Sunday, January 6, 2013

Hunting for John Dewey's Ghost: Part One

Electrical Wires in Tirana

I have been in Albania for four months now. My son and his wife were here a few weeks back and it was lovely to see them. We went to Munich for the weekend they were here and explored the Christmas markets and toured the Dachau Memorial Site – interesting contrasts to say the least.  Below are a few pictures that may give some sense of that contrast. My daughter-in-law took these and the other photographs in this post; she is a far better photographer than I am.

Where "special prisoners" were kept at Dachau

Christmas Market at Marienplatz

One of MANY Gluhwein kiosks at Christmas Market

View from Barracks at Dachau


While I do not wish to diminish that sharp contrast between the vibrancy of Christmas markets at Marienplatz and the bleakness of the Dachau Memorial Site, the contrast between Munich and Tirana was in some ways more interesting to me and relates to the topic I will begin in this post: searching for a sense of the common good.

"New Town Hall" in Munch



Christmas in Tirana: Decorations on the Main Boulevard





Before I left for my stint in Albania, I had various coffees, lunches, dinners, and meetings with students, former students, colleagues, and friends. At one of these coffees, a former student of mine asked me if one of my reasons for going to Albania was to “hunt for John Dewey’s ghost.” I thought that a lovely turn of a phrase and captured one of my enduring quests:  searching for discursive evidence of a society’s (community’s?) commitment to the common or public good.

Having talked to various people about the state of public discourse here and witnessed (though not understanding) televised ‘debates,’ it is rather clear to me that if John Dewey’s ghost is haunting around Albania, he is shaking his head in despair. He may even be crouched in a corner crying.

Maybe John Dewey is Down this Walking Path in Big Park in Tirana

Or Maybe He Is Down This Path also in the Big Park


But as an optimistic pragmatist (idealistic pragmatist, maybe, borrowing from James Baker), he would quickly compose himself and set about documenting the consequences of this lack of commitment to a common good and, I would suspect, recommend some method to bring about “A Great Community.”
I, however, do not have the intellectual acumen of John Dewey. While I can offer my observations and reflections, I doubt I can offer a method to bring about radical societal change. And maybe radical societal change isn’t even needed.

But I am getting ahead of myself. First, my observations and reflections from my trek to a conference in Bulgaria. While these center mainly on identity, I hope eventually to tie them back to my search for the common good.

My hunt for John Dewey’s ghost started as soon as I landed at Mother Teresa Airport, but it really kicked into high gear when I took a road trip in mid-November to Sofia, Bulgaria for a conference. The conference was sponsored by the Balkan Sociological Forum and its theme was “Close but Unknown Neighbors: Balkan Sociological Perspectives.” As you can probably imagine, many of the presentations were on identity and identity formation. I was called upon to moderate two panels during the conference.  I will get to the good, the bad, and the interesting about that experience, but first I wanted to relate some stories from the bus ride itself, as they give some insights into Albanians’ consciousness about a common good.

Soon after we left Tirana and were on a new four-lane highway to Kosovo and on to Bulgaria, a colleague sitting beside me on the bus made a comment about the highway. She indicated that as we approached the border, we would go through a long tunnel – one of the longest (maybe the longest) highway tunnel in the Western Balkans. She said construction of the tunnel and new road we were on had cut travel time from Tirana to Prishtina, the capital of Kosovo, by more than half!  A trip that once took well over seven hours on windy narrow mountain roads could now be accomplished in a little over three hours.

As a side note, a tunnel is currently being built through Krabbe Mountain, which I drove over on the way to Ohrid, Macedonia. It too will cut travel time from Tirana to Elbasan at least in half.

My colleague went on to explain that the roads during the communist era were purposely constructed to be difficult to maneuver. The reasons for this included making it difficult for Albanians to escape the country and, perhaps more importantly, making it extremely difficult for the enemies of Albania (or, more accurately, enemies Enver Hoxha supposed Albania to have) to land planes inside the country.

Really?!?! Yes, really. I guess Hoxha wasn’t worried about helicopters . . . or maybe that’s what all the bunkers were for. For citizens to both protect themselves and shoot down the helicopters. But that’s another story.

This colleague also told me that during the communist period her father was a civil worker – an accountant, I think. But during his course of work, he displeased someone higher up than he. He was soon “reassigned” to agricultural work, which he continued to do until the fall of Hoxha’s regime and his eventual retirement.

She further explained that during the communist era, the ability for citizens to travel was tightly restricted. For one thing, few people had cars, the trains did not (still do not) run across the borders, and a person could be shot for just walking near border crossings. In fact, she had a cousin who was shot for walking near a border crossing. She ended her stories with the profound proclamation that “You Americans can never really understand Albania, because you have not lived through what we have.”

Quite true. I cannot imagine a world in which I have no contact with an “outside” world – a world no bigger than the borders of my country, or a more accurate comparison would be no bigger than my state, or even more accurately the county in which I live. To give you some idea of how small this insular world of communist Albania was, consider that the state of Arkansas is approximately 137,700 km2; Albania is less than a fourth that in land mass: 28,750 km2. In a nation so small, a sense of the common good or public good should be easy to find, right?

