The last village in Albania

After a few weeks exploring Albania’s mountains in the north and the coast to varying degrees of success, we planned our next move which had been on the cards for a while – to volunteer at a local project in the mountains in the South. We had planned from the start of the trip to intersperse our travels with some focused projects as a way to have another kind of experience and to see things from a more local perspective. After 6 weeks of not working, we were now both eager to get our teeth into something so we started contacting local hosts via the Workaway platform. We were surprised to find out most hosts had their next few months already planned out and so we were left with only a few options, one of them being a small “eco-village” project in the heart of the countryside. So we worked out dates with Fatmir and set off to his location. He had warned that the road was a bit dodgy but when we google searched the location we found a small van being pulled with ropes across a river…eh…we have a caravan we told him but he reassured us that the photo was old and that the road was now tip top more or less. So off we set.

We hadn’t planned for the narrow 7km dirt road, complete with river crossings, big gravel, uneven surface and to top it off, steep! As we thought it couldn’t get worse I was saying to Robbie “well at least there’s not much hope of meeting much traffic” when a small truck came beeping round the corner and forced us to reverse back along the gravel. I honestly thought the caravan was going to topple into the river as I could see if bouncing around in the mirrors, avoiding the thought to the best of my ability that of course it would pull the car in with it! I was a nervous wreak on arrival into the village but Robbie was unphased… I don’t know how he does it.

We were welcomed into the world of Fatmir and his family with Turkish style coffee and the best pommegranites ever eaten as he introduced us to his project – to restore his great grandfather’s stone house and turn it into a guesthouse. His world, largely created from hope and optimism seemed oblivious to the state of delapidation of the buildings but without much ado we got stuck into a series of tasks that he had set out for us while he proceeded to tell us more about Albania than google ever did over the next few days.

Everything had a story. Our first job was to restore an old wooden baby’s crib, used to carry his grandfather on his mother’s back across the mountains when she had to flee the village due to one of the many wars the region has experienced. The next task was restoration of an old wooden chest, that had been the dowry of his great grandmother. He explained that the young girl on marrying would go to the husband’s house with the chest and it would as well as the household linen, contain her belongings and 7 dresses. Each dress was for a specific moment in the woman’s life still to unfold. Only 2 of those moments used the same dress – the dress used at the wedding party was put away and never touched again until it was used as a shroud on the deathbed.

The main job was to make a wooden shed. On arrival it was to house a donkey, but there was a change of plan after a travelling rug salesman and his family showed and bought the donkey to make into salami meat, much to our kids horrified looks as it was beaten into a small transit van. The shed went ahead none the less in wait of the next donkey opportunity and to store wood in the meantime. Robbie and Aran did the job in a few days while Zev busied himself helping turn the wheel of the 150 year old manual sewing machine being used to make the sheets and pillowcases.

The jobs were spaced out inbetween other events. Helping Mehrad from Iran and Fatmir’s mum to make labourious and tasty meals in her twig fired oven using what they had for the large part – fruit and walnuts, beans and freshly baked bread, cheeses and figs… Aran spent most of a day distilling mint syrup, and making pommegranate mollassus. We heard answers to lots of the questions we had about Albania.

We were surprised to hear Fatmir tell us that the first plastic in their village only appeared 30 years ago. After the fall of communism in 1992, his father and the other young men of the village, walked across the mountains to Greece to find work, and on his return he brought home a plastic bottle and showed it to the village for the first time. It was placed above the mantelpiece of the house, and was the object of much admiration as until then all water was collected in heavy oak barrels from the river and tied onto their backs to hike back up the hill. From there, the plastic has collected and although Albania has had a surge of tourism in recent years, they still have no infrastructure to deal with basics like rubbish collection or recycling. The word in Albanian for “throw away” translates to “dissolve” he told us and so the older people of the village still have no understanding of the fact that the modern materials don’t disappear, he explained as we passed ditches full to the brim of rubbish.

We went for a hike even further into the mountains one day and went to a completely abandoned village apart from one family still living as goat herders. The people all over were so friendly, despite our lack of language skills they blabbed away at us uncaring that we hadn’t a clue what was going on. We were invited in for coffee by old ladies in head scarves, saw the goat herding families, and listened every morning to the wailing ladies in the cemetery paying their respects to loved ones. It was an amazing experience to step back in time. But it was with a sigh of relief that we got the caravan back down the hill without incident and back across the river!