Week 2 - Learning in Lepushe

Dinner with Arlinda

After the first week in Albania, I started to develop some kind of an idea of what I wanted to accomplish before I left. I decided to frame the classroom experience in a way that emphasized the main goal of the B3P project, which is to encourage the development of sustainable businesses in the region, in order to give people who grew up in the local villages and want to continue living in the area a chance to do so. Now, I realize that I might seem like a strange candidate for this kind of work. As someone who has started to make a life for himself as an expatriate, this is more than a little incongruous. After all, why would I want to spend a month working to encourage people who have already decided to leave to stay and rebuilt their community when I've seemingly decided to leave my own behind?

Above the Lepushe Valley

The community in Vermosh is not actually not a particularly old one, as far as I've been able to gather (and, as with most things I'll write here, this is from various unreliable sources, so take it with a rather large grain of salt). Because of the extreme cold of the winters and remoteness of the mountain location, lying deep in the Albanian Alps, far from population centers and inaccessible except by extreme means for a large percentage of the year, it was more or less considered uninhabitable until recently, and is still a very difficult place to live.

A Donkey in Lepushe

 

 

But despite this, the community in the Kelmendi region, which includes Vermosh, Lepushe, and several other villages and towns, has created a strong identity for itself, and has contributed greatly to Albanian national identity, and to forging a unique identity for those from the region itself, one that has survived the massive emigration from the region that followed the collapse of the Hoxha regime in 1992. During the Logu i Bjeshkëve Festival, I met a number of attendees from New York and Michigan with local roots who had returned to celebrate their heritage. The strength of the communal feeling is also attested to by the number of American and Canadian license plates on cars in the area, which also proves the claim that I often heard that many locals rely almost entirely on remittances from their relatives abroad for their livelihood.

Fog Rolling into the Vermosh Valley

The region is also famous for its intransigence in the face of both Ottoman and Communist domination. In his speech at the festival, the Albanian President mentioned both of these historic facts, and that the region was famous for being hostile to Enver Hoxha, so much so that he never actually set foot there during his entire rule. On our way out, we stopped at the spot that is legendary for being the farthest north that he ever went during his time as ruler of Albania.

Barn next to our Guesthouse

When I look at this place, with its deep traditions, close-knit community, and strongly held communal values, I can see the value in maintaining it. I grew up with a sense of dislocation, not only because I moved several times during my formative years, but also because none of the places that I moved to ever gave me the sense of inclusion that I could see in the communities that make up Kelmend. This is a broader problem in American society, which has seen the unmooring of traditional community ties over the past few generations, something that has been commented on as the "bowling alone" phenomenon for decades.

The Vermosh River

 In Lepushe, we weren't hoping to solve all of the many issues that have led to the mass exodus over the last generation, but there are clear problems to be resolved that, if they were to be fixed, could go a long way towards ensuring the long term sustainability of the community. In my first reading of the project, I was mostly interested in volunteering for B3P because it would give me a chance to use my skills as an English teacher. For me, Albania was an impoverished country on the fringes of Europe, so it seemed self-evident that going there to teach English would be positive for the local community.

A Dilapidated Building outside our Guesthouse

Upon arriving, though, I started to think about the project in different terms, about how the development of sustainable businesses run by local entrepreneurs could help to ensure the viability of the community itself, rather than only serving to open up opportunities for individuals within the community. In most of my experience in language learning, the goals of my students were universally self-interested; they spent the requisite number of hours in my class and then went off to conquer the world, building their own little fiefdoms wherever they found opportunities and running them according to their own tastes and interests. Certainly, individual success is always the most important component of language learning, and when it doesn't factor into the course syllabus, students tend to drift off and lose interest. But in seeing the project as being about more than just individual success, but rather about imparting a set of skills that could potentially be used by members of the community to build lives for themselves and their families, and to serve and help the people around them, this made it far more valuable, and helped, however incrementally, improve the lives of the people in Vermosh and Lepushe.

The Lepushe Valley

The central goal of the project needs to remain the creation of opportunities for locally run, sustainable enterprises, and I think the work this summer did help make some small amount of progress towards helping to make those opportunities a reality. As a person who has never felt home, I recognize the value in the work that the organization is doing, and the importance of the attempts of the local community to revitalize itself. This is an area that has overcome decades economic stagnation and poverty, a brutal climate, and government oppression, and out of that has been forged a community well worth a galvanized effort at preservation.

Homes in Lepushe