The Blue Monkey Review

Cindy had generously invited me along on her observation trip yesterday. We headed out of Podgorica at 0700, so that meant I had to catch the bus from Niksic one hour earlier. But, in spite of my aversion to early morning activities, the day's trip proved well worth the effort. Part of the benefit flowed from Cindy's reflection on what she has seen. "There are still schools using wood stoves here," she tells me. "Part of the students' responsibilities is to get the wood for the stove in the classroom." And, as we both note, there seems to be a sharp difference in the kinds of schools available to students. In Sutomore, a resort town on the coast, the school looks from the outside like a small version of a school you might find in Westmoreland County. The teacher who Cindy observes is Nevas, an energetic woman in her forties who clearly is eager to do a good job as a mentor. Almost everything about Nevas would qualify as unusual here. She divorced as a young adult, something not commonly done even now but very rare 20 years ago. A single mother, she has aggressively sought scholarship funding to travel all over the world.

Nevas' school (like her life) serves as a metaphor for Montenegro. Socially and economically, Montenegro should be part of the dynamic European system that sits just 90 miles away across the Adriatic. But it doesn't quite fit. Sutomore, for instance, sits in a beautiful cove. Montenegro's coast drops precipitously into the Adriatic, leaving few beaches but making up for it with startling scenery. The beach in Sutomore is rocky and not very broad. During the summer months the beach probably fills up with Montenegrins. Cafes, bars, discotheques line the beach front road and I find an open café even at 8:45 in the morning where I can enjoy a cappuccino and contemplate my temporary home.

The part of the university where I teach, the Filosofski Fakultet, provides some examples of the difficulties Montenegrins struggle with (faculty here refers to an administrative division and to the buildings, i.e., I go to the faculty to teach in the English program). The English program has attracted a talented group of teachers, both native speakers and Montenegrins, many with high levels of ability. Yet reform in language instruction has moved slowly. Several teachers have told me with regret that most of the English courses are still conducted in Serbian. And in spite of the hard work by Janko, who is the chair of the program, of and Dean Bojka, the faculty lacks simple material resources. For instance, I am approaching my mid-term exam and still do not have a course list. Equipment, like slide projectors and overhead projectors, either are not available or have fallen under the control of a single teacher who has no plans to share. Teachers share offices or go without. The faculty building looks like something from an inner city high school, the kind where children get left behind. If this building were at SHU we would not include it on our campus tour. We would be thinking about tearing it down.

We continued our journey down the coast. We passed through Bar, a port city with an overnight ferry to Bari, in Italy. Bar looks like a European city--lots of modern shops, wide roads, people who look like they are taking care of business. Janko had given it a high recommendation when he told me it was the one place in Montenegro that was clean. But we don't have time to spend there and keep heading south. Cindy points out that there are more culverts and tunnels as the road goes further south. She doesn't know why, but since we are in Montenegro she suspects that the explanation has to do with personal connections somewhere. I'm trying to absorb the idea that anything other than the public good could determine road improvements (I'm from Pennsylvania, after all) when we pass over a culvert where one side is blocked. As we pass the signs that stop the traffic we can see that the other side has a whole forming in it. And then we note that our side has sunk and also seems to be collapsing. "Is there another route for the trip back?" I ask. No, of course not.

Ulcinj might be the strangest place in Montenegro, and that would have to count for something pretty special. It did not belong in Montenegrin territory until after the Congress of Berlin in 1878, when the Congress signatories awarded the Albanian port city of Ulcinj to Montenegro in exchange for territory that Albania had seized elsewhere in Montenegro. Consequently, the city remains predominantly Albanian (up to 85%). Everything in the city is bilingual, including the schools. At the school where Cindy did her observation, all classes are available in Serbian and Albanian. Driving through the narrow streets to find parking, we saw Catholic Albanian women with headscarves. But we also saw four of the cities' five mosques. Ulcinj is predominantly Moslem. For what might be the first time in my life I heard the call for prayer as I walked away from the school where Cindy was doing her observation.

I spent my time exploring the Stari Grad, or Old City. These walled cities dot the Adriatic coast and are spread throughout the Mediterranean. Some kind of urban life has gone on in Ulcinj for thousands of years, and the Romans certainly fortified this area. So did the Venetians and the Turks in their turn. The walls of today's old city, combined with its location on a spit of land surrounded by water on three sides, would have made it just about impregnable. But stone walls with clear views of green ocean have more attraction for tourists than for invaders these days. There are several restaurants and at least two hotels in the Stari Grad, and even though many people who are not tourists still live there, the old fortress seems to be getting ready for the foreign invaders.

In fact, the entrance is a construction site. I ask a boy who is standing nearby if I can get into the old city and he tells me that I can and a good deal more than I couldn't follow. He points the way in, over the planks that allow the workers to walk over the ditch that goes through the door in the city wall. I head up the hill, use the planks as needed, and enter the fortifications in the middle of the construction project. Back home, this would be a hard hat area and certainly not open for visitors. But workers here have no hard hats. When someone approaches giving me a suspicious look I ask if I can look around (I probably said something like, "Can I around see?") He says yes, then asks where I'm from. I give him the good news, and he becomes a little more talkative. Turns out, he is the engineer or project manager here, and he tells me that they are putting a conduit into the old city for power and water. But this project clearly is being done on a Montenegrin shoestring, and the project manager (who is from Croatia) sees it as making the best of a bad situation. Twice in our talk he concluded one of his explanations with an adjective and epithet rolled up into the one word, "balkan." (bal-KAN)

That's probably the only adequate term for education here. In case we might have missed the point that educators are struggling, the principal at the school where Cindy did her observation helped clarify the situation. We had a little time in the school before Cindy and the teacher, Nada, went to class. So she invited us for coffee or tea. We demurred, but it quickly became clear that we could not hold out against this hospitality. She showed us into the principal's office and he asked what we would like: "Coffee, teac, juice, schnapps." Nada was going through the refrigerator and turned to smile and ask if I'd like some liquor. I thought it best to decline. Nada had to leave for a few minutes and Cindy began to ask the principal some general questions about the school. Within minutes he had begun to discuss, with some heat, the situation he faced (Cindy had to give me the details later). Both he and his wife taught, he said, and yet they could hardly make enough to live on. Anyone in the area who gains professional certification takes off. And students have no motivation, since they don't see that education offers them much. When Nada returned, she gave me other examples. Teachers who rented out their homes during the summer months or worked extra jobs after finishing teaching. They didn't take on the extra burdens for more consumption, but just to have enough for their families.

"That kind of thing doesn't surprise me anymore," Cindy told me on the way back as we sped up to get over the collapsing culvert as fast as we could. "It seems normal." I suppose that could apply to our whole day. Balkan.