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Email to the Editor

How I Spent My Christmas Vacation with the Missionaries of Charity in Albania
To: Editor et al.
From: Father X
Christmas in Sunny Tirana
December 23
Our plane landed at Rinas Airport at about 4 in the afternoon; a single east-west landing strip. I was surprised to see a picket of soldiers surrounding the airfield, armed with machine pistols. These weren’t boys, either; all tough-looking men in their 30s. Nor did they have that bored look of recruits doing nuisance guard duty. I never got an explanation of their presence. There were only two other aircraft in view: small, dumpy ADA (Albanian Air) twin-jets that looked as if they were designed by the illustrator of Rocky & Bullwinkle cartoons.

We climbed down onto the tarmac where more soldiers (armed) pointed us into a door for passport control. Foreigners had to queue for the window, only to be told to fill out entrance and exit forms and rejoin the line. There were no pens or counters provided, so there was much burrowing in purses for Bics, etc. Another soldier pointed me to a window where I was told to pay $45 entrance tax, which I had not expected. With ill grace, the gal in the booth accepted 85,000 lire. I was told later that the rate varies on the basis of country of origin. Italians pay $40, Dutch $37, Brits $56.

Walking outside the terminal (about the size of the Elkhart Trailways station), I saw more soldiers, who kept non-travelers standing back about 40 yards from the entrance to the building. Sister Francis Pio and Sister Sylvia met me and walked me to the Land Rover in which Father Jack had driven them. He drove us back to Tirana as fast as the traffic and the condition of the road allowed, leaning equally heavily on the accelerator, the brakes, and the horn.

The surprisingly heavy traffic consisted in about equal proportions of bicycles, horse-and-buggies, and motor vehicles. Muddy cows grazed along the shoulders, between the many stripped cars. Not notably industrious in other respects, the Albanians really make a thorough job of stripping a car: doors, hood, glass, wheels, dashboard—it all goes. The roadside is a more or less continuous auto junkyard except in the very center of town. The fields had hundreds of Monet-style beehive haystacks, irregularly spaced, and hundreds of low concrete domes with gun slits, maybe ten feet in diameter, capping the self-protection bunkers Hoxha built to repel the expected invasion. There were three or four decent, new, and well-kept businesses en route, but the most characteristic style of recent Albanian building is a story and a third of unpainted cinder block, as if everyone had run out of money halfway through construction—or better, since almost every building is surrounded by a wall and heavy steel gate, it seems as if the materials intended for the upper floors were diverted to personal protection.

Halfway through our trip the road was blocked by a clapped-out sovietski-style bus that had gotten hung-up on the rear overhang while turning off onto an uphill grade. Somebody found a woven towing strap which was attached to the front bumper of a panel truck and, with much grating and smoking metal of the undercarriage, the bus was pulled free. All the while a dozen or so countryfolk were looking on, one of whom had a big handlebar mustache and cloth cap and sat on a donkey so small his heels almost touched the ground.

Coming to the town center we turned off the main avenue into a side street, which, like all side streets in Tirana, was a mud lane. No sidewalks. Pedestrians hop along from high spot to high spot as if they were using boulders to cross a creek. As in Calcutta, garbage is piled in large chin-high mounds at the corner of certain intersections: kitchen waste, cans, dirty Pampers, newspaper, plastic, the lot. The MCs’ house consists of a pair of two-story concrete buildings surrounded by a concrete wall and steel gate. I doubt if the electrical power in the neighborhood stayed on for more than four hours continuously during the eleven days I was there, nor for more than 70 percent of the time in total, but while it worked there was some heating and running cold water. I was shown to a plain, clean room containing four empty bunks. A puppy followed me up the stairs biting at my pants cuffs.

After Mass, the sisters put me to work humping boxes of food and clothing and medicine up and down stairs, and then in helping prepare a couple hundred Christmas parcels for the poor—in this case, the nine old men whom they take care of in the house, the homeless people that come to the soup kitchen, a dozen or so shut-ins, and the inmates in the Tirana prison.

