The Blue Monkey Review

“How long does the bus to Istanbul take?” asks one of the foreign teachers at the faculty in Nikšić.

“Not that long,” Janko tells her. “But it is full of those guys you see with the clothes. Smoking all the time.”

The guys with the clothes? In fact, there are guys with lots of to sell in Nikšić and all over Montenegro. Before I came here Yaacov Lozowick, archivist at Yad Vashem, wrote to ask me if I was going to the Montenegro, the one where half the people were engaged in smuggling? Well, yes, that’s the one.

In 1999 British Prime Minister Tony Blair said that Kosovo was “on the doorstep of Europe.” Quite apart from Blair’s strange sense of geography, this gives you a notion of how the Balkan’s figure into the economic system of Europe. And if you examine a map you will note that Montenegro shares a border with Kosovo and so must also be out there on Europe’s front stoop. But, Montenegro, with regular flights to Frankfurt and ferries three times a week to and from Bari, in Italy, is much easier to reach than Kosovo.

It’s no wonder, then, that goods traveling from East to West or vice versa should make their way through Montenegro. News reports have shown car loads of drugs stopped on the highway or seized in the port of Bar. Some of the people tell me that they’ve met people who talk quite casually of taking drugs into western Europe. But, the drug trade is global and changes its transfer points as the needs of the trade dictate. Although I don’t know if we have our own syndicates here, I suspect that involvement with the drug business here is opportunistic rather than integral.

But drugs are really just part of the emporium that is Montenegro, which is a kind of upside down iceberg where what is most abundant is also hard to miss. Trade in goods that are not, strictly speaking, legal, tells a lot about the country. For instance, it explains on both the supply and the demand sides the ubiquity of men wearing leather jackets. It also clears up why cigarettes seem to be sold by wandering young men with open boxes filled with a variety of brands, or women sitting on street corners covering up their goods with plastic sheeting during the rain. One recent headline said that “Rome Wants to Be Paid for Cigarettes.” The car ferry from Bari must provide regular relief for Montenegrins yearning to breathe the air of Marlboro country.

Since the topic of cars has arisen more or less spontaneously, let’s talk about that. Last week in Podgorica I made arrangements to rent a car to go to Dubrovnik to pick up Ruth. The receptionist, Ivana, had graduated from the Nikšić faculty and had yet to secure regular, professional employment, so she enjoyed the opportunity to speak English. She told me that normally there is a deposit of 1000 euros to rent a car, but ask the manager to waive the deposit. So, I enjoyed the décor of the rental office and had a glass of blueberry juice and chatted with Ivana for a few minutes..

“Who rents cars?” I asked, to make small talk.

“Mostly foreigners. Or people who want to go abroad.” I must have looked a little puzzled at that latter information, because she added, “Maybe you know, or maybe you don’t know, people cannot drive cars out of the country. Many cars here don’t have official papers, because maybe they are stolen in Germany.”

The manager arrived about this time so we could perform the waiving of the fee ritual. Nema problema, because I’m a professor at the faculty and I know Cindy who teaches in the faculty and whom Ivana knows. Later in the day I had coffee with this very same Cindy, and she told me that many stolen cars end up here. But the other, perhaps more common avenue is that someone of Balkan descent will purchase a car in Germany and drive it here, sell it for a good but still bargain price, then go back to Germany to report the car as stolen. When Cindy and her husband bought their car a while back, they purchased an older model Audi just so it would be visibly too old to attract suspicion as a stolen (or “stolen”) vehicle.

All this talk of stolen cars and contraband cigarettes might lead one to conclude that Montenegro suffers a lack of law-enforcement personnel. That conclusion would be wrong. Montenegro must have one of the highest police to population ratios of any country in Europe. Najo, my landlord, says that he spent three months with his brother in Sweden some years ago and saw one policeman in that time. Here, you see them everywhere—they are about as common as the Roma, though rarely as active. There might be one for every other street corner if they were spread out, but they generally stand in groups, three being the most popular nunmber of associates. And often you see them along the roadways, flagging drivers down and—well, I don’t know what. Enforcing some laws, I suppose.

Cindy has been stopped many times, and has had to show no end of papers to prove that her vehicle is legal. True, it is too old to make sense as a stolen car, but the other quirk here is that foreigners cannot legally own a car. So, although Cindy’s car and her ownership are perfectly legal, it isn’t something simple like purchasing a car and registering it in one’s own name. Thus, every so often she has to work through this with members of the constabulary.

“But, I’ve never had to pay a bribe,” she concludes with relief and triumph.

