Our day with Brixhilda: Smiles all round

I’ve always been intrigued by the stories of sponsors visiting their children, and imagined how it would be to visit my sponsored child, Last, in Zimbabwe. This was an impossible dream but when my sponsorship of Last ended, I asked for a new child to sponsor. The strange coincidence was that we received the details of Brixhilda in Albania, just two weeks before my husband, Clive and I set off with friends for a group walking holiday in Northern Albania. This was too short notice to arrange a visit, but we took photos of the city where she lived as we drove by, and were able to imagine her life a little bit more. We’d spent time exploring some of Albania with our guide, Bledar, and it kindled my curiosity even further.

I’ve been interested in Albania since reading about Brother Andrew’s disappointing visits in his book “God’s Smuggler” and listening to the weird propaganda broadcasts by Tirana Radio in the 1980s. I even read a few history books this year, discovering Albania has only been a nation since 1912, and has gone through an incredibly rapid, and at times painful transition since emerging from the oppressive communist dictatorship in the last twenty years. So when my daughter, Joanna, decided to do a student interrail trip through Europe, ending up in Croatia, I needed no further excuse and booked Bledar to take us round more of Albania, and talked to World Vision about visiting Brixhilda.

Bledar joined us on our visit to Brixhilda and afterwards, he wanted to take us to Albania’s top restaurant (according to TripAdvisor) on an organic farm outside Lezhe. We felt like we were on a secret mission when we met the World Vision team in the carpark of the restaurant, and were taken to their offices to meet Brixhilda and her family closeby. I’d tried to learn a few words of Albanian using an app on my phone, so managed to greet her but struggled to communicate any more. Talking to a six year old through a translator feels a bit awkward but her mother was very smiley and her uncle made a welcome speech in Albanian, and teased Brixhilda that she would soon be writing longer letters to me than to him, her favourite uncle! We weren’t able to meet her father as he had just returned from three months working in Greece as a welder (he can’t get work in Albania) and he was sleeping. Her aunt came and joined us. She is studying Food Science at Tirana University, so I was very pleased that Brixhilda will have a good role model for achieving highly in her own education.

The World Vision team had planned a visit to a children’s holiday project, so off we all went in a minibus for an hour’s journey. Brixhilda and her little sister Klea (age three) were very good on the journey, and when we arrived we found a huge group of fourteen year olds who were on a week long residential hoilday, with a theme of 'respect for women and girls'. They were from targeted sections of the community, including children living in poverty and boys who were not normally safe to leave their home due to ongoing blood feuds. Attitudes to women have traditionally been about ownership: girls pass from the ownership of their father to their husband when they are married, and have very little opportunity to make their own decisions about their lives. We were led to the front of the hall like celebrities, and some of the groups told us what they’d been learning, with great confidence and some emotion. We were very impressed with how attentively and respectfully the other young people listened – as a secondary school teacher I know how difficult this can be for some young people. The project leader was a very committed and thoughtful man, assisted by some nuns and some lovely young women and men who were there to help, and to lead the songs and dances which all the young people joined in with. We had a go at the dancing too. Suddenly it was my turn – I was handed the microphone and asked to make a speech! I said a few things, encouraging the young people to respect each other, the girls to be strong and the boys to treat girls as unique individuals. I appreciated the time to think of the next bit while my comments were being translated.

After posing for some group photos, we headed back to Lezhe for a meal in a restaurant. A warning: lunch in Albania is not a snack so don’t plan to eat later. We enjoyed fresh goat’s cheese, bread, salad and 'burek' (cheese filled pastries) and would have been quite happy with that, but then came a big slab of lasagne. And still we were only on the starters; next was a plate of meat or a whole fish. Then desserts, various and creamy. We were trying to save space for our special meal later, but it was hard not to eat all this delicious food. Over lunch we chatted more with Brixhilda and her family via translation, and I tried out some more of my Albanian. She became very curious and I showed her my app, which was quite fun for her, matching words to colours and numbers. We then gave her a bag of small gifts, which delighted her. She loved the pencil case and sparkly gel pens and wouldn’t let me open the whistle pen, clearly she wanted to save that for later. Her sister Klea had some smiley stickers, and Brixhilda went round the table awarding each of us a sticker. I’d earlier admired the little string bracelet she was wearing, with a cross on it, given to her by her father (“bukur” = pretty) and I was so touched when she took it off and gave it to me! What a sweet, generous child. “Faleminderit” (thank you). We all piled into the minibus to drop Brixhilda and her family home, and Klea decided that Joanna needed to be taught some basic words, so spent the journey pointing things out: “car”, “house”, “tree” etc. Joanna tried her best to imitate the words in Albanian, but everyone was laughing hysterically! We said goodbye quite fondly.

It was lovely to meet Brixhilda and her very smiley family, and I hope that the sponsorship will be more meaningful to her as she knows me a bit now. I’m sure we will enjoy writing letters to each other and joking about “recel”.

We took a long break watching the sun go down in a peaceful place that Bledar knew on the escarpment looking down on the plain, and waited for our lunch to go down so we could enjoy our supper, which was really excellent and definitely the best meal in Albania.

I was surprised to find out that only four sponsors from the UK have visited Albania this year, even though there are 28,000 children supported by World Vision, and another 4,000 on their list waiting for sponsors. I’d really recommend having a holiday in Albania, visiting the fascinating cultural sites or walking in the unbelievably beautiful Accursed Mountains. You could even stay in Bledar’s family’s guesthouse in the heavenly valley of Valbona, and incorporate a visit to a World Vision project. It gives another perspective on life in Albania, Europe’s second poorest country, and its lovely people who break every stereotype you may have picked up about Albanians.