Oh, Technology

I need to vent… I hate technology!!! The internet has been down at work since yesterday afternoon, which is connected to the phones. So to make calls for work, I had to use my cell phone today. I tried to do some writing on the grant this afternoon, but every time I needed to look up a piece of info or refer to an email, I had to put it on my mental to-do list for later when the Internet is better. I decided to come over to the Bishops and use their Internet, which at least goes in and out… but I found out that an in-and-out connection isn’t very good for Skyping. I was just trying to talk with a friend from the U.S. a few minutes ago over Skype, and the connection kept cutting us off every 30 seconds. Ugh! It made me feel pretty much helpless. Oh, technology.

On a happier note, the last couple days I have gotten to do a significant amount of socializing. Yesterday I chatted for a while with two of the day care workers at the center. They’re around my age, and they’re Christians as well. We have a little more in common than perhaps the people I live near (don’t get me wrong… I LOVE my neighbors, too!) They get to practice their English on me, and I get to practice my Albanian on them.

Something Short

As I sit in my bedroom with the window open, the curtain is blowing back and forth rather violently for an afternoon. I can even hear the wind at times. For once I can sit here without the fan on in my room and feel pretty much comfortable temperature wise, even though it’s the hottest part of the day. This breeze we have today is very welcome after a week of very still, hot, humid weather. Last night I experienced the most sleepless night I’ve had since my arrival, because even with the fan on and the window open, there was no escape from the heat! As we get deeper into summer, the heat gets hotter. This week my physical energy level was much lower than in the previous two weeks, which helped me understand even more why few people go out in the afternoons.

My landlord and landlady work very hard to provide for their family. Arti has a large cart of sandals which he takes into town every day to sell, and Mariana makes berek pastry every night to sell to shops in the city. Now that beach season is here, they have begun taking food and drinks to the beach to sell to tourists to try to make a little more money. I did enough complaining about the heat this week for a whole family, but when I think about Arti and Mariana outside in that heat faithfully going out to earn money every day to support their family, it reminds me to toughen up and bear it.

Last night Danika and I attended our first authentic Albanian birthday party. Klesti is one of the little boys who lives in the house just in front of us and is in and out of our apartment all the time. He turned six yesterday, so his aunt and mother made dinner (darkë) for the family and a birthday cake (tortë). Enida and Redi (our landlord’s children) sang the happy birthday song in English, so of course Danika and I were able to join in. Then several of the family members pulled bills out of their pockets and gave them to Klesti… it is customary to give money to someone when they have a birthday. The family toasted to him, wishing him many more happy years. In fact, whenever you share a drink or a meal with someone here, it is typical to do a toast with your glass or coffee cup and say, “Gezuar!” which is similar to saying “Cheers!” Tomorrow Klesti and his little brother are going with their mother to Greece to visit their father who works as a field worker during the summers. We are going to miss them!

As of yesterday, it’s official that I am going to stay in Albania for two weeks longer than originally planned. The time is going by far too quickly, and since my future plans are still up in the air, I wanted to stay on just a little longer. Now instead of saying that I have two weeks left, I have an entire month!

This is a short post… okay, shorter than they usually are, but I’ll close with another cultural note: As an unmarried person I am still considered a “girl.” No matter how old you are, you are considered a child if you are unmarried – eight, eighteen, or twenty-eight. The other night I was at the Bishops’ house finishing some work while Danika came back to the apartment. Instead of leaving her alone, our host family wanted to keep her company because they didn’t want her to get scared, at home alone. If we’re out of the house past 9:00 p.m., Mariana always calls to see where we are because she doesn’t want anything to happen to her “girls.” You can rest easy, because we are well looked after :)

We are doing a good deal of PR this week. Monday I interviewed the director of a school just outside of the Kënet, and yesterday I interviewed the vice-director of the Këneta school. Anisa has been a GREAT help with interviews as a translator, especially since she has a teaching background and understands the educational issues we are trying to understand and address. And as an added bonus, we get to hang out more! On Monday after an interview, we got coffee together and talked for a couple hours. It was my first time at one of the locales here, which is crazy, because cafés are everywhere! Most of my coffee-drinking thus far has been in people’s homes, so it was nice to get out. Socializing and drinking a coffee together outside is a huge part of the culture here. Relationships are #1, and you see cafés in practically every other building!