In spite of the vigilance of the police, contraband goods somehow slip into the country. In fact, if Nikšić is a guide, the country is awash with smuggled goods. There are blocks in Nikšić where, every week day, cars line up and their drivers unload wares for sale. I had assumed that the kiwi I purchased from one of these car peddlers came directly from farmers in the Montenegrin countryside. I think that is usually the case, but the last kilo I bought came already packaged and with an Italian label.

The other goods on sale are almost all more banal than kiwi. Nikšić peddlers could fill a Sam’s Club with the underwear, gloves, slippers, and petrochemical furniture they offer for sale. I don’t take pride in my violations of the social contract, but I think my umbrella came from a load that fell off a truck somewhere in Szechuan province. No doubt it was carried along the silk road to Istanbul. There,
a tall, leather-jacketed, chain-smoking Montenegrin bought it from some smuggler’s souk, and loaded it with his other checked luggage onto the bus for the ride home.

Posted by at 10:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Ponedjeljak

A strike demonstration had been planned for 10 A.M. in front of the main government building. So, instead of going to the USAID funded program office there, I was directed to go the building for RTV Montenegro. Once there I call the journalist who will be interviewing me, Jelena Bobicic. She is ready for me and quickly takes me to the news room where we find a table with a huge flatscreen computer monitor. Jelena leaves, but in minutes she returns with the cameramen and soon enough the translator joins us.

Jelena is young and very nice, and she is beautiful. But other than having her company for the half an hour that the interview takes, I’m not happy about it. I had discussed the questions with Irena, the woman from Breaker Point who set up the interview. I did manage to have her drop the questions about “high context, low context” cultures, but otherwise I am still expected to discuss issues related to business culture and communication. “What impact does diversity have on American business culture? Is this something that affects global markets?” Jelena asks me. I improvise. I say something about targeted advertising. A casual viewer who knows nothing about this topic will think I’ve wandered the globe studying this very issue. “How have new technologies shaped the use of English language?” I really struggle with this, something that is painfully evident when I see myself the following evening on TV. I give one of my now world-famous mid-sentence pauses that seem to be for emphasis but really signal a totally blank mind. Finally Jelena asks about youth in the U.S. and Montenegro, something I can talk about intelligently.

And then it is over.

I give away more Seton Hill University pens and continue a conversation that had started a few minutes before with a new acquaintance. This is not Jelena, of course, but Momir, the translator. He is a young man, 30 or less, who has lived and worked in London. I’m eager for a coffee, and Momir seems eager to talk. I had told him that I arrived in Nikšić just after the big snow. “So, you saw how well organized everything is?” His sardonic humor and his evident frustration with his homeland continued through our talk. “There is corruption everywhere,” he tells me with some heat after we find an outdoor table at a café across the street from the RTV headquarters. How many politicians in the governing coalition have children in foreign universities? What bribes do you have to pay to have the same services that in England you would receive by filling out a form?

And he also complains about the backward attitudes, as he sees it, of many Montenegrins. “Until a few years ago journalists edited tapes by slicing them with a razor where they wanted to make a splice. The BBC provided some digital editing machines, so now it can be done on a computer. But there are still people who resist learning. I taught my 65 year old father how to work a computer, but we have people at the station who are 45 who won’t learn. Anywhere else in the world, you don’t want to learn a new technology then you can leave because someone younger will come in to do it.”

I ask Momir about the referendum, the topic that frequently makes front page headlines in Montenegrin papers. Should Montenegro separate from Serbia and become fully independent? “I don’t think we should be talking about that,” he says. “The media should not pay attention to that. There are too many economic issues that are far more important.” His father, for instance, worked forty years in a factory and now lives on 150 euros a month. Salaries here are distressingly low.

Yet, people will go without food “so they can have a new cell phone.” Everyone seems to have a cell phone. The desire for consumer goods here seems completely disconnected with the economic level of the country. Most cars here are tiny, Ladas or Skodas or ancient Fiats. But a surprising number of Audis and BMWs show up on the streets of Nikšić and Podgorica. And young women (from teens to young mothers) dress very well. There is no shortage here of footwear that combines the worst features of stiletto heels with cowboys boots. Nina told me that she asked her women students about their fashions. They told her exactly what each item of clothing and accessory cost, totaling for many of them 100 euros or more. This is in a country where teachers earn 200 or 300 euros a month.

Momir sees many good things in Montenegro, in spite of his frustration. He returned here with his Croatian wife because they plan to start a family soon. “I remember when I was young I could just go outside and play, and no one had to watch me. When I got hungry, I could knock on any door and someone would feed me.” I see part of this phenomenon daily—children playing near their apartment blocs with no adults watching, let along supervising. Sometimes there are adults present, going about their own business. Sometimes there are no adults anywhere. And, “If you have to pay for something in London and you lack one penny, then that’s too bad. But here if you don’t have what you need, even if it’s 10 euros, someone lets you have the money.”

