Open Doors

One thing that has taken a little getting used to here has been the open doors and open windows policy. Even in the very cold mornings during the first days of training, and even when it was raining, my host family would frequently leave the house door open.

Here in my permanent site, the door is frequently open. It causes a problem for me because I am under constant attack from mosquitoes—one night in my room, I killed five of them and was very close to freaking out. Before I moved here, my family put a screen door in my room which allows air flow and keeps everything else out, but it still can’t compensate for all the insects coming in and out of the house during the day. I’ve tried using room spray, plug-in insecticide and Cutter and nothing has really worked. I’m not even sure the mosquito net that Peace Corps could give me would be able to accomplish much of anything either. So for the last two months, I’ve been fairly miserable. It’s one thing to get mosquito bites, but for me, they take weeks for the itching to subside and to heal. I’ll wake up in the middle of the night, no matter how much anti-itching cream I’ve applied, and still keep scratching. It’s pretty awful because there is no relief. Almost as bad as when I shave my legs and hit a few of the bites: my legs have a few craters from that that will take even longer to heal.

But today, it wasn’t the mosquitoes that came in through the door. I came upstairs to my room, and caught a glimpse of movement in my eye. I thought I saw a kitten. “Oh my God, Serg, please tell me you saw that,” I said to my host sister who was cleaning the house. “No, what are you talking about?” she asked. “I think there’s a kitten in my room!” And when we walked into my room, and I got on my stomach to peer under the bed, there was an incredibly tiny kitten. It must have been an effort to climb the 30+ stairs to get to the third floor of our house and into my room.

Then began a twenty minute effort in order to corral the kitten. It ran out of my room and into another, and then hid in a cupboard. Serg was trying to scare it by using the handle of a broom, which really wasn’t helping. I told her to be gentle with it. Gentle, until I slowly put my hand in the cupboard and the tiny creature started hissing at me! I tried to pick it up with a blanket so it wouldn’t bite or scratch me, but I couldn’t get a hold of it. It was incredibly tiny and frantically ran around the summer porch trying to escape, to no avail. It even tried jumping a foot in the air into the doors. Eventually it hid behind my shoes and Serg picked it up in a blanket once and for all, the kitten hissing the whole way down the stairs, down the outside stairs, and out into the street.

Now someone else might have to go through the same thing: as soon as we set it down in the street, it ran frantically back into the direction of our house, and narrowly pinched through our neighbor’s gate. Let’s see how they handle a kitten in their house.

2666

At the beginning of this blog, I said that I wanted to make this not just about my experience in Albania but also a wider range of topics. Unfortunately I’ve gotten away from that. It’s probably because I spend a small fraction of my time on the internet or on television and my access to information has changed my routine thought patterns accordingly.

Last night, I had a dream that I was talking about an author, Roberto Bolano. His final book, published posthumously, has devoured my thoughts for the last two months. Apparently it’s so embedded in my subconscious that I’m giving lectures in my sleep.

I was introduced to Bolano in a Latin American fiction class I took my pre-junior year of university. In my obsession to achieve the “perfect schedule,” (classes all day on Tuesdays and Thursdays and the rest of the week free) I took a random elective that fit into the schedule. Like many classes, it fit my schedule and was something I knew nothing about. And like the best professors, you find yourself thinking about them and their classes years later. It’s only with the passage of time that you can truly appreciate the gift that they have given.

Since then, I’ve read a few other pieces of Bolano’s work and learned more about this life and the world he created in his writings. “Ambitious” is certainly one adjective that comes to mind. 2666 was certainly a high note to go out on; one that would have been difficult to top. It’s a huge web of settings and characters, all touched by the spider Santa Teresa (a fictional Ciudad Juarez). Bolano creates a profound sense of desolation, as wide as the desert where the bodies of women continue to be found and as hopeless as the search for justice that organized crime, societal ambivalence, police corruption and overall governmental ineptitude prevent.

Some favorite quotes, amongst many:
“So everything lets us down, including curiosity and honesty and what we love best.” “Yes,” said the voice, “but cheer up, it’s fun in the end.”
“Only in chaos are we conceivable.”
“It has nothing to do with belief… it has to do with understanding, and then changing.”

The Return

I made my first visit back to my satellite site and my first host family last Friday. When I got there, my smallest host brother was the first one to see me. Playing with the hose, he yelled my name before jumping on me. Then I saw my brothers and my dad. My mom, as usual, was knee deep in work. “I have four brides this weekend, and eight next weekend!” After I walked into the salon, everyone commented on how good I looked. They were amazed at how much my language has improved in the last two months as well.

I drank a coffee with them, sitting in the salon, just like in the old days. They seemed upset when I said I had to leave (considering I didn’t pack a bag and I wasn’t sure when the furgons would stop running to Durres). I’m hoping to come and stay a weekend in September because my host mom will be less busy with weddings at that time. Plus I’ll really need to do something with my hair by then!

