“We leave something of ourselves behind when we leave a place, we stay there, even though we go away. And there are things in us that we can find again only by going back there.”

“We leave something of ourselves behind when we leave a place, we stay there, even though we go away. And there are things in us that we can find again only by going back there.”  – Pascal Mercier, Night Train to Lisbon

The G:  Our service is coming to a close incredibly fast (meaning I started this post and am not posting it until our last day at our site), and I’m left with a lot of mixed feelings when thinking about leaving Albania.  I’m very happy we set out on this adventure a little over 2 years ago, and I’ll always appreciate and cherish my time here. I don’t think many other experiences can match the kind of cultural understanding, personal growth, and challenges that Peace Corps service brings.  I’ve grown to love Albania, and will miss much about my life here. I’m still in denial I’m leaving so quickly, but 10 things I already know I’ll miss are:

“What Would You Say You Do Here?”

The J: Office Space, arguably one of the best movies of the 90s, which says quite a bit. One side note, I’ve been told recently that I look like Ron Livingston. I don’t see it, but it’s out there and he isn’t a bad looking man so I’ll take it. On an unrelated tangent I’m only a week late writing this (I really was when I started writing it in September). Also the photos are mostly unrelated to this post. In an effort to ameliorate some anxiety and struggles coming from challenges and deadlines this post is only going to be the fun and successful life events that have happened here. This post isn’t meant to be me prevaricating my own failings and challenges here. I will do that in a later post but it may very well be tortuous and today it would be perfunctory. And so ends my GRE vocabulary usage. Since this blog post was started I have taken, done satisfactory enough on the GRE, and applied to graduate school. 

Due to time constraints, we will only go over one event that we have done here. It was a productive and nice finale to the 2017 school year.

First is our successful and surprisingly well attended spelling bee competition that was hastily cobbled together towards the end of the last school year. My wonderful counterpart (the Albanian I work with) had the alacrity to do a spelling bee competition between the four middle schools in town. However, there were a few things that needed to be taken care of before this activity could happen: finding a place to do the spelling bee, getting other schools on board, deciding on the logistics of the competition, narrowing down competitors, and providing the ever important rewards. All of these had a basic story arc of “oh shit what are we going to do” then let’s talk to somebody and then bug them again, followed by great things should work out, and finally culminating in wow that was pretty awesome.

“A man who has been through bitter experiences and traveled far enjoys even his sufferings after a time”

The G:  “A man who has been through bitter experiences and traveled far enjoys even his sufferings after a time.”  Who better to start us off on a post about marathon running than the famed ancient Greek author Homer with a quote from The Odyssey?

Well if we’re going to run a marathon, we might as well run the original – this was Keith’s idea before we even left for Albania.  We decided our second year of Peace Corps was the year to do it, so we’ve been training for the original marathon (from Marathon to Athens, Greece) since July.  We have been running 4 times per week, 2 short runs, 1 medium run, and 1 long run.  We’re surrounded by mountains, so our runs our very beautiful but there’s always several major hills to contend with.  Running has allowed us to see more of the area and have some interesting interactions with people.

“In winter we must protect one another, keep each other warm, share our strengths”

The G: “In winter we must protect one another, keep each other warm, share our strengths”  –  The Game of Thrones, George R. R. Martin

The fall weather came very quickly this year.  In September, we went from some very hot summer temperatures one week to rain and damp the next, and the warm temperatures never returned.  Today we’re even getting some snowflakes mixed in with the rain.  The sudden change in weather (and the fact that I’m reading the 4^th Game of Thrones book) is making me think more about the not-so-welcome fact that winter is coming.  With that in mind, I’ll share a story that I should have shared 9 or so months ago.

“It is not enough to be busy. So are the ants.”

The J: “It is not enough to be busy. So are the ants. The question is: What are we busy about?” The quote comes from Thoreau and raises a good question that we should occasionally check in and ask ourselves.

Let’s address the elephant is the room. I’m bad at writing these. I have goals to write but haven’t had very well defined plans obviously. I don’t like being a liar but that seems to be how it is with these blog post promises. I had every intention of writing a blog the next day but it didn’t happen. I have a reasonable explanation. I had to do things for the IRS. In the end it was for the better aka bigger return, so that was worth it. I know I said I would post about politics a day after the last post, but we had a nice RPCV from Uganda passing through town and we spent our free hours talking with him about similarities and differences in our service. (Our infrastructure is better).