One would think so, but . . . nothing is really “easy” to find in Albania. But again I am getting ahead of myself.

One more story from the bus ride to Sofia. As we neared Kukes, a city in northern Albania near the Kosovo border, another colleague, who was traveling with her mother who was born in Kukes, told me that in the 1970s the original city of Kukes, which was in a valley, was flooded to construct an artificial lake that was part of the Albanian hydroelectric system. A new city was constructed on the mountain ridge. Her mother had helped to build that new city.

I imagine this work as mandatory “volunteer professional contribution” work citizens were compelled to do during the communist era – like my colleague the language professor who, with his fellow teachers, built his own apartment building (which he still lives in today) or my political science professor colleague who spent three months a year harvesting potatoes as “professional development.” 

Anyway, the view of the “new” city of Kukes I was able to glimpse from the window of the bus revealed a series of concrete block buildings – massive nondescript gray rectangular blocks, one after another. One was to wonder what the old city looked like, as it had been an Ottoman city and a minor trading post.

Yes, water is important, but at the expense of destroying history? Hmmm . . . a clue on my search for the common good.

One last comment from the bus trip. As my colleagues related these stories they kept saying, “Albania is a country of many colors.” I am still not sure I know what they meant. Perhaps I can never know, as I haven’t lived their history. But I think it may relate to my quest for the common good. And it may relate to all the layers of Albanian identity – Illyrian, Roman, Ottoman, Gheg (North Albania), Tosk (South Albania), communist, etc.  

In fact, the discussion of Albanian identity figured heavily into my experiences at the conference in Sofia. So, on to the good, the bad, and the interesting of that experience

The Good.  Every presenter on both panels I moderated heeded my time cards and did not go over time on their presentations. Can you imagine? I have been on too many panels at conferences when the first presenter took up all the time. This did not happen in Sofia.

I don’t know if people keeping to time happened because generally it happens at conferences in this region or because during the opening session, the woman who organized the conference openly chastised a speaker for going too long: “Unfortunately, Dr. Blah-Blah went on far too long and we have no time for questions.” Or because my status as a “foreigner” afforded me the privilege to make “rules” that the panelists politely followed. No matter the reason, it was surprisingly refreshing and left a good amount of time for discussion.

Also many of the presentations were quite excellent – particularly one that focused on the Roma population in Sofia and another that focused on Bulgarian identity. The author of the paper about the Roma had done an ethnographic study, living in the Roma community for over two years. His conclusions were not necessarily surprising (e.g., the Roma were just afraid of the majority population as the majority population was afraid of them) but he offered a clear and vivid picture of this fascinating and often neglected “gypsy” world.

The presentation on Bulgarian identity was based on survey research that included over 1000 Bulgarian respondents. Bottom line: Bulgarians are proud of their past and ashamed of their present and when primed by asking them to describe either the German people or the Albanian people, they express less pride in their Bulgarian identity. I am not so sure this would not be the case with almost all citizens of all the Balkan countries . . .

Anyway that was the good.

The (Relatively) Bad. As I briefly mentioned in an earlier post, the venue of the opening sessions was beautiful – really more like a church than a university. Stained glass windows, ornate doors, polished wooden floors – but literally freezing! You could see your breath when you talked – really! One of the local organizers of the conference even commented on the lack of heat and jokingly said, “I apologize for the lack of heat but be assured we will turn it on . . . after everyone leaves.”

And we did leave after the opening session.  Whether it got warm in the hall or not, I do not know; however, I do know that the venue for the panel presentations was not nearly as aesthetically pleasing as the hall where the opening sessions were held.

The panel presentations were held in the “Hotel of the Academy of Arts and Sciences,” which was several miles away from the main campus of the university. We had to take a cab to get there. This venue was typical communist era style architecture (boxy and gray) and the décor was straight out of the late 1960s down to the textured wallpaper and paneled walls. But it was warm, so not all bad.

As for the quality of the panel presentations, as I already mentioned most of them were quite good. A few were not – simply straight descriptions of others’ work (e.g., theories of language) without any analysis, or bold opinion (here’s how to fix the economic crisis in Greece) without any evidence. But in retrospect such presentations were not any more egregiously awful than some I have attended at conferences in the U.S. In fact, the “good” presentations outweighed the “bad” and everyone stuck to their time allotments so all-in-all my moderating experience was relatively easy, except for what turned out to be the most interesting experience I had at the conference.

The Interesting. By far the most interesting (and heated!) discussion of my experience as a moderator at the conference in Sofia took place after a presentation on Albanian identity, or more specifically Kosovar- Albanian identity. The authors of this presentation argued that the identities of Albanians living outside the borders of Albania needed to be understood and studied as multi-layered: Albanian (culturally and historically), Kosovar [or Macedonian, Montenegrin or Serbian, etc.] (politically or constitutionally, rights-based), and European (supra-state).