Saranda

This past weekend Danika, my housemate, and I took a seven-hour bus ride to a city in the south called Saranda. I had planned this trip before coming out here, because my cousin's wife, Vana, grew up in Saranda before she went to the States for college, and she just happened to be in Saranda in the middle of my stay here in Albania! (Coincidence? I think not ) It came at a very good time, as last week was a very busy week, and Danika and I were both in need of some rest.

I got to meet Vana's family for the first time and stay with them in their little apartment located a five-minute walk from the beach with a perfect view of the harbor from their balcony. It was stunning! If the sky is clear, you can actually see the nearest Greek island of Corfu which you can reach by ferry from Saranda in 20 minutes. We would have jumped on the ferry immediately, except I didn't bring my passport to Saranda! Ugh! I know better for next time, I guess.

Before leaving Durres, Ken gave me the number for a guy he knew in Saranda who houses missionaries sometimes. We planned to stay with Vana's parents on Friday night and then stay at the missionary house on Saturday night. When we got to Saranda I told Vana about him, and he just so happened to be a friend of hers who she knew in high school! But wait, it gets even better.... Vana's family took us to dinner on Friday night at their favorite pizza restaurant, and he happened to show up there too! This is just one of the many ways I've seen God provide when He didn't have to.

A Post Long Past Due

I offer you my sincerest apologies for not blogging this week! I won’t start into excuses, because it will only waste time and cyberspace, and there are lots of things to write about the past week. So here goes!

As I may or may not have mentioned in a previous post, one of my initial tasks was to focus on language learning. This is a very basic and essential part of being a missionary… which seems like common sense and is reiterated in mission courses, but now that I’m on the field, I have a much more personal understanding. Ken and Dawn’s (and Global Partner’s) vision for this field is to see a sustainable Albanian church formed – not a foreign church dependent upon foreigners for its survival. My housemate puts it this way: if you’re doing your job right as a missionary, then you won’t be needed forever. The point of missions and church planting is to allow the Holy Spirit to work from within the culture as new believers are discipled and can disciple their own people. Discipleship works like multiplication. But now I’m getting a bit off track, so let’s get back to what I wanted to say.

Task Time!

It’s Saturday. Again. How can it be that I’ve reached my second weekend here already? Time is indeed passing quickly, so it’s time to buckle down and work on the grant proposal that you might remember me mentioning before I left the U.S. Let me give you a little background and info on my project…

The region in which I’m serving is called the Keneta, which means “swamp” in Albanian. Prior to the fall of Communism in 1991 the region was all farmland. Afterward, the farmers divided up the land and sold it to people from the villages who swarmed into the city looking for work. This was all done without any sort of legal process or zoning procedures. Now the region is full of illegal homes and buildings, and because of this there are no records for the buildings. People of the Kenet are generally looked down upon by the people of the city who were already living here, and the city government generally places the Kenet at the bottom of its priority list. Paved roads are nonexistent, making travel very difficult. The most common form of transportation into the city is walking, but you also see a great number of motorbikes. The roads are dirt which turns to slippery mud when it rains. Recently though, more stone has been brought into the “main” roads which makes them a little more usable during rain. No organized disposal system exists, so garbage is thrown in large piles in the streets or in the sewage canals.

Laughter is the Best Medicine

I'm sitting in the Bishop home once again, this time listening to a rather noisy cow next-door. Speaking of cows... I walked past a couple of them tied up on the sidewalk in town, with not a care in the world. Except they should care, because they were tied up next to the butcher's shop! I felt kinda bad for them. But fresh beef is something to be prized in Albania... not many people eat much meat because it's expensive. So yeah, I'm getting to eat lots of bread and vegetables!! Good thing I love my veggies. And they have some good ones here, too. Last night, I got to experience making what they call berek... it's a classic Albanian dish - basically a big savory stuffed pastry that looks like a pizza with a pie crust on top. Our landlady, Mariana, has a job making them, so she's very good at it. The ingredients are very simple, but she threw all the ingredients together without measuring anything. Danika and I are hoping to make some ourselves sometime, but it could be disastrous. I will keep you posted on any developments there.

