Mid Service Conference

A week before mid-service conference I visited a new volunteer in my region in the small, mountain city of Leskovik. She is a young English teacher in grammar to high schools that have students traveling or boarding from small villages throughout the area. Leskovik is situated in a high saddle, overlooking valleys to the east and west, only a few miles from the Greek border. It was a major military base during the communist regime, but now more than half the population consists of the students. We hiked up into the steep, rocky hills to the south of the town. These are riddled with bunkers that are connected by a warren of tunnels. They are now used mostly for storage or for stables. It is hard to imagine the work that went into their construction. She told me that the father of her host family from pre-service training served as an officer here and, although he had privileges as an officer and misses the full employment under communism, he has no desire to go back to the old system.

Now Leskovik has little employment besides the school and hospital. Under a new reorganization plan, hospitals in smaller towns will be closed and made into clinics with minimal staffing. This will be hard for people living in places like Leskovik which will be a 4 hour bus ride from a hospital in either Korca or Gjirokaster. People living in rural areas, which have a higher percentage of older residents, will be especially hard hit by the new policy.

We strolled down the wide main street in central Leskovik which has straight rows of mature shade trees on either side, a remnant of the previous military influence in the city, I guess. We each had a glass of very sweet iced cocoa at a table amid a profusion of petunias on the deck of a coffee bar before I joined 13 other passengers in 9 passenger furgon for the trip back to Korca. Luckily the man sitting on my lap had bathed recently and the lady next to me was agreeable to opening the window.

A week later, I was on a bus to Tirana for Mid-Service Conference. Most of my cohort attended. There were a number of presentations about planning for post service. Former volunteers who are now working in Tirana talked about how they obtained employment with the State Department, the Peace Corps, the UN and a couple of NGO’s. One of the perks of PC service is that after completion of service, former volunteers can apply for awhile for US Federal jobs without going through the full competitive process.

Not everything was relevant to me. There were sessions on resume writing and discussions on alcohol abuse. Still, it was good to see everyone and, despite the oppressive heat, we took advantage of our time in the capital. We went out for Chinese food (there are a few ethnic restaurants in Tirana) twice. I bought some decaffeinated coffee for my landlord who has a heart arrhythmia complicating his recovery from his heart attack. This is not available in Korca as far as I know. I bought some black licorice for myself (also not in stores outside of the capital). I had my mid-service physical exam with the Peace Corps Medical Officer at the clinic at the staff office and met with a professor from the University where I will be teaching in the fall. He was about the only one in the department not on August vacation.

I asked him about how he had dealt with the anarchy in 1997. He responded slowly. He said that he had found jobs for himself and his wife, who is a veterinarian, in Canada and had obtained visas, but his mother had reminded him that he would be leaving his home country permanently. After talking it over with his wife, they reluctantly decided to stay. This was a rare exception to the brain drain that occurred in the chaos that followed the fall of communism and the Ponzi scheme a decade later. I was invited to dinner at their apartment. His wife is also an artist, and her work, decoupage with dried grass stems instead of paper, was striking. When I told one of the other volunteers about it, she observed that such a technique would be useful during times of communist privation for non-approved artists.

Several of my cohort traveled to Korca on Thursday for the Beer Festival. Some stayed with me, others with other volunteers assigned to Korca or nearby towns. We walked across town to the park near the University where the festival was held. There were dozens of booths serving light or dark Korca beer on tap, grilled chicken skewers or sausage like, kernace, a Korca tradition. A large dish of kernace, two chicken kabobs, and a fresh baked roll was about $4. Beer was about 50 cents a glass. An Albanian rock band blared away on the stage. What they lacked in quality they made up for in volume. I could barely stand it long enough to finish my share of the kernace and chicken, but most of the group stayed until long after midnight. I was glad I had a spare key to give to that group and woke to find them snoring away on the couches in my apartment.

I let them sleep in and, when they woke up, served French toast, coffee and cut up watermelon and figs for breakfast. We used some of my valuable supply of maple syrup I had brought back from Singapore. Later we walked around Korca. Some left to visit other volunteers in the south of Albania, still others arrived. I headed back to the festival to join them after the heat of the day subsided to eat more chicken and kernace. I hoped the band would be more tolerable but brought my earplugs along, just in case.

