Sunday, September 19, 2010

My Wood for the Winter


This past week I also received my wood for the winter. I will be heating my house with a wood stove. It will replace my regular stove for the winter and I will have to learn to cook with a wood stove. I imagine that there will be several burnt meals, before I figure out the proper way of using it. I had help from several of the kids in town to move my wood from outside next to my apartment building to my balcony in my apartment. They were hard workers and I really appreciated their help. We were able to get all of my wood up over the course of the week. We would work for about two hours a day. It is now all in apartment waiting to be used this winter.

School in Fushe-Arrez

On September 6th, I had my first day of teaching. Since then I have actually only taught 5 days, due to illness and having to go down to Tirana for a day. I will try and give you the idea of what a typical day is like so far.

I get to school a bit before 8am. I enter the school and talk with the teachers while we wait for the 8am bell to ring allowing the students, who are waiting outside in the courtyard in front of the school, to come in and go to their classroom. Here in Albania the students stay in the same classroom all day and the teachers move from room to room each period. After the students get to their classroom, Valbona, my Albanian counterpart, and I head to our first class of the day. We enter the classroom, which is about 5 degrees warmer than in the hallway due to all the students and the direct sunlight coming in from the windows. We do not turn on the lights in the classroom or anywhere in the school for that matter and just use the natural light from the windows. The room is very bare. The walls are painted white on the top and green on the bottom, there might be a couple posters on the walls and there is a blackboard at the front of the class. Sometimes it is a regular slate blackboard as the ones we are used to in the States, but other times it is just a black rectangle that is painted on the concrete wall. There are three rows of desks in front of us, where there are between 25-40 students facing us. There are two to three students to a desk.

Valbona starts by taking attendance and then reviews the homework, while I stand in the front or head to the back of the class to give some support in keeping the class in order. We then begin teaching the lessons. Valbona and I usually split up the lesson, where I do the reading and she write on the board or vise versa. She always does the grammar lesson, which is fine by me. I have to read very slowly, so the students can understand me. Most of the students have ony heard British English, as that is the kind of English that is taught in Albania and throughout most of Europe. Few of students have heard someone with an American accent speak. This difference in English has caused a few complications, such as when I write on the board the words that they don’t understand from the readings, since I spell things the American way. For example I spelt “realized” on the board and a student was really confused and asked Valbona why I spelled it with a “z.” They had learned to spell it, “realised.” This has caused some difficulties, but It is good for the students. Despite the fact that when I teach, we don’t get through everything, since I have to go so slow, Valbona is happy that I can provide the students with the opportunity to listen to a native speaker. When the bell rings to signal the end of class we leave and head to our next class.

There are 6 class periods in the day, with a 40 minute break after 3rd period. Valbona and I usually teach 5 periods in the day and during our off period we go and have a coffee. The day goes from 8am to 1:15pm.

In the afternoons, I have been planning my own lessons or I have relaxing. Valbona goes and teaches at the private English language school in town. She is very busy giving courses, which accounts for the great English I hear from the students who live in the town proper of Fushe-Arrez. She is a great teacher, which makes my job a bit easier.

My First Couch Surfer

Kumar and I had our first Couch Surfer a couple weeks ago. Simone was in his early 20s from Milan, Italy and he ended up staying for three days. I should probably explain couch surfing to those of you who have never heard of it. It is a website that you sign up on, it is free, but they request donations if you can afford to give. You make a profile and you friend people (much the same as with Facebook). You write references for your friends and those who surf your couch. You then can search for people who might live in the city you want to go to and see if they are willing to put you up for a night at their house. I always check the person’s references before accepting them into my apartment. It works really well here in Albania, because most of the couches are of Peace Corps volunteers and I can really trust what they have to say. And so this is how I came to accept Simone to come and stay in Fushe-Arrez. He ended up staying at Kumar’s house, as I did not want to harm my reputation here in town by having a boy stay with me. It was a fun few days. Simone cooked diner for us one night and we showed him what life is like in a small Albanian town. We went to a soccer game in town at our new soccer field and watched Kumar play. It was a great experience where we learned a lot about different cultures. Hopefully, someone else will want to make the trek out to Fushe-Arrez sometime soon.