Over the past four months I have been blessed by three distinct and sometimes overlapping groups of people.  The Church Body in Fushekruje, the crew on the work site, and the missionaries I have met since coming here have all blessed me in ways beyond counting,and I have tried to capture that in these writings.  There are two other groups who add color and life to this exciting world of mine.  First, there are the people back home; my family and supporters who write and skype and love me.  Second, there are those Albanians for which no reason for connection has been made obvious; a seeming random collection of friends made familiar by hospitality and warm interactions.

A group of boys who sell mementos of Albania in and around Qender Skenderbeu.  These three approached me about eight weeks ago hoping to sell a tourist a key-chain, pen, magnet, snow-globe, or miniature flag.  We sat for awhile on the steps between the Sahat and the Jamiya talking about who they were and who I am.  I took a small flag to fly from my backpack and some red pens with the two-headed eagle on them.  Since that day I have probably seen and spoken with these young men on ten different occasions.  Each time a Christian has a chance to witness; to make a friendship for Christ.

My friend Shpetim owns a business near the church building site.  He is always inviting me to sit and to talk.  His English skills are superior to most of the people I have met here and we trade questions about language with one-another.  He is from Kruje, but has been in Fushekruje for many years and he has introduced me to some of his friends there.  

Also in Fushekruje, living in and around the apartment complex near Capo Nord, is a group of elementary school aged kids.  A few of the boys will holler “Hello!” in big voices meant to carry a great distance.  “How are you?!”  They yell at me.  Mostly I will wave back at them so as not to hurt their pride.  Sometimes I will take a few minutes to ask how they are doing.  It is fun to be such an anomaly to people so young.  Yesterday I noticed them playing cards as I walked past.  They stood to pose for a photograph.

There are also a number of vendors I have come into contact with.  Mostly men, they are shop owners, waiters, cooks or all three depending on the size of the establishment.  At Lokal Tymi you can get the best qofta in Fushkruje.  The first time I saw the sign I thought “That must mean “local time,” an idea akin to “our place.”  Yesterday I realized that it means “The Smoky Restaurant.”  It is an indoor grill house with a small window in the back and the front door as its only ventilation.  Best carbohydrate/fat combination you are likely to find anywhere; a healthy chunk of bread and four sausage meatballs for about 90 cents US.

And so, here I am, there you are, you are a Christian, you are a witness and your sphere of influence is broader than you can imagine.  Every conversation, every meal with a stranger, every coffee shared in friendship is another moment given to God for the strengthening of His kingdom.

If I wanted

To sit with my mother

For a cry

Over wine

On the porch my father built

Light a fire for my sister

Who is always cold

Share my day 

With my father over a meal

My mother cooked

Drive to Yakima

To be fretted over

By Caroline

Meet me at Costa’s

We’ll share breakfast and poetry

See you in your kitchen

Updates over microwaved coffee

Call you in the afternoon

Hear about the desert and your fiance

Visit you at your restaurant

You’ll insist that I not pay

Forgive me love

For I have gone missing

Into the blue

Be it ocean, dream or sky

There is no Heaven here

And no Hell besides

For there can be neither

Without love 

Joshua Hughes 8.8.2012

The land for the church in Fushekruje is adequate, but by no means lavish in size.  It was purchased from one of the first families in Fushekruje, to avoid any future claims from returning Albanians looking to retake their family plots.  All of the land around our church belongs to the family we concluded purchase from a few years ago.  From the ground it is possible to see at least five different houses belonging to five different members of that same family.  If loving one’s neighbor as oneself were ever this necessary, I would struggle to name the time or place.  One of the day’s activities was bringing the back-road, used commonly by both family members and the church alike, into proper shape.

The temperature peaked at about 102 degrees in the afternoon, with less humidity than usual.  My sister and her family live in Tucson and I never understood a love for heat until a few days ago.  As I was walking along the sidewalk of the main road in Fushekruje, a slow wind pushed the hot air over me; it was like taking a hot bath without the being wet or like to drown.  I closed my eyes for a few seconds, imagining that I had caught whatever madness possessed the first natives of Arizona to remain there.

Yli, our tile-man, started laying out the tile for the sanctuary on the main floor of the church today.  I prefer tile to any other indoor flooring surface.  I have watched a few masters of this art, as they work out the pieces to the puzzles we walk on.  I haven’t had the privilege of seeing how one performs these tasks with such a limited tool-kit before.  In the States, “doing it yourself” is made easy due to sheer accessibility to tools and building materials.  Yli is stitching this quilted gown together by hand, I and he is doing a great job.

Tomorrow we will continue to work on walks and walls, entrances and exits.  Before we know how it happened we will be worshiping God in the first church building the city of Fushekruje has ever known.  Will you come and celebrate with us?

