Iowa Martins in Albania

Thursday, April 22, 2010

Dubrovnik to Albania III



On New Year's Day, we began the drive back to Albania about 9:00 am. It's quite evident that Albania was a hermit kingdom. Our maps have roads going to Albania, but they are not always there. The main thin to takeaway about the roads on our trip around the Adriatic, through Italy, Slovenia, Croatia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Albania is the that roads were all lovely—until we entered Albania. One cool thing we saw was the "Wild Hog Crossing: 6 km" sign. The boarder crossing was like a shack in the wilderness. Immediately upon entering the road became chunky.




As we drove through the Shkodra area the rain came down in buckets. One week later, most villages I the area would be evacuated before they became completely isolated. The Peace Corps volunteers in the area were hustled way to Tirana so they would be cut off from medical help, etc.




The road was quite obviously in a state of repair. It looked like they were improving the surface, but at that time, it was a tragedy. As we drove, the road would suddenly stop and we would have to make a 70 degree turn down through some slop and over a boulder. At one point while we were following some taillights through heavy rain, there were car on the right AND on the left going the other way with nothing in between us but soggy dirt. Another instance on our trip when the strength and beefiness of our truck came in handy.
The three boys in a window overlooking the bay of Dubrovnik.

Dubrovnik the old town II




As we walked into a restaurant at noon on New Year's Eve, we came across a group of Americans who had just sat down. The father/husband acted like George Bailey as he tried to solve any problem. He could have been an understudy for George Emerson from "Room with a View" – as he said, "Well, we can move over here, and you can move that table next to this one, move that chair, and then grab another chair. Then you'll have a spot."
As we settled into the new arrangement of furniture, Maura said, "You all seem somehow familiar."
"I'm Matt Huddelston and this is my wife Jane, my daughter Lucy, and son Tom."
"Maybe we meet in Kazakhstan," answered Maura.
"We were in Kazakhstan."
Turns out that I had been the kids' computer teacher, and Maura had been Tom's homeroom teacher when he was in third grade 6 years ago. Tom, of course, had undergone the greatest change by doubling his height. Matt also changed a lot in the fact that his hair was now completely silver.
Aa a well-informed embassy dude, Matt told me about Croatia and Dubrovnik, Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina. After Yugoslavia broke up, the mixture of Croats, Serbs, Muslims, Orthodox Christians, Roman Catholics, Bosnians, Albanians, and the rest made the entire make-up of the Balkan Peninsula complicated- to say the least. So the Yugoslavs made an attempt to force Croatia to stay.

