gjakmarrje comes (again) to Shkoder

What a weekend!  Things kicked off Friday, I came home early to start a relaxing weekend, and it really has been, but in a very weird way. 
    Gjakmarrje (jock marr yea, or just jock marr) is the Albanian found in  the Kanun of Lekë Dukagjin.  The Kanun has been present in Albanian society for a long time but was made into a formal code somewhere around the 15th century.  The kanun or code has many rules and I'm sure most Albanians don't know them all but one that many people know is gjakmarrje.  It literally means blood taking (gjak is blood and marr is the verb to take).  The code goes something like this... If a person, lets just say person A, kills another person, person B, then the male family members of person B are responsible to murder a male family member from the family of person A.  It could be person A or his brothers, father, sons, or cousins for that matter.  Normally all of the stipulations are decided upon by a meeting of the families and the chief of the tribe, when there was a tribal chief to mediate meetings.  Things that could be decided in this meeting were the members of the family that were eligible or ineligible for the blood feud, or if a family was wealthy enough they could buy their families out of the blood feud.  Family members are always safe in their own house, but not outside of it.  This practice is also what keeps foreigners and guests safe here.  If person C were to come to your house for a few days from out of town and while they were in town they were killed, you would be responsible for avenging person C's death.  As residents of Shkoder blood feud is a little more visible to us than to many other volunteers in Albania.  The Kanun has always been more predominant in the north than in the south and during communism it was the main form of justice since Hoxha's army did not venture into the mountain highlands.  Thethi ( a city in the north of Albania) is cut off from any contact for around 6 months a year depending on the snows, and that is presently imagine when Albania had all of 20 cars, that is really cut off from the rest of the world.  After the fall of communism in Albania people felt once again that they had to manage for themselves, and the Kanun reemerged as the primary means of creating "justice" that the state was not able to guarantee.  One particular example is a great one to show the lack of power that government had.  During the years immediately following the fall of communism everyone built whatever they could where ever they could trying to gain a claim to land.  Many former parks and green spaces were overrun with illegal buildings even in the capital city of Tirana.  One place that many people chose to build was a long the river that ran through the heart of the city.  The government came along and started destroying the houses along the river and forcing people out of their homes they had built but one family was engaged in a blood feud...so what choice did the government have?  Of course they let the home stay illegally on the river.  Eventually the family members passed away of natural cause and the house still sits on the river in the heart of Tirana.
    In Shkoder we have at least one house where we know that a current family is trapped as self made prisoners, and we have heard rumors about a second house that is close to one of our favorite restaurants, what we had not heard about was an actual killing because of a blood feud.  I figured that these men just holed themselves up inside their houses until they eventually passed away from old age.  That is until this weekend.  I was on facebook catching up on the latest farmville news when my friend and local pastor posted that all the events for this coming weekend were cancelled.  He has a friend in from the Netherlands or some other country and so I gave him a text message to see if everything was ok.  He replied back that a pastor had been killed here in Shkoder.  I got a call from a co-worker at the Aarhus center that I have been working with to meet him to give him the pictures that I had from a meeting we had on Tuesday.  He was one the phone when I arrived and when he finished his conversation he looked extremely distressed.  I know how small the 4th largest city in Albania is and knew that he had just heard the same news I had heard a few minutes earlier.  From the news reports I have read and people I have talked to the cousin of this pastor murdered someone between 5 to 8 years ago.  The brother of the victim took his revenge on Friday.  People are in shock over the murder especially since it took place in a very public area of town near the pedestrian walkway.  The key issue, in my opinion, is what changes will come about because of this event.  Obviously changing the public opinion on blood feud is many years off but I believe it is the responsibility of the governments of Shkoder city, district and region as well as the national government to begin putting an end to blood feuds in whatever way possible.  It appears that Albania and Bosnia will gain visa free travel to EU nations this November.  They also hope to someday gain admittance into the European Union.  I find it very hard to believe that the European nations will admit Albania with a system that at the very least permits and in many ways encourages an eye for an eye, especially when it spreads to entire family of the perpetrator. 
    In other news, we had our first major power outage of out time here just over 32 hours.  The power went out sometime before 1:30 Tuesday afternoon, and returned 9:31 Wednesday night.  Luckily we had not been shopping recently and lost very little food, just a few apples that were sitting in the puddle of defrosted freezer ice.  I managed to make it through the whole Buckeyes game last night but fell asleep during the michigan-michigan State game.  (the power outage really adjusted my sleeping schedule to sleep by 10 or 10:30)  I woke up to a pleasant surprise of MSU beating u of m.  What I discovered later because it didn't even make the first headline of ESPN.com was that Alabama also lost to South Carolina.  So now Ohio  State should be #1 in the BCS poll that is due to be released some time this evening.  Makes a good end to a rather shocking weekend.  Go Bucks!!

working too much?

It has been a rather busy couple of weeks.  Two Wednesdays ago a Peace Corps representative met with Tiff and I and a coworker in our office talking about how our first three months were going in the office.  After talking with her for for about an hour, she implied that I worked too much.  I think that I was taking tsaying that we were working 24/7 too literally and I am trying to relax the amount of time I spend at the office.  But things are picking up quickly.  Last Saturday, the 25th of September a village outside of Shkoder held the first (hopefully annual) "Play for Peace" soccer tournament.  The day was centered around the International Day of Peace (September 21) and organized by The Door, an NGO funded by Norwegian Aid.  Tiffany and I had proposed the idea to Kastriot a while back, and he ran with the idea.  The Peace Corps country director came and spoke on a very wet and rather chilly day, but we still had a full complement of teams.  4 boys teams and 4 girls teams competed.  In the end the boys from Berdice and the girls from Juban won.  Everyone involved was very excited on the success for both the soccer games and the crowd turnout (which was estimated between 200-250) in spite of the terrible weather.  That afternoon we welcomed other volunteers from "the north" for our first northern dinner.  We had a potluck at our place with veggie lasagna, spicy chicken bruschetta, babaganoush, samosas, chili, rice with veggies, potato and corn salad, fruit pizza, brownies, oatmeal raisin cookies, fruit salad,  and honey cake, along with a few drinks.  The party was a success but we were exhausted from the soccer tournament and I fell asleep in the 2nd quarter of the Buckeyes game (which was already a blowout by that point).  The week was filled with coffee meetings and planning for an environmental group that Tiff and I are wanting to start here in Shkoder.  US Aid had a meeting on Friday to help plan the next phase of their local governance program which Tiff helped organize bringing a few NGOs that weren't invited by city hall and met with the representative before the meeting.  Tiff also has helped the Aarhus Center complete a few post season beach surveys, and we were very surprised with some of the responses.  We have also been busy watching all of the new fall TV shows, and catching up on the ones we have been missing.  I thought we watched a lot of TV in the US but it is true when they say you never watch as much TV than when you are in Albania.  On Tueday I will travel back to Puka to attend a deforestation round table that hopefully will end with a convention being signed by all the leaders of the Puka region to stop illegal logging.  We will also have information sessions in the schools for the Outdoor Ambassadors group that we want to have the first meeting on the 13th of October.  I have some other plans for groups I want to organize but I'll wait to get more information before I share that with the world (or all 8 people that read the blog).  In other news it looks like Tiff's family will be visiting us in the spring, which is very exciting for us and I think they are excited as well. We are always excited to have more visitors.  Hope all is well in the US and to talk to everyone soon.