1st month

I know it has been a long time since we have updated, but now is as good of a time as any so this is our first month as residents of Shkoder. I have been working with World Vision every day generally going in at 9 and getting out every day around 2 or 3 but some days I get out as late as 5:30 or as early as around 1:30 depending on what is going on at the office. My days have been filled with creating a filing cabinet, going out to visit some of the villages and most recently filling out annual progress reports. These are required for every sponsored child in the area which for Shkoder is 298 children. I can't believe other cities that have twice or three times as many children as we do and have to do an APR for all of them. It seems like "grunt" work and I have been frustrated at times when I get "sent" home (Alketa, my counterpart tells me I can go home if I want, which means either go home or sit around doing nothing) but overall I think I have had a better experience in terms of amount of work than other volunteers and less work than others. I also got to spend a couple of days in Tirana at an emergency action plan training with 15 other volunteers mostly from our group. I really enjoyed the opportunity to spend some time hanging out with friends from training and learn some important stuff in the process. July should be an interesting month as there is a party in Lezhe for the 4th of July on the 3rd-4th and we will camp out on the beach. Then on the 9th there will be another party in Tirana hosted by some embassy people. I think we also want to plan another trip somewhere for a few days but we aren't sure if it will be south to Gjirokaster and Berat, or stay north and visit Puke, Fushe Arrez, and maybe even make it over to Kukes and that area. I guess time will tell. Again for those who want an address to send packages E-mail me and I will send you the address, just let us know when you send something so we can watch for it. We have gotten 1 package already, and look forward to more. Things that we can always use: contact solution (just don't list it on the contents of the box), peanut butter, candy (starburst, peanut butter M&M's, reese cups, rolo's etc.), Terry needs a new pair of tennis shoes if he ever hopes to play soccer again, tampons, note cards (preferably 3x5 blank), reusable grocery bags (you can usually buy them for $1 and use them as padding for other things). We also have more that we would like but ask us in an E-mail if you want more detail. We hope all is going well in the States and hope to see some of you in Albania soon!

TnT

tourist day

so we have been living here for a little over a week and the 3 newest Shkodrans decided to take a photo tour of the city here are some of the results, more to come later...

if it doesn't work here it should also be playing in the slide show to the left on the newer layout.

Breaking Stuff

So it is official...we are Volunteers. I know you all thought we were for about 3 months now but in reality we were only trainees until we swear in which we did last Thursday morning. Now we are volunteers and residents of Shkoder. After we swore in on Thurs. I went to the capital and had my finger looked at again and it turns out it was broken but healed correctly. The doctor said that because it is my ring finger it isn't really important, it is only a helper. He gave me some excercises to do and sent me on my way. I met up with Tiffany and our site mate, Jessie, on Friday morning for the rest of the trip to Shkoder. We made it here and have been exploring and getting our apartment settled. We have an address now which we will gladly share with all of you if you ask us for it because giving it out on a public website would not be a smart idea, and if we wrote it many of you wouldn't even recognize it as an address. Other than the broken finger we are both healthy and happy, excited to be living in Shkoder, and missing our friends and families back home. Other than the 3 weddings we are already missing this summer it sounds like we now have another wedding next summer too. You all need to stop having important life events while we are in Albania, it is really inconvienant for us to have to miss this stuff.
On the work side of things it is still slow but that is to be expected for the first week of work. World Vision celebrated June 1 (Children's Day) by bringing children in from many villages to watch a movie in the theater in town. They got to see Ice Age 2, and I got to see most of it twice. It was translated into Shqip so my understanding of the words wasn't good all the time but I managed to follow the story line. Tiff has been at the city hall for two days and is doing some minor translating of Shqip-English into better English. I think we are still both a little lost on what we are supposed to be doing exactly but more of that will come with time. Finally it sounds like we will have a constant source of internet, so we can set up Skype dates and facebook chats soon. I am excited because I will still be able to enter the football pool and know all of the final scores because Albania is 6 hours ahead of the east coast USA, right UC?