Belgrade army was bombing area around Dubrovnik and then bombed the Mid-Evil city itself.
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http://www.pescanik.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=4754&Itemid=158
The escalation of violence against civilians and the ethnic-cleansing operations conducted by the Serbian forces were the immediate cause of the NATO bombing of FRY in March 1999, which is why it was termed a ‘humanitarian intervention’. But after NATO’s initial raids Miloševic did not stop - on the contrary, he intensified the crimes in Kosovo. Many state and public bodies participated in ‘cleansing’ the southern Serbian province of its population. Yugoslav army trucks and Serbian Railways trains were used to deport the population to the Macedonian and Albanian borders, the municipal services were used to remove corpses from the streets, and the Serbian police executed civilians and secretly transported their bodies to central Serbia using refrigerator trucks. The organisation and extent of the persecution following the start of the NATO bombing shocked the world.
It was soon understood that what was happening was an ethnic-cleansing operation on an unimaginable scale, which subsequently became known as Operation Horseshoe. It seemed that Miloševic was implementing a ‘final solution’ to the Albanian question. Only three weeks into the NATO bombing, the United Nation’s High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) registered over half a million displaced Kosovars, and several hundred thousand more who were internally displaced. The deported population had their personal documents and other proofs of Serbian citizenship confiscated, and were thus deprived of their individual identity. Up to June 1999, over 80% of the total population of Kosovo and over 90% of Kosovo Albanians had been driven from their homes. Around 10,000 Albanians were killed during the operation, which lasted less than three months. Thousands of houses were demolished by means of artillery, bulldozers, fire and explosives. Religious objects were not spared either - around 150 mosques were destroyed.
We in Serbia had no idea what was happening, of course. The state television broadcast images of destroyed bridges and TV towers, alongside occasional downed NATO aircraft. Some of us were in air-raid shelters, others fought bravely against the mighty NATO air-force, while Slobodan Miloševic and his assistants continued their joint criminal enterprise in Kosovo.
Following Miloševic’s capitulation and the withdrawal of the Serbian army and police from Kosovo, we became inundated with images of Serb refuges and torched Orthodox churches. The deported Albanians who returned to Kosovo together with the international forces revenged themselves against the Serb minority for the crimes committed by the Serbian state. Since that time, the commemoration of each anniversary of the ‘NATO aggression’ involves references to Serb victims, to Serb refugees, to depleted uranium, and to the illegitimacy of the bombing; but the true cause of NATO intervention or the terrible war crimes which the Serbian state committed against Kosovo Albanians is passed over in silence.
http://www.pescanik.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=4754&Itemid=158
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At the beginning of my attempts to make heads or tails of the information, one problem was journalists' habit of interchangeably using Yugoslavia and Serbia, Yugoslav and Serb. I think I've been able to figure out that since Serbia has Zagreb, where Matt and family now live, Serbia felt itself to be the biggest part of Yugoslavia, and sometimes the moniker of Yugoslavia still gets applied to the place.
From Wikipedia, I've learned that after Yugoslavia broke up, Serbia and Montenegro formed a union for some years, often using the name of Yugoslavia, or Former Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY). Serbia and Montenegro was the name used by the US for a time. During that time, however, often the country was known by its synecdoche (sĭ-něk'də-kē) (a figure of speech in which a part is used for the whole) "Serbia" because Serbia and Zagreb has a dominant influence on the country.

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1 Oct 1991 – Yugoslav Army attacks Dubrovnik
May 1992 bombardment ends

Dubrovnik and south I

Dubrovnik. It's a cool name. I know of it because of the bombings in the '90s. The city was bombed by Serbia. I think they did it as a kind of terrorist move that would scare them into staying in their country. To me, that sounds completely illogical. I'm trying to educate myself on the situation here. I'm reading Balkans by Misha Glenny. It's a 700+ page brick that starts to explain the current situation with the relevant details from 1804. I started at the beginning and there were just to many vowelly challenged names: Zdrjac or Djnska--and even the name of the country known by many as Croatia--Hrvatska . I couldn't connect the dots. So I began with the Epilogue. At least there were things about which I have some memory--Bill Clinton, NATO, Slobodan Milosevic. (BTW on the flight from Albania to Rome at Spring Break, I was able to place my seat beside a teacher at school. She is from Serbia and her last name is Milosevic. She was also born in the same town where Slobodan grew up. She is not related--as far as she knows, anyway) Now I am reading Chapter 9 and I will leap backwards. I hope I will be able to sense of things.



We drove into Dubrovnik on December 30, 2009. Fortunately, we found a house with a couple rooms about 100 steps from the old city. The next day, the four of us spent 90 minutes just walking around the wall. The old city has a wall around it that is wide enough at places for 7 people to walk abreast. I had an image of running a marathon on the Great Wall of China. The old city protected by the walls has lovely buildings and apartments. There were cannons, rock windows, narrow stairs—it would have made a killer venue for a game of hide and seek—or something more sinister. I felt a bit like a peep monster when I accidentally spied people cleaning their shoes or cooking dinner. It was interesting to see satellite dishes popping out of the stone walls, and among the clothes lines. Coming from my United States experience, just imagining that we are walking on stones that have been tread on for hundreds of years was awesome. It was awesome to see hear and FEEL the Adriatic crashing into the rocks. Even more was the feeling when we would be three stories above the sea.










