The First Weeks of the 2010-2011 School Year

Note: Click on images to enlarge!

First Day of School - leaning out the teachers' room window, watching students and parents gathering




Bearing Flowers - First graders bring flowers, real and artificial, to their teachers on the first day of school





Class 7A

 


Class 7B




Class 8 - can you vibe the personality? :)




The Seniors!!! (Maturant)




School director, Veli Xhelili, and brave student delivering first day speeches on the front steps before assembled townsfolk




Patient Listeners - members of Class 7




Molly and Visa




Visa and Najada "Ada" Pasho, math and information technology teacher




The faculty - 24 teachers and two administrators, plus three village teachers, serving 370 students in grades 1 - 12




Nikolla "Niko" Josifi, school music and art teacher




Shelegur's First Day of School - our village students following their first English lesson of the year.  From left to right: Enea, eight years old; Kleo, nine years old; Aldo, eight years old; Flori, four years old; and Armando, ten years old




Visa and some of the most well-behaved students you will ever find; in the Shelegur schoolhouse




First Graders




Retired Teacher Speechifying - Polikran, former school director and teacher of Russian and Albanian literature.  Under Hoxha, he spent more than fifteen years in prison and performed hard labor for expressing pro-American views.  He now has a son in the 10th grade.  He told me all of this one day while I was stacking wood for winter.




Filing In




Visa and Diana Mici, physical education and health/survival skills teacher




Stavrulla "Vulli", math teacher




The Schoolhouse in Shelegur - Enea racing to catch up for a berry-picking excursion




The End :)



Try explaining...

what you mean by:

- static cling
- lonesome (and how that differs both from "lonely" and "alone")
- reticent

...to a non-native English speaker.

Hurrah for baking!

I noted this in an email to a friend and have brought it up with some sisters…
Hurrah for baking!!! Baking assuages the soul wounded by cooking failures. Whenever I bomb yet another experiment in a pot, I resort to the simple science of flour and baking soda/powder to boost my self-esteem. HOWEVER, it must be admitted that I recently attempted two batches of brownies that failed to properly set and had to be eaten out of the pan like cake. Due to having followed Prairie’s especially tailored brownie recipe, the mess tasted like heaven. But it remains that I cannot yet coax a brownie from a pan.

Fall is here, and my students will not get off their cell phones

I am sitting on my couch, trying to remember how to knit—I had one brief lesson with Miss Katie K, a most patient fellow volunteer—and am thinking it might just be better if this scarf knitted itself. It's cold! Let's say my fingers have been too numb to type as I am struggling with my wood stove situation... and thus this blog post is so late? Or how about I haven't an adequate excuse and what I am posting here is in fact an adapted email?

This is my favorite season, and Leskovik shows it off to particular advantage. The clear days are crisp with a high wind. I can wear sweaters and want to go for walks with a canteen, rucksack, and Heidi as a cheerful, rosy-cheeked companion. I can forgive the indecisive rain and blankets of soupy fog. Even those days evoke the Sleepy Hollow legend and Hudson River mystique.

Fall + the advent of the school year = a starry-eyed official start to service. Four weeks of school with seniors and sophomores equate a bit of a crushing blow (only a bit because it's like a crushing blow in slow motion - little bit more crushing every week). Four weeks of school with seventh and eighth graders and village school students equate relief, enjoyment, and renewed interest in teaching. After years of helpless laughter at my mother’s dinner table, I finally have my own wild student antics—wily ruses to lead lessons astray and hopeless, yet earnest, blunders—to cackle (and I do mean cackle) over with Visa while planning in the evening.

We have a Halloween party coming up on November 1st and another party after the 30th of November (we're thinking perhaps right before Christmas) for the 7th or 8th grade class that wins a magic bean competition. The two seventh grade classes and eighth grade class are pitted against one another in a competition where they win/lose points based on behavior and performance. Each class has a jar filled with pinto beans, from which the students can lose or earn back beans. Whichever class reaches November 30th with the most beans still in the jar wins the competition and a class party, catered by yours truly. I promised “American food”, which drew a universal chorus of “oooo!”, so that ought to be interesting. I unintentionally set the bar rather high for myself, being a merely passable cook. AND, most of my students' mothers excel in the kitchen - few Albanian girls reach adulthood without a mastery of cooking that puts the average American twenty-something to shame. This setting of the bar unintentionally high is turning into a repeat offense in all aspects of service in Leskovik, but it does keep me busy and happy.

Cooking and party aside, the classes are engaged in fierce combat (no other word fully expresses the nature of this competition). When a student steps up to the plate to deliver a particularly earnest performance during a lesson and all of the kids rally to maintain some level of calm in the classroom, putting a lost bean back into the jar makes up for having to kick an intolerable, completely insolent sophomore and his I’ve-just-about-had-enough-of-your cell phone out of my earlier class.

