In this interview, you’ll hear from Beck Amodeo, a Peace Corps Education volunteer in Albania. Beck shares what daily life looks like, the work being done, and how service has shaped their personal and professional growth. You’ll learn about housing, cultural differences, project work, language learning, and what it’s like to live and work in a new country. This interview offers a real look into Peace Corps service and what future volunteers can expect.
Table of Contents
- Volunteer Experience and Motivation
- Living Arrangements and Cultural Integration
- Surprises and Challenges
- Advice and Support
- Practical Tips and Language Learning
- Social Identity
- Final Thoughts
Volunteer Experience and Motivation
1. What do you do as a Peace Corps Education volunteer in Albania?
I am a TEFL (Teach English as a Foreign Language) Volunteer or English teaching volunteer in Southern Albania. My main job is to teach English at a primary school, Nëntë Vjeçare, while integrating into my host community, which is a small village near a tourist location.
Along with teaching English, I have been teaching French language classes as well, since I have been around the language for much of my life. My reading and pronunciation are good enough that I can teach a decent French class from the textbooks used by my school.
Frankly, I was hoping that my school would have Italian language classes that I could teach since I have been a teaching assistant for my high school Italian teacher. Instead, I use my knowledge of Italian to communicate with my director, coworkers, and community when my Albanian isn’t quite sufficient.
To integrate with my community, I taught myself to tan sheep leather from my family’s butcher shop that would otherwise be discarded and wasted. I then began working at the local blacksmithing forge to practice my Albanian language and give English lessons to his children, who were my students.
2. Why did you decide to join the Peace Corps and serve in Albania?
My father was in the pioneer group to Uzbekistan after the fall of the Soviet Union, where he met my mother, so joining the Peace Corps was always in my plans, though not specifically encouraged by my family.
Living Arrangements and Cultural Integration
3. What is your housing like in Albania?
I currently live in independent housing, but I am still very close with my host families from both PST (Pre-Service Training) and the first 6 months of training at my site. I live in a village near a tourist destination, so my shopping town is quite nearby, and I was ecstatic to find many high-end Italian food products on nearly every store shelf.
Since I am half Italian and speak the language fluently, I have been able to integrate with the Italian-speaking parts of my community, as many Albanians have worked in Italy and speak the language well. Additionally, my comfort foods are mostly Italian, Turkic, or Slavic foods rather than American cuisine, so comfort food has not been an issue to find.
4. What moments or interactions stand out during your service?
When I first arrived at my site, I saw that I would be living with a highly productive family with a restaurant, butcher shop, corner store, and hotel rooms being constructed above the restaurant. My bedroom was a repurposed kitchen next to the slaughterhouse, so I would often wake up to see my host father dispatching an animal right outside my window. I knew immediately that I was going to have to adapt and learn some new skills to thrive in this unique environment. Within a month, I had taught myself to tan sheep leather from the slaughterhouse and make usable blankets and rugs from an otherwise wasted resource.
Later in my service, I befriended members of the Romani community in my village, which led to meeting the village blacksmith and working with him to forge stoneworking tools and farming equipment. We would also refurbish steel parts of the nearby castle, which was a UNESCO heritage site.
Lastly, my knowledge of languages allowed for deeper and more meaningful interactions with my community, as many Albanians had learned other languages while working abroad and were happy to practice their foreign language skills.
Surprises and Challenges
5. What has surprised you most about living or working in Albania?
Albania’s collectivist past definitely made for some interesting cultural exchanges with host families, neighbors, and landlords. The concept of privacy, personal space, and boundaries is a bit fuzzy here. There have been a few occurrences of extended family members of host families or landlords walking into my room to grab something they needed unannounced, or coming into the room while I was away. Nothing overly intrusive, but definitely a departure from American norms.
6. What challenges have you faced in your Education work, and how did you respond?
Mainly, I had never taught in a classroom professionally before, so there were some challenges with transferring teaching technique theory to practice, but not much else that a teacher in the United States would not have encountered
I overcame them by simply maintaining a cool head during stressful situations and following my counterpart. Being calm in tense situations is an invaluable skill that can be used in all aspects of life
7. What secondary projects have you worked on during your service?
Most notably, I have worked with the village blacksmith to forge tools out of steel for the community, the nearby castle, and customers abroad.
Additionally, I plan to start an aluminum recycling project to help reduce some of the litter in the community, as well as cast various useful items from the resulting aluminum scrap.
Lastly, teaching French was not part of the job description, but when the opportunity presented itself, I jumped at the chance to expand my teaching capacity.
Advice and Support
8. What advice would you give to future Education volunteers in Albania?
Make both achievable and lofty goals. You would be surprised how many opportunities there are to learn new skills and integrate better into your community while learning them. I found an abandoned communist era weightlifting gym and secured the keys to it within the first few months at my site. Many people told me it didn’t exist, but I asked enough people that eventually, I found it.
9. How did Peace Corps training prepare you for service?
Mainly, the language classes were invaluable, as the Albanian language is difficult to learn without some formal instruction. Also, try to engage with your community as much as possible to get a better idea of how the language is spoken in casual conversation.
Practical Tips and Language Learning
10. What would you tell future volunteers to pack—or leave behind?
Be sure to pack for both warm and cold weather. Albania can get brutally hot in the summer, and while it is not always freezing in the winter, you will want the extra layers.
11. How has language learning been for you in Albania?
Try to start early. There aren’t many resources outside of the onboarding provided by Peace Corps, but there are free movies on YouTube with subtitles that you can study. If you speak two or more languages already, you will pick up the language much more easily than your peers.
Social Identity
12. How has your personal identity shaped your service experience?
Personally, I have been lucky not to have run into any problems in this capacity outside of the scarcity of Catholic churches in the South. When possible, I walk more than two miles to reach the nearest Catholic church, but I could see how some might find that inconvenient.
13. Did your identity lead to specific challenges or situations?
Not at all.
Sometimes people will want to discuss controversial American politics, but you can remind them that you are a non-political humanitarian volunteer.14. What advice do you have for volunteers who share your identity?
Educate yourself on your religion and that of those around you. People will want to discuss it, and it is important to either diplomatically discuss differences, bond over common beliefs, or steer the conversation to something else.
Final Thoughts
14. What final advice would you share with future volunteers?
Try everything, reciprocate coffee invites, pay goodwill forward and back, pursue goals, and don’t give up if met with apathy or skepticism.
The best way to integrate into your community is through some sort of medium. Whether it’s coffee or helping someone load soil into a wheelbarrow, you need a medium through which you interact with people. If you don’t drink caffeine or alcohol, you will need to come up with unique ways to meet with people and chat for hours.
I cannot say my experience is the standard one in the Peace Corps, but it is a possibility out of many. If you can leverage your skills and knowledge to overcome unique challenges, you will thrive in the Peace Corps and in life afterwards.
One thing is for certain: you will have periods of extreme productivity but also boredom. Try to minimize the latter with ongoing projects, but they will be there.
Also, Albania is a very blue-collar society, so if you have the strength to help members of your community fix or move heavy things, they will appreciate it. Many people here are retired due to injury or are physically unable to do the physical work they used to do with ease, so they will appreciate the heavy lifting help.
Are you thinking about joining the Peace Corps? If you’re curious about service and ready for something new, apply today. Like Beck, you can live abroad, work with communities, and grow in ways you didn’t expect. Apply to the Peace Corps and take the next step.
The content of this post does not necessarily reflect the views of the U.S. Government, the Peace Corps, or Albania Government.
