ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Wednesday, April 16, 1997 TAG: 9704160022
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-11 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ANDY KEGLEY
WATCHING a country come as totally unglued as the tiny Balkan nation of Albania surely has over the past couple months is, for most Westerners, an abstract and unimaginable experience, particularly when viewed from the comfort and security of our living rooms.
For several dozen Southwest Virginians who've been associated with Virginia Tech's support for the Agricultural Revitalization of Albania project the past several years, of which I was privileged to be one, reading about this general chaos in Albania and the specific destruction of the university agricultural laboratory was disheartening, to say the least.
Not only was an American investment wasted and the dependence of Western aid from the United States set back many years, but the very thing Albanians most wanted and needed - to become more like the West - was postponed indefinitely.
Indeed, the irony was overwhelming. The Albanian lust for Western-style capitalism, pursued via investing tens of millions in flawed pyramid schemes, was what toppled this fledgling wanna-be capitalistic country. While the government may be crippled, I am fairly certain that on every street corner in Tirana, the capital of Albania, vendors will still be hawking their candy bars, cigarettes and bananas from their kiosks.
My own Albanian experience occurred two springs ago, as part of Virginia Tech's multiyear contract with the Winrock Foundation through the U.S. Agency for International Development, to provide infrastructure leadership to the developing agricultural markets, particularly through the Agricultural University of Tirana, one of the tiny nation's three major universities.
Midway through that contract, a team of leading agricultural economists was assembled to review the AUT's curriculum and recommend to the Albanians how it might be made more attractive and competitive - not just domestically, but among neighboring countries and indeed all of Europe. The Albanians asked for an outsider, a lay person so to speak, with some experience in the end product of an agricultural university's mission. As a farmer and community activist, my name bubbled up on a list, and there I was - in a place where very few Americans have been.
One has to have seen the country and its people, the university, its facilities, its staff, its students, its dorms to appreciate the Albania of the 1990s - where it was coming from after a half-century of the most severe oppression on the planet, making Stalin's Russia looking like preschool.
I can't quite imagine a high school in the bleakest coalfield of Appalachia at the turn of the past century being any worse off than what we saw in the university there in Tirana in 1995. The periodic chart of elements was at least a dozen or so discoveries off from the current; the veterinary sciences facilities consisted of roping an ailing horse and operating in the schoolyard mud; students warmed themselves in their dorm rooms with open fires.
Running water? A Tech business professor's greatest accomplishment while serving his tour at the AUT wasn't hooking up the dozens of new computers or devising a new curriculum that made sense in the global scheme of things, but instead, rigging up flush commodes in the women's room in the main teaching building. He became a campus hero.
After the initial flurry of headlines and front-page photos emanating from Albania over the past month or so (surely prompting Trivial Pursuit questions among media copywriters: When was a picture from Albania ever on the front page of any Western newspaper?), the plight of Albania after the dust and chaos died down was buried back inside the paper.
But there, in a brief story a few weeks ago, was the story that ripped into my heart, and for everyone else who had the opportunity to work in Albania in connection with Tech's ongoing consultation there undoubtedly provoked a gut-wrenching feeling as well.
The story mentioned the agricultural university specifically, and said that, following the chaos and rioting, library books lay in heaps of ashes, and that the state-of-the-art laboratory was smashed to pieces. The Albanian quoted said the lab had been on a par with other European labs. That in itself was no boast, but a statement of immense pride, an accomplishment that the Tech program had a large part in achieving in consort with several other international development organizations.
Dozens of Southwest Virginians had worked hard, in that isolated and impoverished country, helping to rebuild the Albanian agricultural infrastructure, from plumbing the classrooms, to networking a million dollars worth of new computers, to cataloging the library, to teaching English and numerous other course offerings. Now, sad to say, we read of the destruction of the very tools supplied by the West, which were meant to assist the Albanians in becoming what they most wanted.
Probably no other Third World country is so close to mainstream civilization - a short ferry ride across the Adriatic to Italy; Western television has been beamed in for years - but so far removed from the basic amenities and supports, not to mention the necessary tools in order to be even moderately successful in the global economy envisioned by the Albanians and the international developers.
With so far to go, again Albania is looking to the West for assistance and support - only this time, after the destruction of a half-decade of groundwork, the West may ask for some stronger concessions and guarantees that its work won't be for naught. The infrastructure skeleton of Albania may be broken, but the human spirit is alive and well in Albania. It is that spirit that deserves our renewed technical and financial assistance.
Andy Kegley, a former member of the Wythe County Board of Supervisors, has served as chairman of the Rural Economic Analysis Program Advisory Council with the Virginia Tech Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics, and splits his time between a family farm in Wytheville and Mountain Shelter Inc., a nonprofit housing development organization for which he is executive director.
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