Momir is making some investments, and he is also attempting to launch his own business, selling Montenegrin properties over the internet. There are some good ones available, so you should check out.

Srijeda

Last night I watched myself on Montenegrin television. I should mention that production values here are not what they are at, say, NBC. My three minute interview was used as color in a program on business communication, but that program consisted of two women professionals—one a communication consultant at some ministry, another a professor in my Filozofski Fakultet—sitting with an interviewer and answering questions. They could have been used as examples of “low context” culture, the two of them about as animated as distant cousins at a Baptist funeral (and I’m not going to say anything about their make-up choices). My three-minute interview, by contrast, showed a man struggling to make the best of a bad situation. I took some comfort from knowing that no one, certainly no one I know, could possibly have an interest in seeing this program. And, even though it was misspelled once, Seton Hill University appeared on the screen when my face was there.

After the interview I return to reading Nell Irvin Painter, Standing at Armageddon. My cell phone starts buzzing and making other noises, its non-subtle message alert. “I JUST SAW YOU ON TV,” I read from my friend Goran. Goran is writing a dissertation that compares Serbian and American literature. What, I wonder, could have led a Thomas Pynchon scholar to watch that program?

This morning I had a meeting with one of students in my American Civilization course. Early in the term I had asked if any students would volunteer to take me to an Orthodox service. Petar Božović was the only one who came forward, but it turns out he is not Orthodox but Jehovah’s Witness. I declined his invitation to the Kingdom Hall in Podgorica, but we agreed to meet later to talk about the Witness movement in Montenegro.

There was no hot water in my apartment this morning, so I didn’t shave and feel a bit more “balkan” than usual when I go out. On my way to the faculty I see the cleaning woman who tidies up in my classroom when my last class leaves. Over the weeks we have become cordial, especially as week by week I can say slightly more and make sense of more of what she says to me. We greet one another and then she tells me, “I saw you on TV last night.” I confess and then go about my business.

Petar and I head into the center of town. Nikšić’s town square has two broad streets leading into it from either side, both of which allow only pedestrian traffic on the long blocks just before the square. On the side nearer the faculty the block is almost solidly lined with cafes and bars, most of them with outdoor seating. A lot of the seating is already taken at 10:30, and just like every other day when I’ve gone there, the pedestrian areas have lots of people, mostly male people, standing or sitting around. I can’t figure this out. They can’t all be Fulbright scholars.

Petar and I have a good talk. He explains his own religious quest, how he began a search for real meaning in his late teens. What impressed him about the Witnesses, he tells me, is that the people who represented them practiced what they preached. Witness families seems to have a higher level of moral behavior than other families. And the kind of love shown for other Witnesses, who come from all over the world, greatly impresses Petar.

Petar, like other serious young people I’ve met here, feels a need to gain some distance from his own culture at the same time that he wants to change it. He knows his Bible very well, and shows me passages in an English translation that I note was published in Pennsylvania. He clearly takes seriously his mission as a Witness. I wonder how this message, one that grew out of the local preoccupations of American Protestants, has managed to find any hold at all here in the Balkans. Perhaps, in spite of its dramatic vision of an apocalyptic future the Jehovah’s Witness movement may contain some form of the optimism of its country of origin. That may explain Petar’s comparative lightness of spirit.

In fact, heaviness of spirit often accompanies the skepticism of many of the people I’ve met here. “How do you find Montenegro?” asks Tanja, another of my students who I happen to meet outside the faculty. In Serbian or English, “Kako je u Crnoj Gori?” is the most common question that I’m asked by Montenegrins. “Everything is very nice,” I told a clerk in a shop earlier this week. “It is very interesting,” I tell Tanja. “Interesting?” she responds, finding even this ambivalent reply unexpectedly positive, then asks “How do you like Nikšić?” Another common question, though the subtext is not always so well hidden. At the airport two weeks ago I happened to see Slavica, who is my contact person at the consulate. The first thing she said to me was, “How much do you hate living in Nikšić?”

“It’s very quiet here,” I tell Tanja. Again, she finds my enthusiasm hard to believe. She obviously feels much less warmly toward Nikšić (she commutes from Podgorica) and even toward her country.

“I feel like a bird with clipped wings,” she tells me. Since the breakup of Yugoslavia and the war in the 1990s, Serbians and Montenegrins cannot travel except to a few Balkan countries without a visa. The economy, of course, is the other pillar of Montenegrin pessimism. When I suggest that political and economic change might occur rather quickly, Tanja responds, “Maybe in a thousand years.”

