At church in Fushekruje this morning we were getting off to a very slow start. Twenty minutes after service was to have begun, Fatjon told me that Visi was at the jobsite working with Yli. Yli is pronounced like the name Julie without the J sound. Yli had agreed to help us line the flower beds with a bituminous wrap on Saturday, but evidently that got pushed back to today. With service in a holding pattern I decided to head up to the job site to lend a hand. We call roofing that goes down with placed flame “torchdown,” in the States. Yli is one of those men who has a bank of both tools and skills which are rare in Albania. He gave his time today out of respect for Visi and myself, out of friendship.
Besides being a skilled tile man and overall good guy, Yli also has a torch, a large grinder, and a powerful chorded drill. When you hire a craftsmen to come on site, one of the things you are paying for is his tools. He let me borrow his drill to set the bolts which are now holding the galvanized roof structure I had fabricated in Kombinat in place.
One of my frustrations while working here has been the simple lack of good backup plans. Its possible to make just about anything work when you spatch it together with found materials and let gravity lend a hand, but those kinds of solutions are rarely appealing to the eye. Here in Albania I feel fortunate when the power is on. I have been spoiled by my time working in the States where I can expect to find any tool I could ever want either in the back of my work truck, at the nearest big box hardware store, on in Greg Vammen’s garage. I can understand why so much of the work I see appears to be a good first try, and not a professionally finished product. The law of entropy is as real here as it is anywhere, and when things break, they aren’t repaired. There simply isn’t the wealth.
albaniacalling 