All in all, things are good. I put a bean back into Class 7B's jar today, rewarding the students for NOT once uttering the word "beautiful" during the lesson. Albanians are addicted to the word beautiful (translates as "bukur"). The level of restraint displayed was remarkable.

I also drew a peacock and the Taj Mahal on the blackboard to illustrate something in a 7th grade discussion. Everyone hollered “xhami,” which translates to “mosque”. It follows that we had to have an impromptu discussion about different domes and what one might find under them. When I cruised by desks later in the lesson, most of the kids had copied the bird and palace, which made me laugh and appreciate the thorough note-taking of newly-minted teenagers. It feels like we've been teaching for six months instead of four weeks (as very aptly remarked by a fellow TEFLer).

My program manager, Agim, recently made a tour of Albania to check in with all of his TEFL volunteers. Being a thoughtful guy, he brought, for my fishing pleasure, a fly rod! The rod had been gifted to him by a previous volunteer. It’s a pint-sized two-piece Eagle Creek sweetheart rod, just right for swinging wildly about in these little creeks with brush and overhanging trees. It looks like I am going to have to wait until I go home to properly complete the outfit with tippet, leader, etc, so I don't know if any fishing will go down until next spring...

I took the rod by the town pharmacy to show to my naturalist friend, Sejdin (he also happens to be Visa’s fiancé’s older brother). He likes to fish and fries his own catch. Might I add that it is highly rare for an Albanian man to willingly enter the kitchen? Sejdin is fascinated by fly fishing. We have made some noncommittal plans to fish the Vjosa River at some point! The Vjosa is about two hours away by car, though it is visible from our mountain.

In other news, side projects are just starting to really take off and the school schedule has FINALLY been, well, finalized. I am working on completely overhauling our school’s library and on adding an English language literature section to the collection. My school director has granted permission to relocate the library and is donating an old desktop computer to our catalogue project. We're working on a grant application, which process has been mildly difficult as the school librarian's baby girl is ill. I salute this stalwart mother for battling through baby illness, work, and grant development.

My women’s book club is kicking off this week! Darien Book Aid (CT pride) sent novels and biographies for our club. I hope we will start with The Memory Keeper’s Daughter, which I have not read. Also, it looks like the Jani Vreto-MLC cultural exchange and joint-learning project is nearing the schedule-building stage, so I am quite excited. The seniors participating in the project are ambitious and dedicated students, so, “me kismet” (loosely translated as “with luck”), the exchange will be both productive and fun (what a piddly word).

I miss you all,

Molly

Post-Communist Capitalism in Albania, as illustrated by Cinnamon-Flavored Gum

When I go to the supermarket in Leskovik and I pay for items, I sometimes receive both coin and gum as change. This occurs when, at the end of a transaction, I am due a fist-full of coins that should include five or one cent pieces—baby leke. Instead of baby leke, the cashier gives me one, two, or sometimes even three, pieces of chewing gum. I balked at first, confused by what appeared to be a pseudo trade system. Actually, I have no idea what that is – the unwanted tender for unwanted goods system? But now that I better understand the reasoning behind this perfunctory disregard for the least-used units in the Albanian monetary system, I am inclined to just laugh.

In Albania, most prices ignore the singles place value and scoot a zero into that spot. This is partially a side effect of the old leke versus new leke phenomenon, compensating for old leke mental calculation when confronted with the new leke exchange of coin and bill. It’s also a way to neatly ensure that 10 is a factor of all prices. It follows that one and five cent pieces are in circulation, but are rarely used. Since prices only stray into awkward territory, like, oh gosh, 487 or 53 leke, on those rare occasions when irritating shoppers purchase produce in non-kilo increments (a-HEM, if you live alone and are buying food for just one person!), no one wants to give or receive these pesky buggers. How to get rid of them once they’re in your pocket? Do you even want to get rid of them; do they really have value in Albania?

Elsewhere, the entire interaction might have potential to break down. Here, a simple solution is handily slapped onto the problem, and we all carry on with life. You get gum—even if you don’t want it—instead of money. It’s a duc tape sort of approach to post-Communist capitalism.

Case in point: Today, I was owed 182 leke at the supermarket after buying bleach, some sponges, toilet paper, three peaches, and one cucumber. Sofika, the gruff and probably chain-smoking cashier who introduces and re-introduces me to everyone, took my 500 leke note and gave me 180 leke and one or two pieces of Chiclet-style gum in return. I thanked her, hurled a couple of mirupafshims over my shoulder to the general audience, and fumbled the gum into the palm of my hand as I headed out the door. The gum then proceeded to sweat up against my plastic bag handles, smearing traces of red food coloring and cinnamon flavor on the inside of my knuckles. Awesome.