I suspect the changes will come more quickly than she will be able to believe.
A point that I felt safe to make in my TV interview was that a rapid growth in the economy here in Montenegro could lead to very rapid changes, especially for young people. The desire for consumer goods already has a strong presence here. The opportunity to acquire more of the good things of life (i.e. the things that people on TV have) could transform the way many Montenegrins live. The free enjoyment of leisure might change, for instance, or the extended dependence of children and youth, the tight living spaces, and perhaps even the tightly knit family units. None of my interviewers has asked me about that, so I will probably leave here without acting out the role of Jeremiah.

Posted by at 3:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Do you see now how dirty Niksic is? -- Janko

During my visit to Ulcinj, I made the acquaintance of Bernard. He is an Albanian Montenegrin, a former student of Cindy’s who graduated from the faculty in Niksic four years ago. Currently he performs civilian service at the school we visited in Ulcinj in place of military service. Bernard, who speaks excellent English, provides some sense of the serious young Montenegrins who must be spread throughout the country. He has taken conflict resolution training and has run workshops as a conflict resolution trainer. He participates in the yearly cleanup of Ulcinj after the tourist season, and writes a column for the local newspaper about current problems.

Cindy, Bernard, and I enjoyed an hour or so on the terrace of a café overlooking the beach in Ulcinj. Spring has arrived in Montenegro, so we could sit outside in ordinary clothing and exchange a little winter pallor for some ruddiness. As we talked, the topic turned to trash. “If we wait,” Bernard says, “we might see a man come and throw his garbage into the sea.” Sad as it is to report, trash heaps defile the beauty of both the beaches I visited this week, in Sutomore and Ulcinj. As a former teacher in Niksic told me, Sutomore is best “avoided during the beach season as it turns into a virtual cesspit. … all the beaches… become trash-strewn once people start going to them--empty plastic water bottles floating in great profundity all over the shore line, not to mention other obnoxious materials.” In spite of the efforts of Bernard’s friend, the environmentalist who organizes the yearly cleanup, Ulcinj residents continue to treat trash disposal cavalierly.

But, trash is a problem all over the country. Scrupulous about their personal appearance and about the cleanliness in their homes and shops, Montenegrins seemingly have little care for their public spaces. Littering seems to hold no social stigma. I remember pulling into a roadside turnout in Greece (probably because we were lost and needed to study the map) and noting that all of the visible trash seemed to be inside the trash receptacles. A similar turnout on the mountain road to Cetinje had no receptacle at all and trash was everywhere. In Niksic the dumpsters line major streets rather than being tucked away in parking lots. When they fill up the people in the apartment blocs leave the shopping bags full of garbage all around the dumpster. Even though the garbage crews clean these up when they collect trash, some remains and accumulates. (It is fairly common to see fires set inside the dumpsters to take care of trash that has yet to be collected.) The snow that covered my temporary home town for most of February gave me an impression of clean streets. With the spring thaw, that impression is also melting away.

So, faced with this clear problem, the three of us conducted an impromptu seminar as we finished our cappuccinos. On one level, the problem has an economic element. Montenegro has few resources to spare on trash collection. Maybe the dumpsters along the main roads in Niksic are a beacon of hope. They are much smaller than dumpsters in the U.S., and the garbage trucks here are smaller, too. But I wonder if those dumpsters represent an effort to get Montenegro to clean up its act, or rather, its streets. They are made in Greece, and they all look about the same age, i.e., fairly new. And lately I’ve noticed that some of the garbage trucks carry the European Union symbol. Maybe outside funding has moved into the country to help meet this problem.

There is also the level of social control. For instance, Cindy and I both remember “keep America clean” campaigns from our youths (which were decades apart). “Give a hoot, don’t pollute” she quotes from one such campaign. Plus, she tells Bernard, you get fined in the U.S. for littering. But even social control depends on cultural factors. Cindy talks about the impression that her teachers made on her when they discussed littering and recycling at school. Bernard responds that they have programs like that in Unlcinj, “but when the children tell their parents they laugh at them.” Montenegrins have inherited attitudes that prevailed during Communist rule. They tend to see government as both corrupt and incompetent. Even though Montenegrins recognize the advantages of membership in the E.U., they don’t take kindly to initiatives from the Union or from NGOs that try to change practices here (E.U. efforts to establish gun control here meet with about the same response that they would in Pennsylvania, though probably without the violence that would ensue in the Commonwealth). But garbage, in particular, seems to suffer from cultural marginalization. The clearest sign of this is that garbage crews are overwhelmingly made up of Roma. If a non-Roma is in the crew, he will be the truck driver.

