Week 3 - Lessons in Lepushe

Lepushe

During my three weeks teaching in the Vermosh valley, I tried to focus on giving my students a basic understanding of the language they would need for some tourism-related businesses. We spent time going over vocabulary from hotels, restaurants and touring, and then I gave the students the choice to prepare a short presentation from one of these categories in pairs or small groups. The resulting skits capped off our three weeks together, along with a reading from a small brochure that the group produced to advertise the community and the postcards that I had each student write to supporters of B3P.

 

In front of the school

One of the most enjoyable activities that we had over the three weeks was the restaurant roleplays, which we did in a nearby establishment. I'd planned to do the same thing for each of the three sections, but those didn't quite pan out; I've learned to accept that planning ahead doesn't always guarantee success, and that it's best to just expect only a certain percentage of what you actually want to do will come to pass.

 

Two Miss Bjeshkeves

What I liked best about this activity was that the students really seemed to get into it, which made the preparation that I'd done in creating menus and dialogue sheets feel worthwhile. We didn't have a copier, so I had to do it all by hand, but considering that I didn't bring my computer, my ankle was still broken, we only had a few hours of class time per day, I didn't feel like I had a lot of alternatives to take up my time anyway.

The Hospitality of Albania on Display

One thing that I'd started to realize by the time we got to the middle of the second week was that the students actually had surprisingly diverse backgrounds. In the picture below, you can see both local kids and kids of Greek, Serbian, British (yeah, that's cheating I guess), and a broad array of Albanian extractions. I found out that people from the north tend to be fairer with light hair and blue eyes (see the girl in the center and the brother and sister on the right) and the people from the center and south tend to be darker, which is what I'd expected, based on my complete ignorance of the area.

A mix of teachers and students from both classes

As we came down to the end, I found out that I had to put together a performance for the final day, which would be given to the friends and family of the students as a way to show off what we'd accomplished during the workshop. The combination of the skits plus the brochure that we'd created seemed like a considerable enough accomplishment, since most of the students had come into the class with little or no English, so as the second week ended and the third began, we worked to prepare these short dialogues.

The Kids

The other class, which was made up of kids younger than 15, worked at the same time on their final project, which was a series of songs, including one that I made up for them. These kids continuously surprised me at how quickly they were able to pick up on the language, and how generally how much better at speaking and understanding than I'd been told. At first, it was a struggle to explain the song, the intonation, inflection, but within a days class, they'd already made it through the whole thing, and by the time the performance came around, they were able to pull it off (more or less) without a hitch (blame the difficulty in understanding on my bad recording equipment, not the kids).

The Kids at their Performance

The Fresh Air of Lepushe

Set to the tune of "The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air

In Lepushe, Albania, born and raised

In the valley is where I spent most of my days

Chillin' with friends and learnin' at school

and laughing at Jay when he acted like a fool

When a couple of guys, walkin' up through the woods

started askin' questions 'bout my neighborhood

Where can we stay where the prices are fair?

You should go to the guesthouse to get some fresh air!

Mariana whistled for a mini-bus and when it came near

The license plate said 'Lepushe' and there were eagles in the mirror

If anything, I can say that this bus was rare

But the sights here are so beautiful, I didn't even care!

We pulled up to the guesthouse 'bout seven or eight

And I yelled to the driver: 'Hey thanks, see you later!

Looked at the guesthouse, we were finally there

In Lepushe, Albania, to enjoy the fresh air

 

 

For those of you who aren't familiar with the original:

 

 

Unfortunately, after I took that video, my camera died, so I don't have any video or pictures of the performances from my students, which were also phenomenal. The dialogue below was written by one of my students who speaks German, and I could tell that she was having some trouble differentiating the two grammars, which considering the similarities between our languages and the wide gulf that separates them from Albanian, must have seemed more or less equivalent.

 



A dialogue written in Albanian script



With only 12 days of proper in class time, I didn't have the time to make much of a dent in that conception, but the outcome of the dialogue presentations and the reading of the brochure advertising Lepushe, which I had the students do afterwards, was successful enough for me to consider the whole endeavor a success.

 

The Front...

And Back of our Brochure