Ina is a 16-year-old girl who lives just behind the Bishops' house, and she has an incredible singing voice. Dawn asked me before I came if I could work with her while I was here. We had our first voice lesson on Saturday and another one this afternoon. She's very good at English so the lessons go pretty smoothly as far as communication, but this is the first time I've ever taught voice before, and I feel like I'm learning just as much as she is as I try to remember what I used to do when I took voice lessons. Plus I have to play piano all while watching and listening to her, and if you know how ADD I am, you'd understand that it's a bit of a challenge. But as she left today she thanked me over and over for working with her. She's so sweet, and so patient, because I feel like I should be thanking HER for dealing with my ADD-ness!

Youth Night

It's almost 8:00 p.m. and I just returned from youth night at the Operation Mobilization Resource Center. It was a blast! Eva Bishop and her 16-year-old friend, Ina, let me go with them, and we got to play several games with a bunch of the other Albanian youth there. Ina has learned a lot of English from Eva, so we did quite a bit of talking and I found out that she speaks some Spanish! It made me happy, because you have no idea how many times I've nearly blurted out words in Spanish.... and it's not like Albanian in ANYTHING like Spanish... I think my brain just hears a foreign language I don't understand yet, and I grasp for words in the only foreign language I know...

However, Danika and I have learned most of our Albanian greetings already. We spent two hours with Anise, our language teacher this morning (which had our brains fried by noon), and soon after that one of our neighbors came up to our apartment and visited with us for a while (none of the family speak English by the way). But we had so much fun pointing at things and learning the Albanian words, and in turn giving her the English.... but I say a lot of "yo kuptoj" ("Don't understand"), and laugh at ourselves. I found out that I have a legitimate Albanian name! But it's spelled a lot differently.... Xhesika.... which looks pretty awesome, I think. I may have to consider getting it changed when I get back to the States :) 

On Friday afternoons the English missionaries get together for worship time, and we had such a sweet time of worship together. Granted, I love hearing Albanian all the time, but being able to offer up praise to God in my own native language, singing classics like "As the Deer" and "Shout to the Lord" touched me in a special way today. It was good to feel the overwhelming grace of God.... the miracle of me even being here hit me in a new way. Yet I couldn't help but think how wonderful it would be to also watch Albanians lift up sincere praise to God. Pray for these people. They are so beautiful and ripe for harvest, but the devil doesn't want them to come to Jesus. Thank you for all your prayers. I love you all!

It's about 7:45 p.m., and the day is coming soon to a close for us. It typically won't probably end this early, but the jet lag makes has made it a little difficult to be responsive throughout the day :)

I apologize to everyone for not writing sooner. I intended to post during my layover in Munich, but unfortunately I could not connect to the internet. Oh well. It gave me some time to run and get a coffee and water... which cost almost $15!! And I thought Starbucks was expensive.

As we prepared to board the plane to Tirana, I immediately recognized my new housemate, Danika, thanks to Facebook pictures. We arrived in Albania and proceeded to pick up our luggage, but waited awhile and couldn't find Danika's. It turned out that hers hadn't reached Tirana quite yet, but apparently it often happens with the Canadian airlines (Danika is from New Brunswick).

We had a wonderful authentic Albanian lunch (except for the fact that native Albanians typically eat their large meal at dinner rather than lunch) made by Eva, the eldest of the Bishop clan. She's graduating from high school next year, and then Josh is next oldest, and then Steven.

Then we went to look at our apartment, which is on the second floor of an Albanian family's home. They are such a beautiful family! Arti and Mariana are our landlord and landlady, and Arti's parents, his two children, his sister-in-law and her two boys live with them. We went over to get acquainted with the family, and what started as a simple meet-and-greet turned into cookies, Turkish coffee, and apricots, and lots more conversation.... learning Albanian.... lots of laughs at Danika and my nonresponsive faces... and three hours later we began to wrap up the visit.... Dawn was begging to let us go to bed and get caught up. Sooooo that's what I'm gonna do. Right now :) Next entry should be a little better lol, because I'll have my normal brain power back.