It strikes me that Montenegrins have to embrace the change in practice (and the change of culture it implies) or lose some part of their country. I’ve described the coast, so readers will know that this tiny country offers some stunning scenery and attractive destinations for tourists. But the country has far more than a remarkable coastline. When I first saw Lake Skadar from my seat in a bus I almost jumped off my seat. The mountains that cover most of the country offer hiking, skiing, and probably every other outdoor activity imaginable. But western tourists won’t put up with litter. If Montenegrin’s don’t clean it up, then parts of their heritage will be lost as outsiders realize the wealth to be reaped from the world’s largest industry.

Posted by at 1:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

“This will only take five or ten minutes,” Nenad tells me. He is the interviewer from state television and we are arranging ourselves in the meeting room at the American Corner (the American cultural center) in Podgorica. In one of life's bizarre turns, this is my second TV interview of the day. When I arrived in Podgorica a few hours before and walked across the central square (parking lot) a woman with a microphone and her cameraman latched onto me. “Ne govorim Srpski,” I told them, but to no avail. The fact that I could tell them I didn’t speak Serbian meant that I knew enough for their purposes. She kept asking me what I thought of Dukanovic, Montenegro’s prime minister, and my view on the referendum to determine if Montenegro will remain in union with Serbia. “I don’t know much about Dukanovic,” I said, and other things in my garbled Serbian. But in the end she got a sound bite from me, that I believed there should be a referendum. That should really advance U.S. / Montenegrin relations.

“You were here today discussing American youth culture,” Nenad begins, and asks me to explain what I mean by this term. He obviously was listening to my presentation, because I began by asking the audience to clarify what we meant by those terms, “youth” and “culture.” The group responded well. Almost all of the 20 or so in attendance were students who came either with Nina or Cindy. They had excellent English by and large, and they clearly found American youth and culture very interesting.

“What are some of the features of this American youth culture?” Nenad continued. I responded a bit generally here, talking about the social events in American high schools. In my presentation I had concentrated on the prom, because the Seventeen magazine that I had with me featured an article on “Great Prom Dresses (Under $100).” Many of the students knew about proms, knew that they were dances at the end of high school. That a prom queen is elected. All correct. “But you have to understand,” I told them, “that for many American girls, and for many boys, too, the prom is the greatest event in life between birth and marriage. And for some, it will be the greatest event of their entire lives.” At this Cindy made a face. Later on, though, TJ, who is the public affairs officer at the consulate and who also came to the talk, held forth at length about his prom. TJ’s prom ranked among the big moments in his life.

“What are some of the influences of American youth?” Nenad asks. It would be hard for me to overstate this because I see the impact of the peer culture everywhere, and not just in American society. I try to keep my shoulders from hunching as I tell him about youth culture and both fashion and music. “From the 1950s forward,” I had told the students earlier, “every new development in popular music began as a fad among youth.” But I could as readily say that American youth fads have set the pace for every new type of popular music worldwide. There are exceptions, of course. I’m not here to coin hyperbole.

“And what are some comparisons between youth culture in America and in Montenegro?” Lovely. Montenegrins love to hear what other people thing about them, though it bears remembering that even though they are their own harshest critics, they don’t particularly care for criticism from outsiders. Later in the evening Cindy tells me that her students complain to her, “You can’t hold us to American standards. We are at a lower level of development.”

“I don’t know much about Montenegrin youth,” I begin, carefully. In fact, much of what I know about Montenegrin youth I had learned in the previous hour. When I had finished the material I wanted to cover and asked for questions, Nina had asked the same question that Nenad later poses, about comparing youth in the two countries. At this I returned to my bag and pulled out a Croatian magazine entitled Teen that I had purchased just a few hours before in Podgorica. The themes and issues in Teen are strikingly similar to those in Seventeen. Fashion and cosmetics take up a lot of room, but so do issues about boys (Decki), dates (one article talked about ways to keep the first one from turning into a disaster), appearance and physical changes (an article about grudi, i.e. breasts), and sex. One girl had written, “I kissed my (female) friend. Am I normal?” Dr. Sanja wrote back very good advice, telling the girl that sexual identity takes some strange turns in adolescents and not to worry about this.

But differences exist, and these may be more important than the differences. “Do you think of yourselves as rebellious?” Cindy had asked. “Does there come a time in adolescence when you feel your parents know nothing?” To my surprise the students who responded said no. They had more respect for tradition and for their parents and grandparents. In the U.S. youth culture promotes both individualism and conformity. Adolescents become so devoted to their peer group that they readily reject much of what their parents stand for. This probably promotes individuation, the separation from the parents that is necessary for adulthood. But that process takes a much different shape in Montenegro. “Many of us live with our parents until we are 30.” One woman referred to herself as an exception, but she recognized that extended dependence was the norm. Everyone else in the room agreed.

