An American in Albania

[Mjellma]

An American in Albania, Durrës 1999

O Albania, Albania!

I don’t know how many times I have said those words since I worked in Albania during the Kosovë Crisis of 1999. As I learned them during my time there, they can be said with pride or with embarrassment, with hope or with dread. I have since learned that those words are a charm. They lead the speaker to grow fonder of Albania—O Albania!
I had not planned to work in Albania. I was awaiting a work visa for another country when the aid agency for which I worked asked me to go. The air war over Serbia and Kosovë had begun. Refugees were pouring over the border into Albania. They needed me to distribute UN World Food Programme food rations to refugees in the camps.
I must admit that I was at first reluctant. A close college friend of mine was also a patriotic Serbian-American, and she and I had long discussed the situation in Kosovë. I understood that Kosovë was the birthplace of Serbia’s struggle against the Turks, and that giving away the region would be equivalent to the United States abandoning Virginia or Texas. I believed, I must admit, that Serbian soldiers were merely fighting terrorists in the villages of Kosovë.
Yet I felt that I must go to Albania. I was not so prejudiced that I did not want to alleviate the suffering of the Albanian refugees. Here was an opportunity to work after 10 months of waiting for a visa. I left April 6 for a country about which I knew very little outside of propaganda. All that I had learned about Albania in school was that it was a “small isolated country” (there was no information about Albania available to Americans in the 1970s and 80s). I had also read about Albania in the book, The World’s Most Dangerous Places, which had detailed the riots of 1997.
Getting into Albania at that time was difficult. The skies were full of NATO jets, so it was impossible to fly. To reach Albania, I took a number of different means of public transport: I flew from Atlanta to Zurich, then from Zurich to Bologna. From Bologna I had taken a train to Ancona, Italy. A short bus ride later I was at the port, ready to board the ferry from Ancona to Durrës (a taxi trip would take me from Durrës to Tiranë, but that is for another story).
By the time I reached the port at Ancona I was exhausted. I had not slept since leaving Nashville the day before. I found the ticket counter, where I noticed that there were already a number of people being served. I looked for a place to wait in line—or “queue” as they say in Britain.
Standing there, waiting to purchase my ticket, I noticed that people who came after I had were not waiting in line. Instead they were pushing their way to the front and handing their money to the ticket agents. In fact I was the only person waiting in line that evening. Eventually I pushed some people aside and bought a ticket for myself—in the same way I had seen others do before me. I had learned my first lesson about Albania before I had even gotten on the boat: Albanians do not wait in line. (Later I teased a friend from Korçë about the way Albanians formed lines. “We waited in line for 40 years!” he retorted.)
Most of the passengers on the ferry were Albanian, along with some television news crews from Luxembourg and the United States en route to cover the war. One of the friends I made was a man named Zim. A Kosovar Albanian who had settled in Florida, Zim was friendly and taught me some basic Albanian phrases that I would need to know: Good day, goodbye, thank you, and excuse me. He then taught me much more about the situation in Kosovë than I had learned in the previous two weeks.
Zim had returned to Albania to find his mother, known to have crossed the border at Kukës shortly after the crisis began. His father had been murdered by Serb policemen a few months earlier. Now it was time to rescue his mother. As the ferry approached Durrës, he agreed to drive me as far as Tirana that evening, where I would stay at my agency’s offices.
Once the ferry docked, there was a scene at the visa office similar to the one I had seen at the ticket counter in Ancona: dozens of Albanians pressed close to the glass while I, joined by European and American journalists, waited for a line to form—or for the mob at the window to die down. After about forty minutes of waiting, I was coming to the realization that the wait might last for hours. At that moment, I heard a voice from the front of the line: “James, my American friend, hand me your passport and a $35 visa fee!” It was Zim. (He was Albanian, after all, and he had wormed his way to the front of the line.) Within minutes, my passport had been stamped and I was on my way off the ferry. My first friendship with an Albanian had resulted in the offer of a trip to Tirana and a short-cut to the front of the line. It was the first of many friendships I would form in Albania, the first of many generous gestures that I witnessed.
The scene at the Port of Durrës was a confusing one for me. As they left the ferry, cars pushed their way to the exit pell-mell—again without the use of queues. I noticed a policeman directing traffic. When a car darted into an open space to cut into line, I noticed that he would blow his whistle sternly, then walk to the driver’s window. There would be a moment of conversation, and then the policeman would smile and wave the car along, only to whistle once again at a new car, where the process continued. Later that evening, as Zim drove through the streets of Durrës following a visit to his sister’s house, we encountered another policeman who whistled us to a stop. He had noticed the Swiss license plates of Zim’s car, and wanted a closer look. There was an exchange in Albanian, the same kind of smile that I had seen on the policeman at the port, and he waved as we left. I asked Zim if the policeman had asked for a bribe. He shrugged. “I just play stupid,” he told me.
As an American, I must admit that it was difficult to get used to the way the police operated in Albania. They stood at posts at the edge of prefecture or city limits and stopped most cars. Occasionally they would ask for money to buy coffee. In America, to be stopped by the police is a big deal—and it usually implies one has done something wrong. In Albania, one can expect to be stopped three to four times in a given trip from city to city.
Of course the attitude of the police is much different too. My encounters with American policemen have found them to be stern and very serious. With the Albanian police, there was an informal tone. We have a word in English, “affable,” which describes a person who acts friendly to please as many people as possible. I think that word described most of the Albanian policemen I met.
As we drove to a hotel to spend the night, I tried to get a sense of the buildings of Durrës and their architecture. What surprised me were the empty skeletons of buildings that seemed to be everywhere—concrete beams and balconies with no walls or roofs. I looked up at one balcony, imagining the buildings to be deserted, only to see a man appear and light a cigarette as we sped past. What a fascinating country, I thought to myself; signs of construction were everywhere, yet nothing was finished. I saw expensive Mercedes Benzes dodging between potholes on the main streets. This is Albania: a country, a society still in an awkward rebuilding phase just eight years after the fall of Communism.
O Albania, Albania! Had I known the words at that time, I would have spoken them as an incantation. I had much to learn about this country, from the excesses of Enver Hoxha’s communist regime to the darkest days of 1997. I would soon find much to love about this land and its people, and—contrary to the propaganda I had heard—little to fear. I would give away tons of food in the next five months, and yet I would receive—from refugees and natives alike—a far more enduring insights into the nature of hospitality, the way the world really worked, and the “Albanian mentality” which would remain with me for life...

do vazhdon...

[Mjellma]

Autor eshte James Dittes i cili do ju sjell perjetimet e tina nga Shqiperia...

[MI CORAZON]

Si duket qenkemi komshinj une e Xhejmsi , lule e Drenices.
Po e takova, do i them se " The SWAN ", me ka fol mire per ju...
Si gjithmone.......:) .......Korasoni.