I attempted to pass off this sugary treasure, cozy in its little wedge of shiny foil hacked from a pack ensconced in the change drawer by the Sofika’s knee, to a convenient child or fly-ridden dumpster. Both work – I’m not a fan of super sugary gum. But I am a fan of Sofika, and I like this ritual. It makes for all kinds of excitement.

I always wonder how Sofika calculates the value of each piece of gum and what color my palm will be when I get home. To whom should I try to give the gum? Little kid, older kid, my neighbor’s son’s colleague’s kid? I would be a creeper in the United States; never accept candy from people on the street! And if I succeed in foisting the gum onto a kid, I am perpetuating poor dental health habits! Can I even justify throwing the gum away if I can’t find a handy child willing to rot holes into his/her teeth? Oh my, waste, waste! Additionally, chucking it into a dumpster just contributes to the national trash problem! Escalating guilt, guilt! Internal debate and berating ensue.

And finally, the ritual reminds me that we’re still in a post-Communist state of transition where private businesses inevitably engage in a little artistic manipulation of financial transactions. Ah, behold, macro-level problems playing out at the micro level! But hey, from the perspective of people just trying to function in a country where money and relative value are still a little fragile, if this practice makes for a more efficient transaction at the local supermarket store…who’s complaining? Really just PCVs protective of their teeth, I would think. It’s gum, after all! CINAMMON-flavored gum!

Note: This supermarket observation was written shortly after I moved to Leskovik. I have since learned that Sofika is a covert, as opposed to chain-smoking, cashier and that I can receive match boxes instead of gum if I smile winningly and ask about her migraines.

Baxho - the Dairy

About two months ago, when I was still the “new foreigner” in Leskovik, I went with a neighbor girl to the local dairy, or baxho, to buy cheese. The baxho occupies the bottom floor of a small destroyed factory. Leskovik has several miniature factories like this, some made of stone and others of cement with what used to be tall glass windows. They are remnants from Communism that now lie either in ruins (sometimes because of the 1997 pyramid scheme crisis) or have been partially rehabilitated for private use by whoever is interested and can stake a semi-solid claim on the property.

Quick digression to discuss this curious leftover from Communism - With the fall of Communism, property rights became a major problem. No one really owned any land for fifty-odd years, so, when democracy and capitalism took hold, old disputes revivified and people attempted to stake ownership to houses, gardens, and fields. Things got temporarily ugly and then terribly messy. Today, now that most Leskovikqarians have built new cement houses or moved into raw brick apartment buildings, stone houses are abandoned and the surrounding property is simply cultivated by whoever last occupied the space.

Case in point: the network of communal animal stalls and pens behind our apartment building, mentioned in the previous post. They’re made from repurposed materials—warped planks, corrugated tin, flour sacks, plastic sheeting, stones, barbed wire, etc. It’s like a tiny town without ownership. Everyone is tucked up against everyone else. It’s unclear where one man’s cluster of stalls end and others begin. Post the morning milking session and the arrival of the cowherd to collect the prize milkers and new calves for a day in the pasture, I skirt clouds of flies and hop around manure to get down to the main road.

This sort of impromptu, and yet highly productive, repurposing of available space is exemplified by the dairy operation. Factory space is less ambiguously awarded to entrepreneurs than grazing and garden plots. Half of the three-story factory’s bottom floor has been converted into a dairy, and, behind a heavy blue door, a vast cool chamber hums with activity. The rest of the building is still burned out. The windows lack panes, scorch marks smear their wretched palms across the walls, the floors are covered in shattered glass and tiles, and there is an eerie stillness.

It was my first visit to the dairy, so naturally most activity ceased so everyone could come ask about the American. Once they discovered I could speak Shqip, they also talked to the American. Where are you from? Why are you here? Wait, are you really going to stay here for two years alone?! But you are 23 years old and unmarried! Well, good for you, sweetheart. Really, that’s wonderful. But we will have to find you a nice Albanian boy.

After going through the usual round of questions and exclamations, I had opportunity to observe the assembly line they had developed, the vats of brine and sweating cheese, and picked out a kilo of feta to be weighed on a shuddering scale with brass weights. Only a kilo, but, just because this is Albania, and Albanians are the most hospitable people I have ever met, the entire staff offered to have the kilo delivered to my door by an eight year-old playing outside with a new kitten. I paid 300 leke (3 USD) for my prize and took it away in a blue plastic bag with advice to soak it in the salty yellow whey that you can buy by the giant one-liter Coke bottle.

