Life in Vermosh

 

Cricket in Vermosh

There were a lot of surreal moments in the three weeks that I spent in Vermosh, from hidden mountain villages to rapping middle schoolers to what was perhaps the country's first series of regularly scheduled cricket matches. But as I prepared to go, I mainly thought about the last weekend I was in the village, when nearly everyone else had left the house and I was alone with my book on the balcony, enjoying the wonderfully temperate mountain climate, a departure from the blistering heat of the south, and soaking in the calm that settled into the valley with the absence of my fellow travelers.

Table Garnish

From the start, it was apparent that the food we were to expect in Vermosh was to be good but lacking in variety, which for me was no problem, since the dishes they served tended towards the delicious end of the spectrum. Both guesthouse owners (our group was split into two) hosted barbeques, one in the middle and the other at the tail end of our stay. The first was to celebrate the birthday of one of my fellow teachers, which fell (I believe) on the last day but which the host family would be missing because they were about to emigrate to America, a fact that punctuated the severity of the situation facing the community.

Digging In

Albanian barbeques bare scant resemblance to their American counterparts, except in the inclusion of meat, which is abundant, maybe even overly so. Including the family living in the guesthouse, there were easily 30 of us, and one sheep provided plenty of meat for that group. The was actually quite a bit left over. This was true even more so during the second barbeque, which took place at our guesthouse on the day before we left. The meat prepared in cuts like we would normally have in the States, so there's a lot of gristle and other kinds of unsavory parts that get left into the heap that gets placed on the table. On top of that, they boil the sheep's head and serve it up, the brains being something of a delicacy (and pretty delicious to boot, when you get past what it is you're eating).



Albanian Barbeque

As soon as I drove into the city center of Vermosh on the first day and saw the church, I knew that I wanted to attend a service. The area is overwhelmingly Roman Catholic, which was at odds with what I knew of Albania as being a Muslim country. Turns out that like most countries, Albania too is a nation of diverse faiths, with a large Catholic population and smaller Orthodox one. Kelmend is Catholic, but their cousins who live across the border in Montenegro are mostly Muslim, which probably speaks to the remoteness of Kelmend as much as anything else. The service was surprisingly short, with only a few parishioners getting up to take communion at the end. I was surprised to see a fully ordained priest leading the mass, but it turns out that he is the priest for the entire province, and rotates between churches. I just happened to be there during Vermosh's weekend. When the priest isn't around, a group of church elders reads from the bible, and they have a sort-of unofficial service. One interesting thing was the way that they began the mass, with an extended, 30-40 minute long chant, similar to what you hear from Gregorian monks. It was an unusual experience.



After Church with the Lumaj Family

The oddity of attending an Albanian mass paled, though, in comparison with the experience of participating in some of the first ever matches in the newly formed Vermosh Cricket League. I have high hopes for the future of the sport, the rules of which until recently were more or less completely indecipherable to me.

 

 

One of the guys from the UK is a big proponent of the sport, some would say a cricket evangelist, and he convinced his team back home in Wales to donate a bunch of equipment to the community. It didn't quite take at first, but by the final week, there was a solid group of people showing up, and a bunch of kids who had really taken to the game. I still don't get some of the intricacies of the game, but as one of the Brits told me, nobody really understand everything (it's like baseball in that way), so just run around and have fun. Unfortunately, my ankle prevent much running around, but I was able to serve as a very incompetent referee and enthusiastic spectator.

 

 

The sun I setting but the cricket goes on

After the final day, all of the cricket gear was donated to the town, specifically to the local school, which will hopefully mean that when spring rolls around another season of sport will come with it. I'm not quite convinced of cricket's merits, but I like that in this little corner of the world, soccer's monopoly has been chipped just a little bit. As we were leaving, though, one of the Albanian translators warned us that the bats would likely be burned for fire wood over the winter, which leaves the future of Vermosh Cricket in serious doubt.

At the finals of the first annual Vermosh Cricket Championship