The interview ended, I shook hands with Nenad and thanked the cameraman. They will take out all the stupid stuff, I told myself, and felt comforted. I might have congratulated that I had advanced one of my main projects here in Montenegro, to make Seton Hill University better known than Seton Hall, to make Seton Hill one of the best-known American universities in the country. I’ve given away many Seton Hill paraphernalia, and I mention the school when I can and sometimes when I probably shouldn’t. But the press releases for this talk, picked up by five or six newspapers in both Latin and Cyrillic script, and by the Montenegrin web hosting service, identified me as a professor at “Grinzberg univerzeteta.” The struggle continues.

Posted by at 10:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

"The worst school that I've been in is in Niksic. I was there in January last year and it was so cold that I had on my coat, hat, and gloves. That's how the teacher dressed, too. Periods were shortened to 30 minutes because it was too cold for the students." Cindy Rauth, a teaching fellow now in her third year in Montenegro, continues. "It was so cold that they left the front door to the school open. It made no difference. And the windows in the bathrooms are just openings with no glass." Thanks to Cindy's initiative, student teachers can now have practica in schools throughout the country, and she has worked during the last two years to train teachers as mentors for student teachers. I attended part of one of her workshops a few weeks ago and can attest that the training she offers brings all of the best practices from American experience to English teachers in Montenegro. But Cindy is also realistic, and a bit pessimistic, about the state of education here.

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.

Posted by at 2:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

On March 4 I left my apartment in Niksic at 6 a.m. and tramped over snow-covered roads, with snow falling all around me, to catch the van at the hotel for the Podgorica airport. Eleven hours later I walked out of the Monastiraki metro station in Athens. I was fairly tired by then, but I did note that it felt warmer outside on Athinas Street than it had inside the Podgorica airport.

Carol and I had planned several weeks before to meet in Greece for spring break. It is carnivale time in Greece this weekend. During the week we saw signs of clowns everywhere, and even some clowns. We saw children gathering for a parade, the little boys dressed like cowboys and their mothers dressed like Indians in short Indian dresses and with pointed high heel boots. A glance at the calendar, however, will show that it is not really spring. "We say here that March is the cruelest month of winter," a pharmacist on Hydra told us. The bathing suit in my suitcase was the one piece of clothing I never used. And Carol ended up buying two different sweaters. But, with the exception of one very gray and rainy day, we had a mix of sun and clouds. True, we had some short showers on our drive along the southern coast of Attica to Delphi. And, it did almost turn into snow just as we reached Delphi. Still, we had nice enough weather on Aegina for Carol to convince me that we should rent a scooter for a mad dash from one end of the island to the other and back. Chilly, yes. But still a blast. From the perspective of winter in Pittsburgh, or in the mountains of Montenegro, the weather was nearly perfect.

We noticed on our first full day here that you can see the weather shaping up. The rain stopped, and stayed away as we made our way to the Acropolis, and from there we could see the clouds breaking up in Aegean and sunshine headed our way. It never really reached us, but again and again during the subsequent week we could watch the weather in other parts of Greece. Driving along the northern coast of the Peloponnese we could look across the Gulf of Corinth at snow capped peaks in Attica (pretty darn close to our destination) and see the rain falling into valleys ahead of us. The drama of weather added to the spectacular scenery all around us.

Saying spectacular scenery can easily be overused in talking about Greece, and I may have already crossed the line. The country is beautiful, with its Mediterranean climate and terrain. From my meager knowledge of geology, it seems to me that Greek soil sits mainly atop granite and limestone. And it doesn't sit very far atop of them. The marble that covered the Parthenon came from quarries close to Athens, and both quarries and the sale of marble and granite are common sights in Greece, as are rocky mountain peaks. The terrain left me with the impression of being in mountains that popped up through the water, or that stood in the wrong place when the Mediterranean formed. From the cruise ship we took out to the islands, we looked around at mountain peaks. And along the coastal roads it is clear that much of Greece has almost no coastal plain, let alone a piedmont. In Nafplio, where we stayed two nights, we climbed the thousand steps up to the Turkish fortress and from there could see just how little beach surrounds the entire peninsula where the town sits. There are interior valleys, in both Attica and the Peloponnese, and these must have produced huge grain crops in ancient times. These valleys, and even the vast stretches of water, serve as interludes between mountains, and they provide stunning vistas.

