District XI: Beso tek Une!

Last week I was invited by another volunteer to come to her site and help her in putting on a musical extravaganza with 45 Albanian students and 5 other volunteers. It was a show that her and some of her students worked on last summer when she took them to a theater camp in Texas and then adapted slightly for Albania. The show included singing and dancing as well as small scenes of school life and I have to say it was pretty amazing. The kids worked incredibly hard on it as well as an amazing amount of effort by Sarah, Tauchia and Travis to get the kids ready. Amanda and I came in to play the role of teachers in the show and to help corral the kids as well as joining in on the singing and dancing. The show had the potential to be cheesy or bad and I have to admit that when I first came up two weeks before I was a bit worried. But as these things often do, it all came together in the end and we had three really great shows.

The shows took me back to my days in theater in school and made me realize again what many students here are missing out on when these programs are not available to them. It was great that Sarah has formed a theater group in Rreshen, but this is something that doesn't happen in every town and it is likely that unless the next volunteer to come to Rreshen is interested in theater that the program will not continue after Sarah leaves next year. This is one of the real challenges to being a volunteer- finding ways for the projects you start to continue on after you leave. It has to be a perfect storm of circumstances- a local person that is committed to the cause or other foreigners willing to take it on. But we can only start something and try to build the right conditions, we can't be here forever.


Anyway, even though they were a pain in the butt sometimes, the kids in Rreshen were great and I am really proud of all of them and really proud to have worked with them. Congrats to all the kids that participated on a job well done. Together we can!