getting into a routine..

First things first if anyone would like to send me mail (which would make me one of the happiest people alive), my mailing address during PST (pre-service training, the first 10 weeks) is:

Kip Guthrie

Korpusi i Paques

P.O. Box 8180

Tirane, Albania

They said it takes between 1-2 weeks to send and/or receive

Anyways, I wanted to touch base a little bit on a bunch of different interesting/fun things that have happened so far.

Gender roles: Lives for women here are much different. The women of the household are expected to do everything. They cook and prepare food for the whole family, clean up after everyone, do all of the laundry, and work on manual labor outside with the farming and gardens also. Not only this but they don’t go walk outside or go to cafes/bars at night, they don’t drink or smoke, etc. Basically the men are just the primary bread winners with the work they do but then aren’t expected to do any other work and they get to have fun and be social. It is acceptable for women to engage in some of the activities men do in the bigger cities, but in the small villages it just does not happen. There isn’t a law against a woman being in a bar at night but she might be shunned by the community if it happened. The female trainees I am with are all trying to find a happy medium between accepting Albanian culture and not being afraid to show some American culture in regards to social norms, but it isn’t easy for them. When I try to help around the house here my host dad always insists I sit down and let my host mom and brother do everything, so I myself am trying to find a happy medium between not being disrespectful in not listening to my host dad and trying to show some effort and nice gestures. These women have very large and swollen hands because of the amount of work they do. They literally don’t use oven mitts when they cook with the stove and oven because of how tough their hands are.

My frannnds: I definitely have a group of friends who I am much closer with than most of the others. I get along with everybody here great but there are a group of 5 or 6 of us that definitely flock to each other whenever we are in a large group setting. Shout-out to Brenna, Casey, John, Maayan, Sean, Zoe. Like I said, I love everybody and want to get to this point with everyone but this kind of just happened and it’s been a lot of fun so far. I hope we can continue to stay close throughout PST even though most of us are separated from each other but for the two days out of the week we go to Elbasan, and then throughout our actual service where we will be separated throughout the country. Maayan and I are in the same town though and the other volunteers we’re with (Jason, Lisa, Patti) are awesome too so PST here won’t be bad at all. Lisa and I’s families are BFF’s and we live 5 minutes from each other. I’m about 10 minutes from Jason and 15 from Maayan and Lisa.

Homework: Yeah we have homework every day with our language classes. It’s probably a good thing but just kind of funny. And studying is definitely a necessity if we’re going to learn any of this language half decently.

Avash avash. This is the Albanian saying for “little-by-little” or “baby steps.” They say it all the time though and I love it. It just flows off the tongue and you can use it in so many different circumstances. It’s been great.

Darkness. Literally you can’t see ANYthing walking around at night. There aren’t lights outside at all. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such pure darkness before. Obviously it makes for some great stargazing but it’s a bit petrifying to be out at night. Not that there is a real reason to be scared but you never know. And if something did happen who would know?

Who wants to be a millionaire? There is an Albanian version of who wants to be a millionaire here and I definitely got two questions right. In no way can I claim that I understand the language well enough to be able to do this but both questions were about American pop culture that would be obvious to anyone in America and my knowledge of the numbers and different animal names were all I needed. Still, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t proud of myself for this.

Chickens/cows/donkeys/horses/turkeys/dogs/cats oh my! Yeah they are all everywhere. Wild chickens walk the streets in more prevalence than squirrels do in American suburbia. If a family doesn’t have a tractor they have a donkey, horse or both. I see at least 1 turkey a day and there are a ton of wild dogs and cats. Almost all of the dogs here are completely wild. There are no recognizable breeds just a lot of mixed who knows what. And if you get too close they get very scared. People here don’t like dogs and often kick or throw rocks at them for fun.

President Uncle. My host mother’s brother is the mayor of the village. So basically that’s pretty cool. He drives an SUV which is a big deal here. He comes to the house to hang out every once in a while.

