was completed in the 1400s, when Berat was a mostly Muslim town and Christians lived within the citadel walls. The citadel was quite a complex, it was really more like a small village, with several churches and homes, some of which people still live in. I walked through one open door and found myself standing in a kitchen with a gyshe, (grandmother), eating lunch.

The Texan and I ran into a group of boys playing soccer, using some ancient ruin as a goal – I’m not going to use the pejorative “chunee” to describe these kids. They were pretty young and didn’t have the fifteen year-old attitude that typifies chunees. We were quickly corralled by our new tour guides and led all over the citadel. They chattered away at us in Alabanian and a little bit of broken English, we responded with our usual combination of broken Shqip, (Albanian), and English – Shqiplish. The boys were very insistent in leading us to a particular corner of the citadel. We rounded a corner and the boys motioned towards a parked Mercedes, we could see two guys sitting in the front seat smoking. The Texan and I stood there for a second with the boys wondering why exactly, when were walking around this ancient citadel/castle, we were interested in these two guys having a cigarette break, we’ve seen this a few times in the last five weeks.

One of the boys tapped on the drivers side window of the car, startling the guys inside, they talked for a second, the boy motioning at the Texan and I. The two men stepped from the car, revealing their attire, bright red and green Hugh Hefner-esqe satin robes. They both wore absurd toupees, one guy tried to straighten his stick-on mustache.

“Miredita,” (good day), “Italian, German?” one guy asked raising his eyebrows at us.
“Yo, jemi American,” I replied.
“Fine, I have little English, no problem.”

The two Sears Catalogue robe models took a few steps from their car, briefly discussed something with each other, and began the show.

“Here in these citadel we may be protected and our religion grow,” said the guy in the green robe gesturing toward the perimeter of the citadel.
“Yes, in this year we must be safe from the persecution from the muslims,” red robe replied. I was impressed with the word “persecution.”
“Lets have a walks around and tour this citadel.”
“Fine.”

And the Texan and I were ushered back through all the homes and churches that we had already seen, this time accompanied by two men in satin robes, toupees, and fake facial hair, giving what seemed like a fairly revisionist history of Christianity and Islam in this city during the Ottoman Empire. After the little introduction we figured that these guys were sort of historical re-enactors – not unlike the dozens of Ben Franklins that wander around Philadelphia harassing people – except it was entirely unclear as to who they were supposed to be, with the robes we figured monks or some equivalent, but that wouldn’t explain the toupees or fake mustache. So they were really neither historical nor portraying anyone in particular or re-enacting anything. The Texan and I stuck with Father Green Robe and Father Red Robe for the comic relief, and were even prepared to pony up the few hundred leke that we thought the “tour” would cost. Surprisingly, we weren’t hit with a fee for something we never intended to buy – which does happen to me daily. Best show I’ve seen in awhile.

May 2, 2006

Just some rambling recaps of the last couple of days.

My host uncle’s wife, Mira, walked in on me in the shower yesterday. This was really not her fault at all. My strategy for conserving the hot water for the duration of my dush has been to turn off the water while I’m lathering up. I didn’t have the door locked, and without the water running Mira just walked in. I’m not really embarrassed, but Mira ran out of there completely mortified, I’ll probably never see her again. Just another chapter in the awkward relationship I have with my host family.

Yesterday was also May 1st, May Day. I had known that we would have the day off from language class and other training, but I had no idea what May Day was, or what it was recognizing precisely. I have since learned that it has something to do with Communism, I don’t know what exactly, but I think it’s on this day that big military parades have traditionally been held. We’ve all the seen the newsreels of Soviet, Chinese, and North Korean troops marching through the public square de jour in perfect formation, complete with tanks, jets, warheads, and thousands of people obediently observing. My reaction to pictures of these parades has always been: “wow, they are really good at marching in a perfect formation. It’s a good thing we fought the British and not these guys in 1776.” I think that’s what May Day is.

With communism fifteen years in Albania’s past, May Day has been kept around to provide a free afternoon for people to head to town to see and be seen. I met up with a handful of other Americans for lunch, after which we settled into a café in a park in Elbasan and enjoyed a few frosty beverages. This particular park includes a bumper car rink, very similar to the bumper cars that are a part of every traveling carnival. The rink in Elbasan is popular, and on May Day in particular, there was a big crowd of people lined up, and plenty of heckling chunees to go along. Tragically, the whole concept of bumper cars seems to be largely lost on Albanians. The bumper cars are loaded up with three or four to a car, the Shakira soundtrack gets blasting, and the vehicles are turned loose. However, in anticlimactic fashion, people spend their ten minutes behind the wheel just driving around in circles. They make a concerted effort to avoid bumping, the thrill of wheeling around a twenty square-foot rink to the sounds of euro pop is, apparently, all people are after. We watched the “bumper” cars for at least an hour and saw not a single collision. After having now gotten over the initial shock and awe at how people drive cars in Albania, this was truly shocking.

