Nearing a Year

In two weeks, a new group of Peace Corps volunteers will arrive and I’ll be celebrating a year in-country. The second half of my service is rapidly approaching and the questions are starting to come. What have I accomplished? What do I need to improve? What do I need to get done before I go home? I’m not the only one considering all these points. The reality that our service is almost half complete is starting to sink in to other volunteers. For most of us, it’s a little scary to think about what comes next. Grad school? More development work? Foreign Service? Where are we going “home” to after these two years are over? How much will everything, everyone and ourselves have changed?

I’ve said before that you spend so much time counting up to the half way mark, and now that count-up will turn into a countdown. This experience has gone by in an instant, and given all the unanswered questions that need to be answered, I know the second year will go even faster. Now that the sun is setting within view of my window again as the days grow longer and longer, I take a moment each day to watch it slip into the sea. In those last rays of light, I think about my day. What did I learn today? What do I need to improve for tomorrow?

So what have I learned, now that I’m at the year mark?

Two weeks ago, I had my first genuinely bad day at work. Given that we’re already six months into the school year, I don’t feel too bad about that. Maybe for the first time, I realized just how hard it is to be a teacher here. I honestly don’t know how my Albanian colleagues do it—let alone how most of them are career teachers that have been in the system since I learned how to walk. Students are usually varying degrees of impossible to manage and the lack of interest in learning is astounding. Today I had finally had enough as I waited ten minutes for the class to settle down enough to even start the lesson and then had to shout over students to teach. In the middle of a sentence, I stopped, went over to my materials and plans, picked them up and walked out of the room. My counterpart later told me not to take it personally and that it happens to everyone. When it comes down to it, I don’t care what general classes of high schoolers think of me or my lessons. I just want them to learn something and to make an effort, not for my sake but for their own. They are the ones that will have to go to university and find jobs.

It is hard for me to understand students and their mentalities because I can’t comprehend the idea of not wanting to learn. I do not understand it. They sit in class, talk louder than the teachers, and laugh a lot. Will they be laughing as much in the future when they have nothing to do with their lives because they lack the education? I don’t understand how lightly education is taken. If I had to guess, I’d say a severe lack of parental discipline is partly to blame as well as a consequence free environment that seems to be the norm at most schools I’ve seen. We certainly have discipline problems in the US, but at least we always knew what would happen if we did something. Here, I’m not exactly sure. The worst thing that happens to students is that they are thrown out of class—after which they go drink a coffee with their friends. Hardly an effective punishment, but what else can we really do?

General apathy is probably the biggest problem that I see in these students, and for that we have no real answers. It becomes a game of teaching to the three or four students in each class that want to learn and trying to encourage interested students to try. Maybe that’s all we can do.

I’ve also learned to accept that my pants will never, ever fit. As soon as I find a pair that fits me, they soon become too big and I’m right back where I started from with either my crotch at my knees, my belt needing new holes and/or having to roll my pant legs up. At least you can find a lot of great shirts at the used clothing market. I’m still holding out on a retro Team Germany jersey before the World Cup in 2010.

Most of us have become junior Albanian economists. Why? Well, not all stores have everything and not all prices are the same. Like most Albanians, we memorize prices and stock. For example, I know that in Lushnje, a town an hour away from me, they have powdered sugar imported from Italy. I know that the Durres EuroMax grocery store has soy sauce for 890Lek. I know that a grocery store in Berat has decaffeinated Lavazza espresso. It’s foolish to think that by walking into any store you’ll easily find whatever you’re looking for.

I’ve realized how much I love teaching and how much I love explaining and clarifying things. Recently, I checked the Olympic medal count every day at my school. My host mom, the school secretary, would always ask me what I was looking at (and why I was clapping when I would see the US leading). That led to a discussion about the Olympics and the sporting events. My Albanian is good enough to explain more complex things, for example, luge being “like an ice road and that’s 130KMH.” So eloquent.

But most importantly, it’s been 9 months of not being burned by my host family’s fry-o-lator. It’s a kitchen machine that I respect and fear, being both a useful instrument to preparing artery-clogging food faster, as well as being similar to the machine in “Night Shift” that has a penchant for blood. So far it hasn’t gotten me… but I know it’s lying in wait.