This chore occupied the remainder of the 23rd and most of the 24th. Each parcel was a plastic sack containing a gift-wrapped present of a stocking cap, a couple pairs of socks, and some soap. The rest of the bag was filled with food and bit and pieces from the refugee relief goods with which the house was packed, ceiling to cellar. Some of it was predictable: powdered milk, blankets, cans of stew, diapers, toothpaste, lentils, rice. Some of it less predictable but understandable: fine chocolates, Q-tips, packets of Del Monte fruit juice, croutons, Nestle’s Quik (4,000 boxes). Some of it hard to fathom: mineral water from Scotland, patent-leather platform pimp shoes, and boxes of individual bags of Worcestershire sauce-flavored potato chips from Ireland. Considering the extreme difficulty of trans-shipping any material in the Balkans—breakdowns, pilferage, impassable roads—you have to wonder at the process by which it was decided Kosovo refugees were in need of Worcestershire sauce-flavored potato chips with their mineral water.

At any rate, the sisters seemed to have a pretty good idea of what would be useful, or at least pleasurable, to people living on the street in cold weather, and the Argentinean Sister Lilia instructed an Albanian girl named Marjela and me on what to put in the bags, while opening various crates and boxes in the basement: combs, toothbrushes, shampoo, hard candy, plastic rain-hats, small toys, Handi-wipes, 12-packs of elaborately lacy panties. (“Put in each sack three knicker, Father.”) We stopped in order to serve supper to the old men, had adoration and benediction, ate our own suppers, and then resumed work in the basement, shifting, restacking, and opening more boxes—too many of which contained no exterior indication of what the contents were, adding greatly to the confusion. Often we worked by candlelight because of the power outages. Marjela (who spoke Italian, fortunately) opened one box and looked in bafflement at a double handful of panty liners. “What are these things?” she asked. I wasn’t really up to a detailed explanation. “Bandages,” I said.

December 24

Cold and rainy. I got up at the usual hour as the recorded muezzin of the nearby mosque started the morning drone, and did a bad job of washing and shaving in cold water without a mirror. Down in the kitchen I made myself some instant coffee and starting washing dishes. There was a 5-liter electric water heater plugged into the wall at head height in front of me. At one point I saw molten plastic dripping onto the sink and looked up to see all the insulation burning off the water-heater cord and the bare copper wire exposed and arcing. The kitchen filled with smoke. I yanked out the plug and went to tell Sister Joselaine, the superior. She was disappointed, but not surprised, and explained that a man had just been in to fix the wiring. “The wiring” in the basement is a treat. It doesn’t run in conduit, and there were no real junction boxes; it was limp and draped over pipes, tanks, through holes in cinderblock, etc. The junctions were formed by twisting the exposed ends of multi-strand, not even taped, and there was a flash and a stink of burnt rubber every time the furnace kicked in, for example. I saw a circuit breaker panel on the second floor, but I still don’t understand how the water heater could melt apart or the junctions could arc every time a switch was thrown without tripping a breaker or blowing a fuse. Or burning the wires within the walls. That got me wondering about the likely response capability of the Tirana fire department—a thought I decided not to pursue.

The plumbing visible in the basement was also interestingly non-Western. Pipe joints are welded rather than threaded, even where there’d be a tee in the US the pipes were joined by a weld, and usually the pipe was heated and bent where we’d expect an elbow. There were no unions or cut-off valves, and it occurred to me that welders must be plentiful while fittings are scarce. In contrast to the alarmingly amateur wiring, though, all the welds and bends looked well-executed to me (and, as long as I was there, the plumbing worked perfectly).

More parcels were filled in the morning, more boxes shifted. I noticed some had personal messages attached. “Packed with love by John Crimmen, Catholic Medical Mission Board, New York.” Several boxes were printed CATALUNYA x KOSOVO, on which some enthusiast had added in marking pen, “Catalunia is not Spain! Catalunia is an oppressed country. Free Catalunia!” I hope the Kosovars feel their pain. Also there were several boxes of French Army MREs: Ration de Combat Individuelle Rechauffable. Each box listed the 14 available menus, consisting of an “hors d’oeuvre” and two “plats cuisines en barquettes.” Among the former are Rillettes de Saumon, Mousse de Canard, and Pate de Campagne; among the latter, Volaille a la Parisienne, Risotto aux Fruits de Mer, and Gratin Dauphinois. The box I opened out of curiosity contained chewing gum, candy, and a heating kit as well.