The next three month gap I can only really account for 1.5 months of because we were traveling with loved ones. The rest of it was just me being torpid and anxious to start blogging again. Shout out to both our families for visiting and driving us around.  It was a wonderful time and it was fun to be kept again.

“Just living is not enough,” said the butterfly, “one must have sunshine, freedom, and a little flower.”

“Just living is not enough,” said the butterfly, “one must have sunshine, freedom, and a little flower.” – Hans Christian Andersen, The Complete Fairy Tales (A nod to this famous Dane)

The G: This is another long overdue post I’ve been meaning to write for a while… it is about Girl Scouts, so I have a shameless plug – like the Girl Scouts of Albania Facebook page to see what Albanian Girl Scouts are doing:  https://www.facebook.com/girlscoutsalbania/

I’ve been lucky to be the benefactor of something two Peace Corps Volunteers from the group before us started in motion.  They thought it would be great to have young girls throughout Albania running around in Girl Scout uniforms working on improving their communities.  Fast forward to August 2016 – two women from my town and I attended a training in Tirana along with other Peace Corps Volunteers and Albanian counterparts.  The training was put on by the World Association of Girl Guiding and Girl Scouting and supported by Peace Corps Albania to train us how to start and sustain Girl Scout troops.

“Peace cannot be kept by force; it can only be achieved by understanding.”

The J: Albert Einstein to say the obvious was a very intelligent man. He also summarized the core belief of Peace Corps which had its 56^th anniversary on March 1.

Though we constantly tell ourselves, and anyone reading this, that we will be better and start writing more blogs, the habit hasn’t really taken hold. This is all really to just say we have much to cover and only a short while to get there.  I have a half page of ideas I hope to discuss sometime, but I will just talk about a few events.

Let’s start with a brief recap of the biggest festival/holiday of the year here, New Year’s. During communist times it was the largest holiday people celebrated because it wasn’t associated with religion. Religion was made illegal under the communist rule and persecuted. People would come together and try and celebrate with whatever small excess they were able to save. This usually wasn’t that much more than usual due to the many flaws with communist systems that have been tried over the years. (Hopefully a post for another time). Today they put American Thanksgivings to shame with what excess they can. They have “Babagjyshi i Vitit te Ri” Old Man of New Years which is basically Santa but he comes on New Year’s and is pretty much just as unrelated as normal Santa from religion and Christ. By which I mean very unrelated. Now people come together to eat too much food and desserts (usually baklavas) and then dance and shoot off fireworks all night.

“The Neverending Story”

The J: Great childhood movie

We already talked about how we had to stack our wood, move it and stack again, but as the title would imply, that was not the end of the story. Though like all stories I tell there is a long detour and who really knows if I will even get around to the story I was trying to tell by the time all is said and done. The gift of storytelling was never really a strong suite of mine, an entertaining yarn perhaps but gifted storytelling, no.

The untold story of the wood stack is what one puts the wood into… a wood stove. Shocker I know, but the wood stove in and of itself is a nice little anecdote. We started asking about getting a wood stove in August because our apartment did not have one and it was agreed upon it would. We went around looking at stoves including in Macedonia and found some we liked. We wanted one that was good at keeping heat and had the possibility to cook something on it.

“When you’re a mountain person, you understand the brilliance and beauty of contradiction…

The way land can be your greatest teacher.  How something can be both grounding yet elevating, intoxicating yet soothing, wild yet serene, intensely primal yet patient, and cycling yet predictable within the shifts, and rhythms.  Mountains keep us on edge yet wrap us in the sensation of safety all at once.  I don’t know of anything sweeter, or more magic inducing than that.”
– Victoria Erickson

The G:  And now for a couple of mountain stories because this country is full of glorious mountains.

“Females are strong as hell”

The J: Quote from Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt which is just a good show and an enjoyable song:

It was The Day of the Girl on October 11 and I’ve been meaning to write a little about gender relations so here we are (better a month late than never). I will start with the most recent example of women being very strong that doesn’t include the daily strength of my wife being more than me. That event would be stacking wood. Forewarning there is a lot of back story to get to the actual women being strong part. I apologize as it is mostly due to the whole not blogging for two months thing.

Perhaps you knew this but maybe you didn’t, winter is coming (dimri po vjen in Shqip). As such, due to a major heating source being wood burning stoves, we have bought three cubic meters of wood to burn this winter. Now luckily for us we can store it outside and just cover it with a tarp instead of stacking it in our small apartment. We made a nice three meter stack in the park like other families. Though I must admit we were yelled at in the first ten minutes for stacking it in the wrong place – aka in the woman telling us we were in her spot.