http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-12253481
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-12253624
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/22/world/europe/22briefs-Albania.html?_r=1&scp=3&sq=albania&st=cse
http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/21/pictures-of-the-day-albania-and-elsewhere/?scp=2&sq=albania&st=cse
About Me
- Molly
- Albania
- Peace Corps English teacher in a rural Albanian mountain town
Sunday, January 23, 2011
Saturday, January 8, 2011
December in Photos
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| Town |
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| Najada, Ida, and Vulli in the teachers' room |
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| Obliging cow outside my building |
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| Looking toward the rest of Albania, outside my building |
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| Cows coming in for milking below my building. They calmly walk back through town without escort, single-file, and sort themselves into their appropriate sheds. |
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| We weren't all ready for snow. |
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| Snowed-in bunker |
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| Domestic violence project with the seniors |
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| Are you paying attention?! :) |
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| The Friends of the Library with Librarian Diana Pasho |
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| Visa's xhaxhi and her mother dried mutton from cousins in Dragot over the stove. It's called (I'm not 100% on the spelling...) pasternak. |
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| Oresti, the original energy man of the 7th grade |
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| Grading tests with Visa next to the stove in her apartment |
How go those wintry nights?
It goes without saying that I am highly appreciative of my dedicated woodstove. She is assured of a healthy raise and front office next season. We are companionably barricaded together in one room most nights … which statement makes me reflect that I sound like a questionably sane individual communing with a cat. I am unhappily aware of a thread of truth in that.
When I’m not sleeping at home, I’m being introduced to Albanian life behind wintry doors by Visa, her family, and friends from work. I show up with wool socks and am unyieldingly ordered into house shoes. The tiles are cold, and the mamas are fierce.
Albanian winters are, for most, the time to flee inside immediately following work, pour flavored roux over përshësh (crumbled bread), twitch the antennas to face a vast sky awash with stars, and pray for Grua e Hekurt (an infinitely popular, and happily subtitled, telenovela) to defy the weather and bless our apartments. Hajde hajde noble Valentina, bursting blouses, evil fake baby mamas, and dastardly, mustachioed vacqueros! Valentina and her many trials are the daily fuel of teacher room conversation.
When the electricity, humbled by ferocious wind storms of biblical proportions, goes out for hours on end, we light candles, drink çaj mali (mountain tea), and engage in battle over dominos. Visa’s mother taught me to say the names of all the tiles, and Visa sent home a set to my parents. Evenings with them, pressing my feet to the side of their generous stove, are comfort. Honestly a lot of fun and entirely untradeable for central heating, generators, and smug cable connections.
If there’s anything I’ve learned thus far this winter, it’s that simple pleasures are doubly gratifying when you have less. And that you ought to always have candles stashed in a place you can grope your way to in the dark.
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| The valiant stove herself, courtesy of Jani Vreto's dormitory |
When I’m not sleeping at home, I’m being introduced to Albanian life behind wintry doors by Visa, her family, and friends from work. I show up with wool socks and am unyieldingly ordered into house shoes. The tiles are cold, and the mamas are fierce.
Albanian winters are, for most, the time to flee inside immediately following work, pour flavored roux over përshësh (crumbled bread), twitch the antennas to face a vast sky awash with stars, and pray for Grua e Hekurt (an infinitely popular, and happily subtitled, telenovela) to defy the weather and bless our apartments. Hajde hajde noble Valentina, bursting blouses, evil fake baby mamas, and dastardly, mustachioed vacqueros! Valentina and her many trials are the daily fuel of teacher room conversation.
When the electricity, humbled by ferocious wind storms of biblical proportions, goes out for hours on end, we light candles, drink çaj mali (mountain tea), and engage in battle over dominos. Visa’s mother taught me to say the names of all the tiles, and Visa sent home a set to my parents. Evenings with them, pressing my feet to the side of their generous stove, are comfort. Honestly a lot of fun and entirely untradeable for central heating, generators, and smug cable connections.
If there’s anything I’ve learned thus far this winter, it’s that simple pleasures are doubly gratifying when you have less. And that you ought to always have candles stashed in a place you can grope your way to in the dark.