There is more traffic that I remember seeing before in Korca. It can be a long wait to safely cross the street. Cars do not typically give way to pedestrians. They have closed off some of the streets near the Beer Festival and supposedly only pedestrians are allowed on them. Somehow, cars still get on them and don’t necessarily slow down for the throngs of pedestrians that fill them. I am amazed they are not littered with bodies.

There are also more tourists in town than I have seen before. It used to be that a young person walking with a backpack was very likely a Peace Corps volunteer, but just today I have met backpackers touring through Albania from Slovakia, France, England, the Netherlands, Belgium, Canada and the US. There are tour buses parked in front of most of the bigger hotels in town. I hope it gives the economy a boost. The bazaar was more crowded than usual and there are lots of vendors along the streets near the festival.

I had received a phone call when I was in Tirana. A friend of mine from Tirana was in Korca, visiting his relatives. He is a retired engineer with a long time interest in Aviation. He wants very much to get young Albanians interested in airplanes. I wanted to show him the collection of books, charts, models and magazines we had at the American library in Korca and asked him to call me on his next visit. Luckily he was staying through the weekend.

When I got back home, I tried to call. I don’t know if it was because the system was overloaded by all the tourists or if it was due to my general lack of ability with cell phones, but I had the hardest time connecting with him. Calls or texts would not go through, or, if I was lucky enough to connect, I couldn’t hear him talking on the other end or he couldn’t hear me. Late Saturday night we finally connected. Not wanting to risk not meeting, I walked over to the park near his sister’s house and we talked about flying as we drank rosehips tea (called “zinzeef” here) at a table in the café in the park.

He was able to stay in Korca through Monday, so we arranged to meet at the library Monday morning. I hoped it would not be closed for August vacation like so much of the country or that the librarian would not have gone home early as the heat of the day made an oven of the second floor library. He wants to have teens build glider models and have regional competitions for them. There are places in the foothills around Korca that would be good places to fly them. We talked about possible grant sources for remote controls and construction materials, but he wants to keep it very simple. The bigger problem is sustaining interest among the teens and in the community. There is no tradition of after school activities. As soon as classes end, the schools close up, and the faculty and students head home. Korca is unusual in that the library has meeting rooms, but these cater to adults rather than children.

He told me the story of an old friend of his that died recently. He grew up in a small village on the Adriatic. One day a fighter plane, probably Italian, flew low along the coast before banking sharply to the left and heading out to sea. That image stayed with him his whole, long life. He fought with the partisans during WWII. Because of his heroism and loyal service, after the war he was rewarded with an air cadet training slot in Yugoslavia. Then Albania broke with Tito and the cadet was transferred to the USSR for advanced training. The Russians wanted to send the squadron to fight in the Korean War, but the Albanian communist government brought them home. When the government broke off relations with the Soviets, the friend’s time in the former allies brought him under suspicion and he was never allowed to fly again. Not that it made much of a difference as the paranoid regime felt airplanes in general were a threat and used those given to them by the Chinese as targets for artillery practice.

Interestingly, he also told me about a couple of German missionaries in the north who had built a kit plane with a Rotax engine and were flying it off an old military air strip. They had no registration or licenses. I wondered how they were able to get away with it, but maybe it is so unusual that the locals don’t think to complain and the authorities don’t even bother to deal with what in the US would be a violation of numerous regulations. I remember seeing a very small high wing plane built by Kitfox in Caldwell, Idaho, that had a pull cord starter coming through the dashboard. Wouldn’t that be fun to fly off the grass strip outside of Korca!

I wonder if a chance to go for a ride in an airplane would motivate young Albanians to aviation or other technical careers, the way it had so many young Americans in the past. I don’t think playing computer games has the same pull that looking down on your home from a small airplane, but, of course, I am prejudiced. As I walked home from our meeting, late at night through the still crowded streets, a few horse drawn carts clopped by. My first thought was that Albania had a long way to go in its development, but then it occurred to me that when the Wright brothers were experimenting with the design of their airplane, Dayton had lots of horse drawn carriages in the streets and probably less electrification than even rural Albania, and no television or internet or passenger jet contrails streaking the sky overhead. The bigger problem here is to get the young people to look down at their land and see their future in it, rather than to the horizon and the countries beyond the border.