Dear Albania,
My how much like home you felt! Thank you. I was not expecting the wonders that you held. The mountains were stunning, the people were friendly, and you provided a month that felt more like home than I have felt all year.
Ministry was interesting for me. It felt as if I was home, working a job that I don’t love, but that the Lord was able to use. We were teaching at a summer camp of sorts, and while I don’t LOVE children’s ministry a lot of good came out of it. My favorite part of ministry though, was the little opportunities that presented itself with the people we chose to surround ourselves with.
Our host’s first landlord, who is now just a good friend, and his family were the reason our team was in Furkë, Albania. This family was so excited to welcome us into their lives, and we became such good friends. The parents didn’t speak a lick of English, but that didn’t stop the mother from making us dinner, or the father from playing (and beating) all of us in futbol. The kids spoke English and wanted to spend time with us, so ministry sometimes looked like going to get our nails done, or having them over for pizza – only to find out that they were fasting and couldn’t eat… our bad!
If I hadn’t met a local family, I wouldn’t know that you as a country just came out of communism. I wouldn’t know what it was like to live in that, we heard stories of what is was like to be a store owner unable to say “we don’t have milk” when you really don’t have any milk to sell because the government doesn’t want to think the country is lacking anything. If I hadn’t of met a different local family I wouldn’t know what it’s like to be well off in your country – and own 3 houses in different towns.
Albania, you allowed us to get out of our comfort zone and hand out new testaments in a beautiful muslim village, you gave us the opportunity to love on kids who have maybe never hear of Jesus Christ, you gave me back mountains that I wasn’t expecting to see between Nepal and December when I get home. You gave me the chance to live with TWO huskies! ……Which developed the decision that Keda will actually be a black lab and not a husky…….
You had challenges too, some of which were not your fault – we had a teammate go home, we had month 6 fatigue. Some of which are just a part of your culture, like questioning if we as an all women’s team can go into certain cafés? I don’t think even in all of my travels I have had to stop and look at the café to decide if it’s one that I can go into, until now. There was also a new perspective with you flipping the (traditional) role of the breadwinner – the women work to provide for the family, and the men are extremely social… with their male friends at cafés. But you highly value family, with houses built to suit the number of male children so that they can live together, or entire hillsides being a cluster of houses within the same family tree.
So Albania, thank you for your beauty, thank you for your lessons, thank you for your support, and thank you for giving us a soft landing coming out of almost half a year in Asia!
Thank you, Albania
-M
