I really thought I would write another post last weekend but I was too much in the throws of trying to get everything ready to start school last Monday.  I have felt really crunched for time since being in Albania.  It is not just getting up and started in a new school but all of the adjustments to living in a new country are keeping us very busy.  For example, there are several small grocery stores (or markets as they are called here) close to our apartment but it is challenging to figure out what to buy.  Everything is written in either Albanian or Italian plus we simply are not familiar with the items in the store.  Each time I go to the market I try to buy at least one totally unknown or new item just so we can try and figure out what different things are.  We are also continuing to get our apartment set up a bit more.  Although it is nicely furnished there are still some needed things.  This weekend the goal is to get some more lighting into our living room so will be taking a city bus to a lamp store.

                 

There are about 25 new teachers at Albanian College this year.  The first week of teacher training was for the new teachers.  We spent a lot of time learning about the school including the international baccalaureate curriculum,  Managebac (the equivalent of Fairport’s Schooltool), receiving our class and room assignments.  They also ran a class on culture shock which was interesting and helpful.  Each evening they had some type of social get-together which you could choose to attend.  The pictures above are of two of the outings.  The teachers and their families are from places like Australia, the U.K., Ukraine, Spain, Belgium, Greece, Canada, Houston, Atlanta, Salt Lake City, North and South Carolina.  Many of them are career international teachers who have taught in Thailand, Venezuela, Shanghai, Ghana, Tanzania, Bangladesh, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Egypt and other countries that I can’t remember.  It is so interesting to hear about their experiences and get to know them!

This video is of my classroom on the day that it was assigned to me.  It needed to be put in order within a week so it would be ready for the children to come to school to meet their teacher.

This is my very kind husband who was put to work helping to prep my classroom.  Thank you, Randy!

Here is my classroom one week later.  Hooray, it is ready to welcome first graders!

An interesting fact about the wood furniture in the classroom is that it has all been handmade by local carpenters.  Also, notice the air conditioner near the ceiling.  Most of the school is air conditioned because of the intense heat for much of the year.  The temperatures have been in the low to mid-90’s since we have been here.

Here are the three first grade teachers along with our Albanian Assistants.  My Albanian Assistant is standing behind me.  Her name is Edlira Byku.  She has a bachelor’s and master’s degree in English from a local university.  It is difficult to get a teaching position in Albania without experience so it is common for Albanian teachers  to work as assistants for a few years and then apply to work in the public schools. Edlira has been a fabulous help not only by translating for me but also she is helping me to understand the ins and outs of Albanian culture.  I am so fortunate to be working with her! The woman in the yellow dress is another first grade teacher who is from Chicago and came to teach at Albanian College after teaching for two years in Saudi Arabia.  The Asian woman is my “buddy teacher”.  She is from Singapore and taught in Shanghai before coming to teach in Albania.  Both teachers have been so very generous in sharing their resources and expertise as I get up and going with the international baccalaureate curriculum.

The teacher picture above was taken in the school library.  The Albanian College Tirana library has more volumes in it than any other library in the entire country of Albania. Isn’t that amazing?!?!  There are no public libraries in Albania.  Even though the school library has more volumes than any other library in Albania, the library still has a very limited number of books compared to Dudley School in Fairport.

The school put this banner up for the first day of school.  The building that houses Albanian College was previously used as a school to train elite Communists officers.

We were all off of school on Wednesday of this week because it was Mother Teresa Day.  Yes, Mother Teresa is from Albania.  There are parks and squares named after her in Tirana in addition to various statues of Mother Teresa throughout the city.

I just completed my first week of teaching.  I was slated to have 15 children but only 11 of them have shown up so far.  5 of the children speak no English, 2 have some English and the other 4 could be described as being almost fluent English speakers.  They are darling children who I am really enjoying so far.  I will let you know more about them in my next post.

