After weeks of feet-dragging and hand-wringing, I finally booked my ticket today to Podgorica for the 31st of July, my first stop en route to Vermosh, the village where I'll be working in May. For the next month or so leading up to my trip, and hopefully during my time in Albania, I'll be using this blog to write about the group that has organized this project, the Balkan Peace Park Project (B3P), news about the region, and ongoing information about what I'm doing both in preparation and, once again, hopefully some updates once I'm there.
I want to thank everybody who has donated to the B3P and has helped finance this project through my fundraising page. The outpouring of support was overwhelming; I didn't expect to meet my goal, let alone exceed it. I'll be thinking of all of you when I'm in Albania, and I'll post a bunch of pictures to show you the real good that your donations are doing in this impoverished corner of the world.
To anybody who isn't familiar with the organization that I'm going to be working with in Vermosh, the B3P was set up to teach the young people and adults of several villages in northern Albania a mixture of English and Environmental Studies, with the aim of helping them to develop community-based tourism and create sustainable opportunities for economic growth in the region. A video of the efforts of volunteers in 2012 can be seen here.
The B3P is a British charity that was started to support the creation of the Balkan Peace Park, a 'transboundary protected area' including parts of Albania, Montenegro, and Kosovo, and the people living in the region. The area is under threat from environmental destruction from illegal logging and a declining population. B3P aims to unite the existing communities of the region and enable local people to continue to live in the valleys through the support of sustainable tourism.
While the Vermosh project is relatively new, the organization has been successfully operating a summer school in the nearby village of Thethi for several years now. The children of Thethi have limited educational opportunities, as the school in the village does not operate for much of the year and is often in a semi-derelict state with no resources, desks, electricity or teachers. This, coupled with poverty and poor infrastructure has pushed many communities like Thethi to the brink of survival. The B3P is helping to reverse this situation, and its summer education program has been at the center of this process. English language skills are helping the younger generation to participate in eco-tourism, which has been vital to these communities economic survival.
I hope to use my experience as an English teacher and my knowledge of community based tourism projects to help improve the ability of people in Vermosh to take full advantage of the potential for tourism in their region, and to encourage an approach that is both sustainable and growth-oriented. I'll post updates regularly on this blog, so check bag or add this to your RSS feeds.
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