I have now finished the first book, was very interesting. Have just been out to get a family portrait taken, hours of fun for all :)
Anyway, here are some more extracts that I found quite interesting. This guy had a crazy old time of it, going to places Westerners had not been for a long time, and conversing very candidly with a wide range of Albanians.
I’m quite interested to know if you agree with some of these conclusions Emily, particularly this first one. I guess we will know after having worked in the schools perhaps J
Pp 124
Albanian education, both at school and in the home, relies on learning a set of formula by rote, and being able to read this word perfect. The pupil is not expected to question, analyse or challenge any of this information. To doubt or question what one’s school teacher or father told was a sign of disrespect, rebellion and disobedience, casting shame on all involved. As a result, most Albanians could not, in the Western sense, think critically about, or even evaluate for accuracy information that differed from what they had been taught to believe, or what was in their family interest to support.
The following passage refers to the author’s journey from Gjirokastra up to Durres. It includes travelling through Fier, which is the only reference to the area in which we will be staying.
Pp 139 – 140
The houses now were small whitewashed cottages with red tiles roofs in the southers Italian style, with little kitchen gardens and well-tended vegetable patches, vines growing over trellises. It was a relief to see something being cultivated after the devastation of the south. In a five-and-a-half hour journey we had passed just two tractors, both towing trailers, one with a load of bricks, the other a load of hay. Mechanised agriculture in Albania was dead.
Around us were the ruins of industry: stilled and rusting oil derricks; broken, abandoned plants and buildings; a huge glass factory with its courtyard a mountain of smashed crystal shards. The devastation was complete: everything had been destroyed. As an election platform the Socialists had said some of the old state enterprises should have money pumped back into them before they were privatised, but I could see this was an absurdity. The industrial word the communist regime had created over forty-five years through oppression, exploitation and enforced discipline had been destroyed utterly.
At Fier there were signs of agriculture: maize and wheat growing, women hoeing fields of lettuce and tomatoes by hand, oxen pulling carts with wooden wheels, small boys on donkeys with wooden saddles.
In the small ruinous towns of broken, filthy houses we passed through, crowds of listless people stood hanging round hopelessly in the streets; there were no shops, no kiosks, no cafes, nothing. A few mosques and medressehs were being built, each with a prominent sign outside, proclaiming that it was being paid for by either the Saudis or the Iranians. President Berisha had taken Albania into the Conference of Islamic States in a bid to get aid. ‘We are a predominantly Islam country, but the Christian morality’, he had said to his Western friends, his tongue no doubt firmly in both cheeks alternately. Tek ёshtё khorde ёshtё besa – ‘The faith follows the sword’ – was a traditional Albanian proverb.
Pp 138
She continued her confession as if I hadn’t spoken. She could speak to me like this because I was a foreigner and would soon be leaving the country. So many Albanians I met made their confessions like this to me, alone, hurriedly, on buses or walking in the country where no one could hear us. Albania was a land of desperate secrets locked up behind smiling masks.
Pp 129
Timo insisted in taking me out for a drive in his car, an elderly BMW which he apologised for. Albania was a wash with brand-new expensive Mercedes. How could people afford them, I asked.
‘In the beginning, when Albanians were allowed out to the West for the first time, they bought old wrecks for a few hundred dollars. Then they realised cars were so easy to steal in Europe, that the owners received insurance money and the police didn’t care. So the mafia organises this now as big business. Owners of new Mercedes in Italy, Switzerland and Germany are contacted in person and told to leave the keys and the papers in the cars. If they do this they are given a thousand dollars in cash. If they do not they are shot, their houses firebombed and the car stolen anyway. They always do as they are told. Who is going to risk dying to save the insurance premium from going up? The cars are then driven to Brindisi, the Italian police bribed, and the Albanian police bribed at Durrёs and new papers issued. Albania has the lowest per capita income in Europe, comparable to the Central African Republic, and the highest per capita ownership of Mercedes Benzes. This is what the democrats have done for us – given us a republic of thieves and brigands.’
The next one comes from an interview with an English General in Tirana with NATO.
Pp 173
General Johnny was very matey indeed, and alarmingly frank about conditions in Albania.
‘The corruption goes right up to the highest levels, including the President. Nothing can be done without bribes at every point. It’s entirely oriental – no one tells you the truth by design. Everything you do or say is observed, recorded and interpreted. I scraped a car last week in my official Land Rover. A mob formed immediately, the policeman with me vanished into the crowd never to reappear, and several hundred dollars were demanded as compensation by obvious mobsters. The car I’d scratched was evidently owned by a mafia capo. I had no dollars on me. Gave the mobster my card through a crack in my window and drove away, pushing the bodies aside as I went. Angry mob. Had I stopped, they’d have smashed the windows. What a mess, I’d have had to shoot my way out. Not what NATO pays me for at all, no. Next day a group of thugs came to the front door here demanding cash. Had to buy ‘em off with $200 via the armed guard out front. Even in the Congo you don’t get that.’
What did the General think of the recent election results?
‘They were fixed, obviously, by the democrats, no doubt. There was police intimidation, vote-rigging and the stuffing of ballots. I saw it and so did every other foreign observer.’
And the author had a reasonable amount of contact with the missionaries in the northern part of Albania. Once they realized he was who he said he was they helped him a lot, as did pretty much all the Albanians. Their hospitality is quite amazing.
Pp 188.
Trimble began to relax, seeing I was not immediately hostile to the missionary standpoint. He was a pleasant, open Texan from Dallas, in his thirties, dressed in jeans and a short-sleeved shirt. He had taught at an evangelical college in the States, before serving abroad in various administration posts. He had a private aeroplane pilot’s licence and had been instrumental in setting up the Albanian branch of MAF, the world-wide organisation established by evangelical missionaries after the Second World War. This cut the jeep journeys of two and three days over imposible mountain tracks to the far north down to forty-five minutes by air. These flights were used to get people with chronic maladies out, as well as to get missionaries and their supplies in.
Neither the Communists or the Democrats had ever done anything like this for the remote north. All the money they had ever got from foreign aid was spent on themselves and their cronies in the cities. The evidence was before my eyes; Tirana had everything, the villages had nothing. Anyone trying to understand the revolt of March 1997 should use that simple fact as a starting point.
Now this one is perhaps my favourite :)
Rustem was the first Albanian I had spoken to who dealt with the concrete [gotta love that concrete, comes up everywhere!], without a confusing conversational cloud of rhetoric or woolly abstraction. When I asked him how many animals he owned he told me exactly: 100 sheep, 4 cows and his hound. His herd produced between 100 and 110 lambs a year, most of which he sold, except those that replaced the dead in his own flock. He grew beans, maize, potatoes, and plums for raki. It was too high for grapes. What about onions, I asked. Rustem looked disgusted: ‘Those are for the Germans’, he replied with contempt [this man deserves a DB - Ed].
The book finishes thus:
In dealing with the Land of the Eagle and its undeniably proud and warlike Sons, that anarchic mix of smiling murders and honourable kidnappers, hospitable rapists and elegant torturers, welcoming robbers and wife-beating family men, kindly blood feuders and generous headhunters, sophisticated forgers and multilingual embezzlers, perhaps the best words of guidance come in the form of two traditional Albanian proverbs: ‘First buy the horse, then the saddle’ and ‘Only the owner can pull his donkey from the mire.’
Perhaps someone can explain those proverbs to me??
Oh yeah, and as far as new words go, do you know what Mut means?
