Getting settled into Tetovo

On November 29th, myself on 33 other Peace Corps Trainees from the United States were sworn in by US Ambassador Paul Wohlers as the 18th cohort of Peace Corps Volunteers to the Republic of Macedonia. It was a lovely ceremony that involved speeches in both Macedonian & Albanian, the singing of both the American and the Macedonian national anthems, and a traditional dance performance by a local troupe. Afterwards we had a reception with our Pre-Service Training (PST) host families and our new counterparts.

Rachel and I with our host mothers and the Ambassador

It was a very emotional affair for all of us. Most of us felt very attached to our PST families and were quite reluctant to move to our permanent home stay families the next day. We had also gotten used to hanging out with each other all the time, both daily in the PST training villages and weekly for our hub days. It was also a renewal of the sense of adventure though. We'd each been assigned and gotten to visit our permanent postings, our new home stay families, and our new counterparts. It was definitely a watershed moment in our time in the Peace Corps Macedonia.

The next morning, Goce drove me and my inordinate amount of packs and bags to Tetovo. I was honestly not looking forward to living here. My impression during our first week in country was quite limited and I really wasn't that impressed with the city the first time around. However, once I started getting settled in, I realized that it's actually quite nice. I'm incredibly close to the mountains, close to some really good skiing, and only half an hour bus ride away from Skopje. On top of that, there's really a lot being invested into the city. There's new high density housing being constructed throughout the core, there're trashcans to be found, the streets are decently well lit. There's also some really cool coffee bars and the local grocery stores do a good job about stocking the kinds of food I would want to buy. Overall it's pretty nice living in the city.

I share the city with one other volunteer,

Jordan, Shea, Me, Enid, Kelly, and Casey

Casey who is part of the previous cohort to ours (MAK17). Strangely enough, we're neighbors. In a city of 50,000 people, we just happen to live 5 doors away from each other. Two of my friends from Romanovce are here in the area with me. Jordan and Kelly live and teach English in villages about 5 miles away from Tetovo. There's not really any public spaces for women in their villages though, so they make it into town fairly often for coffee and talk. Also living in the area is Enid, a MAK16 who will be leaving soon to return to the United States. Another PNW volunteer, she and I actually have some acquaintances in common from back in Seattle. Overall, we're a pretty solid group here in the Tetovo region I think and I'm really excited to get to spend the next years of my life with them.

I'm also going to be spending the next few years of my life living with my new host family.

I live right in the middle of the city with a grandmother (Baba in Macedonian) named Dobrica. Baba Dobrica is a super energetic, fiesty, and hilarious retiree and widower. She and I share the first floor of a two story duplex. On the second floor live her son, his wife, and their two daughters (13 and 18). Baba also has a daughter who lives with her husband, and their daughter (18) and son (22) out in the village 5 miles from Tetovo where Dobrica's husband is from. Baba doesn't speak English, but everyone else does, so I try to get by in Macedonian whenever possible, but it's really comforting knowing that assistance is upstairs if the conversation ever gets too complicated.

Living here has definitely been a different experience than living in Romanovce. You're willing to put up with a lot more when you know it's only going to be for two months. When you're living with someone for the next two years though, it's really important to get things right. You want to strike the right chord and balance between being just a renter and being a full-blown member of the family. The motives of the family also have a lot to do with how your home-stay experience goes. In my case, my baba is basically adopting me. In other cases though, the host parents have been primarily motivated by have a reliable source of income. Luckily for me, my baba and I are both pretty outwardly expressive people and we're both pretty flexible. It didn't take very long for us to work out a system that worked well for both of us. I have as much autonomy as I need and try to help out around the house wherever possible. I tell her a day or two in advance what my schedule is going to look like and we plan meals around that. I get to cook whenever I want, but don't have to worry about the rest of the time. It also works out better that we have a similar diet. I like healthy breads, lots of vegetables, not much meat, lots of cheese, and not much oil. I have learnt that I have to be pretty insistent about the foods that I don't care for or I get them all the time. Medlars, persimmons, and bologna are all foods that I don't necessarily dislike but I really don't want very often. Other volunteers have definitely had more issues with finding appropriate diets.