Every afternoon except Thursday the soup kitchen serves at 4, and the kitchen was already busy in the morning. The water heater must have melted a gasket when it burned and the floor was wet from its dripping. There were crates of rutabagas and potatoes and local eggs sitting in cardboard flats in 5x6 rows; I noticed khaki smears of muck on many of the eggs.

The sisters told me they play a kind of guessing game with the people who come to be fed at this time of year. The word is out that a parcel is coming, so there’s an overly high turnout, so the sisters try to give the parcel a day early or a day late so as to miss out the scam artists. When the crowd turned up at the outer gate on Christmas Eve it struck me that Albania is a kind of sociological Jurassic Park, preserving bits of Europe everywhere else long extinct. In this case it was impossible not to think of the unloading platform at Birkenau, seeing short, misshapen, swarthy people with babushkas and cloth bags and confused children standing in line and whispering nervously. It also struck me as ironic that, thanks to Mother Teresa and no thanks to Ted Turner, they were in for Sonderbehandlung—and not, in this instance, the earlier euphemism.

After the sisters led them in the Our Father, Hail Mary, the blessing, and Adeste Fideles (in Albanian), they were given bean soup, bel paese cheese in foil packets, two thick slices of bread, chocolate chip cookies, and a small glass of Coke. Some gobbled the soup immediately, tore the bread into the empty bowl, and then fought their way back to the kitchen to argue abusively for more soup with which to soak the bread, before the others had been served. The sisters refused, of course, and were scolded quite angrily for their stinginess.

We were joined by an Italian doctor, Aldo Lo Curto, who I was to find out spends all his time doing refugee work, principally in Amazonia, but it seems everywhere else things are unusually desperate. He pitched in immediately with the pedestrian chores, washing dishes, mopping floors, etc. He had been to the MCs’ house in April and was familiar with the local situation

At a quarter past 11 we left the house for midnight Mass at Sacred Heart, the Jesuit church. I noticed the mosque was strung with Christmas lights, and it was explained that it was Ramadan. Sacred Heart is far and away the most attractive building in Tirana: a Romanesque church built in the late 1940s that would be an ordinary suburban church in the US. Its clean, uniform bricks and mortar joints made it radiantly superior to anything else I saw. All religion was illegal from 1967 to 1992, and the church had served as a state museum and concert hall in the interim. It was jam-packed inside and out, and as we approached I was a little disconcerted to hear Muzak versions of “White Christmas” and “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” piped out into the street via loudspeaker. I introduced myself to the pastor and vested to concelebrate (they could afford a chasuble for all ten concelebrants, strange to say), and we had to squeeze, with difficulty, in single file, through the mob in the side aisle during the procession. Midnight Mass—uniquely in my experience—began at midnight. The congregation seemed equally divided between pious Catholics and un-pious citizens who dropped in for the show. The latter were talking in a low between-the-acts rumble well into the Mass, until the pastor interrupted to give them a tongue-lashing. I was told later that he told them that, if they wanted to talk, they should go home, and they would leave not with a blessing but with a curse. It worked.

Albanian liturgical music (for the Kyrie, Sanctus, Agnus Dei, etc.) is beautiful, singable, and suitable for polyphony. Unfair.

To bed at 1:45, whacked.
December 25

Cold, gray, rainy. I woke up Christmas morning to find my breath visible, the power out, a puppy turd on the stairs, and the kitchen flooded. Helped the Polish Sister Francis Pio fix breakfast for the men. It seems that most of these had been in state asylums and hospitals and then, with the anarchy following the end of the Hoxha regime, the hospital personnel just went home. Good luck, lads. Patients who had willing families were brought home and those who did not were simply abandoned. So the sisters took them in.

