Wood Sorrel Can Bloom Pink: The village behind Mt Dajt Part I

We drove into the village on a streambed. The Mitsubishi Galloper was flying like in a comic book, Hysni at the wheel smoking Marlboros and an older fellow from the home next to him, quietly throwing up out the window. "The road is good at the beginning," Hysni had told us through the translation of his 14-year-old nephew, Orgys. "It's bad at the end." To us, it hadn't even been a road. But in Albania, we quickly learned, the possible and impossible have a very blurred relationship.
Orgys was our teenage-going-on-forty-year-old friend and translator. He and his younger brother Clarence and Michal and I were packed into the back seat with all our luggage. We were headed to a small village behind Mt. Dajt, 20 kilometers or so from Tirana, where the Kuka clan was originally from. Hysni had a few of his elderly poor men living out here, and we were going to help them. We weren't sure how exactly we would help, but help we would.
At our arrival there was much fuss, and neighbors, dogs and cows greeted us. The small house where two men lived was fairly basic, with cement floors and some cots and a basic kitchen. It turned out that most mountain people cooked on a wood fired outdoor stove, and they even baked bread inside of it.
"bukë" (say boook) means bread in Albanian, and is synonomous with the word food. "ujë" (say the oy of boy) means water. I will never in all my life forget these two words, as they were the constant conversation topics in that house. Either there wasn't enough, it wasn't satisfactory, or in the case of water, the men needed a whole lot of it to pour into their washing machine--the one modern appliance in their small homestead. But this all comes later.

When Hysni was there, we visited nearby cousins and neighbors, and at every stop we were plied with strong turkish coffee boiled over gas camping stoves, and strong Rakije (plum or grape alcohol--homemade of course!) We had meat, soup and bread. The men smoked and discussed. When Hysni left, with a calf and lamb strapped into a trailer, banging back down the streambed, we learned that the men of the house had opinions about us being there. Their opinion, it turned out, was not a favorable one. The cranky ring leader, whose name I never learned, bossed. The tall, gaunt mute man named Boujar, was bossed. The quiet man who had come with us (throwing up) became ornery and opinionated, though we didn't understand him. It quickly became clear that they didn't want to share their scarce water with us, nor their food.

Orgys, still looking like a young boy, called the men dajë (judgay) meaning uncle, and in turn they called him djalë (dyal), meaning boy. And the kids we met in Albania were super subservient to adults, in a way that American children would be amazed and then scared about. So the cranky old man bossed Orgys too, and he translated for us. So then, we were bossed as well.

Luckily we were given the garden as a task, so I was happy to pull weeds from the tomatoes, cucumbers and peppers. You could hear the tinkling of cow and sheep bells from every vantage point, and the mountains were a panarama. My other task, it became clear, was to cook. Duh! I was a woman, what was wrong with me? The men had ideas about what I should cook, how I should serve it, when I should wash the dishes. But they wouldn't do those things, only knew how I should do them. It took a couple of days to learn their wishes, but being a pleaser, I did. I washed a lot of dishes, heating water on the outdoor stove, and lugging fresh water from a underground spring, which was down a steep hill. The men usually sat outside in the yard, smoked and talked. They talked late into the night "blah blah blah bukë! blah blah blah ujë!" and then woke up early in the morning, and talked some more. We wondered that they never ran out of conversation topics, but talk they did. They smoked, sat around, and then did some washing in their washing machine.

(to be continued)

The scenery