They tell you when you get to PST that no two Peace Corps experiences are exactly the same, even within the relatively small program in Macedonia...and they're right. A large part of this is because each volunteer, counterpart, and posting are different. Within the last two years though, Peace Corps Macedonia has moved to a permanent home stay program. In the past volunteers would live in families for their PST but would move into apartments for the remainder of their volunteer experience. Now, however, we move from a temporary home stay to a new home stay in our host community and we will live in homes for the duration of our service. In addition to our differences as volunteers, the families we live with now also play a huge role in how our experiences go. Some of my colleagues, for example, are having issues with hosts wanting to be family when the volunteer just wants to board while some of us have hosts who just want more income and really don't want the inconvenience of having an extra person live with them. Some of us have huge freezing rooms in huge freezing houses while others have warm rooms in what are essentially separate units. I'm very happy with my living situation, but working with a permanent host family is definitely just another thing that can really have a huge impact on what one makes of Peace Corps service.

Probably the other largest impact on each individuals service is the work counterpart. These are our co-workers and supervisors for the next two years. Most of the time these are either fellow teachers at schools or one of the people involved in an organization or municipality. For me, I actually have two different organizations and my primary counterparts are the heads of the respective organizations. For the next two years, I'll be working with the Macedonian-Croatian Alliance of Tetovo and the Tetovo Youth Alliance, with the Youth Alliance being my primary assignment.

The Tetovo Youth Alliance is a bit of a misnomer, as they actually focus on good governance. They originally started as response of many young adults to the insurgency in the early 2000s here in Tetovo. As life here as calmed down, they have focused their energies on improving civil society here in the Pollog region surrounding Tetovo. Coming up this year, we hope to be working on a project ensuring that children aren't being used by political parties during the upcoming elections. Past projects have involved monitoring municipalities for transparency or ensuring procurement protocol are followed. They do a lot of work here in the region, but they (and many other NGOs in Macedonia) have a hard time making sure they're busy year round. A lot of the work I'll be doing with them will involve networking, finding alternative funding sources, and building up capacity so that they can operate year round and really focus on their mission. The other important work I'll be doing is to actually help them define their mission, goals, values etc. With these, I can work with them in developing five or ten year plans etc. So much of the work that I'll be doing here will have a lot in common with what I've been learning the last year at the Evans School.

The Macedonian-Croatian Alliance will be a very different work experience though. They are a volunteerism focused group that wants to share their Croatian culture and goodwill with their neighbors here in Macedonia. There really isn't any more focus to the group than that. Some of the volunteers are focused on youth sports, some of them are focused on cultural events, and some of them are focused on underprivileged or handicapped children. With them, it's a lot more difficult trying to identify ways to achieve the goal of building capacity...but implementing projects is still good experience for me so I'll go along with it. Besides that, my counterparts are very enthusiastic about the potentials of having a PCV...so it might be a bit before I figure out what exactly it is they want me to do. I'm still early enough into my service that I'm not really that worried about any of that though.

In any case, that's what I'm up to. We'll see how long it'll take for me to get some other blog posts up on here. I learned a long time ago not to promise frequency of posts. But I'd like to get some smaller posts about some of the things that I've been  up to since arriving here in Tetovo.
Hope you all have a great holiday season!

Romanovce/Rramanli

Considering that I've been here in country for almost two months now, it's probably about time that I tell you a bit about how I'm living here.

Romanovce

I live with the Angelovski family in a town called either Романовце (Romanovce)/Rramanli. It has two names because it has been home to both Macedonians and ethnic Albanians for hundreds of years and both groups have a slightly different name for the town in their respective languages.