One old guy was clearly brain damaged or palsied, continually twisting his head and grimacing and crouching down into a fetal position and then snaking up on tip-toe. Poor bastard, I thought. Sister Sylvia called me away to ask me to change Merteza’s diaper. Merteza it seems had been in the hospital since birth; he was about 70 or so, maybe the size of a normal 11-year-old, with a severe spinal deformity. I don’t think he was grossly mentally defective, but I imagine he had never been spoken to or encouraged in any way, since the only sounds that came out of him were a burbling “bu-bu-bu-bu-bu” and the word “bauku!” (stomach)—both uttered only when he was distressed. On the other hand, he seemed to understand what was said to him perfectly. He lay in bed wearing a stocking cap and with a Chuck E. Cheese stuffed animal next to his head. Small though he was, I found it difficult to change his abundantly loaded diaper (you couldn’t hoist him up by the ankles with one hand) and I managed to soil myself pretty badly in the process. To my surprise, however, just when I needed to roll him over to slide the new model under him, the same palsied guy I had counted so wretched saw what needed to be done, came over, and helped me lift and turn Merteza, himself twisting spastically all the while. It gave me a new understanding of the sisters’ accomplishment, and made me swallow hard once or twice.

Ten minutes before Christmas lunch Sister Joselaine remembered that she wanted the men to eat off red paper plates. It was a feast, after all. She sent me down to the basement to look for them, and, against my expectation, they were found.

A concrete seven-story high rise is going up a block away. The welding and riveting did not stop for Christmas.

I spent the early afternoon moving 20-pound boxes of muesli from the second floor of one building to the second floor of the other. The fatigue is catching up with me.

The soup kitchen distribution was enlivened this afternoon by an absurd set of mishaps. When all the people had been served it transpired that the gate was locked and no one had the key. Sisters, people, and volunteers were all locked in. The power was off. A frantic search was made for the key by candlelight. Then Sister Joselaine remembered that she had seen it earlier in the hands of an Albanian woman volunteer, who had since gone home. Joselaine tried to call the woman to ask. The phone was out of order. As it happened, there was an Italian woman visiting relatives in Tirana who was helping in the kitchen and, amazingly, had a portable phone in working order. The woman was phoned; yes, she had the key, how foolish of her to have gone off with it, of course she’ll bring it right over. Cheers all round. Then she realized that her husband had gone off, locking her in the apartment and taking the key with him; neither she nor her children could get out. Eventually another boy was called who walked over to her apartment and caught the key as she threw it out the window, came by to unlock the gate, and set us all free. A close call.

After adoration and benediction Sisters Sylvia and Lilia took me out to bring Communion and parcels to eight shut-ins. It was tough walking in mud that can suck your shoe right off your foot, leaving you to hop back on one foot and reinsert the other. There are no street lights, and the power was off anyway, so there was no ambient light from the houses. The sisters seemed to have night vision, and I followed them as closely as I could. My admiration for the Missionaries of Charity is greater than ever.
We walked up a number of absolutely black staircases of soviet-style five-story worker housing boxes, and—as is the case in elevatorless buildings—most of the poor folks live on the top floor. Most of them were old enough to remember the old Mass, so I was able to do a Communion service in Latin. It was embarrassing to see their tears. At least three of them had spent more than 15 years in prison for religion-related crimes. The sisters explained to me that they had been tortured as well, causing one to become totally deaf. Another had jumper cables attached to his nose and the power applied, to help him understand his ideological errors more clearly. They kissed my hands after I gave them Communion, and I never felt more like the soft, flabby, timid, coddled American in my life.

To bed at 11, dog tired.
December 26

Gray and rainy. The bishop’s secretary, Father Henry Veldkamp came by today. He filled me in on a lot of Albanian politics and recent history. He told me a Nicaraguan priest who had lived in Rome for six years came to Albania and, after three months, said it was too difficult and asked to go back to Rome. It helped me put things in perspective.

Adoration and benediction early. There are two elderly Albanian nuns who live here, having been taken in by the sisters, belonging to now-defunct orders. Both pretty ill; both spend a lot of time on their knees in the chapel.

This afternoon there were only about 55 people at the soup kitchen, so the sisters decided to give out the Christmas parcels. The people seemed to have a collective intuition of their intentions, and even before the meal was served the children tugged my sleeve and said, “Pakko, ate! Pakko, ate!” (My parcel, father!”). During dinner I lugged the sacks to the edge of the doorway of the main house. The children got special parcels containing more sweets and a toy or stuffed animal. The sisters avoided (most) double-dipping and complaints by locking the people in the dining room and bringing them outside ten at a time and then giving them the parcels, showing them to the main gate, and locking it behind them. In general the scene was not especially gratifying. Even with the first group, as soon as the sisters handed out the bags (all carefully gauged to be equal, all tied with a bow and ribbon), the recipients began to wail loudly and querulously demand a bigger one, crowding around the sisters and almost pushing them off balance; mothers took the bags from their children and then shoved the same children forward to plead for another parcel, etc. As always, the sisters were old pros and knew who was up to what. The people outside the gate compared booty and howled in disappointment and indignation. Tidings of Comfort and Joy, Jack.

