Halloween: The Good, the Bad, the Terrifying

The last weekend in October, Peace Corps hosted a Language Refresher conference for Group 13. We all returned to our old stomping grounds, Elbasan and her villages, for a weekend of grammar, japrak (stuffed grape leaves), and talent shows. Yes, we revisited (in a hotel disco) that ever-popular third grade form of exalting our respective skills. Bring on the disco ball, stand-up, and impromptu jam sessions. Because (we like to think) we are grown-ups, humiliation was absent; appreciation was great. One of my friends came up with the idea of putting together a Peace Corps Albania version of the News from Lake Wobegon. Four of us teachers valiantly performed with tinkling piano music, red-cheeked sound effects, and a Star Spangled Banner-playing kazoo. The script is posted in the next blog entry for your reading pleasure. I also spent a night with my host family – all members of which, I am pleased to report, are hale, hearty, and whole. I left home with oranges and three kinds of jam.

After the conference we all retired in typically haphazard fashion to a southern city called Berat. There the two extremely accommodating volunteers in-residence hosted us, plus Group 12, for a Halloween celebration of excess and ironic costumes. Some were constructed on the bus. There was an Albanian bunker, the “before” and “after” of Albanian marriage, Skanderbeg, and a cupcake. It was, in summary, an excellent time.

Immediately following that weekend, I threw a Halloween party for 40 over-charged seventh grade students. My counterpart and I decided that Halloween, festa e frikshme, merited an after-school party for the combined seventh grade classes. We scheduled the event about a month beforehand. Plenty of time to whip our students into a frenzy of costume brainstorming and apple-bobbing anticipation. We planned careful explanations of costumes and trick-or-treating, completely forgetting Carnivale. Our students knew exactly what was what and put tremendous effort into their chosen alternative identities.  We clearly are blessed with some under-the-radar artists in the seventh grade.  One student come as "a town crazy", totally in character and totally brilliant. It wasn’t p.c., but it was marvelous. 

All we really had to discuss in prep sessions were jack-o’-lanterns… with considerable historical background to make some sense out of a puzzling and otherwise seemingly foolish tradition. I’d never really meditated before on exactly why I liked carving faces into orange squashes and then sticking lights into their guts – or why I had been taught to do so. It took a classroom full of Albanian adolescents with bewildered faces to impress this failing upon me.

Through a series of slightly unfortunate circumstances, I ended up hosting the party on my own.  I had a group of determined girls help me set up the teachers' room for the event, but still would NOT recommend this particular undertaking to anyone. I did, however, learn roughly 54 life lessons in the span of 2.5 hours, no one drowned in the apple-bobbing bucket, and my students hugely enjoyed themselves. Relative gains! That's how we measure success in the Peace Corps.