Shortly after going to the Dasem in Peshkopia, Ervis invited me to go to another wedding.  This wedding was for a young man in Vissy’s family who is also one of Agim’s nephews.  The uncles on the groom’s side of the family have very specific obligations to the family during this time.  Their participation seems to be the most important of any person outside of the groom himself.  The oldest of the uncles, the patron of the family, is more obliged even than the groom’s father to see that proper form is met during the celebration.  It is as if his reputation and authority within the family hinge on his performance of these duties; and that would make sense both sociologically and anthropologically.

Agim was able to relax somewhat for the celebration, he is the fourth brother in his family line.  It seemed evident, even so, that his role was an important one; that his performance was important for the sake of the family.

Vissy and I connected with one of Agim’s four daughters and her husband for the bus ride out from Tirana to the local where the wedding was held.  We took the road out past Kombinat, an area of Tirana which I had not known about.  Near to the local there was a monument to the “Lavdi Pezes Heroike,” four citizens who were instrumental in the unification of Albanians in their resistance against the Nazi invasion during World War II.

A Dasem is an important family event and not many people outside of the family are invited.  Family members who are able to attend are strongly obliged to do so.  The celebration began on Sunday at 9PM and ended on Monday at 4AM.  Over this 7 hour period of time, five courses of food were served.  The dancing at this Dasem was done mostly by the women between the ages of 13 and 25.  Women outside of this age bracket also participated, though sparingly.  A few dances were reserved only for men.  From what I was able to observe, dancing is a time for girls practice being young women and for new mothers to be girls again.  Also on display were the rituals between bride and groom.

The burning of the groom’s handkerchief symbolizes the forgetting of his old self.  Taking this idea a step further; the bride is freeing her husband from his old life, and proving that she does not care about his past.  The groom shows the handkerchief to everyone so that they will know that he is starting fresh.  Once it has been consumed by fire, the groom is given another handkerchief, a new life, by his wife.  I find this to be a beautiful sentiment.

At 4AM, the crowd poured out into the parking lot of the local, each person finding their own way home.  Ervis hadn’t “planned” a way to get back to Tirana, which turned out not to be a problem after all.  Ervis, his mother, one of his cousins and I were in his home near the town of Nikel by 5AM.  I slept until 7:3AM, at which time we left to go to the project in Fushekruje.  By the time we arrived Agim was already there waiting to begin the day’s work.  We all call him Chelik now, which means “steel.”  I stayed on site until just after the five of us had lunch together.

I got a special request a few days ago from a relative of mine named Colter.  He is my cousin Mark’s oldest; the only grandson of my father’s only sister.  He asked if he could have a dog to name.  Well my friend, here she is.  I believe she is the mother of Spike and Emma.  She has a sweetness, a meekness about her.  She reminds me of a dog my family used to have named Bo.  Think of a good name, a name you think she will like.  You are a strong young man Colter, you make your grandparents Janet and David very proud.

The book of Romans is to the Church what the Beatles are to music in America.  You can’t say anything negative about the Beatles without having rocks thrown at you.  For this reason I have never liked the Beatles.  It is for the same reason that I have never appreciated Paul’s letter to the church in Rome.  I am far more likely to seek out the wisdom of less appreciated books than I am to look for it where everyone else claims to have already found it.  Could it be that God intended for me, in this time, to discover this book for myself; to come to regard it as highly as I am beginning to without the clamor to its greatness echoing off of every page of Christian literature?

Taking the opening page verse by verse, Romans eats like a meal from the very beginning.  Paul’s writing contains all of the richness of a full Shakespearean play in 16 short chapters; boiling the history of all things into a concise message, the relevance of which hovers outside of the confines of time and place.  This letter was for the Romans, long dead, for the early church from Asia Minor to the Iberian Peninsula.  It was and is a letter to every congregation that has ever called itself Christian.

Its relevance is what makes it so fun and easy to preach.  As I read and study I find truth for myself, truth for my Church, truth for the believer and the non-believer both.  I am strengthened by the message and invigorated by its beauty and simplicity.  Paul captures the essence of the nature of humankind and the essence of our struggle.  Romans is truly a masterpiece, the likes of which have rarely been realized through human endeavor.

One day, I hope to have the honor of preaching God’s word to you, or even the simple honor of our talking one-on-one about the book of Romans.  Learning together over God’s message to us is a powerful, community building part of the healing purpose that God has for our world.

I arrived in Tirana for the first time four months ago today.  I spent the day with Kreshnik, getting my affairs at the school in order before heading off that evening on the ferry from Duress to Bari.  Since that day I have probably been to Tirana 80 times.  It has been my way to fall into routines all of my life.  Perhaps that is how I missed one of the richest neighborhoods in the entire capital until Fatjon introduced it to me today.