I was ready for the mattress after this, but the sisters took me to a carol concert at the Jesuit church at which a youth choir was performing. The youths ranged in age from about 6 to 19 and sang bad music badly, accompanied by an organ, a Penney’s electric bass played by a 65-year-old in jacket and tie, and a keyboard with a rhythm switch, so that all the carols were set to that “krish tunka krish” Ramada Inn dance-band beat. Each song featured a different soloist, and they postured before the mike in poses taken, I assume, from pop artists seen on Italian TV (which is picked up in Albania). I took occasional side glances at Sister Joselaine, who is a 40-ish black woman from Washington, DC—though she speaks in that MC Indian sing-song—and her face was impassive. The choir was dressed in shiny blue poly-satin robes like gospel choirs wear in the US, and they tried to move in that rhythmic dip, turn, sway that gospel choirs do. They were amazingly bad at it, stiff, jerky, totally out of sync with the music and with each other. On the way out Sister Joselaine asked me what I thought of it. I bent down to her and said, “Sister, white men can’t jump.” She grabbed my arm and laughed, “Father, it’s true!”—catching my meaning exactly, and coming as close as she ever did to displaying her DC roots.

December 27

Rainy, gray, less cold. Sister Francis Pio asked me this morning after Mass to give the men a shave. She handed me a shaving brush, a dish of soap, and a Bic razor. They sat one by one in a plastic outdoor chair and I bent to the task. It is extremely difficult to shave the upper lip of a heavily bearded man with no front teeth, as there is nothing to push against. It is extremely difficult to shave under the chin of a heavily bearded man with loose skin and open sores. It is likewise difficult to shave someone with spastic head and mouth motions, doubly so with a dull razor. I have to admit the guys were admirably stoic, but I don’t think by my ministrations I sweetened Albano-American relations.

The electrician came by to fix the wiring. He did not have a flashlight and could do nothing. He promised to try to borrow a flashlight and come later.

Two pairs of Mormons came by today to help; they were typical, clean-cut Mormon missionaries—dark trousers, white shirt and tie, 18-22 years old—and they have to do so many hours of service per week, so they come to the sisters, which I found somewhat surprising. Elder Hansen told me there are 24 Mormons in Tirana. They seemed to have a somewhat fish-out-of-water air about them, but whether this was caused by Albania or by a house of Catholic nuns I couldn’t say. Sister Joselaine told me some are good workers, some not so good, and that their language ability is pretty bad. The ones I saw schlepped a lot of heavy boxes around in reasonably good spirits.

In the afternoon I helped Doc Aldo sort out expired medicines in the sisters’ pharmacy; we spent about three hours at this and threw away three large potato sacks full—maybe $2,500 or $3000 worth, according to Aldo. He says drug companies tend to give away medicines that are near the end of their shelf life. He told me that the sisters do not permit any Albanian doctors to enter the room where the medicines are kept, even if they volunteer to provide services free, because in the past they have stolen medicines and resold them to pocket the money.

December 28

Rain again, colder. I’m getting better at bathing Merteza and changing his diaper, although I still foul myself up pretty badly. I’m in sort of a bind here, because I only brought along one spare pair of trousers (wool). The one I’m wearing smells like ripe diaper. If I change, however, I will not have a clean pair for the flight back. I could wash them in soap and water, I suppose, and wear them home unironed and damp and ankle-high. I think it’s probably better to count on the forbearance of the sisters and stay rank.

Two of the men in the central room make an interesting contrast. Moussa was accused of democratic sympathies in the 1960s and spent nine years in prison and 20+ years in a hard labor camp. The other guy suffers from depression and cancer of the throat and jaw; he was a police spy for the regime and has been cast out by his family and most others as well. They do not bandy reminiscences. I was bathing Fiqereti today in the bathroom. He objected to some part of the procedure and walked out back to his room buck naked. Sister Joselaine laughed and led him back to finish the job. He is totally deaf.

