Letters from the Balkans #01: First-hand experience

Remember the young Albanian girl from the movie Wag the Dog (with Dustin Hoffmann, Robert De Niro, and Anne Heche)? As an American president tries to distract from a sex-scandal at home by projecting a war in little-known Albania on the TV screens of millions of American households, the young Albanian girl not only comes to stand in for a war-torn population, but also the views, prejudices, and nation-building aspirations of an American public on the verge of a domestic scandal.Albania is not only one of Europe’s poorest nations, but also one whose population is consistently victim of racist remarks and xenophobic outbursts in Western Europe. Talking to friends and coworkers about my trip to the Balkans, including Albania, I soon realized that their applause for the Balkans was soon met by deeply-held reservations about Albania. “First-hand experience” with Albanians had left the people I talked to with decidedly negative views of country, people, and customs. Not knowing any Albanians at all and lacking that crucial first-hand experience with Albanians that so many others seemed to have, I would reply that I wanted to experience the country and its people by myself before passing any kind of judgment. And so I took off to Vienna for my Belle Air flight to Tirana.Now, a week after my arrival in Albania, I am positively surprised about how friendly and helpful people are. As a foreigner who lacks any knowledge of the Albanian language, I met people who would mobilize hands, relatives, and passers-by to help me find hotels, minivans, and cafés. Many Albanians either worked in Italy at one point in their life or have been exposed to Italian TV channels since their childhood, so Italian, and occasionally English, get one very far.

Certainly, Albanian helpfulness makes up for obvious deficiencies: public transport is chaotic, timeliness is a matter of interpretation, and here and there a foreigner just ends up paying more for a simple coffee than a local. But then I would remember my childhood time when the bus to my home village ran only a few times a day, ski lift owners would distinguish between a “Gästepreis” and a “Preis für Einheimische,” and many locals would refuse to speak Italian even though most would perfectly understand it. Two decades on, some things have changed, but others haven’t. In any case, it’s never too late to get that much-invoked “first-hand experience”.

Captions:
Picture 1: Our host in Tethi, Ms. Gjecaj
Picture 2: A young Albanian with perfect English language skills from the mountain-village of Thethi
Picture 3: The minivan ride from Shkoder to Thethi proved to be a six-hour-ride of a gravel road