The town has about 3,000 inhabitants, ~2200 of which are ethnic Albanian and ~800 of which are Slavic Macedonian. The town lies in a narrow valley, is about 1/4 mile wide but about 3 miles long. It's surrounded by farmland but is only about 3 miles from Kumanovo, one of the largest cities in the country.

I live with the Angelovski family, one of the Slavic Macedonian families who seems to be related somehow to just about every other Macedonian family in town. I was a little anxious when first we rolled up to my house, but my fears were quickly proven to be unfounded. My family is plain awesome.
First of all, I was greeted at the door by this little guy!

Medo!

His name is Медо (Medo) and he's pretty much awesome. He's about 3 months old now and it's just so fantastic having a puppy around to play with when I'm tired of speaking in Macedonian.
Along with the puppy, we have an older dog (Bruno), two kittens (Max and Sara), two cows (Duschka & Gyurgija), 12ish chickens, and occasionally pigs and goats.

For Dario.

Pretty much just a photo op.
I'm awful at milking.

Harvesting some late season grapes!

In addition to raising animals, my family grows grapes, wheat, barley, sunflowers, leeks, onions, potatoes, tons of herbs & spices, and the juiciest tomatoes I'd ever had in my life. All of this fresh produce means that I've been blessed with some absolutely amazing cooking. This, for example, is my typical breakfast! I start with a bowl of homemade noodle soup (both the soup and the noodles are homemade!), something fried, some cheese, a salad of tomatoes, onions, & peppers, a cup of tea and a cup of coffee. Lunch is normally a bit heavier, and always includes meat and rakija.

What's rakija you ask? Well remember those grapes we grow? My family makes our own wine. Every year my host father produces about 7 barrels of wine. Of those barrels, only about a full barrel goes to wine as a finished product. The rest goes into our family's antique moonshine still where we make our own distilled wine. Though grouped with brandies, this stuff is clear and STRONG (about 60%). And it's not just my family making it either. Most rural families in the area make their own rakija and insist upon sharing it with you whenever you make a social call.  A second item that every family around here makes is called Ajvar (Aye-var).

Stirring the Ajvar

Roasting Peppers

Ajvar is a local paste made from the ground flesh of roasted peppers. It has the consistency of a tapanade and is absolutely delicious. It's a very long process to make the ajvar. First, you roast the peppers on a giant stove until the skin starts separating from the fleshy interior of the pepper. Second, you peel the skin off and clean out the seeds. (Or if you're my host father, you make goofy faces while eating fried fish) Third, you run the peppers through a meat grinder. Finally you throw in some oil and spices and reduce the paste in a big pot over a fire before canning it and enjoying your homemade ajvar the year round. It's delicious, but I'm really not sure how nutritious it can be after being cooked for so long

Sveto & Nadica

In case you've seen any blog posts talking about some people here, I should probably introduce my family. My host dad, as seen in the posts above is named Sveto (Sss-veh-tow). He's an amazing sport and even obliged me with a photo of him drinking Terere. He looks so natural with the guampa in his hand that it's really hard to tell that he isn't a Paraguayan. My host mom's name is Nadica (Nah-deets-ah) and she is easily the best cook of any of the host mothers in Romanovce. They both keep super busy during the day with household and farmyard chores and like to relax in the evening watching some Turkish soap operas (which give my Latin Telenovelas a run for the money). They both are very physically emotive, which is fantastic for me as I struggle with Macedonian as it means that I can look for meaning as well as listen for it. I could rant for hours about how much I love living with them, but for brevity's sake, just know that I could not have a host family that more closely matches my love of laughter, adventure, and hospitality. Finally there's Goce (Go-tse) who is my host brother here. He's a few years older than me and is basically the older brother I never had. He loves teasing me, telling me when I'm doing things wrong, and giving me advice on women. He's generally a pain in the butt...which is exactly what I've been to Daniel since forever so I guess what goes around comes around. 