The first time I bought cheese in Leskovik, no one mentioned to me that I ought to buy the whey. The cheese started to turn in one day. No preservatives, remember? Ah, well. Dairy products here both frighten and impress me.

One of my secret ambitions (perhaps not so secret now) is to learn how to make… my own yogurt. Oh lord.

Gatimi Shqiptar - Albanian Cooking

I thought that I was never going to find Albanian food with much flavor after my training period in central Albania. For a nation that has been shaped by centuries of conquest and intersection of European and Middle Eastern cultures, Albania has emerged with remarkably bland food. Spice is rarely used, and even then with much restraint. You have to travel to cities and comb through the occasional European mart or specialty shop to find elusive items like ginger and red pepper.

Albanian food is also very high in cholesterol and sugar. Oil, salt, red meat (with most of its fat intact), bread, and sugar are the most important elements in Shqiptar cooking. Everything is deep, and I mean DEEP, fried. Even rice and spaghetti are fried before they are boiled.

But, the food is incredibly fresh because the vast majority of Albanians outside the big cities produce most of their own vegetables, cheeses, yogurts, preserves, condiments, wine, milk, dhale (half water, half yogurt, and sometimes a pinch of salt), etc. No added preservatives or hormones. Living in a community where processed food is essentially non-existent is something new for me. The lack of processing, the lack of pesticides and inorganic fertilizers go a long way for health… It is only after most food is cooked that it begins to lose its optimal nutritional value and that Albanians fall into two major health traps—acquired diabetes and hypertension.

In Leskovik I have found way more flavorful cooking than in central Albania, mostly the result of fresh garlic cloves, liberal use of black pepper, and a passion for wild oregano. Everything is a little pikante (spicy) here. My counterpart’s mother gifted me with several bunches of dried oregano from the mountain. She is a fabulous cook and makes a mean, mean stuffed eggplant dish. My stomach groans wistfully just thinking about it, sigh. And her pastiço, the Albanian version of macaroni and cheese (but heavier on milk and egg, light on the cheese), oh my. Serious soul food. Shpresa is always flying about her apartment, just two floors below mine, mopping the loosely-tiled floor and popping something in the oven.

Shpresa and Tomori (her husband, named for the highest peak in Albania) also love their byrek, maybe the quintessential Albanian specialty. Picture a savory, flaky, layered pie often stuffed with milk, wild greens, spinach, or sometimes meat, baked in a giant round pan and cut into wedges like pizza. The less oil involved, often the better the byrek. I also love byrek made with corn meal.

In Leskovik, everyone has a kopësht (garden) on the outskirts of town, wedged into empty lots between buildings, up at the base of the sharp mountain slope, or gracing the ruins of stone houses that were abandoned post-Communism for cement dwellings down in town. This mountain community is free of air pollution and all of our water is clean, straight from mountain springs (before the banking crisis in 1997, Leskovik was famed for its hot therapeutic springs). We drink water, opaque with oxygen, straight from the tap. The vineyards are lush, preparing for the September wine season. Cherry season just finished. I am overwhelmed with white cherry and apricot preserves, gifts from all of the lovely women in my building. It’s actually a bit dangerous – anytime I visit anyone’s house and am settled into a chair for the customary cup of Turkish coffee, a saucer of sugary preserves materializes at my side.

Shqiptar cooking, for all its liberal use of fat and sugar, is yum when prepared by the experts. And for those of us learning gatimi shqiptar, behold, freedom from recipes! Everything is to taste, everything is eyeballed, ho-hummed, an extra pinch of this maybe, and an extra dash of that. I have helped to make gjize, a white Albanian made of koss (yogurt) boiled down until lumps of squeaky cheese emerge from the yellow liquid and then can be strained through a series of cloths. Kind of like cottage cheese. I have also learned how to make the aforementioned stuffed eggplant dish, as well as stuffed peppers, and the Albanian macaroni and cheese. Next I hope to learn petka, an Albanian homemade macaroni liberally doused in butter and salt. It’s the perfect comfort food. We also have an Albanian version of a doughnut, called petulla.

I also participated in the preserve-making process during cherry season, mostly sitting on a three-legged stool next to a cow stall and manure pile pitting cherries into a bowl of water (and dead flies) between my knees. Behind our Communist-era apartment building is a maze of animal stalls made from a medley of salvaged materials; it’s a veritable shanty town of human ingenuity.

During the two weeks dedicated to preserves, the shanty town was humming and smoking with boiling vats of sugar, water, and pitted fruit on top of drunkenly leaning and blackened wood stoves. I sweated and pitted. The flies, which are ever present in a thick cloud, droned happily in pools of rapidly cooling sugar, and everyone had sticky feet for days. And all those gifted preserves I mentioned earlier? They arrived at my door in repurposed glass jars still too hot to touch.