Volunteer Visit to Rreshen

This weekend I visited another TEFL (Teaching English as a foreign language) volunteer in Rreshen. It is a village in the north of Albania. It took about six hours to get there with three different stops. I first had to take a furgon to Elbasan. I met up with some other trainees there and we took another furgon to Tirana. It took about an hour and half to get there, due to the steep mountains and the numerous switchbacks. It is not really a trip for someone with a weak stomach or faint of heart (depending on the furgon driver). In Tirana, we met up with one of the volunteers working Rreshen and took a bus the rest of the way to the city.

Rreshen is a beautiful city, which is situated in the middle of mountains. It is almost an entirely catholic town, which is unusual for Albania. As it was Easter weekend, EVERYTHING was closed both Sunday and Monday. They closed down the bashkia (city council), the schools, many of the bars/cafes, the dyqans (stores), and the museum. Here are some fun Easter traditions of Catholic Albanians. They do not have Easter egg hunts. They do dye eggs and then the little kids go door to door wishing everyone a “gezuar pahket” (happy Easter) and they receive eggs (a lot like trick-or-treating). The kids then play a game where one will hold the egg and another kid hits the first egg with their egg. The egg that breaks loses and the winner receives both eggs.

Although, I was not able to observe a class until Tuesday morning, I did learn about what it will be like to be a volunteer. It was a very good experience. It allowed me to see that it actually gets a bit easier in some ways once I am a full time volunteer. I will get my own place to live and I will be able to cook my own food, which is a very nice luxury. I love my host mom’s cooking, but it does tend to be the same things or very similar tastes. The first night in Rreshen we made calzones, then we had taco salad and cheesecake, and finally we had a lasagna type dish with garlic bread. It was delicious. The taco salad was made with ingredients shipped from the US, but a lot of the other food we managed with the ingredients in Albania. Tirana does have a couple specialty import stores where you can find little bits of home like peanut butter. However, those items are extremely expensive and you can only really afford them on special occasions.