It was a claim that seemed quite reasonable to me, but, WHEW! What a fervor it created! I think the main bone of contention came from the authors’ use of the first order Albanian identity (the cultural level) as fundamental coupled with their use of the term “national” with this level. Many in the session took issue with this, stating Kosovars were Kosovars first and foremost no matter their cultural heritage, same with Macedonians, etc.

The Albanians argued back that “No! They/We are Albanians first!”

I cannot adequately describe the passion with which each person spoke. I let the “discussion” go on for a while and tried to paraphrase the arguments of anyone who made a comment; however, at some point I realized the discussion was going nowhere. I ended the conversation by stating that it seemed the argument was not going to be resolved and there seemed to be confusion due to translations, interpretations, and semantics (the language of the conference was English and I was, again as in Macedonia, the only native English speaker in the room).

As I reflect on this discussion, I realize that, yes, the conflict was due partly to issues of speaking in a language not native to any of those putting forth their ideas but also due to, well, language use. Kosovar-Albanians speak Albanian, so to say they are “Kosovar first and foremost” seems a stretch, right? Our language is inextricably tied to our identity and our worldview, right?

One the other hand, the authors’ use of the words “national identity” for the first order “Albanian identity” did not ring true either. Cultural or historical, but not national, right? The national identity of Kosovar-Albanians is Kosovar, right? People who are citizens of Kosovar, vote in Kosovar, are Kosovar nationals, right?

Actually, it is not that clear. Any Albanian living outside of Albania can vote in Albanian elections. Of course, no system of absentee voting exists, but if you can get yourself to a polling place inside the borders, and prove you have registered to vote as an Albanian, you can vote. Really you can.

And perhaps to muddy the waters even more, on the way back to Tirana, on a road in Kosovo, our bus passed four men walking. They were all dressed in traditional Albanian fashion, including high-domed Qeleshes, which indicated they were from Kosovo. One of them was carrying the Albanian flag.

“Where are they going?” I asked those around me.

“They are going to Vlore [a seaside town in South Central Albania], for the celebration of Albanian independence. A group of men does this every year.”

And sure enough, when I went to Vlore two weeks later, the bus I was on passed the men again. Still walking. Still carrying the red and black double-headed eagle flag of Albania.

Albanian Nationals? Kosovar-Albanian Nationals? Albanian-Kosovar Nationals?

As I stated earlier finding anything, even identity, is not an easy task here.

But this identity conundrum, is quite interesting. And also provides another clue on my search for the common good here in Albania.

I’ll end here since I have gone way too long. Next time, I hope to add more pieces to my “common good” puzzle, although I am not quite sure how all the pieces fit together yet or even if they fit together.

John Dewey, where are you?


My Son and I on the Hunt for John Dewey :)


Postscript: This story does not quite fit anywhere, but it needs to be told. It is also about identity, but not necessarily Albanian identity. Some time ago, I had dinner with a group of people from various institutes and universities. During the course of the conversation, I began talking with the person across the table from me about the EU and Albania’s bid for EU candidacy status. I happened to mention that a colleague back home thought the EU would be the next super power.

“That will never happen,” was his reply.

“Why not?” I asked.

“Because, if you ask someone from Germany where he is from, he will say ‘Germany’ or a Frenchman will say ‘France,’ and an Albanian will say ‘Albania.’ No one will say ‘I am from Europe.” That means nothing. And besides, you will never get leaders from all the EU countries to agree on a unified foreign policy.”

His answer was so simple yet so profound. I thought of my own answer to that question, “Where are you from?” To another American, I would probably say “Arkansas,” but I’ve learned here I have to say “America” because that has meaning. And it has meaning to me, also. I am an American fundamentally, just as a German is a German and not a “European.” What exactly is a European identity?

Sunday, December 2, 2012

Passion and Politics: Teaching and Learning in Tirana (and Beyond)


It has been a very busy few weeks. I have attended four more conferences (although two were one day meetings here in Tirana): one at the law school on Electoral Politics; one at the Sky Tower Hotel on higher education here in Albania that was organized by former Albanian Fulbright scholar to the U.S.; another in Sofia, Bulgaria (taking two 12 hour bus rides to get there and back) that was sponsored by the Balkan Sociological Forum; and the last an interdisciplinary conference held in Vlora, Albania and sponsored by the Albanian Sociological Institute and various universities. All were interesting and informative in their own ways.

And I turned 60. In Sofia!

In the next post I will reflect more on the conferences and the general principle of a public good or a common good. This concept of a public good or a common good seems to run through most of the conversations I have, and I hope I can articulate my understanding of what it is, or isn’t, or could be, here in Albania.

But first I wanted to reflect on my weekly teaching routine.

In case you aren’t interested in my weekly routine, here are a few pictures from Sofia and Vlora. At the end of the post are some pictures that give some sense of the festivities that took place in Vlora and Tirana for the 100th anniversary of Albanian independence. I think they are a good place to start in regard to understanding the possibility of a vibrant public life here in Albania.


