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Wymer greets the first elected National Albanian Student Government Association executive board.

V

I wrote most of this final update in the Frankfurt, Germany airport. Boy was that interesting. I thought Atlanta and Chicago were crazy airports! This place was nuts. It has to be the biggest airport I have every flown through. I guess my little Reagan National Airport in DCA looks better and better all the time. As I finish this final update about Albania back home in DC, my luggage is floating around somewhere in Germany. Hope it gets here someday!!

Anyway, this trip has been life changing, and I am grateful for the opportunity. Working with a very wide spectrum of folks in Albania has been an intense and rewarding experience, but I also feel a new appreciation for the United States of America. I’ve been just about everywhere in the US, but this was my first trip to Europe, and I think I learned a lot more than I taught. It would take years of in-depth study to grasp the long and rich history of the Balkans, but I’ve certainly had a crash course and enjoyed it.

Since my last update, I’ve probably had a dozen meetings. I met with George Soros’s Open Society people (I left my GWB t-shirt in my hotel), had a training session with the entire delegation of the Albanian Student Association as they prepared for their first national election, and even spent a couple hours signing about 450 certificates for each of the students we trained throughout my stay. (I really hope the certificate said something good, because I have no clue what the writing meant. I just signed at the bottom where it said the only two words in English on the page: Steve Wymer).

The last few days in Albania were the best. I witnessed the historic elections, and then met with the new executive board of the National Albanian Student Government Association. I also attached a picture of the two brothers, Dretan and Alban, who founded the student government association in Albania. To start this process, they wrote grant applications to several of George Soros’s foundations, asked for and received funds from the US and Dutch embassies, and got a grant from USAID to travel to every school in Albania, organize fair elections, and fight the many walls thrown up in front of them in their efforts to organize student governments in Albania. There were a LOT of people who did not want democracy and representation to include university students, and it is slowly happening, due, in large part, to their efforts. They are good guys, and I really respect the effort they undertook. In my book, they’re heroes of a sort.

My last training session with the new executive board included a lot of talk about how to help the fledgling student governments on each campus across the country, how the association might impact the new higher education policy their parliament is debating for the first time, and a lot of other issues. Other than the mafia group that rolled in to see what we were talking about (I swear I am not joking . . . there are more “Tony Sopranos” in Albania than America!) it really went well. I was pleased, and I think the Albanian students can take some of the tips as direction for their future.

Some relationships back home opened the door to meet with some very high-level Albania government officials, and that was definitely a highlight. In the parliamentary system in Albania, it is a tradition that a member of parliament (MP) has to take you in order to have a meeting with the prime minster, president, or any cabinet members. So Monday morning, Lajla Pernaska (Republican MP) picked me up, and we went to the Department of Defense. The meeting with Minister Medur was interesting. We met for almost an hour in his office, and I must have walked past 100 huge dudes with machine guns to get in there. (Let’s just say that you do NOT mess with Albanian special forces.) His office was about the size of my high school gymnasium and decorated with pictures of secretaries Rice and Rumsfeld and about every defense minister in Europe. He’s an ambitious guy, and I think he is gearing up for a presidential run someday, so that put an interesting wrinkle on things. Medur is fluent in English, and I got a great perspective from him on the past and future of the country, as well as some interesting insights about the Albanian military. Albanian marines are serving in Iraq, and we may not have another country in the world that supports US policies as ardently as Albania. I was shocked to see the amount of American flags flying right next to Albanian flags . . . and they LOVE Clinton for his commitment to the Balkans.

In all, we definitely made a difference in Albania. The students there are energetic about the future, and I think some of my perspectives about higher education in America helped them see what is possible. Albania has so much work to do, but they are a proud country, and I think democracy will thrive there if the US and other countries continue to be involved. The embassy has invited me to come back, and I hope to finish up a grant proposal to USAID in the next few weeks to organize a delegation of young professionals from the States to travel to Albania and set up a leadership development conference for young Albanians who aspire to lead with a moral conscious in their country. I may be asking several of you to participate, so I hope some of you can stand some bad food and dust for a couple weeks, because I think there is a lot of great work that can be done in Albania.

Look forward to connecting with you all soon and thanks for sharing this with me.

Best,

Steve

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