This afternoon after adoration a teenage girl named Aurora (plump, sulky, potentially pretty) sat down at a table with me at Sister Joselaine’s bidding to teach me to say Mass in Albanian.

For supper, a local specialty of puff pastry filled with goat cheese, and the best tangerine I ever tasted.

December 29

I was doing the men’s breakfast dishes when Sister Francis asked me to hang a picture of the Feast at Cana in the stairwell. I grumbled a little to myself about the impracticality of these women and the unlikelihood of being able to find wire suitable for hanging a framed picture, and still sulking, entered the go-down (storeroom) to be able to say I looked around a little. The first thing I saw was a coil of safety wire sitting on top of a box. Spooky. Changed my attitude, pronto.

Helped the sisters wring out laundry (hand-washed in tubs) and hang it up to dry on the roof, where there are some clothes lines sheltered by corrugated fiberglass. It’s still raining and cold and humid, and I imagine they’ll take three days to dry.

Fashion note: Albanians love black. Men and women; old folks and kids. I don’t know whether the reason is predominantly the influence of Islam, or of Italian high-fashion, or of Gen-X despair a la mode, or of some entirely native taste, but I was certainly not out of line in my clerical garb. It’s interesting, because most ex-Coms like the Poles go in for clothes the color of Playskool toys.

December 30

A fairly uneventful day, still gray and drizzly. The power was out most of the day. A Maltese Dominican came by, wearing a brown suit with a cross on the lapel. I was prejudiced against him in that I was told he recommended the sisters watch the movie Sister Act—whence he must be a dope or a heretic or both—and earlier he had trucked over a TV and a VCR for the purpose of a screening. They couldn’t find the remote control, however (the work, I am certain, of the same guardian angels that tossed the safety wire in my path), and it didn’t come off.

I shaved the men again today with my own razor and with hot water heated on the stove, and it worked out much better. I could actually shave them instead of just scraping at their hair. Still improving my diaper-changing technique. We’re running out of clean, dry clothes for the men, though.

Shifted mattresses. Lugged an enormously heavy hospital bed with a pneumatic lift mechanism up to the second floor. Helped pack parcels for the sisters to take to the Tirana prison this morning. I can’t imagine what the prison can be like. They got small cakes, chocolate, toothpaste, underwear, some small boxes of cookies, soap, fancy shampoo. Adoration and benediction and vespers combined.

In the evening the sisters and I went to the Jesuit house in Tirana—by Albanian standards, it was sumptuous. Clean, new, well kept, even a working elevator and a remotely operated gate. The Jesuits were on the way out, however, so our visit was brief.

December 31

Overcast, cold, occasional drizzle. Noisy all day with firecrackers in a steadily growing crescendo. At 2 pm I counted an average of 15 detonations per minute. Ali went out before lunch and came back drunk. Sister Joselaine, “to punish him,” let him bang on the door for 10 minutes, then gave him a scolding, then let him in. “I should be stricter, but he’s so cute,” she said. The sisters asked me to say a Mass at midnight in Albanian for the youth group, with a homily in Italian. Later it turned out that many parents were afraid of gunfire in the streets and refused to let their children come out, so our Mass at midnight was just for the sisters. At 5 pm we went to Sacred Heart Church for the vigil Mass. The archbishop celebrated and homilized. To bed at 1:15 or so. At about 3 it seemed I half-awoke and heard automatic weapons being fired, but I was too drowsy to be sure.

January 1

Mass in Albanian this morning. Pretty rough going. Went to the other MC house in Tirana; the superior, Sister Tecla, a mulier fortis. I said another Mass and she showed me around the place. It’s a new building, built by Italian-American and Albanian-American donations expressly for the purpose. For some reason the Turkish Army has a compound next door—counter-Greek presence? The sisters there take care of women who have been abandoned—about 30 total.