And, if you get a chance, come back in a couple of weeks or so for the dish on the common good


This is the hall at the University of Sofia where the opening session of the
Balkan Sociological Forum conference was held. Beautiful but freezing!

In the foyer outside the room where opening sessions were held.

In the center of Sofia. Taking a break from the conference.
That is our "guard dog" on the left. He followed us all around the city and protected us from the other dogs.
For my birthday, some colleagues and I went to a traditional Bulgarian restaurant.
They surprised me with a lovely wooden plate.

We stopped in Kosovo for dinner on the way back from Bulgaria.
We are getting ready to do a circle dance.

My colleagues said this would make a lovely hair commercial.
All I see is someone who has to watch her feet to do the dance!

View from the balcony of the hotel in Vlora.



Sunset in Vlora. I took this picture right across from the hotel where we stayed.


MY WEEKLY WORK ROUTINE.
My weekly work routine up until last week consisted of co-teaching a senior level course in Public Sociology and sitting in on four ESL classes. The Public Sociology class meets once a week for four hours and the ESL class met four times a week (including Saturday afternoons) for two hours. The ESL class ended last week, and most of the students in it will take a qualifying exam next week to see if they can move from their current “Upper Intermediate” status as English speakers and writers on to an “Advanced” class.

I have already written fairly extensively on the ESL class so here I will elaborate a bit on the Public Sociology class and a “guest lecture” I did for a Political Systems class.

The Public Sociology Class. You may be wondering, “What the heck is Public Sociology and why are YOU (a communication scholar) teaching it?” Well I was wondering that myself until I researched public sociology a bit.

Basically public sociology is a combination of critical cultural theory and communication activism. At least that’s how I see it. In 2004, Michael Burawoy, then President of the American Sociological Association, made a keynote speech at the ASA annual conference advocating for more emphasis on investigating quotidian dilemmas in people’s lives rather than engaging in experimental research or research based on aggregate data gathered from sources such as the GSS.

Here’s a quote from Burawoy:

“. . . There is no shortage of publics if we but care to seek them out. But we do have a lot to learn about engaging them. . . . We should not think of publics as fixed but in flux, and we can participate in their creation as well as their transformation. Indeed, part of our business as sociologists is to define human categories—people with AIDS, women with breast cancer, women, gays—and if we do so with their collaboration, we create publics. ”

Hmmm. Sounds very much like publics theory to me, although my own training did not emphasize so much the “creation” of publics by researchers as much as the understanding of publics through analysis of their discourse.

Anyway, no matter. I have built my part of the course around what I already know and teach about publics and public problems.

I have given two “public lectures” (advertised on my host university’s website and attended by more than just the students in the class): One on the connection between the assumptions of public sociology and the principles of coordinated management of meaning, a communication theory, and another on the role of universities in developing citizens.

In the regular class, I have focused on publics theory and communicative action using the work of John Dewey, Jurgen Habermas, Joseph Gusfield, Gerard Hauser, and Barnett Pearce.

Whether teaching to a small group or a larger group, I have tried as best as I could to make the presentations interactive (more on that later).

As to the “small group” (or regular class), we have six students enrolled, but generally no more than three attend. I have been told this is fairly typical for private universities here; however, the three that do attend are fairly attentive and engaged in the class.

I am co-teaching with a woman who is a native Albanian, but got her PhD in Sociology from Michigan State. She lived in the U.S. for sixteen years and speaks fluent English. Together we designed the course to include the information I’ve already mentioned plus three broad case studies/examples of scholars engaging in public sociology work. We have decided to use Barbara Ehrenriech’s Nickel and Dimed as one case study and Dwight Conquergood’s work on gangs in Chicago as another. We haven’t decided on the third, if you have any ideas let me know J

For what I consider the major assignment in the course, we have asked the students to write an analysis paper that will require them to do some fieldwork. We adapted the assignment from one I used in a course I taught on the material and social construction of poverty a few semesters ago. Basically, the assignment asks students to work with an organization that addresses a public problem and analyze the effectiveness of the organization’s methods.

The rest of their grade will come from a final exam. Apparently this is generally the way students are assessed here. One exam at the end of the course. Whew! I doubt I would have made it through my undergraduate degree much less my masters or doctorate if everything rode on one exam for each class!

So that’s the class I am actually “teaching.”

On Thanksgiving Day (yes, of course, Thanksgiving is not a holiday here J), I did a guest lecture in a Political Systems class. It also is a senior level class. As I recall, there were seven students in the class: six women and one man. My lecture was on the stages of Presidential campaigns in the U.S. and the communicative functions of each stage.

I used video clips for the presentation and they proved to be the most interesting part of the presentation for the students.

Here are a few reflections on these classes:

Language. The most fundamental challenge in the classroom for me is my lack of Albanian language skills. My interactions with students lead me to believe most speak at perhaps an “upper intermediate” level or maybe just a tad lower (“intermediate”) and my Albanian language skills are at best “beginner” level. So when I teach, the lesson consists of me talking in English for a while and someone else translating what I say into Albanian for a while. If I ask a question of the students, it takes four steps before I understand the answer.

