I was in school until about a month ago.  It took me three years to earn my Master’s in Theology from Fuller Seminary.  During that time, as an elective, I took a class on preaching.  My professor outlined for the class a seven day progression of thought, prayer, and further contemplation on the subject to be preached.  Beginning Monday, and working some small or great amount every day until Sunday, a proper preacher hones the message they will deliver.  My pastor in Fushekruje, a man named Alban called me on Friday afternoon asking if I would like to preach today.  I told him I needed time to prepare, and that perhaps next Sunday would do better.  I also said that in any event I would need a more experienced interpreter to handle the subject with me before an audience.  He assured me that he would ask Leyla, a very talented young lady, to be there at the necessary time.  

Later on the same Friday, Alban called again to say “OK, good.  I have asked for her and if she come on Sunday, then you will be the preacher.”  

“Sounds good Alban,” I said.  What else could I say?  I decided to prepare a message on the opening ten verses of the book of Romans.  I have to hand write my notes because I don’t have access to a printer.  This morning, though I came prepared, Leyla was not at church.  I breathed a little easier.  Also not at church were our worship team leader or his wife.  Fatjon, Leo and three young ladies were conscripted to lead the songs.

Artiola, Brisilda, and Emanuela turned out to be my worship team.  After five short songs had been finished, pastor Alban stood in front of the congregation and said “Joshua, you said you would not preach unless Leyla was here.  I thought that she would be here but, she no here.  So, you are preaching or no?”  In the States we call this throwing someone under a bus, I’m not sure what the term is for it in Albania.

“Sounds good Alban,” I said.  What else could I say?  My first ever sermon went off quite well.  Fatjon provided the necessary interpretation with some small help from Alban when a Theological term was too foreign.  Alban’s English is choppy, but he does understand the ways of communicating our faith.  In truth, I enjoyed standing with my friend to deliver the words of Paul to an audience.  Some of the 13 had never heard this particular message before.

Of greater note than my inaugural pastoral performance was the presence of a special friend in the audience.  Sajmir said no to a day of fishing to attend our service today.  He did so to honor me.  As I type these words now I feel the honor at the top of my sternum where my throat begins.     

Tirana has few attractions.  Their Museum of History is one, and it offers both the flavor and the feel of this place.  Although it was ransacked during the instability in 1990, walking through its halls is like walking through a history of the known world itself.  Albania was once called Illyria and the people who populate this rich-soiled, mountainous region by the sea have been warriors since the days of gods long forgotten.  Although she has been conquered many times, Albania has never lost her fighter’s soul.  The Museum of History is a museum to the human spirit.  Fatjon was my key to understanding all that I saw today.

This man was called Batto and he led the Illyrians in a revolt against Rome from 6-9 AD.  Some of the other pieces of art housed here are of lesser or unknown people.  What can be known is the intelligence of craft and the precision of skill involved in taking any amount of rough stone and turning it into a timeless treasure.  Amongst the ancient Albanians were fabricators with a sharp passion to create.

Orientation being one of the principle keys to effective communication, one of the things this museum has plenty of is maps.  Albania is truly where east and west meet.  It is the frontier land of the two great religions.  I forget that not far from this place is where the first shot was fired in World War I.  The histories we learn from in the States trace the people’s of America’s founding and I have had omitted for me a true world view.  I am learning for the first time that Albania fought the Fascist armies of both Mussolini and Hitler.

I have to remind myself that I am in fact in a place that has given birth to giants.  The history of my nation is as much a history of invention and the leveraging of scientific advantage as it is a history of post-industrial idealism.  We do lack for heroes as tall as mountains and twice as strong, however.  Albania’s history is one of necessary adaptation balanced by savage resistance to change.  There is a longing here to be a part of Europe and West and whimsical fetching after ancient ways entombed with Skenderbeu himself.  This unique combination gave rise to some of Communism’s greatest minds.

History is so very subjective.  Before coming to Albania the only person of this race I had heard of was Mother Teresa.

Before our tour of the place had ended, Fatjon and I were joined by Pastor Alban and his twelve year old niece.  Kreshnik called to see what I was up to, and he came to join us for coffee.  God has blessed me with the finest friends a man might pray or hope for.  We wound up at a place called Skytower, where the floor of the bar spins at a rate of one rotation per hour.  Tirana is growing so quickly, I am certain that many of the things we saw from our perch today will soon be demolished.