Reflecting on my way home, I thought about how happy the visit made me and the good fortune I had to live in their home. Seeing them two months later, it was like nothing had changed. I still felt just as comfortable as I did then. I had been by their house so many times over the last two months and I hadn’t stopped. I’m so grateful for how well they took care of me and how they made me feel like a member of the family in those first weeks here in country. I don’t think my experience would be as great as it has been without their love and support those first weeks. It really helped me create a good foundation.

I thought about the differences between my past family and my present family, and my apprehension about adjusting to life in a new family at my permanent site. Things have certainly changed since my first days here in my second family, largely in ways I wouldn’t have predicted. We have developed a very deep relationship, and I’m pleased to have two relationships with two different families. They have helped me in ways I’ll probably never be able to express. Even though I had some concerns about “me-time” and personal space, since I had to sacrifice those to spend 3 ½ more months in a family, I know I made the right decision. Before I came here, I knew I wanted to do this right. I kept that idea in my mind when it came to goal-setting. Living in another family has really benefited me on a lot of levels, and I feel genuinely blessed for the people that I have met here. They are a large reason why my transition has been so smooth, and for that I am very grateful.

This and That

Random things that don’t fit in any particular entry:

- Speaking about the dangers of living here in a previous entry, there’s something else to add. I tried to turn on my friend’s television and I heard a slight popping sound. The screen didn’t light up. I tried again to turn it on. Nothing. A few seconds later, I smelled something hot. I turned on the light and found the source of the smell: small tendrils of smoke curling out from the back of the television. I’d have to say that’s a new experience for me.

- Remember when I filled out several million forms to join the Peace Corps and my name was spelled wrong on everything? We all know how much I love that.

- I went into a bookstore recently. I’m really impressed with the selection, especially the availability of translated classics for good prices. I was less enthused about the entire shelf of Dreiser. And again I have to ask, “Who is reading this?!”

- I bought a can of peas a few weeks ago to cook at my house with spaghetti. When my family didn’t have a can opener, my host sister’s fiancé stabbed the can with a huge knife and sawed through the top to open it. That is a close second to the first time someone opened a can for me in this country: by pounding a knife into the can using a stone. I appreciate the resourcefulness.

- We have all kinds of tourists staying at our house in the first floor apartment that I’ll live in in just over a month. I recently had a conversation with an Albanian who lived in Macedonia. “You need to tell Americans that we are good, civilized people,” he said. “The best friend of America is Albania.” After a conversation about Iraq and the economic crisis, he was sufficiently impressed. “Stay here and marry and Albanian man,” he told me. Where have I heard that before?

- My friends and I will be reviving the Peace Corps Albania newsletter, which has been dormant for a little bit. I’m hoping that we will be able to make something really great that will serve as a good document to look back on when our service is over.

- Our country director recently sent us an e-mail about rooming assignments at conferences and other Peace Corps Albania events. The reason I mention this is that he told us how, in most cases, everything is random and rooming friends together wasn’t a consideration. I mention this because it makes my friendship with my best friend here, Kate, seem almost fated. We were together in Philly, together in Elbasan, spent PST in neighboring villages, and were together again during the Counterpart Conference in Tirana. It’s kind of amazing to think how frequently we’ve been put together, especially knowing that this was largely so random.

- Something you might not know? There is a Western Union in almost every village, no matter how small. If there isn’t one in the village, there is one within a reasonable traveling distance. Why? Albanians working abroad send massive amounts of money home to their relatives. In fact, it was the #2 source of income in the country next to tourism.

Mosquito Pills?

All throughout PST, my language teachers frequently told us that Albanian has far less words than English. Although I don’t know how it breaks down quantitatively, I know this fact is true just by speaking the language.

For example, when we went looking for gift wrap, I said that I didn’t know how to say “gift wrap” but that I hoped it was “leter.” Although I was joking, I was right anyhow. And that’s the reason I mention the word shortage. “Leter” can mean any of the following, depending on the circumstance and the word that it’s paired with: napkin, playing cards, paper, toilet paper, gift wrap, aluminum foil, a piece of paper or a game of card or sandpaper. What a wide variety! So it’s not enough to hear the word “leter,” but also the word that comes after it, since adjectives follow nouns in Albanian. One basic word noun with many different meanings.

Let’s move on to a verb that’s the same way. “Pi” means “to drink.” However, in conjunction with words like “cigarettes” and “pills” it means to drink or take medication. When my host mom saw how my legs had been annihilated by an army of mosquitoes, she asked me why I hadn’t “taken the pills for mosquitoes.” I had no idea what she was talking about. I thought to myself, “There are pills for mosquitoes?!” But what she really meant was “why haven’t you fumigated?” Apparently, not only does “pi ilac” mean “take medication,” but also “spray bug spray.”
But if you happen to hear about a pill for mosquitoes, let me know. I’ve been scratching so much that the only way to stop the scratching would be a pair of handcuffs.