I visited most of the rooms and said my “Gezuar” (Happy New Year) to the old gals. There were two women in their 40s in wheelchairs who were clearly retarded. Sister Tecla said they were found living in a building with the bodies of their parents (who had presumably taken care of them), both of whom had been killed—by an intruder, possibly. “Was like everywhere bathroom, Father.” There were also three younger women with babies, who had, if I heard the explanation right, been sold by their families to the Albanian mafia, who in turn sold them to the Italian mafia as prostitutes. When they sought public assistance for their pregnancies they were sent back to Albania by the Italian police and turned over to the sisters to take care of. At least this is what I think Tecla told me. All three seemed a little under par mentally. Sister Tecla also said she heard a bullet ricochet off the terrace last night, so my hearing rifle fire may not have been my imagination.

I made spaghetti al pesto tonight, which Aldo and I ate along with some panettone. A good change of diet. Some wine would have gone down well.

January 2

Sunny and very cold. Mass at 6:30 in Albanian for the old sisters. Somewhat less awful. Then off with a Mass kit with Sisters Lilia and Sylvia at a quick pace past Skanderbej Square to grab a “bus” out to a village on the outskirts. Ice atop the mud-puddles. The taxi was a clapped out Euro-Ford van with about ten passengers on average. Very mushy brakes; we almost rear-ended a broken-down Mercedes. The bus lines, to the extent that there are any, are served by a variety of equipment: old Italian Iveco buses, ancient coaches, still with the paint and lettering of Belgian and German tour companies, ancient East German rattletraps, and Fiat and Ford vans, which for all I know might be gypsy cabs.

We made our way slowly out of the city, stopping to avoid huge craters and sinkholes, sometimes easing through foot-deep puddles. It struck me that Tirana has to be one of the few surviving cities with vandals too poor to afford spray paint. There wasn’t much in the way of graffiti anyway—I guess few exterior walls were comely enough to afford much satisfaction by their vandalizing—but what there was was painted on by brush, a weird time-warp, back to Barcelona in the 1930s or something. In twos and threes the other passengers got out and bargained with the driver about the fare.

We were at the end of the line, at the foot of a mountain east of the city. A woman with a bucket and branch-broom was sloshing out the “church,” a 20 by 30-foot cinderblock room with a slab floor, no glass in the windows or door for the doorway. Judging from the debris the goats and chickens must have used it normally. Some people came up to us with bowls of fruit and hard candy and turkish delight, which Sister Lilia refused deftly; also a table for use as an altar. I was told the countryfolk would have walked three to five hours down from the mountain to come to Mass, and they arrived in groups of four or five over about the space of an hour. Several dressed in black and babushkas; one about my age in lipstick and earrings, with broad shoulders and muscular working man’s hands. The little kids were all unusually handsome, and almost seemed to belong to other parents, as they had light brown hair and very fair skin.

When about 35 arrived we began a rosary and when 45 had come we started Mass. None of the worshippers laughed at my Albanian, but of course they may have thought I was speaking Flemish or Portuguese or something. At any rate, the look on their faces, in P.J. O’Rourke’s phrase, was that of starving Ethiopians being given a piece of wax fruit. I wonder if they realized when Mass began. I homilized in Italian, which an Albanian girl from Tirana translated into Albanian —or at least she told me that was what she was doing, though it seemed that every fifteen-word sentence of mine was reduced by Liljana to four or five monosyllables.

Aldo, meanwhile, had been visiting the other MC house to treat the women, though when he got there a 13-year-old girl who had come by fell into a grand mal epileptic fit. He took her to the hospital. No gurney or litter, so he had to carry her in to the emergency room in his arms, still seizing. The only doc around said he was a cardiologist, not a neurologist, and he couldn’t treat her. Aldo said he was a doctor too, and at least the cardiologist could give her a shot of Valium to stop the fit. After to-ing and fro-ing the cardiologist agreed to give her a half-dose of Valium, which kicked in and stopped the seizure. Aldo then took her to the other hospital, the one with the putative neurology facility, and found the place open but without a doctor and without a nurse anywhere. After some minutes they found a charwoman who said she thought they might be at lunch—it was Sunday, after all. So the girl was brought home to her mother.

After my good-byes (in sweet-smelling clothes), I got a lift to the airport with a noisy jeepful of good-natured teenagers. Packs of skinny dogs en route. I had to pay a $10 exit tax. That was expected this time: a last kiss on the cheek from Albania. I won’t end on a sour note, though. After boarding the airplane, there was no wait in the taxi aisle for take-off; we were airborne immediately—something other countries could do well to emulate.

That first hot shower felt great.

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