I’ve been in service for some months now, so it’s time to update everybody on what I’m doing. For those who are new here, I’m a community development volunteer in the Peace Corps. I’ve been assigned to two workplaces: the Language Center at South East European University and the Center for Equal Opportunities “Mollëkuqja” (“Ladybug,”)… Read More »
An interesting thing about Albanian is that the names of occupations all seem to be gendered. (At least I haven’t yet learned of any exceptions.) A teacher or professor is “profesor” if male and “profesoreshë” if female. An accountant is “kontabilist” if male and “kontabiliste” if female. It got me thinking a bit about how… Read More »
I started a new weekly newspaper called The Elizabethtown Advocate in 2010 after quitting my job in the Philadelphia bureau of The Associated Press. I had long been interested in running my own newspaper. Elizabethtown was a town of 12,000 people about 75 miles west of Philadelphia and it had lost its longtime paper, the… Read More »
It was more than 10 years ago that I showed up in Elizabethtown for the first time. I had been living in Philadelphia, where I’d worked for The Associated Press since 1998, mostly working night shifts to cover the news of Pennsylvania. But I’d reported for three small-town daily newspapers before that, so I knew… Read More »