Thankfully we can rely on God to provide new beauty to replace the old.  Fresh purple to fill voids left by decay.

Sitting at this keypad interface I feel the need to apologize to anyone reading this.  I cannot capture any of the things that I love with words perfectly enough for you to know how it is to love them as I do.  

Nor is it possible to give you a late night

Followed by a morning start at sunrise

Two coffee mugs full of yogurt

Sweetened by the honey from a single type of Albanian wild flower

Cold water breakfast

A quick walk in the morning heat

Bus less crowded than you expected

Hurk, jerk, lurch and stop to the city center

Tirana

Another quick walk, more heat

Another bus to a van filled with friendly, sturdy people

Sleep as you can in the heat in the back seat

Fushekruje 

To a place you have been before

A place with a bathroom you can trust

Double macchiato and time with the journal

Your friends gave you in El Salvador

Passing a friend on the way, you buy his coffee

He did not expect that

Now at the job site

Greeted by friends and a few acquaintences

There is a lot of crushed rock to move

Ervis has lost a family member

He and Egim will be at the funeral today

You express your grief

Wondering how anything will get done

A man named Pierin has come looking for work

Of course this is God’s hand

The end of the work day

Brings shape to some things

Tightens and sharpens the reality

What will be

What this place will look like

Your friend’s wife has prepared

A meal to prove their love for you

At the door

Remove your steel-toed boots

Roll up your Carhartts

Rinse your feet in the freshest water

Wash your face and head in it

Come inside to everything they wanted to give you

Ask for anything you like

They are honored that you feel honored

The more you take

The taller they sit in their seats

Take our fig tree’s finest fruits

To taste and to enjoy

As you leave our home

Please promise you will come back

Today marked a turning point for me in Albania.  In Fushekruje I met with the plumber, the electrician, the tile-man, the engineer, and my crew.  In the States we call a person who performs that combination of tasks a superintendent.  If we can consider the Plagenhoef’s the clients for this project, then I am also an engineer.  Today I was honored to hear Pastor Kurt say “we certainly couldn’t be moving forward on this project the way we are without you here.  Having you has been a blessing at the right time for us.”  I am always up for that kind of criticism.  I am honored to be thought of as a blessing by any person, but especially to people who have dedicated their lives to the service of others in the name of Jesus.

My crew and I celebrated the Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence by the Continental Congress 236 years ago the way Albania celebrates July 4th every year.  Ervis, Siamir, Fatjon, Egim and I installed the next runs in the rain-handling system.  I was able to capture something of note in the following photograph.

In the foreground on the left is Fatjon.  Siamir and Ervis are farther away putting the drain pipe to its proper height.  You can see Egim in the foreground on the right.  Age is difficult for me to gauge here in Albania.  Often times someone in their late twenties might appear to be in their early forties, the reverse of which is never true.  I’m going to put Egim at forty-five going on sixty.  He is Ervis’ uncle and the most reliable parishioner in our church.  He is a sweet man.  You can see here that Egim has one hand on the shovel and the other in a fist near his mouth.  Egim is always watching to see if I am watching, and when I am he promptly spits into his palm to reinvigorate his hands for work.  I can be certain that for the next twenty to thirty seconds he will be working himself into an honest, heart-pounding sweat.  He is the most quiet person on the crew, and he is a delight for me to see each morning.

Head down, honest wage earner Egim, you bless me.

Pockmarked

Full orange evening sun

Dogs curse your navigation to our sky

An unwelcome rising mirror

I find you lovely

A welcome sign

Humidity will decline

If air would only begin to move

All that you missed

While hovering behind

The distant granite curtain

Will recall for you in dreams

Toes touching two full facing

Slack distances definitions written fresh

Sway in the hope of remaining

At the sweat-soaked end

Embrace to the popping

In step-less dance

Humming a quiet celebration

Heat allows the memory

Of fine ligaments

An intimate static

It is good

A love unspoken

Report a

Lingering of

With you

Good wandering

Compression

Two

Being

Friends

I have been spelling the name of the capital city of Albania with and a at the end instead of how it shows up on most maps.  The official spelling is, I think, Tirane.  This spelling is deceiving however because the Albanian alphabet has 36 letters and the “e” at the end of Tirane actually is pronounced like “uh.”  Hence Tirana.  Both this evening and last I have been in the capital after the setting sun had carried with it all of its ambient traces; the moon has been spectacular.  Last night I joined Pastor Alban and his father near the city center for the European Futboll Championship match between Itali and Spanje.  A few readers won’t find it spoiling of me to announce Spain’s 4-0 dominant performance.

