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In June a team of young people made a three-week mission in Albania. This outreach was done in cooperation with ICPE and the team was pretty international - the total of 18 of us came from 10 different nations: Malta, New Zealand, Poland, The Netherlands, Slovakia, Austria, US, Germany, Malaysia and Nicaragua. Below are some thoughts and stories from Albania.
Albanian Chaos
Chaos is probably the word that comes to your mind after you spend your first few hours in Albania. The traffic in the cities as Tirana is a one big mess. If you’re not constantly alert, entering Tirana you won’t notice the asphalt road suddenly end in a ditch... If you wouldn’t slow down fast enough you can wave your car’s suspenders farewell. Only Mercedes would survive. Shaken from the bump you’re not surprised anymore that the circular crossing at the entrance to the city is just gravel and dust where the cars enter from all directions without an apparent system, sometimes in rows of 2 or 3. The European politeness tells you to give right, however if you stay there for too long, the ones behind honk you impatiently or start taking over and then you can just shake your head powerlessly... I was so glad that there’s wild Slovak driving blood circulating in my veins! With the perfection of a German or an English politeness I would really have had a hard time here.
Albanians obviously don’t mind. From their perspective traffic is still more-less working. Politics or administration is much worse off. By the time we’ve been in Tirana they had nationwide elections – when we were leaving in 10 days the official results were not known yet! Not that they weren’t counted but the loosing party was trying to turn over the result on their side with various bribes and obstructions.
With the background of a great poverty and houses falling apart you see all the Mercedes’ and BMWs of the highest classes that are cruising the streets here. Finally we were explained that almost all of them are stolen from the Western Europe, imported and legalized (in “Albanian way”) and sold in a local car market (would you take a BMW7 for 9000 EUR?)
In Albanian mentality there’s something incredibly warm but also incredibly cruel. You can’t grasp it even after many years of living in this country. Albanians are people that would give all that they have to treat you as a guest. They almost never harm a stranger but can be very cruel towards their own neighbor. In the North the “Blood Revenge” still exists. Most of the crimes for which men sit in prisons here are murders. The blood revenge says that if someone from a family is killed his death has to be revenged by a death of the killer or somebody from his family. This second death has to be revenged again, then again and again... Whole families escape to the other parts of the country to hide. The only way how to cut this spiral of death and revenge is a real forgiveness. In Albania you can see very apparently what we often tend to overlook in our cultures – that the reconciliation and forgiveness through Christ is the only true answer.
Kids from the Factory
After the communism finally fell in 1991 also in Albania, many former factories went bankrupt. Then the people who lived in the mountains near Tirana have moved into the city looking for jobs and because they had no places to live they settled in the ruins of these factories. Thus city quarters like „Tractor“ or „Combinat“ came into existence depending on what kind of factory it used to be before.
The sisters of Mother Theresa that we worked with minister a lot especially among the „factory people“ – they visit their improvised homes and run daily summer camps for the kids. Thus we spent for example a week with the children from „Tractor“. Besides an every day’s short preaching we played a lot of crazy games, soaked them with water, sang and danced, one day we even took them to the Dures Beach. The families coming from the mountains are often Catholic, however many children were Muslim too. Islam doesn’t seem to have deep roots here though, despite nominally most of Albanians is Muslim (around 79%).
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