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| Miss Visa, the designated Turkish kafe maker |
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| From left to right: Shpresa, Visa's mother; Ilda, neighbor, friend, and village teacher; Mika, Ilda's mother and Shpresa's close friend; Visa |
Winter Has Most Happily Arrived
December finally ushered in the snow – isha shumë e kënaqur (I was very pleased, like the insufferable cat that got the cream). It became bitterly cold, and then suddenly the sky opened up after days of harsh breath and frozen stillness. I sat up for a while one morning after waking to the first snow fall in the wee hours. Total silence. No teeth-grinding, petulant braying; no mournful howling. Not a single donkey, dog, or Peace Corps volunteer wanted to disturb the fragile, hesitant hush. We were all enchanted. REM cycle blown and resigned to propping eyelids open in class, I dozed with tea on the couch and surveyed the hills on the opposite side of the valley over the cowsheds and woodpiles below. The landscape was a muted, dark proposition palely draped in snow. Could fling yourself off the balcony and swim in the stars and cold!
The following day was an inexorable flurry of snowballs merrily pelted with just this side of playful force in the middle of lessons. Students wiped out in the stairwells, teachers debated taking class outside, and the boys that will be boys stomped our main street into an icy slip-‘n-slide. The latter performed moves with agility that would have put Michael Who-Lives-In-The-Cemetery-Above-Pajovë Jackson to shame. A very good day, indeed :)
After-school course has become variable. We sort of squint at the sky and calculate the relative worth of an extra hour in a chilled room with shuddering, old-school (and largely ineffective) radiators. Courses often disintegrate into holiday planning, but still discussed in English. I try to indignantly convince my colleagues (here, my students) that I have lingering, albeit struggling, cold-weather standards and so should they! They humor me, tolerant folks that they all are. These informal lessons go down over scalding cups of Turkish kafe or thick salep (orchid root tea) at the lokal across the street. Now that I've wrapped up a grant application, we’re re-introducing a serious grammar regimen this week, I swear.
Learning in mandatory attendance lessons has also become variable. Having abandoned the creeping drafts by the walls, our students lean on each other, pressed into central rows. They take turns getting up to thrust their hands between the ribs of the radiators. This is where active warm-ups and mobile exercises make a double hit in the classroom. So we aim to keep it fun and kick-off vocabulary reviews with a basic round of Hangman (adapted here into “The Wilting Flower”) and supplement text comprehension with sentence-assembly teamwork and William Tell Overture’s resounding crescendos. Our eighth graders get a mid lesson break to perform interpretive stretching. Anything else that gets our students on their feet finds its way into lesson plans. We also threw a holiday party, which warmed up the seventh graders to an eventual shedding of jackets and swaying of hips. I frowned and Visa laughed. A very tame conga line was duly formed.
I salute my students for plowing through work despite temperatures inside often dropping below those outside concrete and brick walls. Take that, American teenagers! I challenge you to A’s with frozen extremities and elbows refused their full range of motion by A Christmas Story-esque layers.
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| View over the valley into Greece; the mountains are totally obscured by the low snow clouds. |
The following day was an inexorable flurry of snowballs merrily pelted with just this side of playful force in the middle of lessons. Students wiped out in the stairwells, teachers debated taking class outside, and the boys that will be boys stomped our main street into an icy slip-‘n-slide. The latter performed moves with agility that would have put Michael Who-Lives-In-The-Cemetery-Above-Pajovë Jackson to shame. A very good day, indeed :)
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| Jani Vreto, blanketed in snow during the long school day break |
After-school course has become variable. We sort of squint at the sky and calculate the relative worth of an extra hour in a chilled room with shuddering, old-school (and largely ineffective) radiators. Courses often disintegrate into holiday planning, but still discussed in English. I try to indignantly convince my colleagues (here, my students) that I have lingering, albeit struggling, cold-weather standards and so should they! They humor me, tolerant folks that they all are. These informal lessons go down over scalding cups of Turkish kafe or thick salep (orchid root tea) at the lokal across the street. Now that I've wrapped up a grant application, we’re re-introducing a serious grammar regimen this week, I swear.
