Can you pick up my friends?

I can’t believe that I have been here a week. Like is often the case when you are in a new situation or a high-stress-do-a-lot-of-stuff-at-once situation, days seem to stretch to weeks and weeks seem to feel like months. I feel like I have learned so much in just a little over a week. It is amazing how much you can pick up with language classes 5 hours a day. After class, I go home and engage in a kind of charades, talk, look-up words game with my host mom. She is very good at speaking slowly, talking with her hands and repeating words for me.

The food so far has been good. My host has been trying to feed me way too much. I basically have toast in the morning (with peach or fig jam) and then have had various things for dinner. We go out for lunch and are lucky to have a few different options in the town. They have fast food which is basically like a gyro and pizza and pasta. I am pretty lucky in that I have had salad almost every day. They eat meat basically every day, but (I think) I told her that I don’t eat pork. Even though this is a “Muslim” country, there seems to be a lot of pork products around. My host is Orthodox and she went to church last week. There is both a mosque and a church in my town. You can here the call to prayer every day, although I have never seen anyone go into the mosque. Most people that you talk to will say, “I am Muslim, but I don’t practice.” I have only seen about 5 covered women.

Today we went to our second “hub” day in Elbasan. On hub days, the whole group (all 37 of us) come from the 8 satellite sites to the PC training office. Today the COD (Community and Organizational Development)- get used to acronyms, the Peace Corps has a lot of them- group met with the mayor of Elbasan. In the afternoon, the whole group had a training on PC approach to development and then talked about group dynamics. During the group dynamics part the trainer asked if anyone had ever heard of a particular theory of group formation. Since we talked extensively about that theory at BBfP last summer, I raised my hand and said that I had. She asked if I would come up and explain it to the group. With the help of a powerpoint, I basically gave the presentation on the theory! Good thing I feel pretty comfortable teaching material that I’ve only seen once (thank you substitute teaching). My other big accomplishment for the day was to actually get our whole group into the town. We have two volunteers that are living outside of town. They live right off of the road and decided that if it was possible it would be nice if the furgon (minibuses that act as most of the public transport between towns) could pick them up near their house instead of walking all the way in to town (about a 20 min walk). So this morning when we got on the furgon, I told the driver that we had two friends that were on the way and it would be great if he would pick them up. After a little bit of miming (and discovering that I have no sense of direction and was pointing in the wrong direction) he understood and kept two seats open. When we got close to their house, I pointed and said “there, there” and he stopped. Total success! It’s really the little things that count.

Albanian language for the day:

“Ne kami dy shok në rruga.” We have two friends on the road/way

P.S. I am having a little bit of troube getting the computer at the internet cafe to let me upload pictures. I will have a few pics as soon as I can figure this out. . .