We are half way through Week 6 of our 9 weeks and it has been a really great week so far. Of course, language learning is still a struggle. I do feel at times, it is getting better. It is a hard language and as long as you are doing your best the language teachers and Peace Corps staff tell you are doing fine. We have been told that are placements within Kosovo have been decided and that our country director, Carolyne, will be approving those placements on Friday. I believe we will not find out for a week and a half, where we are going.
For Easter Sunday, eight of us volunteers took a hike to a grassy knoll that we hiked to before in one of our first weekends. It was beautiful day in the 70s and we sat on the knoll and had a picnic. Everyone pitched in and it was mostly junk food. Some of our group painted, colored, played chess or studied. I crocheted two hacky sack balls. These are the first two, of three hacky sack juggling balls that I am working on. It is still Ramadan and many of us prefer to spend the afternoon away from fasting families. Although they offer us food, we do not like to eat while they are fasting.
Easter Sunday picnic with plenty of junk food
Easter is not celebrated throughout Kosovo as it is a mostly Muslim country, however; there are pockets of communities that do celebrate all the holidays. The second biggest religious population is the Serbian population which primarily practices the Eastern Orthodox faith and do not celebrate Easter until May this year.
That being said, we got a holiday trip on Easter Monday. Our trip was to one of three ethnic communities and we got to pick our trip. One trip was to a Serbian community outside of Prishtinë, the second was to a Romani community also outside of Prishtinë, and the third was to a Bosnian community in the municipality of Peja. I did not really care where I went, so I waited until the end to see what was left. So did another volunteer, Vincent. In the end, someone wrote my name of the Peja list and Vincent's name on the Romani community.
Peja is almost a three hour drive away and is on the western border of Kosovo where it borders Montenegro. We actually drove across the whole country at it's widest point in three hours. In reality, there is a mountain range and national park between Peja and Montenegro. We were headed to a Bosnian community there called Vitomirice.
As we neared Peja, after riding in the van for several hours, we began to see snow covered mountains in the distance. Tarik was our guide for the day and while he is not one of our language instructors, he often comes to training events when there is need for a dancer or when there are cultural events. He always has a smile on his face and he seemed particularly happy to be heading to his home community.
Tarik is Bosnian and grew up just outside of Vitomirice. There is a lot to say about the minority ethnic groups in Kosovo and as I still need to study, I will leave that for another blog. We did meet with the head of an NGO (non-governmental organization) called Mladi Volonteri (we are actually featured on their facebook page). His name was Rago and the organization primarily works with young people with the goals of advocating for minority rights, peace building, and democratization. His office is at the cultural center in Vitomirice and he showed us around and told us a little bit about his project and the work they are doing. He showed us the memorial to the people who lost their lives in the ethnic cleansing of Bosnian people by Serbs in the early 1990s and about the Bosnian genocide. I have added the link from the Houston Holocaust Museum that will explain it better than I could. Vitomirice has a second tier soccer team and they play on the field next to the community center.
The backdrop of the community center is the mountains and the Bleshkët e Nemuna National Park. After our meeting with the director of Mladi Volonteri, we headed into Peja. As we walked through the charming city at the foothills of the mountains, it was not uncommon to hear one of us say "I could live here". But the reality is that we are not likely to be placed in Peja. Fortunately, since Kosovo is small, we will all have the opportunity to come back.
Peja has the feel of a place that caters to the outdoors. There was a wonderful street of small shops and outdoor vendors which lead to a large open square with a small clock. We walked through the square and nito a small restaurant with outdoor seating. The air smelled clean and fresh. We all thoroughly enjoyed our lunch of small round fresh baked loaves of bread, qebapi, and for me the best salad I have had in a while. Qebapi is a type of sausage that the meat eaters all rave about. This is a Bosnian and/or Serb dish and it also sold in Kamenice.
After lunch, it was coffee time and we made our way back to a bridge that crossed over the river that ran through the heart of old Peja (which is actually fairly new as Tarik said it was heavily bombed in one of the wars). The water running through the river was so clean that you could see the rocks in the bottom and there was very little trash in the city center. We went to the Radio Caffe and sucked down a coffee or two. We could have stayed so much longer, but all good things must come to an end. We needed to head back especially since our driver hoped to make Iftar dinner with his family around 7 pm.
Our ride back was uneventful to Prishtinë where Tarik was dropped off by the driver and then we headed back to Kamenice. We twice passed the sight of the Serbian monastery (one of the sites that Thom saw today as Thom and I did not do the same trip). Our driver decided to take the shorter route through the mountain road as it would typically be quicker during this time of day as the road from Gjilan to Kamenice is busier with end of the day traffic. We were just twenty minutes from Kamenice, when the van blew a tire and we were stuck.
Our drivers English language was limited and one of our better Albanian speakers eventually was able to figure out that our driver had called for a new van and it would be either 15 minutes or 50 minutes. It was a nice day and we waited along side the van for, yes, 50 minutes. A new van arrived at about 6:30 pm. Our driver was fasting and there was no way he would make Iftar to break fast. I had an unopened bag of dates in my backpack and handed them to the driver as we volunteers loaded on to our new transport. We finally made it home to Kamenice around 7 pm.
Our family went out for Iftar and Thom meet me in town for dinner out at a restaurant, before I finally got to head home.
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