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.
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