Getting to Makeдонија

Since this is my first blog post from here in Macedonia, there's obviously a multitude of topics that I can cover. Since I'll be here two years, I'll have a lot of time to really give each of them the time they deserve. If there's anything you're curious about, just comment or message me directly and I'll try to make a post on it. In the meanwhile, I'll try and catch you all up on what I've been up to.

My Dad and I

Roomies!

Dan and I

After a long few weeks of goodbyes in Washington, I was seen off at the airport by my awesome roommate Alex and my Father Paul. My mom was there in spirit but was in Connecticut preparing for an awesome relay race in New Hampshire. I was joined by my fellow Evans School student, Daniel Kostek

We left SeaTac at 8:30 AM on Thursday the 12th of September on what was supposed to be a direct flight to Ronald Reagan Intl. Airport in Washington D.C. However some nasty weather in DC kept us from getting there as soon as we had anticipated. We hovered around in the air for an extra 90 minutes before landing at Washington Dulles for another 2 hours to refuel and wait on the tarmac until we could make the quick flight over to Reagan. We finally got to the hotel at 8, about 3 hours later than we had planned. After a delicious dinner of Ethiopian food with Alison and Josh Schorr, I stopped by my last brewery in America (Capitol City Brewing) before getting to the hotel and meeting some of the people from my group.

We're a pretty diverse cohort, from all across the US. Washington definitely does the best job representing though. There's about 6 or 7 of us out a group of 35. We're also demographically much different from the average Peace Corps group. We're pretty close to having an identical level of males and females, we've more retired volunteers, a majority of us are in or have completed grad school, and only two or three of us are straight out of undergrad. I'm actually really glad for the diversity in my group. Not that I was at all concerned about the quality of the people that the Peace Corps lets in, but I think the the depth and the variety of experiences present in our group really set us up well for a successful experience.

Training in DC was pretty standard. It was a bit of form signing, followed by a lot of group activities. The moment I saw markers on the tables of the hotel conference room, I knew I was doomed to group-building exercises. They really haven't stopped since then, but I'm just glad I've been able to get this far without doing a trust fall. I'm pretty sure just getting everyone to Macedonia was an achievement in group dynamics.

Over the last 40 years, Peace Corps really has gotten the flight logistics problem figured out well. 5 of us were selected to be group leaders. We were responsible for getting everyone into groups, handling tip money for the hotel and the bus driver, getting everyone checked out, loading and unloading the bus, and doing group counts periodically throughout the airport. I was amazed at how smoothly everything worked. Even more amazing though was looking at the collective mountain of stuff that we brought to this country.

After a long flight from Washington DC, a quick lay-over in Vienna, and a short flight over to Skopje. We finally made it to Alexander the Great Airport in Skopje.
 Upon leaving the airport, I was very surprised to find that Western Macedonia looked surprisingly similar to my home in Eastern Washington.

 It's kind of an interesting situation that I've actually spent a lot of time processing. I've traveled halfway across the world, but the land itself reminds me exactly of where I came from. There's the same brown landscape with low shrubs and bushes. Same mountains and hills in the background. Same fantastic mountain skyline. What I've seen has definitely been beautiful, but we'll see how the similarity ends up effecting me over the course of the next two years. Could make me homesick or could lessen the degree of homesickness. Could just not matter at all.

We spent our first week at the lovely Woodrow Wilson School in Tetovo, a predominately Albanian city in Western Macedonia. This is an international school in Tetovo that teaches both Albanian and Macedonian children from K-12. It's an absolutely gorgeous building with a great mission and a great staff. We were really lucky to have been able to stay there. We had a very full schedule at the school with days full of language trainings, safety trainings, medical trainings, and cultural awareness trainings. We were greeted by a group of currently serving volunteers who formed the Volunteer Support Network. They've been amazing the last half year! They've answered every sort of question we could ask on Facebook and they've been great resources here in country for helping us with navigating the culture. We were also welcomed to Macedonia by local dance troupes who performed the local circle dances for us.

