The facts of life…

Last Sunday was very enjoyable and very frustrating, all in one. We’ll start with the good part. The host family of one of my site mates invited the volunteers living in Berat over for dinner. The four volunteers, the parents, the daughter who had recently returned from studying high school in Italy, her Italian friend from school, and four other friends all dined al fresco, enjoying the surprisingly cool evening and wonderful view. The food was so good. We started with an appetizer of pasta, which is common as both an entrée and appetizer, followed it with salad and various pickled veggies. The main course featured qofte (chafta), which is an Albanian dish made of fried minced meat patties, Cornish hens (I think), lamb, and byrek (booreck) another Albanian dish. We had fresh fruit and ice cream for dessert. As we ate dessert, the host father played traditional folk songs and all the Albanians joined in. The festivities lasted until midnight and made for a very memorable evening.
And the other side of that coin was earlier that day. I have gotten used to not having power from around 11:30 till about 2:00. That’s the time you have lunch or coffee (most businesses have generators), meet with colleagues, or rest at home. However, the new luxury that I have to sporadically live without is water. I didn’t have water for most of the daytime last week. I am not sure if losing water will become routine, especially as summer wears on, or if it was just an odd occurrence. The most frustrating part is the lack of water conservation. In fact some of the behaviors are quite wasteful. People are charged a flat fee for water use and not by consumption amount. If there were water meters, people would behave very differently I suspect. Each day that I didn’t have water, I found at least one person watering the street. No really. That’s what they were doing. To this day I am not sure why. I know that businesses will do it to cut down on dust. As for the others, that is a mystery I have yet to solve.

You take the good, you take the bad, and you have the facts of life, the facts of life.