A Grim Life
Arber Shehu
July 15, 1997. If I can remember correctly, we started our trip going north to Tirana, the country’s capital city. Early in the morning with all our furniture, belongings and pieces of memory all packet in to a run down, paint rusting truck, we left the city of 1,000 citizens that lived off the business of mining the coal that powered most of communist Albania.
The trip was brutal on the roads filled with holes big as washing sinks. A five hour trip on a part dirt road part crumbling pavement covering the dangerous sharp curving steep sides of inhospitable terrain of hills and mountains filled with mushroom shaped bunkers of the former communist working party of Enver Hoxha.
We entered a city were all sorts of life come together from gangsters, pimps, hustlers, merchants, villagers, gypsies, foreign journalists televising the county’s darkest terrifying times and liquor drinking, cocaine sniffing politicians. Tirana, the size of Dearborn with a population of 300,000 or more at that time, was a chance at hoping for a better life. Poverty swamps the city every day. Tirana was the most prosperous city. The wages offered by the constructional boom fueled by blood money from the mafia was twice that of a $10 a day job in other cities. There were no more manufacturing wages. Prosperity for six out of ten people was agriculture; back breaking laborer with out the luxuries of machines like a tractor or a plough.
My father moved us in to someone’s first floor, big two storey house. My oldest brother and father already had jobs because they moved before as. Brother worked at bingo and father on construction. My mother received a job working; making $2 dollars a day at her second cousin’s clothing shop. Many others were forced to be entrepreneurs, opening up kiosks and stands wherever there was space in the downtown central plaza of the national hero, Skenerbeu. The more lucrative street entrepreneurs were old men converting currency from refugees, immigrants working low paying jobs in every corner of Europe. My second oldest brother, a mislaid adolescent worked at night time as a guard with a Kalashnikov assault rifle for protection in the clothing shop. I went on to third grade.
Beside working, mother’s other duties were to do her best in the worst times. With constant black outs, house work was a struggle. Many emigrated from the hell they called home to Greece and Italy. October of 1997 my mother went forth with the decision to fill out a lottery to win a green card.
We moved from the grim muddy streets, small two rooms a hallway that served as a dinning and living room too a slightly better working, not so big apartment.
Meanwhile my oldest brother enrolled in Marine school to a south-western costal with the Adriatic sea city, Vlora. Father relentlessly tried to teach my second brother his profession. Mother still had the same job. The lottery was answered and the paper work had began. I went on to forth grade.
The necessity was too great. Twenty two months of rigors demands and health examinations went through, eroding our mix emotions.
May 28, 1999. On air port Rinas, kissing, hugging close relatives goodbye, we depart on an Albania on an Italian air line.
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