Fatjon was the only person on our job-site to forecast Spain as the winner last night.  From what I witnessed there were two types of fans at the festivities in Tirana; fans of Italy, and fans of Germany whom Italy had knocked out in the semifinal.  Banners and flags for Germany are still on display throughout Albania.  The outdoor cafe we watched the game from was crowded with exuberant, chofta loving soccer enthusiasts.  Soccer here is as popular as crawdads in New Orleans.

Around halftime, with my team down by two, and time getting away from me, I decided to leave.  Catching a bus back to Sauk from the center of Tirana can be a matter of luck or luck’s evil twin; I’m not certain there is a schedule.  This allowed me the luxury of taking in a few public art pieces from a new perspective.  There is a monument to an unspecified partisan soldier which was erected in 1944.  The fierce mountain soldiers of Albania composed the only army to defeat and drive out their Nazi occupiers without the assistance of one of the principle allied nations during World War II.

The same color as the cheap plastic army figurines that come in bags of 50 or more, I had first mistaken this powerful figure for Communist blight.  Other cities like Sofia have remnants of an almost Mormon style, faceless, nameless artistic movement which at one time was meant to wrap everyone in the flag of Socialist protection.  Now I see this monument as the showcase of valor to everyman.  Many Albanians believe that their nation has been without solid leadership since the death of Skenderbeu in 1468.  The clan, the family, the three to ten person squad one belongs to is the equivalent of one’s nation here.  When the person represented by this statue gave the battle cry, he did so only for his sons and grandsons.  Furthest from his mind were presidents and generals he would never meet.

Stronger than any soldier in Albania is the woman he has taken in marriage.

Albania is fascinating for a number of reasons, one of them being the architecture of public buildings.  Mount Dajti will appear as the top attraction on most tourism searches for Albania.  This morning I met Cimi at his house to go to the mountain together.  He offered for us to go on his motor-scooter and after hearing about the alternative route and its three bus connections, I agreed.  My first time on a motorbike of any kind was about two months ago in Tunisia, today’s experience was similar.  I tried to focus mostly on relaxing my muscles while holding onto the wrought steel handles behind my seat.  I had every confidence in Cimi’s abilities, even when he started digging into his back pocket to answer his cell phone while we were in motion.  I am almost positive he saw that teal colored bus we cut off.  

Today was the first time that either Cimi or myself had ridden the cable-car up to the top of Mount Dajte.  We both enjoyed the views immensely.  The hotel at the cable-car’s terminus is called Belvedere Hotel.  This structure might just as easily appear on the cover of a Robert Heinlein space travel adventure book as adorn the peak of one of Albania’s great national treasures.  It is futuristic in a Soviet sort of way.  Another noteworthy man-made feature of the mountain are the numerous military bunkers which pop out to the eye in seemingly random places on hill crests and along winding roads.

“Bunker Enverim,” is what Cimi calls these things; defensive structures composed of rebar reinforced concrete which were built under the order of Enver Hoxha.  Every person I have spoken with about the late dictator offers some manner of thanks to God for Enver Hoxha’s death.  The bunkers are reminders of a time when Albanians had little or no food.  According to Wikepedia, some 750,000 of these bunkers were built.

Saturday turned out to be a good day to visit the mountain.  Most Albanians set Sunday aside to visit family attractions.  Cimi and I only encountered a handful of people over the course of our three hours touring the sites.  We stopped in at a lavish mountaintop lodge for coffee and were the only patrons there.  I found the solitude to be refreshing.

Won’t you come and enjoy the air here?