There is a cluster of small universities near the soccer stadium which is south of Qender Skenderbeu in the middle of Tirana.  I have been to this area a number of times before.  I had known of the park behind the university for the arts for some time, but I hadn’t known how beautiful it was there.  Nor had I realized how much I miss having areas like Green Lake and the Ballard Locks to visit from time to time.  There are some smatterings of art here and there including a statue reminiscent of the wood carvings and subsequent aluminum castings of Seattle’s Richard Beyer.

Beyond the park is a good sized artificial lake with businesses and an elevated road composing its north and west shores respectively.  Fatjon and I followed the Rruga Kristo Luarosi, past the artificial lake, under a highway overpass, to the Tirana City Zoo.

This place where animals are kept in cages is far from the pride of the city.  I have been warned by quite a few Albanians that its collection of animals was meager.  For many it is a point of embarrassment.  Fatjon and I were two of the four patrons to Kopshti Zoologjik in the hour or so it took to take in the sights, smells and sounds.  Albania has the ambition to be more European, but it seems to lack the resources and the will to hasten repairs to attractions such as this.  There seemed to be no funding for supervision of guests either.

The largest dwelling of the place had been built to house two medium sized brown bears.  Fatjon and I watched one climb down a staircase into a pool of water to escape the heat.  Eventually this same bear came close to the bars of the cage.  The animal seemed frustrated as it reached over the short wall to try and grab some grass which had grown tall just on the other side.  Beyond the entrance the zoo lacked signage of any kind; including signs about feeding the animals.  Fatjon took it upon himself to aid the bear in its struggles for sprigs of fat grass.

From there we went to a coffee shop where I was able to watch my first bit of this year’s Olympic games.

Women jumping on a trampoline is an Olympic sport now.

From there we went back to explore more of the park.  We found the place where the three Frasheri brothers are buried: Sami, Naim, and Abdyl.

We also had the good fortune of spotting a summer bride with her photo entourage.  The wedding season has picked up as of late; motorcades of honking cars bejeweled with bows, hearts, and lacy streamers can be seen in the city at nearly any time of day.  Weddings are a thing of magic, even for me, even now.  There is nothing quite so beautiful as a woman all in white.

Friday was a day for putting some projects to rest.  The men on site from Fisnik’s firm put the stucco and white-wash on the walls they had erected over the course of the week.  The crew of four worked well, but it was more than a little tense to have them on site while my crew worked as well.  There was only one water source, and one power source. The visitors seemed to feel entitled to the use of our tools.  Lines are not easily drawn here, because the law is so unreliable.  Violence is often answered by violence; rarely by the legal system.  Individuals need to decide in an instant if this bag of cement, or this shovel is really worth dying over.  The members of my crew have decided that they cannot work in tandem with these other men; a conclusion I am forced to concur with.

Sajmir and Agim spent the day pouring the slab for the gabina behind the church.  The gabina will be the outdoor shed that houses the back-up electrical generator.  At the University of Washington they offer a class called something like “Construction Methods and Materials.”  The first four week of this course focus on concrete.  The professor I had for this class would spend each day showing dozens of slides of construction sites and the like; giving explanations for about what the slide portrayed.  One of the slides was of an etching from a few hundred years ago in which a crew of men are depicted as working a concrete slab while standing on it.  “This artists rendering is of course wrong,” I remember him saying.  “You cannot stand on concrete as it is being poured.”    

In the front of the church Ervis, Fatjon, and I worked to make the trench ready for the plumber Mariglen to repair the pipes we ruined yesterday with the back-hoe.  I could not have imagined how expensive these repairs would be.  The water pipes were of German design and manufacture.  The junctions have embedded heat coils which melt the pipe at its ends in order to connect them.  In order to take the materials we needed, Mariglen and I drove out to a fairly remote farm house north of town.  Thankfully Mariglen knew how to perform the work required of him.

We were able to finish the repairs and hook up the last pieces of our sewer and water run-off systems by day’s end.  At 4PM, quitting time, we had not begun to fill the meter plus deep trench in with material.  We could have left it for tomorrow, but our neighbors rely on this road for access to their houses.  In our discussions with them before hand, we promised to only interrupt their coming and going for two days.  We stayed late, and left things better than we had found them.

Today was a fine day, as good as any might be.  I rose with the sun and enjoyed some breakfast alone while reading over the passage in Romans I am preparing to preach on this Sunday.  I have grown very fond of the honey here and I add it to my coffee and my yogurt.  I heard once that if you eat local honey you will become immunized to the pollen in the air.  I have always had allergies before coming to Albania.  Honey, real honey, cannot be found in grocery stores.  You have to purchase it from a special vendor or through a personal contact.  I have found that whatever is required for the acquisition of this ancient elixir is a small price indeed.

