Business as Usual....

I'm sure you'll all be pleased to know it's business as usual back in 'Paradise'. The natural order that demonstrates the phenomenon of "When your spouse is away the children always get ill." & also the phenomenon of, "When you get back from holiday lots of things always go wrong " was alive & kicking last week.

When we got back we heard that 2 days before, colleagues in our NGO were involved in a head on collision with a Mercedes. Two staff members died (1 a 32 y-o mum wth 2 young children) & 9 were badly injured, 1 critically. They were in a furgon (A furgon is a minibus taxi with no seat belts usually & fairly fast drivers.) They almost certainly had no seatbelts, but the accident wasn't the driver's fault. The worst of it was that evidently there are no emergency services here, only police, so you have to sort it all out yourself. Imagine that for a moment....

So the nearest NGO office workers went out & had to administer 1st aid, pull the bodies out of the wreckage, then drive the injured AND THE DEAD BODIES (of their colleagues) to the nearest hospital which was ill equipped, so they then had to go & buy mattresses for the injured to lie on. They were all badly shocked, the hospitals are terrible & the injured are in them on their own, far from their relatives in Tirana or Librazhd. One of these injured was in the furgon not able to move with 2 broken legs & watched her colleagues die whilst they waited for help....

A friend here, who does 'member care' as it's called, (bit like being a counsellor for overseas workers) did the 'Critical Outcome' Debrief- 1st proper one he'd done & found it v harrowing. He is leaving this summer & had prematurely (as it turned out), packed up all his notes & resources on this topic.

He said responses were text book amongst Tirana office (who had colleagues hurt/die but weren't actually there) but for the Elbasan office, where they were the ones who pulled bodies out, saw colleagues die etc (& people were pretty mangled) they were all very resistant to being there but had been told they had to be. So my friend was in this room with glass on 3 sides, AND a corridor running down one side, told them to turn phones off so they put them all on vibrate on the tables in front of them & weren't at all focused. Most said they didn't want to be there because it brought it all back, they wanted to bury it, not think about it, & said they felt worse now doing the session than they had the previous few days when they thought they were getting better. It's yet another of the many examples here where people just don't 'know' stuff we take for granted. My friend was trying to explain about post traumatic stress disorder coming out 6 months later, or illness, hallucinations, whatever, if you don't deal with 'the stuff'; and that it would be far worse, but they've never HEARD this stuff & thought he was faintly unhinged.

It has really shaken everybody up & reminded us just how dangerous the roads (& much of the driving) is here.This week my husband was handing over to his colleague, the CEO of his partner NGO in Kosovo, so he was driving to their branches all round the whole country over last wk. Fortunately his driver is a very careful &  good driver, so much so that my husband has nicknamed him 'granny' (after his own granny who brought new meaning to the words 'careful'&  'slow') Unfortunately though, you can do nothing about the other nutters on the roads... he came back safe & sound anyway. But made for a bit of a wobbly wk for me.

It's funny when you're just about to leave you feel, 'Yay, I'm almost there,  I've survived without killing  a pedestrian, being in an accident, falling down a pothole or being electrocuted in our dodgy flat' but now I have become slightly paranoid. Friends of mine who rode bikes EVERYWHERE safely, (1 had been here 3 yrs, the other 7) both had accidents within a few weeks of leaving.

Ok, then much more minor but still horrible; on Tuesday we got sewage seepage again in our mains. To misquote Oscar Wilde, to happen once 'may be regarded as misfortune' but to happen twice 'looks like carelessness' Yes, someone was definitely being careless.

Here's what happened: when the kids had a bath on Tuesday night, I went in & the bath smelt of poo! It was also a faint browny colour though we get that after rain as our water comes from a well.
So I tried the taps & they were all smelling dreadful. I had made the mistake too of making tea with tap water before I had run the bath (or fully realised what was going on), but as I poured the tea it stank, so didn't drink it. Phew, saved by the smell...

Two days later, after ignoring my messages, ('saving face' issue again), the landlord put a few randomly selected chemicals into the tank after draining it, & chlorine down the well. A water engineer friend says you should empty the whole system & flush it through multiple times with anti-bacterial chemicals. Hey ho, that's just NOT going to happen. Oh & the reason? He told my husband it was because the villas around us until recently weren't on mains sewage so their sewage just seeped into the ground (maybe so)....but I don't believe that caused it because we have been here 3 years & if that happened every time it rained, our flat would be a permanent sewage works. In fact it has only happened once before which was when the landlord had switched everything off & was re-laying his own sewage pipes & his daughter turned something on which meant (on that occasion) raw sewage went into the well. Yeurrrrrrrgh. Anyway for me once was more than enough. Twice & someone somewhere is definitely being careless.

Personally I think it's from all the building work going on round us.  They have probably broken through a sewage pipe somewhere.


By Friday 3 of us were laid up in bed with a diarrhoea & vomiting bug, despite not drinking the water (we don't ever anyway.) The children had bathed in it & did do their teeth in it. I didn't. We had washed dishes in it. Maybe it was just coincidence. At least this time round our typhoid is up to date....