Needless to say, the teaching process is slow this way and I can expect to cover about half the material I generally cover in the time frame. The glacial speed of the progression of class is exacerbated by the lack of textbooks, my second major challenge.

Textbooks. While efforts are being made to translate basic texts, the number of textbooks available in Albanian is very limited. This might not be such a huge problem if there were an abundance of original Albanian texts – works by Albanians in the fields of political science, sociology, psychology, discourse. But, sadly, this is not the case. In fact, during the communist era many texts were banned or destroyed. Here are two stories that poignantly illustrate the significant impact of this censorship.

By far the most interesting presentation I saw at the law school conference on Electoral politics was on the “lost texts” that contained historical accounts of the electoral system in Albania from 1912, the year Albania gained Independence from the Ottoman Empire, to 1939, the year Albania was invaded by Italy, setting up the rise to power of communist leader Enver Hoxha, who ruled Albania with an iron fist until his death in 1985.

The presentation was basically an account of the laws that governed who had the right to vote, how people were protected under the law in regard to the right to assemble and to express their opinions about public matters, and what were the actual voting procedures.

As I listened to the speaker, I was struck by how similar this account was to the one Michael Schudson describes in The Good Citizen concerning the U.S. system. But what was markedly different was that the process of standardizing voting procedures, ballots, etc. was just getting started when POOF! It was stopped dead in its tracks.

Moreover, most of the books that contained accounts of the electoral process were destroyed once Hoxha came to power. Essentially, Hoxha locked down Albania for about fifty years. No one got in, no one got out. Information was tightly controlled. Information was destroyed. Albania existed in its own bubble cut off from the world around it.

If it hadn’t been for the few brave souls who were willing to hide some copies of these accounts of the budding Albanian electoral system of the early 20th century, part of Albanian could have been lost forever.

As it is, few people are aware of these “lost” texts and even fewer can access them.

This presentation was my first concrete introduction to how valuable and rare historic information is here. It also in hindsight conditioned me to the presentations that followed for the rest of the day, although at the time I was not aware of this conditioning.

To be honest, at first, I was a bit horrified by the rest of the presentations I sat through that day. My first reaction was, “Uh, I could have read this on Wikipedia!” But that initial snarky criticism was much too harsh.

A few days after the conference, I had dinner with an American legal scholar who had been a keynote speaker at the conference. I had started to voice my disappointment with the “quality” of the presentations when she said something that gave me pause. She declared that the conference was one of the best she had attended in a post-communist country!

Her reasoning was that most of the presentations were fairly objective, well-translated accounts of electoral systems in other countries or decent interpretations of current international laws related to electoral politics.

As I thought through her evaluation of the conference, I realize how right she was. While the information present seemed very rudimentary to me, it WAS at least information, not widely outrageous opinion or fabrications.

And then I started thinking about how the organizers had been so careful to say the conference was “scientific” – that term puzzled me at first. I was expecting presentations based on data-driven research, not direct translations of the work of researchers and theorists such as Lester Milbrath and Robert Putnam, not accounts of the electoral systems in the U.S. and U.K. that could be surely found in any encyclopedia.

But then I realized that WAS the “scientific” part. “Scientific” to mean perhaps “vetted” or “legitimate” or maybe even “able to advance knowledge in Albania.”

One more revelation I had based on attending this conference was that no clear standards for what constitutes “original research” exist or can exist if an academic community is still struggling simply to have knowledge, not necessarily to produce it. And I can see now how translating the work of others into Albanian can count as “original research.” Of course, I still draw the line at simply copying something and claiming it as one’s own – that’s plagiarism no matter what, isn’t it?

The other story related to the lack of textbooks has to do with the discipline of sociology. During the communist era, sociology was declared a “militant science” and, basically “outlawed.” Those who taught what was akin to sociology could only use the works of four authors: Marx (and I was told one couldn’t actually teach Marx but rather a version of “Marxism” approved by Hoxha), Engels, Lenin, and Stalin!

Oh my! Sociology without Weber! Sociology without Durkheim! Sociology without Mead! In other words, no sociology at all.

Apparently the same was true in regard to other disciplines, in particular philosophy, but the philosophy professor I know does not speak very good English and I haven’t had a chance to sit down with her with a translator yet.

Anyway, these stories give some insights into why there is a dearth of translated texts or original texts to use in courses. Hearing them also gave me a new appreciation for how easy it is for me to have a wealth of information delivered to my laptop with a few clicks of the mouse.

Teaching Style. Students here are apparently more used to a lecture style of teaching than an interactive style. One teacher I talked with said this is a holdover from the communist era, when critical thinking and questioning were not encouraged in the classroom. Students were expected to sit and listen and soak in the information (banking model of pedagogy). She herself experienced this in her early education: children are supposed to sit, listen, and NOT ASK QUESTIONS or have ORIGINAL IDEAS. The best answers were those memorized from the teachers’ lectures or the texts provided.

