Will Travel for Food: A look at Albania

Will Travel for Food: A look at Albania

By John Morris

Last semester I wrote extensively about China and ended the semester with an article called, "On Travel and Minimal Impact." I want to get deeper into that idea this semester, but for now I want to introduce you to one of the poorest countries in Europe.

It's a rough world out there, very different from the lives most of us have led. One such difficult place is Albania.

Few people in Albania speak English: very few are well educated. Decaying schools without supplies are the norm in the countryside. While education seems to be becoming more important, for many rural families, "just getting by" means they need the kids to help out on the family farm and education comes second.

Albania was, until the mid-80s death of the isolationist dictator Enver Hoxha and subsequent break with Communism, shut down to the outside world. Hoxha proclaimed that if Albania needed it, Albania would grow it or design and build it, and thereby advance without outside help.

The advancements he promised never came. Instead, his rule left an economic wreck and representative crumbling, mushroom-shaped concrete bunkers litter the countryside. Once destined by Hoxha (who feared imminent invasion) for locals to run to, and, from their fetid interiors, defend with glory any advancing foe, the bunkers found new purpose as improvised sewers for the passerby.

Despite an unique culture of blood feuds, where the head of a murderer might be paraded around as a hood ornament, or a guilty man's family might pay for the bullet the victim's family uses to kill the guilty man, not all Albanians are particularly blood thirsty.

As guests, we felt nothing but the sincerest warmth from all we met, one of the benefits of travelling with local friends: Drinald was an Albanian man of twenty three years, who, at the age of sixteen, and at the early death of his father, quit school to take over supporting his family in the small village of Mertise (Mërtish). He married an American from Upstate New York, a girl who had come to Albania as a Mennonite missionary, and fell in love- their union a symbol of an Albanian's dream: a poor Albanian marrying an American.
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According to Drinald, many Albanians misunderstand America as an utopia, where everyone is rich and no work is necessary. But they don't know how America became rich and powerful. But they're learning. Drinald is now in law school in Chicago, his widowed mother living a lonely life in his new suburban home. His daughter is bilingual.

As students in America, we're so far from the realities of Communism, subsistence farming, Spanish telenovelas perpetually playing on haggard TVs (symbols of relative wealth), and donkeys pulling part-comically, part-tragically enormous loads of alfalfa. Wheat, now grown on privately owned parcels of land (distributed to the people after the fall of Communism) is planted and harvested by rickety, hired combines and pooled at a local mill, where villagers buy their bread.

Some farmers, like Drinald's grandfather, raise turkeys as a cash crop. Turkeys and chickens are everywhere in the country. They roam the streets in awkward, almost adolescent gangs. They even roam free in the local graveyard and schoolyard. Run one over in your car and pay the owner on the spot- that's courtesy. But the neighbors are friends and help each other out.

In the hot country evenings men walk to the center of town or to one of a few restaurants to sit, drink beer, eat ice cream, and, in a tradition much beleaguered in our own culture of clubbing and loud bars, talk. They talk about what farmers converse and argue about the world over.

When it's late, they head home to their waiting wives who spent the evening at a friend's home with other women, eating candy and talking in living rooms lit by a bare bulb and a TV. The starlight helps them all avoid the septicaemia in the ditches on the way home.

[A short aside--The medical care could be more risky than the disease/injury itself: they have socialized medicine but end up having to pay bribes to doctors for each step of care and still are often misdiagnosed or treated for the wrong illness (pain killers for diabetes, for example).]
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It's the only way the poorly-trained doctors and ill-equipped hospitals can make a living. Some of the doctors (not all) don't care about patient care, in part because there's no incentive- they'll get paid by the government whether they work hard and take care of the people or not. The government elite get their well-trained, well-supplied, foreign-trained private doctors, and for the proles it's free, so who is going to complain? And who would listen? Just don't get sick!)

In the cities things are much different, aside from the medical care. Unlike the county's mud, wood, dung and cinderblock houses, the concrete high-rise apartment buildings, oppressive, and crying rust stains from each window frame, are warm and inviting, clean and comfortable on the inside- typical of proletariat paradises. There isn't such a friendly connection with neighbors.

At night, a lonely a balcony offers not the country silence, but dogs, occasional gunfire, and horns; noises of any city in the world. We walk to the center of town through alleys reminiscent of battleground Sarajevo, under a grey-blue-purple sky lit by sodium vapor lamps, to a space needle, another classic Third World attempted symbol of development. Much of our experience of Albania has been in the rugged, impoverished countryside, so coffee at a ritzy bar feels out of place.

Homeless men and cats sleep on benches under a monstrous statue of some political figure. While most bars blast modern Albanian rock music, one bar played classical music that seemed to follow us as we walked along the sidewalk, empty save for the crews of women in orange suits, mechanistically sweeping up the dust and garbage from yet another full day of humanity with little care for government-owned public space.

Yet Albania, much like any Third World country, has its relaxing beaches and locally famous restaurants- small luxuries indicative of development. Cars are increasingly common, whether they're Mercedes stolen from Western Europe or Russian clunkers. Also common to the 2-lane roads are cars trying to pass 1. a wide alfalfa cart on the shoulder, 2. a couple of cars passing the cart and each other toward the center of the road, and 3. an oncoming semi. Road rules have yet to be fully developed.
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Other signs of development such as plastics littering the land, pollution from industry and souvenir vendors point to what some would call a better future for the people, who, as is often the case, move to the city to find better work as Albania struggles to get away from choking government control and move into a free-market economy.

Just a little about travelling to Albania:

Albania doesn't have many tourists, and, at least when I was there, had little tourist infrastructure, making it a perfect place to go. The Albanians who leave to work illegally in Italy or Greece leave behind a pretty rich history.

If you like somewhat obscure history, Albania is a neat place- it's not as controlled as many tourist hotspots, and the country is pretty inexpensive. The north and south, where I had heard that things are a bit rougher than the central regions, are probably worth checking out, if you're into that sort of thing. Be careful around border regions.

The ancient Illyrian city of Apollonia is in the Fier region, and Berat, home of the St. Theodore Cathedral (inside the Berat Castle) as well as the (famous!) White Houses of Berat is fairly close to Fier. Both are south of Tiranë, the capitol. West of Tiranë is Durrës, a major shipping port on the Adriatic that has long stretches of beach.

The Turks were repeatedly fended off in the mid-1400s by Gjergj Kastrioti Skënderbeu, the larger-than-life national hero of Albania. The Skënderbeu Museum is in Krujë.

The usual precautions should be taken if you go: don't drink the water and dress conservatively. Credit cards are rarely accepted outside major cities, and theft is a problem.

While we had the benefit of local friends, and while Albanian isn't a commonly learned language around the world, Albania is still relatively untouched as a destination, and therefore, although you probably won't find too many luxury hotels, is definitely worth a visit.

It's all part of a truly global education. Get out in the real world and see it for yourself: there is no substitute.

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