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Plates were filled with fresh fruit, salad and more. Since arriving at my first Albanian wedding, music and laughter filled the air. Then suddently, the room that had been a buzz of conversation stopped. You could hear a pin drop. And in the silence, a glass broke. But nobody cared. The father of the bride was on his feet. He lifted his glass. "Gezuar!" Then the folk band began to play again, A Circle As the music filled the air, people stood up one by one. It seemed random

I wrote this reflection the day after I returned to the hustle and bustle of Tirana after a hike in the beautiful mountains of Northern Albania, October, 2022. It's an invitation to grieve the loss of something good and hold on to the memories!

"I think we should just go for it." I stood at the fork of the road with the three other friends. We'd been hiking for two days, and we...

Have you ever hosted an unexpected guest? I've been that type of guest. More than once! A few months after I first moved to Albania in...

"Hitler gave men orders to seize sacred writings from a small Albanian town," a man his 60's told us. "But the priest had other plans for the 6th and 8th century gospel manuscripts." He pointed to a hole in the ground behind the altar. As I stood in that Orthodox church in Berat, my mind began to wonder thinking about that priest who defied Hitler. He would have known the stories from centuries earlier. When the Ottoman Turkish empire was at its height, the Sultan sent men as