#lastsaturday

~ Onn Ibrahim, Special Correspondent, Mission of Hope & Mercy

I woke up without hearing gunfire – artillery shells landing with a familiar boom, and the rapid cacophony of a typical Kalashnikov automatic rifle. Could I be dreaming? I had just had a restful six-hour sleep, and in between had missed my morning prayers, because I had woken a mite too early and had decided to catch another forty winkles, before I realised the sun had arisen past the horizon, and I quickly prayed fajr, despite being late.

The youngest Kosovar baby at a refugee camp in Kukes.

Could I be stretching my familiarity? I was going into my twenty sixth day in Tirana, the capital of Albania, and a population made up of farmers, usually Muslims. I was tempted to visit Rapoh, a government official in the ministry of economics who had a small family of four consisting of himself, wife and two children, one of which has gone to high school, or the equivalent of university, and another still in middle school, the equivalent of secondary.

Rapoh (school teacher) and Nor Azaha (bank employee) at a square in Tirana.

I remembered when I visited them the last time, I was caught by the sweetness and tenderness of Rapoh’s wife – till today I have never known her name – and when she served me two generous slices of what appeared like carrot cake (it certainly tasted like one!), and noticed rather strangely that the cakes were sweet as she appeared sweet, but which in the end I was surprised to find out that the cake wasn’t carrot but banana. That led me to realise the stark reality of Tirana. How it was a city of contrasts, how little people knew of Tirana, and how the entire economy revolved around bananas both literally and figuratively. (You ever heard of the saying, “going bananas?”).

It was only the second day of my visit to Tirana, my first of a series of visits to other parts of Albania where my aim was to visit the Kosova Liberation Army who were, as I was advised fighting a fierce battle in the north near the border with Kosovo. I was crossing the street and came upon a ragged child, who sensed accurately, that I was a foreigner. She stuck two bananas to me urging me – and I think not because she wanted to give but sell the bananas to me – before I was pulled away by Nor Azaha, a Malaysian who was working in a nearby bank.  “Poh! poh!” he said, in a common and perhaps universal language used to ward off street pedlars, like this poor street pedlar, a child of barely three years old. (“Poh,” I discovered to mean “easy” later so “poh”, “poh” meant “easy”, “easy” or could also mean “take it easy”. Say that to a vagrant child in need of food and I wonder whether the words should mean “don’t take it easy, else you’re going to starve”).

I was struck by these power cables that crossed the channel because it seemed so low in height. I was wondering how it would affect safety.

It was enough to thwart the child because she had to remain on the sidewalk as we were crossing a square in the central and most prestigious part of Tirana. I don’t think she wanted to cling to me – and I wasn’t sure whether the bananas were any good either, if I bought them, they could be mushed and I never really liked mushed bananas (unless they were made like Rapoh wife’s cakes)  – and we crossed the square controlling our moves with as much dexterity as I learnt from Kuala Lumpur’s notorious city traffic – and made it to the other side, noticing rather abruptly Albania’s folk hero Scanderberg watching at us with a forlorn but serious look on his face, motionless, stationery and of course, brassy. The huge idol was sitting astride an equally huge and brassy horse, and he appeared solemn while carrying an Albanian flag, which made me wonder dutifully whether it was the same flag which he carried on the day when he was victorious or was it a different one. Or was it a lance which he was carrying, and later historians decided that he looked prettier with a flag.

A walk to a nearby park near where Rapoh lived, I came across these children who were selling cream milk.

At that instant, I wondered about the vagabond child and Scanderberg, about whether there was a connection between the two, perhaps even an accidental similarity; whether there was poverty during his time, or whether his indomitable victory against marauding Turks meant that there wasn’t any destitute child forced to beg for their next meal or whether his 25-year reign of power ensconced in a formidable fortress situated on the highest point in Albania, the town of Kornea, created a strategic diaspora of means meant to shower economic abundance for his people that the present people of Albania could only dream of having.

I asked also whether the child whom I had seen was a Kosova refugee, a Tiranian citizen or a gypsy because she was of dark-complexioned yet had fine beautifully carved features which somehow radiated her European descent and even ancestry.