We are settling into our new apartment after spending the last week here.  Our apartment has three bedrooms but only one of them has beds (we will need to work on that!), two bathrooms and a nicely furnished living space plus a well equipped kitchen.  The best part of the apartment is that the apartment rent is paid by my school.  Yay!  The apartment is on the 7th floor of a 10 story apartment complex.  There are several coffee shops, restaurants and shops at the base of the apartment.  It is in a very busy area of Tirana (see the video).  The school is a 10 minute walk away.  We will not have a car while we are here but walking to most places is not a problem plus for 700 lek ($7) a taxi will take you almost anyplace in the city.

If you count up 7 floors, that is our apartment balcony on the far left.

This is a short video taken from across the street from our apartment.  Sorry the video is so large, I cannot figure out how to shrink it.

The following are several shops as you walk down the street where our apartment is located.

There are lots and lots of fresh fruit and vegetable stands along the street.  The produce is all very well priced i.e. a watermelon costs 140 lek (about $1.40).  50% of Albanians make their living as farmers.  Albanian farmers do not have the money to buy pesticides for their crops which means all the produce is organic.  When purchasing produce we do have to sort through what we are buying more carefully than in the USA but for the most part the produce has been yummy, cheap and  abundant!

A small appliance/housewares shop…

A hardware store…

The cheese shop…

My favorite, the plant and flower shop!  I can’t wait to get a few plants to put on our balcony.

The bakery…

This is the name of our street.

This is a mall about a quarter of a mile from us.  There is a regular grocery store on the bottom floor then 5 stories full of brand new shops with the usual mall stores.  As you can imagine everything here is more expensive than in the street shops.

Randy was very excited to find peanut butter for his PB and J sandwiches.   Most shops do not carry it and when we did find it, a small jar of Skippy peanut butter cost $10.   :0

An Albanian license plate…  We have been surprised that in a developing country there are a fair number of Albanians driving BMW’s, Mercedes and Land Rovers.  Not a lot but more than we expected.  The Albanians were not allowed to have cars during communist rule which means they have only been driving for the last 20 years or so.  Their driving seems crazy at times but not much worse than many large cities.

Good bye to Verizon and hello to Vodaphone, our new phone company.  Speaking of which, here is our new contact information:

Albanian College Tirana
Rruga Dritan Hoxha, Nr. 1
Tirana, Albania 1000

This is the school address because it has been suggested that mailing things to our apartment may result in us not getting them.  Our Albanian phone numbers:

Randy ‭355699891928

Sarah‭  355699891929‬

I have found using WhatsApp is the best way to text and call with family and friends.  It is a free app that can be downloaded on your phone.  After the app is downloaded all texting and phone calling is free as long as you are on wi-fi.

One more thing, please feel free to comment on any posts but if you would prefer to send me an email and you are on a laptop, click on the blue contact button right under where the blog says “Teaching in Albania”.  If you are on your phone, click on the blue words “Teaching in Albania”, then menu and then the blue contact button.  As I am beginning to understand, a comment is similar to commenting on Facebook while using the contact button is an email between you and I.  Please feel free to use either way to communicate as it works for you.

I just finished my first week of new teacher training and am looking forward to sharing about it on my next post.

The morning we were to fly to Albania was the same day that Fairport got 5 inches of rain in 6 hours.  In fact, Fairport was put under a state of emergency because of all the rain.  Yikes! Our flight was not  until the afternoon so we hoped that all would be okay.  In fact, Randy and I told each other during the drive to the airport that we needed to stay clam about all the travel plans that can go wrong when you fly.  We had no control over it so we just needed to flow with it all.

We ended up coming back home that evening to spend the night because of all the flight delays. 😦  We rented a car and drove to JFK the next day.  We were rebooked five times on Turkish Air before finally flying out.

Hooray, we have now boarded our Turkish Air flight to Istanbul!

We made it to Albania!!!!!! We arrived 24 hours later than originally planned but we are just so relieved to be here.   We are in the line to go through customs.

Yay, all of our luggage made it!