Gift Wrap… the Silent Killer?

My friend’s host mom had a birthday recently, so she bought her a gift and we went on the search to procure gift wrap. Sometimes living here is a little work because you have to know enough stores and their inventory to be able to get what you want. Gift wrap isn’t the most prevalent thing around here, although it’s not impossible to find it.

We ducked into a gift store, or what appeared to be one. The front window had a mountain of stuffed animals, some furniture, and what appeared to be tubes of foil gift wrap. The inside of the store had house trinkets and jewelry and other things that look like they came straight from factories in China, potentially loaded with Melamine. We decided to double check and see if another gift store next door might have paper. The second store had spices, wholesale candy, balloons and birthday candles, but no paper. So we went back to the first store and found a box of “wrapping paper.” We started asking questions when we saw the design printed on the paper said, “ha ha happy birthday, this is not a firework.” That seemed like a weird message to have designed on wrapping paper, right? On the bottom, the tubes had different colors listed on them. One was labeled “red.” Another “white.” “What does that even mean?” I asked. Further investigative work concluded that it wasn’t wrapping paper, but something that exploded. When we looked at the other box in the store window that had initially drawn us in, it was again, not gift wrap, but something that exploded. Then the owner tried to tell us the exploding stuff was gift paper. There are so many random things here... where else could you buy a huge version of those plastic little exploding champagne bottles and think it was gift wrap? Thank god it’s still called “leter” in Albanian though (please see next entry).

Oh, the People You’ll Meet

Last weekend I was visiting my friend Kristine. We had been running errands all morning and were almost home. As we approached a store selling the laundry racks that my friend needed, an old man stepping out of the neighboring store addressed us in English and asked us if we’d like to buy some shoes. That turned out just to be a way of starting a conversation, because then he gathered us around him and said that it was the second time he saw us today. He saw us in the morning eating burrek and drinking coffee at our favorite place. “I wanted to warn you,” he said. “Sometimes those places are not so clean.” We didn’t like him talking about my bean burrek place that way, but we nonetheless accepted his invitation to coffee anyway.
And after over an hour of conversation, we couldn’t have been happier that we had accepted the invite.

After he parked what he called his “Benz-Mercedes,” but what was really a old, rusted, Italian bicycle, we went into an air-conditioned café and ordered a round of macchiatos. He told us the origin of his names. Then Salih talked about linguistics and word origins, and the fact that some Albanian words correspond to olde English ones. “How could that be?” he asked us. “I have a theory about that,” he said, “but you have to promise not to tell anyone.” Sorry, dear readers, but I’m sworn to secrecy.

He quoted Robert Burns at length and talked about the connection that he felt to him. Burns talked about the Scottish highlands, and Salih talked about his own closeness with the mountainous land of Albania. He quoted Byron, a notable visitor to Albania. We talked about literature. We wondered why so many Albanians read Dreiser. I saw someone reading Dreiser in a bus. He saw a teenager reading Dreiser. Why?!

“I didn’t always look like this,” he said. “My eyes were once dark blue like the Adriatic, and my hair blonde. But when you get to be my age, you start thinking about the past. You look into your past and don’t think as much about the future. I think a lot about my parents. I hear my father asking me, “My son, have you led a life that you can be proud of?” He told us about his family and his father, a serious man who never smiled much, except when he held his grandson for the first time. And even then he tried to hide his smile. Salih told us that in that moment, everything in the house smiled, “even the stones.” He talked about his mother, his “dear mother,” as he told us. “They don’t make parents like that much anymore,” he lamented. “The ones that would do anything for their children.”

That led to a discussion on the importance of being honest and not being corrupt, even though academic life in Albania can frequently lead to that. He told us he’d been teaching at university for forty-five years and was amongst one of the first groups to learn English at the University of Tirana in the early sixties. He went to many countries establishing education programs and working on methodology. His students still write and people know who he is.

Somewhere along the line, I thought he may have been making all of it up. I thought about all the patients and cases my mom had told me about from her work as a psychiatric nurse. And although I felt a tinge of disappointment at the idea that he might not be real, I was so enthralled by his stories that I didn’t even care. If he was making this up, it didn’t matter. It seemed to be one of the most meaningful and deep conversations I’d had in weeks, so the importance of its veracity gradually slid into the background.

Immediately after we said our goodbyes, I told Kristine that we had to Google him and see if it was real. We talked about how disappointed we’d be if he wasn’t real. I did some stalking online and couldn’t find anything. Kristine tried her luck, and we felt a wave of relief when a Google Books search all but proved it. A section from the book Albanian Diary was highlighted on the screen. It was the name of the man we had met. In the text passage, the man is quoting the work of an Albanian poet. Given that Salih had freely quoted several poets, it seemed like convincing enough evidence to know that he was real. And it was so great.