Cinco (five, pese) de (of) Mayo (May, Maj)

The first job of the “American holiday” committee formed by the trainees was actually to organize a party for a holiday that truly represents the diversity of American traditions- Cinco de Mayo. Even though the tortillas didn’t come out quite right (still a lot of experimenting with baking to be done- the corn flour was not quite what we expected), the rest of the food was great: spicy rice, chicken, vegetables, salsa and even some guacamole. We used the bar owned by one volunteer’s host family and had a great time. I think that her family must have thought we were all nuts when we found a broomstick and started to limbo! Apparently there are some very limber people in group 11! And we even had a piñata! Anyway, it was great to share our culture and have a little taste of home together. I hope that your Cinco de Mayo was happy and safe, where ever you are.

Party in Cerrik! What, what!?

Two of my site mates had birthdays this week, so we decided to host a party. The party itself didn’t actually differ that much from what we do every day. . . hanging out in the internet café, except that this time we had friends. About half of the other trainees came out for a drink. Also we had cake- well sort of.

Courtney and I decided that we wanted to try to bake a cake for the party. We discovered several challenges to baking here:
Unsure about ingredients- I think that this is baking powder, does this look like baking powder? Does anyone know the word for baking powder?
Ingredients not available- powdered sugar, brown sugar, vanilla etc. You may be able to get them somewhere, but I sure haven’t seen them and don’t know how to ask for them.
The oven is in Celsius and not so reliable . . .
Living in someone else’s house and using someone else’s kitchen- including only having very large cake pans and no measuring cups (we baked at Courtney’s house and I forgot my measuring cups at my house).

So we baked a cake. I made lemon curd (one of my favorite recipes) for the filling, but the frosting was a disaster. We didn’t have powdered sugar and with regular sugar it was . . . gross. And the cake didn’t really rise. I am going to go ahead and blame it on the baking powder (is this double acting???) and the fact that we didn’t put it in the oven right away. It tasted fine (and the filling was great!) but it was just kind of flat. I plan to try the same recipe again using my own (imported) baking powder, but I think that I will wait until I am in my own kitchen (only 6 more weeks!). I’ll let you know how it turns out.

Anyway, the party was great, the cake was an experiment and tasted good. The party was fun. Happy birthday Courtney and Karen!

U bësh një qind vjeç.-May you live to be 100 years old!

Byrek

Byrek-

This dish, similar to spanikopita, can be made with cheese, spinach, beans, tomatoes and onions, eggs or meat. Basically any sort of savory filling can be added. You can buy store bought phyllo dough, or make your own simple dough from scratch (of course all of the Albanians make it from scratch!)

Basic Phyllo Dough Recipe (dough-brum):

2 1/2 cups bread flour
3/4 teaspoon salt
3/4 cup warm water
1 egg, beaten
1/4 teaspoon white vinegar

Sift flour and salt and make a well.
Mix remaining ingredients and pour in well. Work into dough. Knead 10 minutes. Cover with a damp towel. Set aside 20 minutes.


Split the dough into 14 roughly equal sized balls. Roll out slowly (slowly-ngadalë) one by one on a board covered with starch or flour (starch-niseshte) until very thin. The way my host does this is by using a very thin wooden dowel. As she rolls out the dough, she rolls the dough onto the dowel in order to transfer the dough to the pan. This part takes a lot of practice, don’t worry if the dough tears a bit, just patch it back together and keep layering! Layer (peta- layer of dough) the first 7 in a large round shallow pan, putting a layer of melted butter or oil in between each layer. After 7 layers, put in the filling and then continue to layer the remaining dough. Pour the remaining oil or butter onto the top (you can also pour milk on top). Cut into pieces before placing in the oven. Cook at 200 degrees C (about 400 F) for 45 min. or until golden brown.

Të bëfte mirë! (Bon Appetite!)

(thank you to Burbuqe for showing me this process and allowing me to take her picture and also to Courtney and Mrs. Çepa for additional information!)

Getting nauseous on the way to Puke and other stories from the north-

This weekend I traveled up to a town in northern Albania called Pukë (pronounced pooka). Even though it doesn’t have the best name, it is a really a nice place. I traveled with 13 other volunteers to Tirana (the capital) and then we split up and went off to several cities in the north. This was the first time that any of us had been to Tirana since we got to Albania. The best thing about Tirana: grocery stores with specialty items (cheddar cheese, honey nut cherrios, tampons, etc.). In fact we actually missed our bus because Winifred (our guide through Tirana/ a current volunteer) wanted to stop and buy cheese. We got to the bus and were told that the bus had just left. Luckily there was someone there that was able to call the bus driver and ask him to wait on the road. After running through a muddy road we caught up with the bus. The road to Pukë was not the worst that I had ever been on . . . it did at least have guard rails. Karen (my site mate and traveling partner) is afraid of heights, so ever time we went around a sharp curve she cringed. In Pukë we met Jennie and Dan, the volunteers that live there. Jennie is an English teacher and Dan works with the local government. Both of them have several secondary projects in the city. We spent some time with Jennie in one of her classes and visited Dan at city hall, but mostly had a lot of coffee with people. The best part of being in Puke was home cooking a meal. Not that my host mom isn’t a good cook, but sometimes you want something a little bit different. Karen made this wonderful orange chicken and zucchini patties. I think that Albanians would think we were crazy if we made orange chicken for them.-Jennie at the overlook near Puke. Big mountains in the distance-

In the morning, we had to get up at 5 am to catch the bus out of Puke. On Tuesdays, there are actually two busses out of Puke at 5 am –one to Tirana and one to Laç, another city in the north. Laç has a church on a mountain that is built over a cave. If you rub your head in the cave it is supposed to cure your ailments. People have been rubbing their head in the cave and being cured for thousands of years and then the Christians built the church over it. The church is dedicated to St. Anthony and the 13 Tuesdays leading up to his saint day on June 13th, people make a pilgrammage up the mountain to the church (and the cave). So we decided to make our way to Laç and make the journey up the hill. It was beautiful and it was nice- until it started raining. Of course, my umbrella was in my backpack---- in the apartment---- at the bottom of the hill. So we got a little wet, but we did make it up the mountain and saw the church (but couldn’t make it inside- too many people) and then slid back down (oh, my thighs!!).

