Hey remember me? I used to post blog entries on this site. Then Baby Nephew Luke arrived, and I’ve been real busy what with the feedings and changings and such. I mean in a cyber/virtual sort of way.
Today, I was invited to hang out at “Mini-Culture Day” for the new Peace Corps trainees in the town of Librazhd. The trainees and their host families prepared some American and Albanian food and we hung out to chat, eat, and dance. Somehow, maybe as the “veteran” volunteer, I got the job of giving the “Welcome/Thank you” speech to kick off the event. I was offered an interpreter, but I figured that I’d be a sorry excuse for a Peace Corps Volunteer if I couldn’t give a one-minute speech in Albanian after two years here. No one gasped or burned an American flag, thereby meeting my standards of a successful speech in a foreign language. It was a good note on which to begin the end of my service next month. Here’s my tip for giving a speech in a foreign language: repeat the same grammar structure, just stick in different vocabulary. For example “You taught us how to eat. You taught us how to drink. You taught us how to live like Albanians. You are our fathers. You are our mothers. You are our sisters and you are our brothers.” They thought I was frickin Demosthenes.
I also learned that the plural of “babai” (father) is “baballarët,” which is kind of like if the plural of “cat” was “catwigumpilala” instead of “cats.”