Last word for today. I now have a decent enough handle on my shqip, (Albanian), and am able to talk about what I’m doing, what I have done, and what I will do in the future. This also includes the ability to say to a kamarier, (waiter), things like: “I will have the rice with meat; how much does the salad cost; do you have soup,” and so on. However, a frustrating pattern is taking shape. When I order something – in a way that is admittingly akin to the way a four year-old would speak to an adult, but simple and clear nonetheless – my request only prompts confusion.

“Une pelquej supe me pule te lutem,” – I’ would like the chicken soup please – I’ll say. The kamarier stares back at me with the puzzled, helpless expression I give to most Albanians when they speak to me. I repeat myself, and still no acknowledgement of understanding. The kamarier will look to our language teacher, or some other person with us who has already established themselves as being able to speak Albanian, with an expression that says “bail me out please.” They’ll repeat what I ordered verbatim, and then it all becomes clear, it just needed to come from someone else’s lips. I’m sure my shqip is not easy to understand, but when I’m just saying “sallate” – can anyone guess what that is – I feel like the request can be grasped. As I’ve gained what I thought was new independence with the language, this has become especially frustrating.

I didn’t sit down tonight with the intention to bitch and moan for 800 words. Maybe half way through my sixth week in Albania the honeymoon has ended and I’m beginning to get annoyed by little things that, at first, were kind of novel and quaint, and I could just chalk up to being in a very foreign country. But, then again, my biggest grievances are the lack of understanding of my broken Shqip, and the mis-use – or non-use – of bumper cars. I’m sure this pales next to the trauma that Mira went through yesterday.

May 3, 2006

In an attempt to stretch my few remaining leke until Friday, payday, I returned to my host family’s shtepi this afternoon for lunch. I enjoyed a nice green salad, rice soup, and some yogurt while watching the same Italian soap opera that I’ve now seen a handful of times and am beginning to pick up on the plotlines. Frank, my host father’s brother, popped his head in for a second. We chatted just briefly, Frank had a bag packed and was obviously waiting for a ride to stop by the house.

“Mire Beni. Mbaron shkolle sot?” – Hi Beni. Finished with school today?
“Po, pak shkolle sot” – Yes, short school today.
“Mire. A po ben mbadite?” – Good, what are you doing later today?
“Do te lexoj liber, bej pak dyterat, pastaj, do te takoj shoku im ne local. Si jeni? A po ben?” – I’ll read a little bit, do a little homework, then meet my friends at the Lokal. How are you? What are you doing?
“Do te shkoj ne Greqi per punon.”

I sat silent for a second trying to dissect the last thing that Frank had said to me. I had gotten through “I will go to ….” when he gave me a quick “mirepafshim,” kissed his wife and one year-old son, and was out the door. From the living room window I saw Frank climb into a furgon driven by my host father.

Frank’s wife scooped up the baby and walked quickly to her room, closing the door behind her. Grandpa was the next to come into the room. “Ku eshte po shkoj Frank?” – Where is Frank going? I asked.

“Ne Greqi.”

We went back and forth for a few minutes trying to come to an understanding as what “Greqi” was. Grandpa left the room and came back with a travel brochure for Greece, mystery solved. “Pse ka shkuar ne Greqi?” – Why has he gone to Greece?

“Punon” – Work.
“Frank do te punoje ne Greqi?” – Frank will work in Greece?
“Po.”
“Sa gjate? Kush do te largohet ?” – How long? When will he return?”

I didn’t understand the response to my last question. I didn’t catch a number, or the words for “days,” “months,” or “years.” Grandpa repeated his response a couple of times, I think he may have been saying something like: “I don’t know, however long it takes, maybe soon maybe later.” I won’t attempt to transcribe the monologue that followed from Grandpa, but I’m fairly confident that I caught the just of it: “there’s very little work in Albania; it’s hard to find a job, especially in a small village like Labinot Fushe; there’s much more work in Greece, Italy, England, Germany, France, and America; Frank has to leave to Greece to make money.”

The whole story is not one that I haven’t heard or read about before. This was not some “aha, people actually cross borders and leave behind families because of lack of work” moment of clarity for me. But I saw the departure and heard the justification first hand.

In six weeks I have not felt a flicker of resentment from my host family. I can rely on our interactions to be socially uncomfortable, but not because I’m American, and I have stuff like a camera and a computer, and I filter my water, and I have three pairs of shoes. But, after telling Frank fifteen minutes earlier: “oh yeah, just a few hours of school today, I’m having a nice day, I’m just watching this soap opera, I’m going to meet my friends for happy hour later on, oh, and by the way the food your grieving wife just brought me for lunch, shume mire,” smiling like an idiot the whole time, I feel a small tinge of, not so much guilt, more naiveté.