This teacher also suggested that many teachers in the public schools still use this method, so the move to more innovative ways of teaching and developing of critical thinking skills has been slow. In fact, this teacher indicated she had moved her own child from the public school system to the private school system mainly because of the lack of innovation and critical thinking pedagogy in the public schools. Sound familiar?

This may explain why when I have asked questions in class, they are first met with a prolonged silence. I have tried following up my question-asking with, “There is no right or wrong answer. I want to know what you think,” and that has worked to some extent. But still when I hear their (translated) answers I get the sense that they are holding something back – not quite willing to venture an original idea.

This is fascinating to me in light of the state of public discourse here. Or it may explain the state of public discourse here. From what I have been told, public discourse here is abysmal. Debates consist of politicians and political leaders making (sometimes outrageous) accusations against their opponents and calling each other names. No cases are made to support any kind of policy claims, in fact, from what people have told me there is no talk of policy whatsoever. It is mainly just posturing. (In all honesty I don’t know if these interpretations are accurate, as I cannot understand what is being said. I will say, though, that the style, which I can observe, seems to be more aggressively argumentative than constructively argumentative.)

Are the politicians and political leaders as afraid to voice original ideas as the students in my classes? Has their education failed them? If the public discourse is as impoverished as I have been led to believe, what are the chances for democracy to thrive here?

Well, these are questions that keep popping up as I make my way here. I don’t have the answers but I can make more observations.

I will make one such observation before I end this post. It was something that I learned when I did the guest lecture in the political systems class.

As I mentioned earlier, the lecture I did in that class was on the communicative functions of the stages of U.S. presidential campaigns (Trent & Friedenberg). When I got to the last stage, the election stage, I focused on how one of the communicative functions of that stage was to legitimate the process. I offered as an example of this legitimating function, videos of Mitt Romney and John McCain’s concession speeches, explaining that one way the system is legitimated is by the person who loses graciously conceding to the winner.

The basic message of the concession speech is "My opponent won fair and square, the system works, let's get along (at least for awhile) because in the end we are all Americans."

And I further explained that the loser always concedes. This is a ritual that reassures the voting public that the system is legitimate.

The students found these videos and the concept of a concession speech most interesting. One student even commented that such a speech would never happen in Albania. The party that lost would accuse the party that one of stealing the election, but would not concede.

I wondered if this was really true, so I asked the professor in the class if she thought this was true.

“Oh, yes!” she replied. “But you have to remember they are speaking for their party more than speaking for themselves.”

Speaking for their party. What does this mean in regard to a common good? A public good? Albanian identity? Hmmmm.

More on this next time.

Naten e mire! (Good night!)

Along Rruga Ismail Qemali in Downtown Vlora

In Skanderbeg Square during Independence Day Celebrations. The caps the boys are wearing are called Qeleshes. Notice that they are shaped differently. The shapes indicate what region the person is from. Most of these boys are from central Albania, as the tops of their qeleshes are flat. The boy with the qeleshe with the rounded top is from another region, maybe Elbasan.

Crowd in front of the National Museum during Independence Day celebrations. The ghost-like things in the background are statues of famous Albanians that were revealed later in the ceremonies.












Wednesday, October 31, 2012

Placid Waters and Powerful Stories: My Trip to Ohrid, Macedonia


This post is about my trip to and participation in a conference on conflict mediation in schools that took place in Ohrid, Macedonia.

Getting There and Back. Exactly two weeks ago today, at around 12:30PM, I pulled my rented white Chevy into the Hotel Sileks which is right across the street from a public beach on  Lake Ohrid in Macedonia. My Albanian colleague and I had left Tirana around 8:30AM that morning,  braved Krabbe Mountain Pass,  stopped for a wonderful traditional sandwich called simete me bugaçë in Elsbasan, worried about getting across the border in  Qafë Thanë, and stopped at least four times after we crossed the border to ask for directions to the hotel.

But we made it.

In four hours we had traveled approximately 92 miles (148 kilometers). Don’t believe the guidebooks or Google maps that estimates a two to two and a half hour drive. It is at least a three and a half hour drive. The road is two-lane all the way and contains many switchbacks. But, as I indicated in an earlier post about my trip to Shushicë, the views from the top of the mountain are amazing.

The trip also requires navigating through Elbasan and a few villages, including Librazhd which can be fairly congested, and stopping at the border, which takes another 20-30 minutes, as there are two checkpoints.

My colleague and I could probably have shaved about a half hour off our time if we had not stopped for the sandwich or gotten a little lost once we crossed the border; but I doubt we could have made the trip in two hours no matter what.

No matter the time it takes to drive through the mountains of Albania to Macedonia, I highly recommend trying it. I must say I was fearful about the prospect of driving in a country where many people ignore solid lines that indicate DO NOT PASS and the average years of driving experience is probably less than five years, but here’s the deal: renting a car is in the end safer, more comfortable, and far more convenient than other modes of transportation.