I arrived at the job-site and found that the construction of the outbuilding which will house the church’s back-up generator was not going according to the plan I had outlined.  The sun was baking down on us; making technical conversations about construction practices and theories through an interpreter a patience bending mind-bleeder.  Aside from my four workers, there is an additional team of four men on site this week.  Their noise and interruptions, opinions and jokes seemed to heap the frustration higher and higher as the morning waded forward through chest deep soft clay.  I decided to free myself through the art of task delegation and walked to the nearest cafe.

After lunch, Ervis and I contacted a back-hoe operator to begin work on opening up the last trench to connect the sewer and rainwater systems of the church to the main system for the city of Fushekruje.  I took a great deal of satisfaction in watching as this work was done.  The final steps for completing the first systems we began work on back in April were now being taken.  In the States it is known that one should “call before you dig.”  There is a simple phone number attached to this premise and it is a good practice to be in the habit of.  We warned Salvator that there was a city water line in the path of his trench and this was, of course, no problem.  I don’t know if Salvator could feel his back-hoe tipping off balance toward the work when the claw of his Caterpillar hooked the stout, plastic line; I could certainly see it.  The pipe was punctured in three places.  Fortunately it was not charged with water.

With that out of the way, Salvator took no additional precautions as work continued.  He soon found a second water line which was smaller in diameter and ripped it in half.  Eventually all of the workers made it out to our trench to offer opinions and to make observations.  I was in no mood for idle chatter, but was prepared when Edison strode out to the edge of the trench we were all working in and observed loudly “you broke a pipe.”

With Fatjon as my translator, the conversation went like this.  “What do you mean?” I replied.

“The pipe there, its broken.”

“What pipe, where?  What are you talking about?”

“The pipe you are standing next to,” Edison insisted.  “Its broken.”

“Now I see it,” I said.  “You must have the eyes of an eagle to have noticed it.  Everyone else has been working out here for hours and yet you are the first to see it,” I said unsmiling, letting my words sit flat.

This isn’t the first time I’ve used humor to disarm a new acquaintance in construction.  It is good to know that some things are not lost in translation after all.

I know that the Lord our God, creator of all things, blessed you with the steep, sloping hillside above the road I walk every afternoon.  He also saw fit to bless you with a single cow.  Today I saw you fling your scythe at it to chase it further up hill.  You did not seem to see me today, but I know that you have seen me.  I get the sense that you see everything. I am as much a mystery to you as you are to me and even though I see you everyday, we are likely never to meet.  You are East and I, West.  You are a woman between the age of 35 and 65.  You wear the black of one who has lost a son.  Here in Tirana you might wear the black for five to ten years, not like the women of the North who wear black for the rest of their lives when a son dies.  Stout and stoic you have carved a place of beauty out of barren ugliness. Although we will not meet, I do profit from your service to this land.  Thank you for keeping watch, as you do.  You are the embodiment of so much about what there is to love about Albaina.

Every haystack has one.  Is it then the searching through the stack that brings us character?  Do we learn perseverance, patience, diligence, vigilance, and faith in the finger-tip blistering, hay-fever activating, back souring work of searching for small, sharp, one-eyed bits of steel among straw?  Does anyone come up from the heap, back pinched from long bending, head rushing at the sudden change in altitude, thin spike pinched between thumb and pointer finger saying “Yes, I found it!  I found it and it was worth it!  Now I can repair my trousers!”  

I don’t think so.  I don’t think its about repairing your trousers.  

When I first arrived in Albania, I saw them everywhere, every sight was rare and fresh, unexpected and mysterious.  I wanted to try every kind of food, wander down every road and alleyway, and meet the eyes of every stranger.  Today was like that again.  I was using my light filled eyes and my walking legs to seek out the glint of chrome hidden by chaff.  And I found enough to fill a pin-cushion.

Ervis and I called for a dumdum (a three or four-wheeled cab-over light truck with a simple box in the back and a humorous appearance) at about one in the afternoon today.  The driver took us to a machine yard for rebar, cement, and welded-wire mesh.  The yard also had a number of offices, fabrication shops, and a scrap yard.  Old, long-since-treasured earth movers and 18 wheel tractor trailers stood silently face to face like machines unearthed after a natural disaster had rendered them to the fossil record.  Men used giant claws at the end of rectangular steeled telescoping arms to lift high the remnants of once beautiful machines.  

The clouds here are beyond description, made more beautiful I am certain for endless reach going up, up, up.  The mountains too seem endless as the horizon breaks over one which stands just below and in front of the next going back, back, back.  The earth here will not perish, gaining strength and green each day as the sun bakes on, on, on.  Today the beautiful things of this land sought me, as I once sought them.