Now that training is over and I am officially a Peace Corp volunteer I figured it was about time I tried to write a blog…. Sorry it took me 3 months!  Here it goes….

I feel like my time in Albania truly began the day I was taken to my host family in Belsh.  I was taken by furgon (van) with other volunteers at my site to a small town about an hour away from our main meeting point.  I sat there with all my stuff surrounding me pretty much in a daze because what else could I do…. I mean I didn’t know Albanian, and there was no way I was gonna learn it in the next hour.  So, I just looked out the window at the bunkers in the middle of fields, the old men standing on the side of the road, and listened as our driver taught us how to say the word beautiful in Albanian (I couldn’t say I needed to go to the bathroom that first day with my host family but at least I could call their town beautiful by the first day!)

Once we got to Belsh, my training site for ten weeks, we dropped one volunteer off and then our driver was sure he knew my host dad and proceeded to his house, nope wrong house, and instead two furgons and a bunch of confused Americans just stood out of some random house.  Then we go on to the next drop off point.  The men grab my bags and lug them up the stairs and I follow to be greeted by the sweetest young family, but I notice they keep saying “hello Emily”.  I ignore it the first time because what do I know, maybe that is how they pronounce my name here, but then I realize this family doesn’t have the same amount of people or the same names as my host family was supposed to.  Finally I get through to everyone that I am in fact not Emily and that Emily is still in the furgon downstairs.  So off I go to sit in the furgon and wait again, all the while realizing “oh crap, I can’t speak to the people I am going to be living with for almost 3 months!”

After waiting for Emily to be introduced to her family we are off again and head down an alley.  We stop at a bright pink house and the housing coordinator takes me in and tells my host parents I need to use the water filter so I don’t get diarrhea and then like that she is gone.  I stand there with what I am sure was the biggest smile I have ever had on my face because I figure body language was going to have to pull me through for quite a while since my verbal communication was practically non-existent.

They immediately took me down to the family room and gave me a red bull and we sit there awkwardly trying to communicate as I give them their gifts.  Luckily one of the language teachers had told me that if I didn’t understand something to just say “nuk kuptoj”,  so of course thinking I would forget that saying I wrote it on my hand, and then must have looked at my hand and repeated that saying at least fifty times in the first 24 hours.   That first weekend was rough, no doubt about it, but I also realized that life was going to stay this way for quite some time and the phrase “nuk kuptoj” wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon for me!

Now I look back on that first week in Belsh and it is simply a blur where all I remember is clinging to my dictionary, writing random phrases on my hand in order to at least say a few words to my new family, and my mom calling me on my cell phone that first day while the whole family watched and it took everything I had to keep a fake smile on my face and a cheery tone of voice.  It’s funny because even though I can now speak enough Albanian to get by (with the help of charades and pointing of course) and at least get the gist of many conversations, I still on a regular basis feel exactly like I did on that first day in Belsh.  It is a feeling I never experienced before coming here.  There are no nerves, no butterflies in my stomach, but I find myself constantly just in a trance where I just have to smile, nod, and try to use “nuk kuptoj, me falni” a little less every day….