We were met at the airport by Gillian, originally from Canada.  She is a drama teacher and secondary administrator at Albanian College.  Her enthusiasm for what she does is contagious!

We were transported to our hotel by a school van.  We have stayed at the hotel for three nights as we figured out all the details involved in moving to a new apartment in a new country i.e. utilities sorted out, leases signed, sim cards for our phones, etc.  Tomorrow we will be moving into our apartment.  Can’t wait!

Even though we are not leaving for Tirana until next week, I decided to go ahead and write my first blog post now.  I want to make sure it all works okay plus I may not have much time to figure it out when we arrive in Albania.

Several people have asked how this international teaching position came about so I thought I would start by giving some background.  Many years ago when I first started teaching at Dudley School in Fairport, there was a kindergarten teacher from London teaching at our school for the year while the Dudley School teacher was teaching in London.  I remember thinking that some day I wanted to do something similiar.

The first person I ran the idea by was Randy.  He said he would be up for a temporary move especially since he is now retired. He also said that 25 years ago I was willing to move to Rochester for his job so he was now up to move with me.  Sweet husband!  After that I met with the FCSD director of human resources and asked if taking some time off from Fairport to teach internationally would be a possibility.  She said I could take a one year leave of absence and then come back and ask for another year, if I wanted to do so.

Last summer the search was on to find a job.  I ended up working with an organization called International Schools Services.  I chose them because they have been helping teachers find international jobs for 50 years and they were very responsive when I emailed them with questions.  They maintain a database of teachers looking for international jobs and another database for international schools looking for teachers.  I filled out a very detailed and time consuming electronic portfolio including my resume, references, transcripts, etc. and submitted it.

In November, 2017 Albanian College  contacted me for a Skype interview.  I had no idea where Albania was and was not sure I wanted to do the interview.  I decided the interview would be good experience so I went ahead and talked to the principal (who happened to be from Australia) of the primary school.  After talking to her, I felt much more enthused about the possibility of teaching in Albania.  She described Albania as safe, cheap, beautiful and it was satisfying to help a country blossom after communist rule.

Originally, I had hoped to teach in a Western European country however I have no experience teaching in an International Baccalaureate school which made those positions too competitive for me.  Also, many of these schools do not provide the perks that Albanian College provides i.e. a housing allowance, a settling in stipend, airfare to and from Albania, etc.

In February, 2018 I attended a four day long international job fair in NYC.  This time I interviewed face-to-face with an administrator from Albanian College (AC).  They offered me a contract to teach first grade and I accepted.   AC is a new school that was established four years ago.  Almost all of my teaching career has been in special education but AC have not yet established a special education program.   Although I will be teaching 1st grade they did express interest in having me consult regarding children with special needs.  The school has about 450 students with a staff of 60.  All of their teachers are hired from English speaking countries (i.e. Australia, the UK, Canada, the USA, etc.) I will be teaching 15 first graders who primarily speak Albanian.  An Albanian assistant will be in the classroom to translate as needed.  It is an International Baccalaureate curriculum that will be taught in English so that the children will pick up on English as the school year progresses.

Randy and I are flying out of Rochester on Tuesday, August 14th to JFK.  We then have a 10 hour flight to Istanbul followed 7 hours later by a 1 1/2 hour flight to Tirana.  New teacher training starts on August 20th.  School starts on September 3rd.  I can’t wait to get started!

Some of you have already seen these links but in case you have not, I want to share them here.

This link is a 7 minute video about the country of Albania in general.  https://www.facebook.com/UneJetoj/videos/1132636080086042/

This link is to Albanian College where I will be teaching.  http://actirana.edu.al/index.php

      

The pictures above were taken right after I signed my Albanian teaching contract at the international job fair in NYC last February.

If you are still reading I want you to know that I promise that most of my blog posts will not be nearly this long.  I just wanted to give you some background about how all of this came about.

My next post will be coming from Albania!  Thanks so much for your interest in this adventure!