Daily Life….and Coffee

When I talk with friends and family back home, they always ask questions about my daily life and the struggles that I face.  Often I am challenged with preconceived notions of Peace Corps service.  Just put the phrase “Peace Corps” into Google Images and you will quickly see what I mean.  Granted, most Peace Corps Volunteers live in pretty difficult locations.  Living in huts and yurts is totally normal.  However, in a quickly globalization world, it is becoming increasingly more challenging to completely avoid development, meaning you get a big clump of countries that I will label as ‘halfsies’.  These countries face a long uphill battle to achieve the arbitrary classification of “developed” but are grossly different than countries struck with immeasurable absolute poverty, such as Haiti and Zimbabwe.  These halfsies trick you with tastes of home. Sometimes you are having coffee with a HCN (Host country national in Peace Corps slang) friend and they pull out their iphone and ask you the wifi password.  These ostensible luxuries, however, mask the reality of the halfsies.  The poverty may not be as extreme or ubiquitous as Haiti or Zimbabwe, but it is certainly existent, and in mass.  Most of the struggle is systemic and for me, generally regarding work culture (Work life here seems to be struggling to transition from an incredibly oppressive totalitarian regime to an open, transparent democracy).  While volunteers in Africa may struggle to get water, we here struggle to work in a system plagued with corruption, apathy, nepotism, and cronyism.  I am not trying to say that one PC country is harder to live in than another, doing so misses the point completely, but rather incipient development often looks flashy, but exists among a myriad of problems and gross poverty.  I often struggle to articulate the duality of my life here in a halfsie.  On one hand, I can make my life sound pretty comfortable, but at the same time I face significant challenges.  Hopefully my describing an average day can help express what I am trying to articulate.

8:00am.  Wake up….first try.

8:15am.  Really wake up.  Bumble around my apartment doing nothing.  Check my email (I have wifi in my apartment, which is totally normal for volunteers in Albania even though it is often uselessly slow).

8:30am.  Finally gain sentience.  Take a shower.  On the note of showers.  Mine has one temperature.  To adjust it, I have to adjust the water tank and wait two or three hours.  Also, the drain for my shower is my Turkish toilet.  I haven’t yet fallen into my  toilet while showering, but I feel like the day is fast approaching.  Hopefully not today.  Kismet.

9:00am: I usually make eggs or buy Byrek and kos for breakfast.  Byrek is layered phyllo dough with goodies in the middle such as spinach, onions, tomatos, or my favorite, cottage cheese.  Kos is, as I am now realizing, not an English word.  I guess greek yogurt is the closest equivalent.

9:30am:  Time for my first coffee of the day.  I head to Turi’s.  I mistakenly get there there before ten which, for whatever reason, means that I will get raki with my coffee or tea.  Morning raki with a coffee is totally socially acceptable, most of the men do it.  We have named it a rakiatto, combining the words raki and macchiatto.  As much as I have grown to like raki, 9:30 is a bit early.  I attempt to talk in Albanian to Turi.  He suffers through it because he is awesome.

10:00am: I begin to work on whatever project I have for the day.  Occasionally I go my office in the town hall, but normally I just work coffee shops.  While the people I work with are amazing, working in the town hall is much like my internet. Coffee number two.  During this time, I will sometimes meet with various community members about whatever project I am working on.  Coffee number three.

12:00pm:  Lunch time.  Albanians generally eat lunch around 2, but I like to beat the rush and eat lunch at a normal American time.  Lunch is generally at this fantastic local restaurant.  The owners are amazing and the food is cheap.  Linda, the owner, usually gives me grief for not talking in Albanian enough.  I generally meet my sitemate for lunch, but if we miss eat other I get the honors of eating lunch at a small, private table with a total stranger.  The conversation is the same almost every time.  Here it is in my terrible Albanian with equally terrible spelling.

Stranger: Pershendetjë.  Si jeni?  A jeni merzit? I Lodhur? “(Hello, How are you doing?  Are you tired?  Annoyed?”  This is the standard Albanian greeting)

Me: Pershendetjë.  Mirë, jo, jo.  Po ju? (“Hello, I am good.  No, no.  And how are you?”)

Stranger: Mirë.  Flet ti Shqip?!  Ku nga?  (“Good.  You speak Albanian?  Where are you from?”)

Me: <What I want to say> Uhhhh, yes.  I do speak the language that we are currently conversing in  <What I really say> Po, uhhhhh  (“Yes, uhhhh”.  I should learn more Albanian).  Jam nga America por tani jetoj in Peshkopi.  Do te rri ketu per 2 vit. (“I am from America, but I live here now.  I will stay for two years.”)

Stranger:  Si ja kalove?  (“How are you passing your day?”  We are back on greeting, I guess).

Me:  Mirë, mirë.  (“good good”.  You can really have a whole conversation with this word.  We continue to do the greeting thing and I explain about the Peace Corps).

Stranger: asflkj sdfl jasdoip zzoiu glnrtn visa.  (At least this is how it sounds in my head.  The stranger has now reverted to rapid fire Albanian with a really really thick dialect.  But I heard the word Visa, so I know what he wants.  He is asking if I can take him to America.  I answer this question every day and am still not sure if it is a joke.

Me:  I usually panic here, forget all of my Albanian and then decide to try out my dialect which  make the stranger laugh. I explain that I am not great at Albanian which he has definitely figured out by now.  We then have a nice, easy conversation that I can handle, like about the weather.  I have asked “Does peshkopi get snow in the winter?” probably a thousand times.  Sometimes if I am having a linguistic off-day he decides to teach me how to count, or just names famous Americans.

Sorry for the tangent, I’ll get back to my day now.

12:30pm:  I go back home, recharge my computer and read for a little bit.

1:30pm:  I go get coffee with one of my friends or have another coffee meeting with a project partner.  Coffee number 4.  Afterwards I work on whatever project or run errands.

3:00pm.  I am home again.  I really need to pee, but I missed the water schedule.  We get running water probably three to fours hours a day.  Luckily, I have a deposit that holds some extra water, but its fairly limiting.  Opps, power is out.

4:00pm.  Power comes back on.  Our power goes out probably on average twice a week.  Some weeks it can be pretty bad and others can be pretty good.  Most day-to-day difficulty comes from lack of functioning infrastructure.  I never seem to have water when I need to do laundry, lack power when I need to do work, and the roads are always terrifying and terrible.  I now head to go play chess with my buddy.  Coffee number 5.

6:30:pm.  Dinner time.  Again, Albanians usually eat dinner at 9, but I can’t hold out that long.  I make pasta with tons of veggies.  After dinner, I try to study Albanian but I quickly give up.  I switch to reading or watching tv (sometimes in English sometimes in Albanian).  This goes on until midnight when I try and go to bed. I can’t.  Maybe I should have had less coffee.