Learning in mandatory attendance lessons has also become variable. Having abandoned the creeping drafts by the walls, our students lean on each other, pressed into central rows. They take turns getting up to thrust their hands between the ribs of the radiators. This is where active warm-ups and mobile exercises make a double hit in the classroom. So we aim to keep it fun and kick-off vocabulary reviews with a basic round of Hangman (adapted here into “The Wilting Flower”) and supplement text comprehension with sentence-assembly teamwork and William Tell Overture’s resounding crescendos. Our eighth graders get a mid lesson break to perform interpretive stretching. Anything else that gets our students on their feet finds its way into lesson plans. We also threw a holiday party, which warmed up the seventh graders to an eventual shedding of jackets and swaying of hips. I frowned and Visa laughed. A very tame conga line was duly formed.
 |
| Klasa 7a, hamming it up for the camera in their decorated classroom. I do not recommend getting that book for your students... :) |
I salute my students for plowing through work despite temperatures inside often dropping below those outside concrete and brick walls. Take that, American teenagers! I challenge you to A’s with frozen extremities and elbows refused their full range of motion by A Christmas Story-esque layers.
Wednesday, December 29, 2010
Floods and Kadare
Fall, most of winter, and spring = (amongst other things) rain and mud. Up in the mountains, most of it washes down into the valleys, and we are thankfully also blanketed with snow. The rains can, however, wreak havoc in low-lying country.
At the beginning of December, Albania struggled with flooding. The northern shoreline and most of the northern provinces were inaccessible. Volunteers were evacuated from Shkodër and Lezhë while others were instructed to remain within their sites, not to risk the roads. NATO even contributed to the relief efforts. Around 12,000 people were relocated by December 5th. Water flooded the streets of the northern cities and villages, forcing residents to pole their way in skiffs and other makeshift flotation devices. Mud in houses, property destroyed, school interrupted, homeless and cold and wet and adrift. Check this BBC clip for footage: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-11923596.
Briefly ignoring the nightmarish implications of a city unexpectedly submerged, Shkodër was once a Venetian city state, so perhaps streets becoming canals makes some modicum of sense. Shkodrans pay tribute to Italian culture with a brilliant bicycle culture and frequent mixing of Shqip with belissimas. I had my hair cut by a Shkodran stylist with extremely flexible wrists who trained in Italy. Venice contracts out production of hand-crafted plaster Carnival masks to a Shkodran workshop. At the sobering end of things, Italy has also lost a considerable number of troops on Albanian soil. Albania – Shkodrans, certainly – owns some measure of Italian culture.
Ismail Kadare wrote a book called The General of the Dead Army (Gjenerali i ushtrisë së vdekur) about an Italian general in the post-war period who goes on an unsettling quest to reclaim the bodies of Italian soldiers interred in Albanian soil. The opening chapters have a passage about flying over the forbidding peaks of northern Albania that aptly illustrates the aura of mystery shrouding both communist and post-communist Albania and her closed, mountainous terrain. I recommend reading that and Spring Flowers, Spring Frost (Prilli i thyer), which won the Man Booker Prize in 2005.
At the beginning of December, Albania struggled with flooding. The northern shoreline and most of the northern provinces were inaccessible. Volunteers were evacuated from Shkodër and Lezhë while others were instructed to remain within their sites, not to risk the roads. NATO even contributed to the relief efforts. Around 12,000 people were relocated by December 5th. Water flooded the streets of the northern cities and villages, forcing residents to pole their way in skiffs and other makeshift flotation devices. Mud in houses, property destroyed, school interrupted, homeless and cold and wet and adrift. Check this BBC clip for footage: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-11923596.
Briefly ignoring the nightmarish implications of a city unexpectedly submerged, Shkodër was once a Venetian city state, so perhaps streets becoming canals makes some modicum of sense. Shkodrans pay tribute to Italian culture with a brilliant bicycle culture and frequent mixing of Shqip with belissimas. I had my hair cut by a Shkodran stylist with extremely flexible wrists who trained in Italy. Venice contracts out production of hand-crafted plaster Carnival masks to a Shkodran workshop. At the sobering end of things, Italy has also lost a considerable number of troops on Albanian soil. Albania – Shkodrans, certainly – owns some measure of Italian culture.
Ismail Kadare wrote a book called The General of the Dead Army (Gjenerali i ushtrisë së vdekur) about an Italian general in the post-war period who goes on an unsettling quest to reclaim the bodies of Italian soldiers interred in Albanian soil. The opening chapters have a passage about flying over the forbidding peaks of northern Albania that aptly illustrates the aura of mystery shrouding both communist and post-communist Albania and her closed, mountainous terrain. I recommend reading that and Spring Flowers, Spring Frost (Prilli i thyer), which won the Man Booker Prize in 2005.
Monday, December 6, 2010
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