-The church on the hill with a line of people leading up to it-

The real adventure of the volunteer visit was learning more about Albanian public transportation. We rode on two buses and three furgons (mini-busses) and only almost died three times. Luckily I can sleep on buses . . . and thank god for Dramamine!

Albanian for the day- Çfare është, është (what is, is) a motto that I'm trying to live by!

The Town of Cerrik

Community map drawn by Chris (with input and coloring from Karen, Leslie, Becca and Courtney)

I live in Cerrik. It is a small town, but defiantly not a village. It has two elementary schools, a high school (which they call a gymnasium- this created a lot of confusion for us in the first few days. High school students are also called gymnasts, which was hilarious to me when I figured that out) and a college. We have our language classes in the elementary schools that is right off of the main square. What we have been able to guess about the town from various conversations we have had is that it was a communist planned town and therefore has a main square and is laid out in a rather organized way around the square. I live in an apartment building that I thought must have been built in the communist era, but someone told us was actually built rather recently. Most of the streets have stone sidewalks and trees, although many of the trees are young, as if they were planted only in the past few years, making me think that at some point the trees were cut down or pulled up and that these are replacements.

When you walk through the park during the day, you see many men sitting on the benches loudly playing dominos or chess. From about 5pm to dark the streets fill with men walking. They come from the villages and the town and walk up and down the streets in groups. Women walk too, but away from the main square. By dark, you don’t see many women out in the streets.

On one side of the park there is a pazar set up every morning that sells household products and clothes, although most anything that you need can be purchased any time from any one of several local duqans (pronounced duchan- the q makes a soft ch sound) or corner stores. There are many restaurants and cafes, some that only serve drinks and no food. The locals seem to know by unspoken rule which cafes are open to both men and women and which cafes only cater to the men. As a stranger in the town, it is hard to know which places it is acceptable for me to go. Mostly, we stick to the internet café- the staff is friendly, the coffee is cheap and the chairs are comfy. The places that it is clear that no women ever go are the billard halls and the bingo parlor. In the US, bingo is a game played mostly by little old ladies- here it is the opposite. There is a cinema, but it doesn’t appear that it has been in use for years.

When the weather is nice, the streets are full of children playing. Jump rope, hide and seek and whatever games that kids make up. When we walk through the street as a group, children run up to us to ask our names and say hello. We had one incident with a little boy that ran up and started to kick several of us when we were sitting in the park. The other children around us chased him off and called him keq (bad- once again the q is a ch so pronounce kech).

There are a lot of things that we can identify as assets in the community, but also a lot of needs. There is a lot of pollution (much like all of Albania), but at least in the city limits there are not many unfinished or half-built abandoned buildings that can be found in the surrounding area. There are a lot of kids, but they don't seem to have a lot of activities outside of school, especially for the girls. The local government seems to be well organized, but there is not much communication between the town and the people. We will only be in this site for three months, but I hope that we can accomplish some good here. . .

Me in front of my apartment building (I live on the top floor)

View from my window


Next installment- cooking: Albania style.

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. . .

I have moved into my host family in my training site. Well, host “family” really isn’t the right word. I just have a host person. She is a lovely woman who lives by herself in a two room apartment. With a Turkish toilet. Fun (I love Albania!). From my understanding (she speaks about as much English as I do Albanian, maybe less) she is a widow, though I’m not sure when her husband passed. She has sisters (5?6?) and one of them lives in New York. She is a very good housekeeper, likes coffee and enjoys watching “Big Brother- Albania.” No, I’m not kidding. I’ve never watched “Big Brother” in the States, but I think I like it even less in a language that I don’t understand. Albanian TV seems to be dominated by a lot of “American Idol”-esqe music shows, news, Spanish soap operas and Big Brother. My favorite thing so far is the news. Anyway, my host is very concerned about my well-being and that I eat enough. She even gave up her own bedroom for me to sleep in and is sleeping on a convertible couch in the living room. This is part of the contract that they sign with Peace Corps for hosting, that I will have my own room. She also cleared out some drawers part of a closet. I know that some trainees don’t have much room or privacy, so I am very thankful for this. I think that once I understand a bit more, we will get along just fine. Thankfully though, there are two families with teenage girls that live just downstairs and the girls speak English. Last night after I had settled in a bit and had dinner, the girls came up for a visit. A little while later their mom came up to tell me that my friend was here. It turns out another one of the volunteers is staying with the cousins of my neighbors and they had come over for a visit. The town is pretty small and three of us are staying right off of the main square. Today we went for a walk around town and found the important things (school, mosque, church, internet café, bank). Our first assignment for Peace Corps is to do a community map, so this was a good start. Tomorrow we start our intensive (4-5 hours a day) language classes. I think that I am doing ok in the language. I can already do some basic things like ask for an orange or say that I’m tired. It will come. It will come slowly, but it will come.

Naten e mire!