“There's more to Albania than Mother Tereza and it's screaming change”

 *Rashmee Roshan Lall

Former BBC World Service presenter writes on the Arbëri Road online petition

 Though it is wholly unscientific and subjective, word association can be an important tool in the hands of public diplomacy officers tasked with the weighty job of deftly managing and subtly massaging their country’s image abroad. Here’s one version of the word association game. Which country comes to mind first when you see the following words: peace, war, violence, activism, corruption, freedom, boring, international, isolated, progressive, failure, safe, dangerous, tolerant, powerful, developed, developing, depressing, historical, valuable, influential, disaster, multicultural, cosmopolitan, misunderstood, over-rated, multidimensional, and diplomacy.

 The answers will obviously vary depending on your nationality, ideological moorings, background, ethnicity, experiences and ignorance. It’s fairly likely that most non-Americans will associate USA with the word ‘war’; many Brits will associate Switzerland with ‘boring’ while the Swiss might use that word for Austria; Indians will associate ‘multidimensional’ with India and either ‘failure’ or ‘disaster’ with Pakistan. Meanwhile, Pakistanis would probably describe India as ‘over-rated’ and themselves as ‘misunderstood’. And so on and so forth.

 But for all the word association games you might play, it’s probably hard to find one that accurately describes Albania. Even ‘Lonely Planet’ seems to find it difficult to sum up, in a succinct paragraph or two, the essence of a country that ended nearly half a century of isolation in the early 1990s and has been struggling ever since to deal with enormous challenges, not least soaring unemployment, widespread corruption, rickety infrastructure, powerful organized crime networks and fiesty political manoeuvring. As the CIA Factbook points out, trafficking in human beings is an enormous problem and it is “a trans-shipment point for Southwest Asian opiates”.

But if Albania seems difficult to capture in a word, one might try two – Mother Teresa. Born and bred in Albania; lived, worked and died in India. But there appears to be a lot more going on in Albania at the moment than the wider world’s forlorn memories of a compassionate nun who’s been dead 17 years. My esteemed friend Dr Gëzim Alpion, himself of Albanian ethnicity and an expert on Mother Teresa, says that social media is increasingly forcing action and accountability in Albania. Gëzim should know. He teaches sociology at the University of Birmingham.

 He’s spearheading an online campaign to get the government to build a road in Dibra, one of Albania’s most underdeveloped regions and says the movement has gathered momentum on account of social media. As he heads to Tirana to meet the great and the good and press his case, is this change we can believe in? Should change be the word one might cautiously associate with Albania?

 The article has a photo of Mother Teresa meeting ‘Baby Doc’ Duvalier’s flinty wife Michele in Haiti in the early 1980s and concludes with a quote from Jack Kerouac’s famous novel ‘On the Road’: “Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life”

*Rashmee Roshan Lall presented ‘The World Today’, BBC World Service’s flagship news and current affairs programme. She was subsequently ‘The Times of India’’s Foreign Editor based in London, reporting on Europe. Till June 2011, she was editor of ‘The Sunday Times of India’. She spent a year in Kabul, Afghanistan, working for the US Embassy’s Public Affairs Section and six months in Washington, D.C., reporting on the 2012 American presidential election. Currently based in Haiti, Rashmee writes for leading international newspapers including ‘The Economist’, ‘The Guardian’, ‘Hindustan Times’, ‘Christian Science Monitor’, and ‘The New York Times’.

http://www.rashmee.com/theres-more-to-albania-than-mother-teresa-and-its-screaming-change/

www.rashmee.com

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