We're All Related

I can’t believe that I’m rapidly approaching my second weekend here. In some ways it feels as if I’ve been here for so long or at least that my life in New York happened a long, long time ago. Going out to dinner or getting delivery seem like concepts in a dream or movie.

As is now usual I woke up at 6:15ish. Gjusha was here. She and Lavdja tried very hard to get me out of bed- Molly! Ha, Ha, Ha (Molly! Eat, Eat Eat) but I didn’t get out of the toasty sleeping bag until 7.

When I finally did get up, I was given tea and coffee to heat me up. Gjusha was gone already.
One my way out, I remembered to take a few pictures of my house for our mapping exercise. I tried to take a picture of Gjusha put I couldn’t find her. When I asked Lavdja where she was, Lavdja pointed next door. Ah, I thought, she does in fact live next door. I found her out back but she absolutely refused to let me take her picture because she wasn’t dressed nicely. She went inside, changed, put on a gleaming white headdress, a clean black sweater and came outside and posed next to a lovely tree for her picture.

My day started at the Kommuna or municipal building of Shales- yes even little villages have one. We (the 4 other Shales volunteers and I) met with a current group 10 COD volunteer who told us what our community project for the next 9 weeks would entail: picking out and developing a community project for Shales and writing a project proposal to present to potential donors. Though we only have 7 weeks until we present our proposal, I’m very comforted that we will a)have the experience of writing a project proposal as a team and b) get feedback on our proposal before venturing out on our own to write them. During our meeting, we were also told various useful tips about working in the government. Our 3 ½ hour meeting flew by.
As a group, we came up with multiple ideas for our project and somewhat settled on one that has to do with trash collection. While people have very clean homes, the mode of dumping the household garbage tends to be placing it in an area where everyone else has dumped their trash or burning it (including the Styrofoam). Most of Albania lacks a formal sanitation collection system and the smaller villages suffer the most because of this since they do not have a tax base and therefore lack the funds with which to do garbage collection.

We thought of incentives for team trash collection, competitions and ways to reuse our trash. The later component a crucial one, as we do not have a place to put the trash after we collect it and want to make the collection something that could be replicated in the future. We floated the idea of compacting and reusing the trash as the base of the bench for the bus stop or using glass bottles to build a window for the school (two another community development ideas we folded in the trash collection idea).
After the meeting we had language class, lunch and more language class. Because the internet is still down the girls had time to go to a drinking only café after school before the sun went down.

As I walked home with Katie Astrit’s Mercedes passed us by with a nicely dressed couple in the back seat. I stopped at her house as did the couple that was in the back seat. They kept pointing at my house, saying Lavdja (my host mother’s name) and Motre (sister). I thought this meant the woman was Lavdja’s sister. She and her husband walked me home and it turns out they live in the house directly across the road from mine. When we got there, the woman pointed to Astrit and said Motre, making me really confused. The woman is either my host mother Lavidja’s sister or Astrit’s sister who lives directly across from Lavidja. I’m really not sure. More importantly, while trying to figure that out during dinner I made a few discoveries.
While trying to ask whose sister the woman was, I discovered that my host mother has 9 sisters and 3 brothers. She is the 3rd oldest of 13 children. Her youngest sibling, at 24 years old, is pretty close in age to her son Aqim who is 20. Rina has 20 cousins on that side of the family. I also learned that Gjusha has 5 children and 12 grandchildren. She lives in between her children (the father of my house and one other).

My second discovery is that there is no mail in Shales. According to my family the entire village does not have mail. There is a post office, though, so I’m a bit curious this assertion. What function does the post office serve if, in fact, there is no mail in Shales? This may sound petty to you, but I have been seriously struggling to figure out the mail situation since I wrote a letter Saturday night. On Monday I asked my family about mail with the help of the dictionary and got blank stares. On Tuesday I tried to mail the letter from Elbasan but was thwarted because I kept getting answered “yes” by the language teacher when I asked where the post office was.
By the time I finally found a different person to ask, I was understood, but was told that the only post office was in the center which was too far away from where I was. I could not make it there and then catch a furgone back to Shales before sunset, when the furgones stop running (Remember- on Tuesday we didn’t get to Elbasan until 11:45).

On Wednesday I had my language teacher translate a few sentence regarding mail (Do you have an address? Can I get mail here? How would I receive a letter here?). It was by showing this translation to my family that I learned, or was told, that no one here gets mail. There is a post office in Elbasan (45 minutes away) and Tirana (2 hours away). If I want to get mail, I must go to Elbasan. In a way, it’s refreshing- I mean how many times do you actually get something good in the mail? Something that isn’t a bill? For me, it’s about 5 times a year. So, no bills! No organizations asking for money. No catalogues of stuff I don’t want sent to me that I then have to recycle, killing trees and wasting valuable resources on the mail truck, recycle truck and recycling center. It’s kind of nice. I explained to my family that it is great that they don’t get mail and I wished I didn’t get mail because all I get is mail from people asking for money- which sucks.
Tomorrow, Rina is going to take her grandmother to Elbasan to visit her grandmother’s sister (aunt of my father- she kept telling me). I’m also headed to Elbasan to learn more about my future tasks and responsibilities as a PCV- very exciting. Maybe I’ll even have time to go to an internet café to post my writing.