Some of those vistas have changed dramatically since distant antiquity. From the mountainside ruins of Mycenae, you can look across the broad plain that was once the port that gave the city its control of such vast trade that it traded influence with Egypt. This change in the landscape that almost counts as geological time gives some purchase on the antiquity of civilization in Greece. Mycenae became a center of a network of trade and conquest so impressive that the legend of the Trojan war gave the leadership of the Greeks to the king of Mycenae. The Lion's Gate that guards the entrance to the city is the earliest monumental sculpture in Europe, and the royal tomb called the Treasury of Atreus was the largest domed structure in Europe until the construction of the Pantheon in Rome more than a thousand years later. Mycenae had declined into insignificance before Delphi became a center for the worship of Apollo and the oracle there became the source of wisdom for all great decisions. That tradition had grown old and probably past its peak when Midas consulted the oracle on the wisdom of going to war with the Persians (and I have to say that the oracle's answer could have been cooked up by anyone, myself included). And it was only after the decades of war with Persia that Athenians began construction of the Parthenon whose ruins we now see.

Except for a cruise to the islands, Carol and I made our own way around Greece via scooter and autombile. Or, put another way, we got lost all over Greece. Even though there are very few roads on the island of Aegina, signage there makes even Pittsburgh's "system" look scrupulous. We never had a problem there, though we did have to ask some passersby to give us reality checks. We had a far more consuming experience in the Peloponnese, taking a "shortcut" to the coast that sent us into terrain unexplored by any tourist since Herodotus. We drove over mountaintops through olive groves that seemed to be planted in the rocks the soil was so stony. We had to stop as a goatherd took his flock across our path. We went down one mountainside on switchback roads so narrow and sharp that I spent all my concentration on driving and could not enjoy the spectacle of hundreds of feet of cliff right next to us. Several times, though, Carol pointed out that there were no guard rails. We entered villages with only a couple of streets leading out, with no sign to give away the route we needed, and with neither road looking promising.

Anyone who knows the two of us will know that we have quite different personalities. And, that person might think that we would react differently to getting lost in a strange country. And that would be correct. On our Peloponnese adventure, I kept focusing more and more on the gathering disaster, as I saw it, while Carol tried to point out that we had the chance to see the real Greece. As I sat wondering if such a thing as a glass existed, Carol kept trying to convince me that it was at least half full. "It could be worse. At least the road is paved." Half an hour later, in an olive grove we had to pull off the road to let a truck pass in the opposite direction, and when we drove on we went immediately onto a dirt road. I could not help but remember that Carol had also said, "At least it's not raining." Not much further, though, we found the one sign that showed us how to find our way out. Of course, the sign had been knocked down so we had to reconstruct what directions it would have given if it had been fully functional.

What we didn't know when we planned the trip is how long it takes to get around in Greece. The roads are far better than in less developed countries, like, say, Montenegro, but they wind around all that geography that makes the trip such a treat for the eyes. But, it is also true that because we tended to arrive at places either very early or just before they closed (3 p.m. in many places in the off-season) we often had sites to ourselves. That was true in the Treasury of Atreus and at Delphi where Carol began to feel the presence of the divine. And we had 10 early morning minutes free of school children from France at the Theatre of Epidaurus, time for me to stand in the center of the circle and declaim the first stanza of "Gunga Din" and hear my voice magnified by the theatre's perfect acoustics. So, Carol was right. The cup was more than half full.

Since we showed such a talent for getting off the beaten path, we ended up turning to local citizens for help with directions. I should have learned after our Aegina adventure that I needed more than five words in Greek. But, resistant to change as always, I found myself trying to communicate with innocent bystanders in my usual mixture of dumb looks and sentence fragments. I think we have a record for the short time we were there for accosting people who had never before spoken to a tourist. "Pros Sofikia?" I would say with a confused look that let them know not to waste words in their answer. One elderly grandmother all in black, including the her scarf, didn't note that look and gave me quite explicit directions that fortunately included hand signs for straight, left, right, though there were distressingly many direction changes. And then she ended her talk with a sign designating a rightward motion as she said something like "fffwwwt." That seemed clear enough, but contained in it was the information that we would be boldly going where no tourist man and woman had ever gone before.

Posted by at 1:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Clan 1: Prof. John Spurlock iz SAD-a, angazue se za saradnika-lektora za engleski jezik na Filozofskom fakultetu, a poslodavac se obavezuje da za izvrseni rad plati odgovarajucu nadoknadu.

Of everything that I"ve written about so far, I have said less about teaching than just about anything else I"ve done since arriving. So, as my epigraph I insert clause 1 of my contract just to demonstrate that I really do work here. (It lacks some of the markings that are used in the Latin alphabet in Serbia and Montenegro--I just haven't found the right ASCII characters yet.)

For a variety of reasons, I find it harder to offer any valuable ideas about teaching here than about other experiences. For one thing, I am not teaching what I would call a lot. I have two sections of one class, and these meet one day a week back to back. So, from 3:30 to 6:30 I'm presenting to my class. And then we do not see one another for seven days. But I think behind my hesitation is some kind of performance anxiety. I came here to teach, and after 25 years (and counting) it should be something that I do well. And the topic of the course--American Civilization--is so familiar to me that I have no trouble organizing lectures except that I have too much to say for the time provided. But if I'm going to say something about teaching American history it should be something profound.