While walking through the Tirana airport in October, I bought a small book on Dubrovnik. I wasn't sure when or if we would go there, but it seemed like a cool place. Although I knew the place had been bombed, I wasn't sure exactly WHO did the bombing. I had an ill-conceived notion that it was NATO who bombed Dubrovnik. Why? Well, I was thinking that maybe they wanted Serbian leadership, Slobodan Milosevic, to stop his practice of killing groups of people in his country. Dubrovnik is a big money-maker for the place. Kind of like, "You better stop killing your own people, or we will kill them so you will understand that it is not nice to kill them." The actual situation was that Serbia bombed Dubrovnik (in Croatia) because they wanted them to stay in their country. "Be our friends, Croatia, or we'll beat the crap out of you." I always think that it is a hugely troublesome question when some section of the country wants to secede. There is a great feeling in my that says, "let 'em go."




On the wall inside the city is a placard that shows a map/diagram of the buildings in the city that were all or partially destroyed during the bombing. As far as our untrained eyes could tell, all of the damaged buildings have been repaired. It was interesting to pick out the roofs of old buildings with dirty red tile—500 years old—and rebuilt ones with clean red tile.
Just outside the city the Adriatic Sea was ferociously pounding the rocks on shore. The constant noise and bluster was as loud as a grain dryer. To simply stand so near and feel safe was thrilling, not to mention the feelings when we overlooked the crashes from three stories straight up.

Tuesday, April 13, 2010

education at the right time

If you put pancake batter on the frying pan before you mix it up, you're going to have a sticky, unappetizing mess. Recently, I have been exposed to two educational situations on which I'd like to comment. The common thread can be summed up by the phrase, "Kids learn when they are ready to learn." I spent January and February teaching the eight-year-olds (third graders). By some lucky chance this happened to be the section of the curriculum when they were scheduled to be introduced to BOTH multiplication AND division. At first glance, it seems like a huge task.
I started by teaching the IDEA of multiplication. What does it mean to multiply? Repeated addition. With the guidance of the Director of Instruction, I taught the kids how to find the answer if they hadn't yet memorized it. During our instruction, we drew many pictures of groups and placed a certain number of items in each group, etc. The test over the unit included few straight multiplication problems like 8 x 5 = ? Instead there were problems that demanded the kids to apply their understanding and then use their multiplication skills to create their own problems.

In the box below, write a problem that requires multiplication to find the solution. Then show how you find the solution. Below is a sample problem that you might create:

Junli makes a scrapbook that uses 4 photos on each page. If the book is has 6 pages, how many photos does he need?
4 photos x 6 pages = 24 photos


The students had great success. I loved to see them find the correct answers. It seemed to me that if the students had tried to learn multiplication sooner, they may have experienced frustration and that frustration may have led to dissatisfaction and even hatred of mathematics.
I may not have thought about this observation if it wasn't for the fact that several parents, especially European parents, were concerned that their children were not studying multiplication as early in their school years as they should. They were questioning the wisdom or our basically American curriculum. This is a completely valid concern. My experience this spring shows me that, at least in the area of eight-year-old mathematics, the curriculum is doing well.

My other experience with kids learning well at the time when they are ready to learn involves my son, Maxim, who will turn eight in June. Velcro on shoes is a wonderful invention. Before this year, we hadn't even thought about getting him shoes with laces. This spring, however, when he needed a pair of shoes, he was eager to try laces, and we were eager for him to learn. He may have been especially eager because success in this area would earn him an arrow to put on his Cub Scout uniform. From the first weekend with laces, he experienced only a small amount of difficulty and annoyance. After three days of me showing him how to tie about 4 times each day, he got it and he's been wearing them ever since. Our classrooms are little houses and kids take their shoes off when they enter. Therefore, he's had plenty of practice—taking off and putting on his shoes probably five times each day.
Our experience with Maxim is that it is often tough to teach him new things. He easily gets frustrated and wants to give up. He garnered this skill quickly and easily, however, with only one true outburst of agony.
This time, the pancakes turned out delicious.