Those other “modes” include a regular bus service that leaves Tirana at 9:30PM and gets to Struga, Macedonia at 2AM, from which you can take cab (if you can find one at 2AM!) for the 10 mile ride to Ohrid; “furgon” (mini-bus) travel, which requires finding a place where a furgon stops, negotiating a price, and  enduring a ride over the mountains stopping every ten miles or so to pick up other passengers (sometimes including livestock) with a driver who, uh, maybe has three years of driving experience; and the train—ah, the train. Apparently you can walk to the border faster than the train can take you J.

So rent the car. It may cost ten times more than the bus or furgon and fifty times more than a  train ticket (apparently you can ride the train to Pogradec, another border crossing, for 340ALL, about $3.40), but it is well worth it.

In fact, perhaps the most difficult part of car travel was actually renting the car (I had to go back to the car rental place three times before the car was ready), or driving through the streets of Tirana (I had to be as aggressive as everyone else in Sheshi Wilson to get through the roundabout), or finding a place to park the car overnight before the trip (I finally just gave up trying to find a place within a block of my apartment and parked at the school).

Or getting gas. Or should I say petrol? No, I should say benzin.  

I had to return the car full of gas, so on the way back to Tirana, we stopped at a gas station on the outskirts of town. My Albanian colleague had a long conversation with the attendant (there is no ‘self service’ gas here), which ended with her pulling out the papers for the car, handing them to the attendant, his pointing to a certain section of one of the documents, and her finally saying, “okay” (the only word I understood in the whole interaction).

Apparently they had the long conversation about what kind of fuel to put in the car. While I knew for sure the car did not run on diesel, I had no idea that deciding what kind of gasoline to put in it could be controversial. The papers indicated the car ran on “benzin,” which is what that station offered, so it all worked out. I saw no pumps for different octane grades of gas, so I guess they were all the same. When I got back to my apartment, I looked up the word “benzin”—apparently it is the German word for gasoline.

One more thing about the “benzin”: I needed less than a half tank of gas. The car I was driving, a Chevrolet Evanda, which isn’t a Chevrolet at all but a Daewoo, but that’s a story you will just have to ask me about in person, has a fairly large tank (65 liter capacity—about 17 gallons). It took 25 liters, about 6.5 gallons, to fill the tank.

Guess the cost. Be realistic. Guess.

Thirty dollars? No . . . Forty dollars? No . . . Forty-five dollars? Yes!!

Forty-five dollars! Actually 4503.67ALL, but I handed the guy a 5000 Leke note and he handed me back a 500 leke note. That’s almost $7.00 a gallon. 

Whew! No more complaining about the $3.85 a gallon gas back home for me J

Language of the Conference . As I indicated above, the conference was on conflict mediation in schools. About fifty people were in attendance—from Albania, Macedonia, Serbia, Kosovo, Montenegro, Bosnia & Herzegovina, and Slovenia. And Germany. The conference was sponsored by two German NGOs that work mostly in the Balkans.

It was a good conference, and I learned a lot about conflict and conflict mediation in K-12 schools in the Balkans. Unlike the US where bullying tends to be based on sexual identity and perhaps race and clichés, bullying in the Balkans, at least according to the conference attendees, centers almost exclusively on ethnicity: As one conference presenter asserted about the situation in Macedonia particularly, “The Macedonians pick on the ethnic Albanians, the ethnic Albanians retaliate against the Macedonians, and the Roma are picked on by all and retaliate against all.”

Basically, the distinguishing characteristic among K-12 students is their first language, which indicates their cultural heritage (back to the politics of language!). This distinction carries over into universities, where, at least in Macedonia, classes may be taught in three languages: Macedonian, Albanian, and Turkish.

As another conference presenter noted, when students graduate from university, the different language speakers often plan and attend different graduation parties, perpetuating the divisions among the groups.
It is similar to students sitting with their own race and cliché in the U.S., but the differences among the students are not that apparent until they start to speak.

A rather striking example of these subtle differences even happened at breakfast one morning. My Albanian colleague greeted another conference attendees with “Miremengjes,” which means “Good morning” in Albanian. She answered in kind and then my colleague started talking to her in Albanian. She stopped my colleague and politely said in Enlgish, “I’m sorry I don’t speak Albanian.”

My colleague was a bit taken aback, “But you are Kosovar!”

“Yes,” was the reply, “But I am Serbian Kosovar.”

Subtle differences recognized by language. But differences far deeper than the language itself.

Interestingly, the “official” language of the conference was English, the second or third or fourth language of everyone in attendance but me.

English as the neutral language. The “nonpolitical” language.

As I listened to presenters and attended sessions, I kept thinking how tiring it must have been for all the attendees (except me) to be constantly translating what was said into their first language.
Since then, I have spent some time reflecting on both my privilege and my limitations of being monolingual. I am indeed fortunate that the only language I can speak is one so many people understand or want to speak.

Conference Stories. During the course of the conference, I had a chance to interact with many wonderful people working on the issue of conflict mediation in schools. Two stories told by conference attendees were particularly memorable and will follow me long after I leave this region.