Turkish toilets. Most of the houses and other places around Albania have “Turkish toilets” which basically means the seat of the toilet is on the ground but you don’t actually sit you just hover. Luckily my house has regular toilets. We also have a shower curtain which I hear is pretty rare around Albania.

No Kip “ih” sound KEEEEEP. They don’t have a sound that does “ih” so my name isn’t kip it is keep. It’s either that or këp (pronounced kepp) so I just go with keep. It’s whatever.

Bizarre alarm clock. Yeah so I set my alarm clocks time and set the alarm and then woke up in the middle of the night because my alarm went off. It was set for 7:10 and went off at about 4:30. This is very bizarre but the only thing I can think of is that the double voltage European electricity is making the time go twice as fast. I don’t know what other explanation there could be, because it literally goes twice as fast. I am using my convertor so technically 220 volts shouldn’t be going to it so I can’t make any sense of this. It might just be a faulty alarm clock and then this whole story is pointless.

Phone: I do have a phone. If you want the number you can ask me privately. Of course it is expensive to call internationally with your phones but if you use Skype to call my phone it is either free or really cheap like 2 cents a minute or something. It’s a pretty cheap and small Nokia go-phone. It has some pretty sweet games like bounce, Sudoku, and forgotten treasures.

Raki: The national beverage of this country. Many men have it with every meal or between meals. It is a liquor that tastes similar to tequila (but pretty cheap tequila.) They don’t take shots though they sip it ever so slowly. The older cousins always offer me more and more and love doing so but my host dad says no after a couple so I just do what he says hahaha.

Avash Avash

Moving in with our host families!

So there is a group of five of us volunteers here in Schushicë and we left Elbasan in two different furgons (mini-buses.) Schushicë is a small village 7km southeast of Elbasan with a population of roughly 1500 and is mostly a farming community. Everyone here has a farm. But the farms are much smaller than what we think of farms in the US. Most of them are between 1-5 acres. The furgons followed each other as we dropped everyone off one by one to our families. We’ve only been told many times how extremely awkward the first day is because of the complete impasse that is the language barrier. So we kind of knew what to expect but were all still very nervous for it to actually happen. Thank god we have phones and texting among all of us volunteers.

MY first day experience(you know.. because "everyones experience is different..":

I walked in to be greeted by my host father, mother, grandmother, a couple brothers, and several random people of whom I’m not completely sure to this date were. I can only assume they were cousins. They have a lot of cousins (Kusheri-learned that word fast) here. My brothers said they don’t even know how many they have… over 20. The first thing we did was all gather in my room and sit around each other with much confusion of what to do next. My host brother Fatmir speaks the best English, he is 16 and goes to school in Elbason. His English isn’t great, but without him it would be a LOT harder. So they asked how old I was, where I was from, if I have kids, if I’m married, and why I’m not married (actually it is very common here to ask very personal questions like these when you first meet people, men and women alike.) They haven’t engaged me in political or religious conversations yet as I hear some other volunteers experiencing but I am definitely ok with that. Most of the time was spent looking through my language materials I have received thus far and reciting common easy to say phrases and questions. My dictionary was in my hand the whole entire time but without knowing proper tenses and poor literal translations on behalf of the dictionary maker this was quite difficult.

Finally, after about an hour or two of dealing with the awkward language threshold, they had me come into what I now know as the main hang out room. It’s basically a small shed (cement shed) beside the house where they have the oven and stove and thus keep somewhat warm in. It’s also where they have the television (nothing crazy… it’s like a 20 inch CRT from the ‘90s) and people here are obsessed with all sitting around the television and watching the most random channels. From what I know so far there is a traditional Albanian music video channel (which at all times of the day sound like the same song on repeat with a plethora of clarinets and repeated choruses), Albanian news channels, an Italian football league channel, an American music video channel (like the kind of hip hop songs that you would hear turning on the radio in America right now), etc. And yes, they sit around, father, mother, brothers, cousins, and grandmother alike watching this American hip hop channel. It is very bizarre. The Big Brother Albania finale was on the other night and from what I understand ALL of our houses were watching it religiously.