I was amazed – that if the child was of gypsy origin – how strikingly similar she appeared to me from the films I had seen of them: in Madrid to Calcutta and even in Frankfurt. Gypsies remain an indefatigable tribe: their continued existence overshadowed by the pompous Jews, popularly paraded by world public opinion of their plight when I knew the gypsies suffered as much iniquity and cruelty from the reign of Adolf Hitler’s. Their plight simply remained ignominious much to my chagrin. Injustices committed against defenceless civilians become today’s currency: hard core criminals are seldom brought to justice.

Generally, Albanian structures do not have a rendering on the exterior. A view of a channel in the middle of the city.

If only I could hand the child some money in return for her bananas. After all this was fair trade: I admired her persistence and wished that my children had half her courage and instinct for survival, but I was prodded by Nor Azaha who simply brushed her away.

I couldn’t think at that moment, and hurried along, not wanting to be left behind by my two new friends – another one a humanitarian relief Malaysian worker from Sarajevo – past the ornate statue, bristling in the mid-morning sun, and conspicuously eyeing me even as I passed him and almost as I began to discern the rear shape of his horse which now took a grotesque view than from the front or side that made me quickly winced as I hated animal bottoms.

“Tirana, oh! Tirana,” as I heard myself singing in the chaotic mid-morning traffic, the rhyme, resembling “Sarajevo, oh Sarajevo,” which I had heard the first time on the second evening of my extended stay in the United Arab Emirates refugee camp on the outskirts of Kukes, a renowned town swooned by the media and therefore made famous to the gasping and gaping international audience because of the seeming plenitude and variety of  international relief organizations, featured as I was in Kukes watching the same cameramen and reporter broadcast UAE’s camp to the same audience in Abu Dhabi and Dubai like the international audience, in the same camp but from different angles and from different places with a slightly different story than the previous day.

An idylIic lake near Rapoh’s apartment.

I was wondering whether the British idiom, flogging a dead horse was a suitable amplification of this weird sight I was witnessing. I was later to find out from the cameraman, an Iraqi possessing a master's degree in broadcasting and directing from a renowned Moscow university, that he was sick to the bone covering the UAE camp and its litany of restless refugees, eager, as it were to get out of their hot tents and loiter in the camp’s compound, uncertain of their future and destiny, and worried sick that winter (soon to come) could kill them in the very camps they were proud to be fenced in.

The image of the child, this time I was perfectly sure, a Kosovar, came up above me and I recoiled, almost missing a step in our hurried walk, and gulped. “Such a beautiful child,” I thought to myself, remembering my children at home thousands of miles away, “yet now in a refugee camp and with the high likelihood that he might have lost a father” and my thoughts carried me to extremes, thinking of many ways how I wanted to help the Kosovar child and the child like the obviously malnourished and unfortunate street child. And then I almost knocked into my friends who were ahead of me as they stopped suddenly trying to evade a white taxi-van at a juncture which was careening in a rush, I thought, could it be because the taxi driver was carrying a pregnant passenger who was about to deliver!

I caught my breath and reminded myself that I had survived KL traffic; surely, I can’t get hit on this mad road of Tirana, ruger, the roads are called here, as a wave of a stink swept me. “Oh well,” I said, “if I don’t get hit by a vehicle, I could have easily been knocked off just from the foul smell of animal shit.” To be sure, another odour blew (“dog shit?”, close but not too sure) but I was ready this time and nimbly hopped over a big green patch of dung, made flat from the squelch of vehicle tyres; itself a reminder of being vigilant in this city of darling surprises.

Apart from being like a war-torn city, Tirana’s air is filled not with the carcase of human remains as in neighbouring Kosovo but with the unmistakable and distinct smell of shit of all kinds. Like when somebody farts in an airconditioned room, one can’t pretend that he or she didn’t smell the stink, in Tirana, the stink reminds you that there is at least a hive of animal activity; if nothing else, the mastication of animal bowels is seriously at work here smacked in the confines (not in the room where the guy just farted) of the wide, open spaces and boulevards of Tirana.

