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 »
Until my swearing-in on Dec. 7, I’d been studying Macedonian exclusively. Now I’m studying Albanian, which is the main language of the area where I live and work. It’s a challenge. There are a number of issues that create challenges. For one thing, I was getting about 16 hours of instruction in Macedonian each week… Read More »
Well, I made it. It took more than three years after I first accepted an invitation to serve, but this week I took the oath and officially became a Peace Corps volunteer. And now I’ll share some information about how I got this far and what you should do if you want to do it… Read More »
As I’ve mentioned before, I’m in an Albanian-speaking area of the country. So far, all my language classes have been in Macedonian, which presents some challenges. For one thing, I don’t get practice in the language I’m studying; for another thing, I have trouble understanding the words spoken around me when I go out. I… Read More »
OK, this is weird, but I finally understand why people in many countries are amazed that Americans don’t have electric kettles. Shortly after arriving, I got a small pot that I could put on a hotplate to heat up water. I poured that water into a mug with some instant coffee in order to get… Read More »
Studying Macedonian isn’t easy, but I’m making progress. Most weeks, we have four days of classes, usually about four hours a day. Our classes meet online via Zoom, which is less than ideal, but it’s working fairly well. One major challenge is the alphabet. Macedonian uses a Cyrillic alphabet, so the letter forms are like… Read More »
Here’s something that I found rather surprising about life here: There’s a lot of English in use, and in many cases, it appears to be used to avoid showing favoritism to any of the local languages. Take, for example, this can of Del Monte peeled tomatoes that I bought in a local supermarket. The front… Read More »
On Friday, Oct. 7, we checked out of the hotel where we had stayed for almost two weeks and met our work counterparts and people from our resource families. I have two work assignments, so I met my counterpart from one of them. He’s Fisnik Xhelili, a co-founder of the Center for Equal Opportunities “Ladybug.”… Read More »
I got my assignment today. I will be in the Tetovo region of the country. My work will be divided between two places, which isn’t unusual for community development folks in the Peace Corps. One will be the Language Center at South East European University; the other will be at the Center for Equal Opportunities… Read More »
For those who are interested in the English language education part of Peace Corps service here, check out Joe Dodson’s blog, To MAK and Back. Since I’m in community development, his work will be substantially different than mine. (Also, I’m a little surprised that he has a blog since I thought that was something only… Read More »