Dear Alan,
You ask me why, I, as a successful professional with a good job and a husband who works for a successful company living in a small but comfortable flat, want to leave Albania.
I’m looking at my young son who is happily drawing.
He’s an intelligent little boy with an enquiring mind. He likes to help people. His enquiring mind gets him into trouble with teachers who see his innocent questions as a challenge to their authority. I want him to be able to learn from a stable educational system, which teaches him the skills of crucial analysis that makes him competitive to his peers in developed countries. I want him to grow kind and helpful without their being seen as a weakness to be laughed at. In our culture, men shouldn’t be kind. They learn this in the playground.
He works hard, but this is not enough. The teachers expect some sort of monetary recompense at exam time otherwise he stands no chance of passing. The teacher herself may well have got the job through payment to the headmaster and who knows whether the headmaster got his job in the same way. These days the profession has attracted many who are not interested in being teachers and who do not want to teach. This is an insult to the teachers who genuinely want to.
It’s not the worst thing. What really matters to me is that not only are the values of honesty or decency not taught but they are seen as a barrier to survival. The parents of his friends realise this and indulge their children’s every whim and train them to fight to get what they want, regardless of anybody else around them.
He turns on the television to see politicians – his role models – calling each other names and behaving like spoilt children who cannot get their own way. And he will meet the children of many of these people driving fast cars and getting diplomas and jobs through the simple expedient of paying bribes. The values of hard work are not appreciated as these ‘role models’ have managed to accumulate material goods without working for them honestly. Those who haven’t reached these heights spend their time drinking coffee, gossiping about each other and recycling the same news which is usually from a media controlled by one of the main parties and which continue the name-calling and insults. I don’t want my child to grow up in this environment.
He, like me will get a job, possibly even a good one. But he, like me, is super-conscientious. This means he will focus on getting the job done and if that means doing other people’s work because they are too lazy to do it themselves (possibly because they got the job through a ‘friend’ so they know their job is safe). Then so be it. He must be prepared, like I am, to be treated as naive for working so hard. He will suppress his natural intelligence lest the boss sees him as a threat.
I want him to live in a country where he pays his taxes and knows that the taxes will be used for the country. He may not be happy that the money may go into guns and fighter jets but at least he knows that it won’t go into a speedboat, a villa or a fast car for somebody’s son. I want him to know that the taxes go to paying decent wages so that he doesn’t have to bribe the doctor or the policeman. I prefer his taxes to go into a kidney machine to save the life of his grandmother or to mend the hole in the road so that his father’s car doesn’t get damaged: it’s better than paying for a Rolex watch or a smart suit for somebody who didn’t deserve it. I want him to know that if he has a dispute in court, the judge will make a decision based on the merits of the opposing cases rather than on the number of zeros in the opposing bank notes.
I wanted to stay and change the system from inside but I cannot do it alone. I know that my fellow Albanians have a tendency to vote for the politician who promises them a job. Maybe I cannot blame them, but I can certainly blame those politician who sees government jobs, not as positions of responsibility that are given to the most deserving candidate but rather as favours to be dispensed to repay moral debts in the way that kings bestowed titles to friends in sixteenth century Europe or as despotic minister give jobs in 21st century Africa. And as new people with no experience are given responsible jobs after every election and as new rules are made simply because the old rules ‘were made by the previous government’, the whole system is paralysed and stagnant.
I know that foreign governments who could help us will not interfere because they respect the right of our leaders to misrule and the right of the electorate to mis-vote for them. The fact that so many of us want to leave might suggest that we want foreigners’ moral code to intrude on our sovereignty. So as the international community won’t come to me, I‘ll try to go to them. We’ve had 25 years of pseudo-democracy that has overseen a decline in morality and, given the current educational system, there is no reason to believe there won’t be another 25 years of it.
While I may be able to grit my teeth and live through it, I don’t want my child to. Alan, that’s why I want to leave.
