Happy 9th err 4th of Korriku umm I mean July

This is my best attempt to keep the blog updated, the posts might be shorter but I will keep everyone hopefully a little more updated on our lives.
On Friday we got to go to the 4th of July party sponsored by some Americans, to be honest I don't know who they were but it sounds something like AMCHAM. We were just excited to be able to go, as we originally did not get peace corps tickets. 30 tix for 90 volunteers, and the math didn't add up, but thanks to US Aid (actually David Smith a contractor for the organization) coming to the rescue, who knew they were into this type of aid, we got tickets. The party was a lot of fun even though no one can figure out why it was on the 9th, a full 5 days after the 4th, which was a Sunday and either the Friday or Saturday would have seemed to be better dates to have the festival. The location was at the Wilson School, an international school named after Woodrow Wilson, and managed to have pretty good hot dogs, although the hamburgers left a lot to be desired. A few of the Albanian beers companies also showed up as well as a winery/brandy(ery) to keep the party lively. They even had a very decent fireworks display at dusk. After we went to the Block (short-north of Columbus, or warehouse district in Cleveland). Well I don't know how much partying is going on in Cleveland right now, but when there was partying in Cleveland I guess the Warehouse district was where it was done at. So we found a bar and hung out with a few Navy sailors. All in all a blast, and we even felt our first Albanian earthquake. We hear they are quite common here but not as much in Tirana and not this big, although it was a modest 4.8. The deck we were sitting on just wobbled a bit, many people around didn't even seem to notice. Yesterday we made it back from Tirana, and met up with some friends to (not) watch the soccer match. All in all a very exciting weekend and we are taking today off to catch up on the latest news of LeBron and the rest of the more exciting news of the world. Still hoping the all but sports is good in the US and everyone is doing well.

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?

apologies and Shkoder

First off let us apologize for the lack of updates in the past month. I realized with the last post we have not written for over a month, and with the surprising amount of E-mail I have received from family/ friends I guess it is time to update.

Secondly if you have not already heard Tiffany and I are moving to Shkoder in about 2 1/2 weeks. If you look at a map of Albania look north for a big lake (Shakar or Shkrodra depending on your map) on the southeastern part of the lake you will find Shkoder, a larger city for Albanian standards. Tiffany will be working with the municipality and I will be working with World Vision, a international NGO that focuses on children. We are in Shkoder for the rest of the week, learning about our city and getting to know our organizations. Shokder is beautiful and will have pictures of the city up soon (hopefully).

Thirdly, pictures are finally up on the blog the pictures there currently are from Lezhe, the site we visited around Easter. I also posted others to Facebook so if you have facebook look them up there. Again we hope all is well in the states and we look forward to chatting with you all in the near future.

spring sprung in Elbasan

On our weekly stop in an Elbasan internet cafe, we got out of our session early so I am writing freehand instead of having a prepared blog update. Spring is beautiful here in Albania. It hides so much of the garbage discarded around. The random flowers that have sprung up along the road side, flowers that people plant in gardens around the US are growing wild and free here along with many smaller "wildflowers." We will find our our site placement exactly one week from today, and we think we know where we will be placed but will not jinx it by posting it here until we are for sure. More pressing is the language test that we have tomorrow back here in Elbasan. I think we are both nervous about it since my vocab is still weak and Tiff feels that her sentence formation needs improvement. I think that after having a week off traveling a Saturday would be better served sitting in class with our teachers having a review session. Speaking of having a week off, Lezhe was beautiful. We traveled by furgon to Tirana and then ate a light breakfast at Stephan's Center, an American style restaurant started by missionaries to Albania. They even had real drip coffee! After meeting our host for the weekend we boarded a bus for the last hour and a half trip up to Lezhe. The city was wonderful, not too big and much bigger than Paper, full of markets, cafes, and restaurants. We hiked up to the castle, went to a beach on the Adriatic and even saw three random pigs that inhabit the city. (the north of Albania is more Catholic and therefore eating, and keeping pigs is OK) With our host we met the mayor of Lezhe who was very impressive with his forward looking approach and attitude. We also went to a school for the mentally handicapped and drank a lot of coffee. The experience was great and we look forward to seeing more of this beautiful country. Now it is off to catch a furgon back to Paper and try to study for our language thing tomorrow! Wish us luck and we wish you all a Happy Easter and hope spring is treating everyone well in The US of A.

Albania, Elbasan, Paper etc.

So we have officially been in Paper, a small village about a 15 minute drive from Elbasan, for two weeks now. It finally feels like we are making some progress with the language and our host family. Agron, our host father, has consistently been our best resource for Shqip (Albanian) at home but recently Arisa, our 13 year old host sister has opened up and we have been trying to teach her some English. We have mainly focused on greetings and colors for now but she is a very good student and will give us small English phrases when we least expect them. Mariglen, our 10 year old host brother, is still shy and just stares blankly at us when we mis-conjugate a verb but we have been playing with him and have found that a soccer ball has been a successful way to bring him out of his shell. Violsa, our host mom, has also been talking more now that we have a little more language under our belts, she is extremely nice and an excellent cook, and Terry has the chickens working over time to make enough eggs for breakfast and dinner, her cooking skills also mean that there has been no weight loss in Albania, so far. Tomorrow we head north-west for a volunteer visit to Lezhe. We are excited to see a different part of Albania and are hoping for a little more connection to the outside world. There is no Internet cafe in Paper and our days in Elbasan are full with other activities. Please feel free to comment on our blog or shoot us an E-mail and we will try to respond as quickly as possible depending on when we get back to an Internet cafe. We also hope to get pictures up of this beautiful country as soon as we have Internet access on a personal computer, as many of the PCs in the cafes have viruses that we do not want to transfer. We hope that all is well in the ShBA (Shqip for USA).