FOOD:

So the first thing they did while we were in the “hang out shed” was feed me some food. The olives, peppers (tasted like banana peppers), bread, and eggs were shumë mire (very good – pronounced shoo-meer.) My host dad is a farmer and the fruits and vegetables are all grown on his farm. I also learned some things I do not like so much, mostly stemming from my dislike of cottage cheese and non-sweet yogurt. They have many sour milk based preparations including something called kos which is similar to cottage cheese but more liquid and gel-like and something called dhal which to me just tastes like milk which is a couple of weeks expired (BUT other volunteers insist they like these so it may just be me.) Other meals I have had include a beef broth soup with pilaf which was delicious (you just have to beware of bone chips inside - every spoonful you need to swish around your mouth before you swallow, but it really isn’t a problem at all), spaghetti for breakfast, and my favorite so far – byrëk (sortttt of pronounced boorek but their y is the sound of the number 2 in French, English doesn’t have a sound for it.) Byrëk is hard to explain and in no way am I going to be giving it justice in trying to but it’s like a panini with flaked crust instead of bread. They also have panini-like sandwiches at the local restaurant and a fast food place with hot dogs and hamburgers (haven’t been there yet though.) And when I say the restaurant- yes there is 1 “restaurant” in this village and it’s basically like an Albanian “Panera Bread” (well… not quite haha) but whose sandwiches only cost 60 lekë (about 60 cents.) Espresso coffees at the local café are about 40 cents. Seriously y’all should live over here during these troubling economic times…

Day-to-day life:

Well my room is freezing at night/morning, but I’ve already mentioned that. We’ve done a lot of walking around, the five of us, throughout the whole village. We’ve been to all of each other’s houses and today we hiked up this cliff overseeing the village and sat down and talked for a while. However not exciting it sounds it was actually pretty awesome. I love the other volunteers that I’m placed here with.  We went to the school for language classes for the first time today. The school is in the town center and is about a 12 minute walk from my house which is not too bad at all. The kids are especially interested in us and love to follow us around everywhere we go. It’s kind of weird but we have gotten used to it. We are often approached by strangers who attempt to speak with us but seriously it is impossible to have any kind of real conversation with how little language we know at this point. The town center has this internet café with computers but more interestingly has large plasma TV’s with Playstation 3s. My host brother and I played a couple games of FIFA… he is a huge Inter fan (a club in the Italian league) and plays soccer for his school in Elbasan.

Like before… there is always much more to say but I think this is it for now. We’re going back to Elbasan tomorrow and will all be together as a big group so we’re looking forward to that. GOODNIGHT ALL

Should've brought my fleece...

Ok SO I wasn’t sure at the beginning if I was going to keep a blog but several exciting things have happened that I feel like I want to remember and write about so I think I’m going to try it out. I’ll try to only write about interesting things and not bore anybody too much with a bunch of detailed specifics but this is my first time doing this so we’ll see what happens!

So let’s start with some random things first…

1 US dollar = 100 "new lekë." BUT when you communicate money to people you multiply whatever actual number you are talking about by 10 which is "old lekë." Sound confusing? Basically you ask someone how much a cup of coffee is and they will say 500 lekë (pronounced leck) but you actually only give them 50 lekë which is about 50 cents. Makes a little too much sense huh? So that is fun.

Everyone here, from all of the other trainees to the whole entire PC staff are great people. All of the trainees and I have so much in common but also come from a lot of different places in life and it’s just a really great group of people. I’m part of the younger group of people… the 22-23 year olds. Most of us are in our 20s and then there are some young 30s and a couple of older volunteers but it’s so easy to relate to and get along with everyone no matter what age or experience everyone has. AND there are actually 2 other Aggies with me.. one class of ‘10 and one class of ’08 who is actually also at my satellite site with me during PST.

