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 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?

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.