One was told casually by a young ethnic Albanian Kosovar woman during a coffee break. She and I and another attendee were standing by the coffee cart by the pool of the hotel, basking in the warm sun.
She started talking about her childhood. I can’t remember why or what was said before her story, as the story was so powerful it seemed to come out of nowhere, to stand on its own. When she was a child she was an avid reader. She loved the worlds created in the books she read. But she wondered why the reality in the books was so much better than the reality of her life. And she wondered how she could enter the reality of the books.

One day when her mother was not home, she had an idea. She realized the reason she could not enter the world of the books was because the books had no doors. She also reasoned that if she made doors in the books she could enter the world inside the books. So she took a pair of scissors and cut “doors” in all the books.

When her mother realized what she had done, she was severely reprimanded for her actions, as she had destroyed every book in the house.

At this point in the story, she laughed at her childish actions. But then she said, “In the end it didn’t matter, because soon after our whole house was burned in the war and everything was lost, including the books with the doors.”

What can one say to that story? How does one react? I laughed with her and squeezed her arm, fighting back the tears in my eyes.

“What a lovely story,” I said. “About the books, I mean.” So inadequate. So outside my comfortable existence. So touching. So memorable.

The other story came from the attendee who had been standing at the coffee cart with me and the Kosovar woman. In the course of conversation, he explained how he had attended high school in the U.S. at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, no less. He had then gone on to get his degree at Brandeis University in Boston. The conversation ended there, but later that day I found him alone in the lobby of the hotel and asked him how his family came to know about Phillips Exeter.

My first assumption was that he was from a family of means. But that assumption proved incorrect. He, too, was ethnic Albanian Kosovar.  Either during or after the conflict (I should have taken better notes!), a U.S. aid worker recognized him as a talented basketball player and helped him to make application to Phillips Exeter.

There he is played stellar basketball, earned a scholarship to Brandeis and was named MVP of the league during his college career. He was even featured in basketball magazines and did an interview on national television in the U.S.

He noted that although his basketball career had ended, he still worked to inspire students (I think he teaches high school or middle school) to do their best and use their natural talents.   

His story and that of the woman are excellent examples of the vagaries of life, both good and bad.

I offer one more story from my trip to Macedonia. This is a personal story. And one that illustrates the depth of generosity of the people of this region.

One afternoon of the conference, we were treated to an excursion to Sve. Naum, an area on Lake Ohrid that includes a monastery, a spring, and an open “market” of sorts (mainly stalls with tourist-y souvenirs). We took a boat to get to Sve. Naum. Here are some pictures I took from the boat. They give some idea of the beauty of the landscape and the lake.

Where we boarded the boat for the trip to Sve. Naum. On the public beach across from the conference hotel.

On the way to Sve. Naum

On the way to Sve. Naum. Development on Lake Ohrid is restricted.

Those are mountains in the background, Albanian mountains, as the country border is through the lake.


Lake Ohrid is one of the deepest lakes in the world.



As we docked at Sve. Naum, fishermen on the pier started shouting to us. I am so used to hearing languages I don’t understand that I tuned out what was being said. As the greeting subsided, another attendees turned to me and said, “That man kept asking you ‘Where are you from’ and you ignored him.”

“What?!?” I said.

“That man kept asking you ‘where are you from” and you ignored him.”

“In English?!?”

“Yes! In English!”

“Which man? Where is he?” was my rather frantic reply. I see part of my job here as being an ambassador for the U.S. and here I was ignoring someone’s simple question about my country of origin.

My colleague pointed the man out to me and as soon as I scrambled off the boat, I made a point to go up to him, hold out my hand, and say with a smile, “Hi! I’m Christy. I’m from the U.S. From America.”

The fisherman immediately shot back, “Kentucky?”

“No . . .,” I said.

“Ohio?”

“No. . .”

“Indiana?”

“No . . ., I’m from Arkansas.”

“Ar-KANSAS!” was the reply.  “Ar-KANSAS! A big river flows through Ar-KANSAS.”

“Yes,” I said, “The Arkansas River and the Mississippi River.”

“Yes,” the fisherman said, “I know my geography, yes?”

“Yes, you do!” I replied and bid goodbye.

Sometime later as my colleague and I were walking through the path lined with souvenir stalls, the fisherman spotted me again.

He shouted, “Ar-KANSAS!” Picked up something from one of the stalls and approached me. He pressed something into my hand and shut my fist tightly saying, “This is for you Ar-KANSAS!”
As I walked away I opened my hand to reveal a mother of pearl pendant in the shape of a heart. I turned around, beaming and waved to him, “Thank you! Thank you so much!”

He smiled and waved back.

View of Lake Ohrid from Sve. Naum


Souvenir Stalls at Sve. Naum

On the dock at Sve. Naum


When I told a friend this story, his response was that such simple acts of generosity give you great insights into a culture.

So true. I will cherish my time in Ohrid, my experiences at the conference, and my heart shaped mother of pearl pendant long after I have settled back into my ordinary life in Ar-KANSAS.

Happy Halloween!

Next time: Adventures in teaching J