Orientation/beginning of training:

Before departing for Albania we had a 2 day orientation in Washington DC. It was my first time in DC and we had a whole day to walk around the mall area and see the capital, Washington monument, Lincoln memorial and such. Being with everyone for the first couple of days in DC was a lot of fun and it has been so easy for a lot of us to already start becoming close friends with each other. Even at this point where we’ve known each other for a whole six days we are definitely closer than a normal six days would be for friendships.

“DON’T MAKE THE A-OK HAND SIGN” is something we all wrote in our language notebooks when learning that it means something along the lines of “go eff your mother” and is actually way worse than what flipping the bird is to Americans. If you wish to use this hand sign to insult someone, be careful, and NEVER use it in a joking sense, even with friends. Using the “A-OK” will immediately engage you in some sort of physical altercation. Albanians love their mothers. Another thing that is looked at as a huge sign of disrespect is the American nervous habit of slapping the bottom of one palm against the clenched fist of the other, alternating over and over. I don’t believe I ever do this but other people are freaking out and saying they do it all the time without thinking.

My PST(pre-service training) is in a village called Schushicë which is a few miles from the bigger city, Elbason, the HUB city that all volunteers from every satellite site get together twice a week at. Before moving to our satellite sites we spent three nights at a hotel in Elbason with very organized and structured days involving introductory courses in language, culture, technical, and safety training all centering around amazing buffet style breakfast, lunch, and dinners with several coffee breaks in between. The Univers Hotel’s food was absolutely incredible for anything I could have expected. It was basically an Eastern European Golden Corral three times a day. Did I mention we had wireless internet and a flat screen TV in the meal-lobby/bar area playing non-stop Top 40 American pop music? Life wasn’t too shabby at this point. We heard Black and Yellow at least twice a day and NO Justin Bieber!

First impressions of the country of Albania:

As soon as our plane landed and we hopped on the bus to drive to Elbason we were very interested in making some first impressions. During the drive our eyes were glued to the windows and there were many “oohs and ahhs” but definitely not in the traditional sense. It. Was. So. Weird. Honestly, if I were ever wanting to film some sort of combined zombie flick/post-apocalyptic movie this is the first place I would go.

All of the houses in this country are made of solid cement (insulation is non-existent but we’ll get to that later.) And most of the houses in this country are only halfway built (if that.) It takes years and years for these houses to be built because families only build them bit-by-bit as they have extra money and money coming in from emigrated sons working in different countries, mostly Italy, Greece, and America. There is trash EVERYwhere. No fraternity or sorority in the world could adopt these highways and make any sort of difference. If you have trash in this country what you do is just throw it on the side of the road to get rid of it. This is the mindset everyone has. There are literally acres of garbage laden earth on the sides of the roads of which if you walked across them you couldn’t get one step in that isn’t on some sort of plastic bag or bottle.

In the same quarter-mile of road you are driving along you will see incredibly beautiful and large estate style houses (often having a pastel and sometimes fluorescent color scheme), TONS of houses only partly built with no construction teams anywhere working on them, homeless people digging through dumpsters, wild and sometimes rabid dogs, trash everywhere, BUNKERS everywhere (Albania has more bunkers per km than any other country in the world), and a healthy mix of very well designed and beautiful looking stores and cafes literally right next door to what I could only say are worse-than-hole-in-the-wall retail stores and cafes. Yes, all within the same quarter mile of road. This country is very paradoxical.

Albania is also very beautiful. Every direction you look there are hills and mountains and the weather is very nice for the most part. Due to the non-insulated housing I almost feel that it’s colder inside the house than outside. During the day the temperature has been hovering around 65-70 but at night and in the early morning it is closer to 40-45. I can’t say that I’m getting used to going to bed with jeans, socks, long sleeve shirts, inside a sleeping bag with additional blankets over that.

I just moved in with my host family yesterday so I have much more to talk about but this is it for now. I have internet at my host family’s house so this communication thing won’t be quite as hard as I thought it might. Until then, Mirupafshim.