Then again, maybe not. Let me follow the good example set by Pedablogue and simply talk about some of the class activities.

First, the students: They have generally good English skills as far as their response to my questions reveal. They are all what we would refer to as "traditional age" at Seton Hill. One or two of the males might be in their mid-twenties, but none of the females look more than 20, and very few look to be more than 18. They know quite a lot about the U.S. from media, but they have also had some exposure to American history. I constantly check in to see if they know a name or term. All of my college students will have at least heard the term indentured servant, but these students were not familiar with it. On the other hand, when I reminded them offhandedly last class that Thomas Jefferson had written the Declaration of Independence, one of the boys said, "We already knew that."

As more than one of my colleagues here has mentioned, these first year students are still adjusting to university life. In my larger class (100 are enrolled, but attendance is more like 70) many students sitting further back in the class spend time talking and messaging their friends. When it becomes too much I stop talking and they settle down, or else their classmates further forward tell them to shut up. This really annoys some of my more earnest students. One wrote on the American Civilization blog that I might need to kick some students out of class. That gave me an idea for something to do in class.

At the beginning of each class I spend a little time discussing a topic with them, something that I can then as a means of discussing an issue that we will cover in the lesson. I had planned to deal with the problems of early republican government, the conflict of private and public or civic interests. So at the beginning of my class last Monday I began by mentioning that someone had written about his frustration with the irritating habits of some of his coursemates. And I then discussed what I thought were the clauses of our social contract: That they had no reason to be in the class unless they were listening to me and to their classmates, and possibly participating. No one got up to leave even when I pointed out that I did not take role and that the lecture notes are all available online or in hard copy.

I then asked what interest any of them could have to be in the class. "Why are you here?" I asked in one form or another a few times. This apparently was a question they do not hear very often from their instructors, and they seemed to have spent little time reflecting on it. Because I clearly had no intention of letting them off without responding, they began to offer some answers. As would be the case back home, some of the answers seemed almost too correct. "I want to learn better English. I like to have class in which I hear good English spoke." That answer came from a girl who I know was saying the whole truth--she literally sits on the edge of her seat and has the look of someone who really is eager to learn. And she does this for a full hour and a half. "We want to learn about American culture," said someone else. "We like class."

I kept pressing them, though, trying to show that I would not give up teaching if they had less than supportive answers. As I pushed some had to admit that the course was required. "But why take this program?" i.e., why major in English. "I love the English language," said a girl in the second period. Again, I have no reason to doubt her sincerity. "But why not biology or German?" It took longer than I expected for them to identify motivations that would qualify as really self-interested. "I want to be a translator," was on of the common ones. "I want to travel."

Then I changed direction slightly and asked if they had any civic motivation for being in this class or in English as a program. Their hesitation at owning their self-interest suddenly seemed mild compared to their hesitation over this question. Naturally, I had to explain my question. "Does taking this program allow you do something for other people? For your country? For your city?" It took quite a while, and more pump priming, before they began to offer some ideas. "If I translate movie, that could be good for some people." "It will help my country not be so backward." But, in general, it seemed to me that they were making up their answers as they sat there in front of me.

This struck me as very interesting. In my classes at Seton Hill University students, with very little prodding, will produce answers that display an almost aggressive ideal of civic responsibility. Of course, most of my history students, and a large portion of our students generally, plan to be teachers. "I love children and want to help them," is, in one form or another, the kind of thing you will often hear SHU students claim. In fact, they often ignore self-interest to jump to their sense of civic duty. I tend to discount this somewhat. I'm enough of a liberal to believe that self-interest comes from a deeper and more basic region of our selves than does our sense of common humanity.

The issue of teaching, in fact, made the contrast between my students here and my students in Pennsylvania sharper still. In an effort to help them out of being stuck on this question, I asked if any of them planned to teach. It surprised me that instead of a show of hands all I got was laughter. It took a few minutes of urging before anyone would admit that they wanted to teach. A few of them want to teach, even though the pay for teachers here is miserable. In my smaller class only one student said she planned to teach. And I had to walk her through the possible civil consequences that teaching might entail: "You will work with children, right? And that will help them be better students and better adults, right?" She agreed, but she added nothing to what I proposed.

In both classes, someone asked me, "Well tell us, what are you doing here?" I didn't answer, saying that I did not want to lose sight of what we were talking about. But I really didn't quite know what to say, and so was stalling for time. I think I have to respond to that question soon.

Posted by at 7:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)