Correspondent in one of the city’s streets with Nor Azaha, a Malaysian bank employee during his last day at Tirana.

I remembered on the first Friday at Tirana while walking towards Malaysia’s only international bank, The International Commercial Bank, I crossed a swath of yellowish-green carpet of grass in full view of the bank, but almost jumped because a stump of human faeces laid in my path (they couldn’t be animal faeces because they don’t do it in full view of everybody to see and besides animals need some sand or earth to cover their faeces). During the week of course, while walking became a necessary business activity because Tirana is really a small city and it is better to walk the streets than sometimes to ride in a car, I almost became impervious to the many types of animal dung which emerged upon us. There were just plenty to see, and the hot Mediterranean summer never ceased to remind us of the waif of animal shit: goat shit, cattle shit, horse shit and the unmistakable smell of human shit.

Not to be outdone of course, is, until today of a sight which I have recorded in my mind to posterity, of a man groping a bulky tree trunk in a park encircled by the road we were travelling on which, naively or stupidly, solicited a response from me. “Why is the guy embracing the tree in the middle of the day?” I’d ask positioning my question to anybody (my welcome committee from Tirana International Airport) who, just like me, wasn’t expecting an obvious answer, and I got an answer. Alias, who heads the Malaysian bank answered, “Here, there is no public toilet, and everything left standing is fair game,” and that I suppose, is certainly the “warmest” welcome I could receive to Tirana.

While the man was busily sprinkling the bark of the open tree, I was left gazing at his posture: he was upright, yes; he was holding the tree, in fact he was embracing the tree, yes; but why wasn’t he holding on to his pecker. I thought it was unnatural.

It seemed strange that people could urinate in full view of everybody. It seemed even stranger that he was doing it in such a callous or on the contrary, arty manner. The fact that he could do it wasn’t the issue. The issue was that he could do it naturally, without a hint embarrassment or a sign of shame: fact is, he did it because he wanted to, and he did it because he was utterly conscious of his action (as of the stool which laid upon my path) it was as if he was trying to tell everybody something.

This seems like a better and unclogged channel compared to some other municipalities I have seen in other parts of the world.

That it stinks in Tirana?

To be sure, on the second and subsequently following days of my stay in Tirana, I changed my walking shoes which I bought in Malaysia to a new pair I had bought in Slovenia, a few days earlier. I bought the shoe in anticipation of my trek with the KLA and because the trendy boots I had bought at Pertama complex, KL wasn’t functional, although it did look attractive enough, and because Slovenia is known as a green country good for long walks so perhaps, they designed better shoes.

With the shoes I had bought in Slovenia, I walked confidently, lest I stepped on anything “green”. What are my “green” shoes meant for? The same shoes brought me into Kosova with the KLA and the same shoes brought me out safely and back to Tirana.

On my last Saturday here in Tirana, I was going to make sure that I would wear the same shoes on my return to KL. I’ll be proud to show Malaysians I walked in Tirana without stepping on shit and I walked into Kosova without stepping into a mine.

As for this hot and surprising city of Tirana, I will salute Scanderberg as he rides high and mighty on his horse and into history for being the only Albanian who held out against Turk’s conquests before he was finally defeated. In his memory though, five hundred years since then, I thought it ironic if not laconic that I had to be careful where I stepped my shoes.

There are signs of poverty everywhere in the city of Tirane, capital of Albania. During Enver Hoxah’s time, food was rationed and after a long time, Muslims ate whatever was given to them, including pork. Some Muslims eat pork to this day even as they know that it is forbidden in Islam because they acquired the habit during socialist times.

It was going to be my last Saturday, and if I am lucky, it will be my last Sunday when the clock strikes twelve tonight. And I know my shoes will be clean when I arrive home.

About the only thing I will miss are the sweet banana cakes made by Rapoh’s wife. And then again, it would be home sweet home.

Arriving Kuala Lumpur International Airport one day, I could almost see myself kissing the tarmac.