Vlora

Here is a picture of me and my Peace Corps-mates cutting a clearing in the jungle with machetes to build a clinic to care for refugees from the insurgent conflict. Well, maybe not. Not every soldier fights in the trenches.

Vlora is a city of between 200,000-300,000. Set on the south shore of Albania, where the Adriatic meets the Ionian Sea, it is a beautiful and historic location. It has been inhabited for more than 4000 years. A strategic location and an excellent harbor, it has changed hands many times, but it is also the place where Albanian independence was declared in 1912, by Ismail Qemali, although Italy then occupied it two years later.

Italy now appears to economically occupy much of Vlora, with a fair number of Italians having second homes there. People on the street would often talk to us in Italian, assuming that if we were foreign, that must be our language. The coast is chock-a-block with high rises of Albanian block and plaster style, most in mid-construction. All that building activity creates a fair amount of dust, but that doesn’t change the natural beauty of the location. Many Albanians have second homes there as well. I stayed with a volunteer who rents a flat in a high rise that is still under construction. It feels like he is squatting as most of the apartments around him that are habitable and perhaps sold are empty in the off season.

My pre-service training group was sent out around Albania the past few days to visit current volunteers at their service sites and get a feeling for what they do and how they live. It was a very useful exercise, although I have to confess that getting sent to Vlora was like winning a vacation by the sea. The weather was sunny, the sea tranquil, and the city was very pleasant without the crush of the summer people.

I went with a nice young couple from Philadelphia to visit the 4 volunteers assigned to the Vlora area. We took buses down and furgons back, changing at Qema, along the coast highway after driving along the Shimbrin River valley from Elbasan. It was about 4 ½ hours each way, on roads that varied from good two lane pavement to rutted dirt, much of it winding through mountainous terrain, kind of like Idaho. Round trip was about $13 dollars, each.

I am very grateful that the Peace Corps has a policy which prohibits volunteers from operating motorized vehicles. Furgon drivers, especially, but most Albanian drivers have a style similar to a prolonged game of chicken. Speed is as fast as possible. Remember, there are trucks, buses, horse carts, bicycles, mopeds, pedestrians, etc. along most roads. Passing can take place at any time with trust and hope that the oncoming driver will give way and pedestrians, carts and cycles get off to the side in time. I cannot imagine how people travel at night and live to tell the tale. We had an assignment to answer a series of questions about our trip. One was about outward signs of religion in the area. There are three mosques and two churches in Vlora, but, based on my experience, most praying occurs on the roads.

I got to follow my volunteer through a day where he went to his office at the Directorate of Health and also watch a class he taught at the university with another volunteer on American Studies. I got to talk with his Albanian counterpart at the Directorate. We talked about educational efforts in areas of drugs, alcohol, sexually transmitted diseases, dental care, breast cancer, diabetes, etc. The only unusual area of concern was thalassemia, a genetic blood disorder seen in some parts of the Mediterranean, apparently including Albania. They have very few resources. Some handouts are donated by various world charity organizations and some are produced locally and photocopied. This conversation occurred in Shqip, so I missed a lot of the nuances. The counterpart really likes Vlora. Apparently it is a plum assignment late in her career. I was also supposed to meet the director of the region, who speaks English very well, but she was away in Tirana, the capital, something I was told was fairly common. I had been looking forward to talking with her.

The class has 160 students registered for it. About half showed up, which I was told was normal. They were noisy, often talking during the class, and cell phones rang frequently. Smaller groups, afterwards, in seminars of about 25 students were more attentive. I was told they rarely read assignments or turn in home work. Classrooms are crowded with students tightly packed on broken benches with scratched-up blackboards in front without other visual aids. I don’t know how they could be accommodated, if everyone showed up. There is also a new building on the campus with new equipment, but our class was in the old building. The usual style of Albanian education is for the teacher to read from a text and the students to take notes. I was told that some teachers supplement their meager incomes by selling grades.

The volunteers’ style, of course, was quite different. They tried to engage the class, and it was clear they succeeded with some. At the seminar, they played a recording of Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech which they had downloaded to one of their laptops. I was asked to say a few words about it since I was a teen at the time and remember it well. I was relieved that the students at the seminar have a good command of English and I did not have to make my comments in Shqip.

I talked about how prejudice is something that we all have that we regard as normal at the time. It is only later that most of us see it as wrong, as mores change. It often takes a leader, an orator, like Dr. King to facilitate that change. Albanians, like many economic migrants, face a lot of prejudice. I hope that the students could relate to the speech.

That night we went to the apartment of another counterpart. Being Albanian, after meeting us briefly the previous afternoon as we walked along the esplanade, they insisted the whole group come for a home cooked seafood dinner. They grilled fresh caught fish from the Adriatic on a hibatchi on their balcony and served it with salad, fruit and bread. We brought the wine. After dinner, over tea and cookies, we played a card game, called “Mafia”. This was taught to us by the volunteers, not by our hosts, by the way, if prejudicial stereotyping led you to another conclusion. The sunset lit up the mountains surrounding the Bay of Vlora.