 

One of the great things about spending our first week in Tetovo is that we got to start our Macedonian experience in a mixed community. Much of the country consists of ethnic Macedonians who speak the Macedonian language, a Slavic tongue that is closely related to Bulgarian and Serbian. They are mostly Eastern Orthodox and leave in the central and eastern parts of the country. However, a full quarter (likely, there are no exact statistics) of the country is ethnic Albanian. Most of the Albanians families have resided in the land that is now Macedonia for hundreds of years and consider themselves Albanians foremost. They speak the Albanian language which is its own branch of the Indo-European Language Tree (A difficult but beautiful language!) and are almost all culturally Muslim. Most of the Albanians live along the western border. There are also considerable Vlach, Roma, and Turkish minorities in the country. Much more on race relations in Macedonia later!

During our Orientation week, we were able to spend a few evenings in Tetovo and had a great time.

 
One of the cultural jewels of Tetovo is the Painted Mosque. This mosque was first built in 1438! It is one of the only mosques in the world that is painted both inside and out. 20,000 eggs were used in the production of the paints. The exterior was refinished a few years back, but the inside has never been touched up! The colors inside were beautiful! Definitely a beautiful first mosque to visit! You can see the minaret of the Painted Mosque in the photo overlooking the town of Tetovo.

Time to start this up again....

More than 3 years after my last post, I'm finally picking up and dusting off the old blog in preparation for my Peace Corps Service. Having talked with hundreds of people about my upcoming time abroad, I'll try and get the gist of what's been going on in my life since the last post. I might even go back and fill in some of the holes in the last few years. We'll see. As you'll doubtless discover if you follow this blog long enough, I'm good at saying things are going to be here in the blog but many times life just gets in the way. I like to think that it's a result of being too busy being awesome but frankly it's probably just because I tend to write a lot and I dread the amount of time it takes me to write some of these posts. In any case...here goes.

I'm currently a Peace Corps Master's International (PCMI) candidate at the University of Washington's Daniel J. Evans School of Public Affairs studying Non-Profit Management (MPA). Essentially, I am taking a year of master's classes, volunteering for 27 months in the Peace Corps, writing my master's thesis while serving abroad, and then returning to Seattle to finish my studies. I purposely chose this path because it allowed me to work and demonstrate proficiency working with non-profits abroad and gives me the opportunity to spend my time in Seattle doing internships with non-profits here in the US as well. Though I have the opportunity to finish my studies shortly after returning, I'm instead planning on taking a full second year. After learning my core concepts during the first year of the MPA program and applying them while in the Peace Corps, I will return with a better knowledge of my competencies and will be able to take courses that either shore-up my weaknesses or augment my strengths. Though this does mean a total of 4 years to finish my studies, I am well satisfied that I will emerge on the other end with a strong resume demonstrating my dedication to social justice work.

In September of this year, I will be departing for my Peace Corps Service in the Republic of Macedonia (or the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia as they are referred to in certain International institutions). I will spend a few days in DC tying up loose ends before flying off to Skopje. While there, I will spend 3 months in intensive language training, cultural awareness training, and learning my role in the country as a Peace Corp Volunteer (PCV). At the end of this time, I will learn my site placement where I will live and work for the next 2 years. I have technically been assigned to a non-profit posting, but what that actually entails I have no clue. After perusing other blogs, I have found volunteers working with both local non-profits and with international NGOs. I think either would be a great learning experience for me, so I'm not too concerned at this point about which I will be working with.

I'll be updating this blog periodically throughout my time in Macedonia. I've learnt that Facebook is a great way to post pictures and keep people updated on occasion with my comings and goings and whereabouts, but I've found that blogging is a great way to put all those posts and photos into context. Plus, this blog has the possibility of being a resource to any potential volunteers or any who are posted to Macedonia in the years to come. I hope you all enjoy this revival of the old blog and I certainly look forward to sharing my experiences with you.

-David