One of the most difficult things to find in the United States of America is a good tile layer.  Craftsmen of high caliber are typically in short supply there.  Tile can be done poorly and then it is a stain on the face of a home or business until that place is torn down.  The best tile layer I have seen is a man named Victor Zayshlyy.  He is from one of the former Soviet Block countries.  The Soviet Union fielded a generation of some of the most mathematically sharp immigrants our nation has ever benefited from receiving.  Stone is a common building material in Albania.  It should be no surprise that finding an excellent tile layer in Albania is about as rare finding a fast-food restaurant in Texas.  This entire country is built of concrete, stone, brick, marble and granite.

I was twenty-seven the first time I mixed a batch of thinset for my Uncle Norman.  The trick is for the grout to resemble wet sand, and for you to add water carefully.  Once you get over your fear of it, tile installation is one of the most satisfying of any of the construction tasks.  It was good for my heart to see the progress which was made today.

My crew, after another round of negotiating the obvious with ourselves and the engineer, installed six of the eight pusetes we need to handle the rain run-off at the church.  We should be ready to cover the entire system by the end of next week.

Today was payday, which is always a good thing.  The men I work with find it necessary to remind me that someday I will be gone from here.  Both Fatjon and Saiamir mentioned it today.  I originally came for a seven month service stint, but after being here for 10 weeks I feel like I am still in the process of getting my footing.  I can’t really imagine going back to the States right now.

At the end of the day today I returned home to the school in Sauk.  Every evening there is a better-than-even chance that I will run into Cimi, my friend who acts as the guard and maintenance man of the school.  Today he invited me to sit on the davenport outside of his brother’s house for some coffee.  Of course I accepted, and soon I was deep in conversation about work and my day with Cimi and his mother.  Cimi knows the word “no” in English.  I am almost certain that it is the only English word he knows.  Tomorrow he and I are going to meet at his house at 8AM to head to the Mount Dajti.  Afterword, I will be joining his family for a church service.  Cimi is a good man with a rare heart.  He is a family man and has only been to one other country in his life; a visit to Athens for 10 days.  Given my experience there, I can understand why he never traveled outside of Albania again.

Love.

I have been getting out of my place earlier and earlier with every morning.  I am finding that I am less soaked through with sweat if I reach my first bus by 6:15 and that the forgone from Tirana to Fushekruje typically leaves more promptly the earlier I board it.  Any time lapse of more than five minutes is spent on my duff sipping a macchiato e mathe me një shequer at one of the countless cafes around the city.

In every city I’ve visited in Albania, one out of four businesses is a cafe.  My father bought me a Lonely Planet Eastern Europe Phrasebook before I left the States. I can always spend time with either that or my journal when five minutes makes itself available.  Five minutes in Albania often reads twenty-five on your timepiece.

Today was very frustrating for a number of reasons, and I am certain that all of you have frustrations of your own.  If you will indulge me for a paragraph or so, I will explain.  The work to install the sewage lines went quite well.  In hindsight we might call that beginners luck, but I could feel the momentum of our progress when that phase was completed.  The next step was installing the drain lines for the rain water.  In my mind, rain water systems aren’t nearly as technical as the systems for handling human waste.  This is Albania, and I do not know what I am talking about.

Although this second system is going to run over the first system, we were told by the engineer to fill in all of the canals.  The engineer then instructed my crew and I to dig new canals at 40cm deep by 40cm wide around the entire building.

Done.

So today when the topograph came out to give us our proper trench depths I was dismayed to learn that about 50 meters of trench never needed to be dug in the first place.  This composes about a third of our total trenching.  Our work for the last week or so has consisted primarily of two combinations of tools: first: shovel and pickaxe, second: pickaxe and shovel.  Aside from some heavy clay deposits in the glacial till fields around Ballard Washington, I have never carved out earth as dense and as heavy as the soil on the site of our new church.  Has anyone seen the movie Cool Hand Luke?

To their credit, my crew did not waste any time complaining about all that we had accomplished for not.  As in the States, the only person in the building process who knows less than the engineer, is the architect.  These kinds of disappointments are part of any major building project.  I may have been the most frustrated person of all.  Thankfully, Siamir took the lead to salvage the day from total ruin.

An increase in caloric intake helped me get over the slump in my eagerness to do anything but go home early.

When you visit, I know the perfect place to take you for byrek.