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.

Week 1 - Landing in Lepushe

Hanging out on the Porch

With a little over a month of retrospective, I can say that I was entirely unprepared for what awaited me in the Vermosh valley. That's not to say that it was a difficult experience, but rather that all of the craziness of the first week needs to be understood in that context. I had some kind of idea that I was going to come to this mountain village and teach English, but I didn't know what the comprehension level of the students or how old they would be, or very much about the village or its culture beyond the minimal information I was able to scrape together via the vanishingly small number of websites that mention the area.

Vermosh

Vermosh, the northernmost village in Albania, has only been settled permanently for a little more than a hundred years, but it lies in a region with thousands of years of complicated and intermingled history. The more I learn about it, the more excited I become to have the opportunity to travel there next month, because Vermosh seems to represent the Balkan region and Albanian history in so many interesting ways.

Ticket purchased, hostel confirmed, ready to go...

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.