Author: Boris Shirman

This second half of the week was a full week. It started with a fourth of July celebration that had the resemblance of an American celebration, with the burgers and the beer, but the live DJ and dancing gave away the Albanian influence in the event. It was really fun to destress from the past two weeks and touch home for a little bit. After this event, we went straight back to business. On Friday I had my shoot day with Fitim, the Military parkour guy as I’ve taken to calling him. The day started promisingly; it was an early start at the military base where I was happily let in with the credentials I had. But that is where it started to go downhill. Every time a military policeman passed us we would get stopped and scrutinized about what we were doing. And then I was informed that I am only allowed to photograph Fitim, so I had to delete half of my photos from that shoot.

After that Friday the weekend was surprisingly relaxing. I did not go to the Peja trip, which meant I had some time to just relax by the giant pool pictured below.

So as quickly as the last problem occurred it was corrected for and then fixed. The week started with Aulona and I finding a new subject to work with for the New Borns project. A man named Burhan who is a member of the Egyptian community in FusheKosovo; he volunteers with Ideas Partnership in order to help teach the people of his community that education is important. Because he was our second subject we rushed through meeting him and did our interview on the same day that we met. I’d rate the interview a 4/10…..he just wasn’t comfortable enough with us yet.

As things tend to happen the day after we did the interview with Burhan we were told that the situation with Fitim was a misunderstanding and that he was still up for doing the project. So that is how I ended up with two Newborn projects.

On a non-academic note, our adopted dog Auk is getting bigger and bitier every day, while I still am more attached to him than I should be I definitely preferred it when he did not untie my shoe laces everytime I play with him.

Well that’s the end for the beginning of week two of classes, more updates to come.

End of Week 1 of classes

This will be a short one. The week has been good, but it’s had it’s ups and downs. I have been able to meet lots of new people, people from this new country I am exploring. Only a week of classes have gone by and a lot has already happened. I have made steps to contacting my final project subject and I have gone through three different subjects for my first newborn’s assignment, a miss rate I have had yet to achieve. The War, Diplomacy, and State Building class is also something new to me; I have never taken a college political science class and even though I really like the topic I definitely don’t regret not being a major in political science.

So I’m tired, obviously, I am. We just got back from our week long trip from the Balkans and it is time for class, but my mind is still on the past week. We went to a record-breaking (for me) five countries in 8 days. Albania, Montenegro, Bosnia, Serbia, and Macedonia, you can also count the Bus as a country since we were probably riding inside for jsut as long as we stayed in some of the countries. This trip was groundbreaking for me in many ways; it was the first time I (mostly) had autonomy (during free time) of my actions during a trip abroad. We went to historical sights that I had never gone to and we also went to Peace organizations, that I’d never heard of, including the OHR in Bosnia and a handful of NGO’s; bars…we also went to bars many. So after a week of traveling, staying up and learning, I am finally back at the campus I arrived in initially ready to learn. I climbed a mountain in Kotor and now it’s time to repeat the performance in Prishtina