Holiday Celebrations in Kosovo & New Years Reflections
The holiday season for us is always a busy one as it wraps 4 festive occasions all into one stressful package: Adi's school bday party, family birthday celebration, Christmas and New Years. Still following COVID protocols, we invited only school friends inside his 'bubble' over for a day of playing at our house and celebrating with Among Us cupcakes, gaming time, opening of presents and general mayhem. It is great that simplicities can still be the most rewarding (minus the clean-up). And that just left us to share a couple other gifts and family singing and treats to acknowledge his real birthday several days later as we arrived at our brief holiday vacation.
Considering the global lockdown, we feel blessed to have found a cabin for rent in Rugova Valley Kosovo, only 2 hours drive from our house. We all needed a break from the same set of walls and grey polluted skies day after day in Pristina. So we were joined with the Reid's yet again for another trip matching the kids with playmates and affording us parents a nice break for fresh air, mauled wines, group meals, and long day hikes. It was a perfect respite the week before Christmas as we returned to our house to celebrate a quiet holiday without family. The kids appeared to love the simple festivities as Santa brought them everything their very small lists requested (despite our limited ability to order anything). It has been nice having all the time off as a family with Pranvera and I only working part time on our various consulting projects.
In Kosovo, the real celebration is saved for ringing in the New Year as we visited with her immediate family and spent several days in pajamas playing new family games and watching holiday movies and baking wonderful treats and preparing full holiday meals (ranging from ordering in a cooked turkey to our favorite sushi). Of course everyone stayed awake past midnight for us to watch a much smaller fireworks celebration span the Pristina horizon as many families shot off their own fireworks to blast away 2020 and hopefully launching us into a much better 2021.
With all the pain and suffering caused by both the political turmoil (in the US and Kosovo) and the pandemic in 2020, we feel unbelievably blessed in having endured, adapted and even thrived trying to find the positive in all the challenges faced. So far, all of us have remained healthy aside from me having a surgical procedure to remove polyps from my vocal which I am still recovering from with a voice coach. We feel blessed that Pranvera's family has survived several rounds of infections and that my sister has been able to relocate with her remote work to be with our father in helping him balance isolation with staying safe till a vaccine is delivered to our elderly. We have really practiced isolation and a completely new norm of no longer visiting the gym, cafes, social gatherings, play centers or meetings. This has kept me in our house days on end but luckily Pranvera, until end of Nov, had her office to go into and staff to manage as she closed out her USAID project. Both the kids have been so lucky to attend their 5th and 1st grade classes in person except for one 2 week quarantine when several staff became infected. In order to balance out some of our sanity and a semblance of normalcy, we have allowed play dates with close friends from school and other family friends. Adi and Rea have taken all the on-line classes and various lock-downs in stride and appear to be developing as mentally balanced as we could hope for during such challenging times.
As COVID started to impact every facet of ordinary life, it was particularly unforgiving on international development consultants as we could no longer get on planes to do our work in emerging countries nor assemble large groups of people to deliver the partnership training's I have been doing the past 6 years. As my work load went to 0 for over 6 months, all this unwelcomed free time was immediately filled by having to help both kids in the on-line learning and to actually become Rea's teacher as her daycare did not offer anything more than 20 minutes a day. Aside from challenging every ounce of patience I could muster, she and I developed a daily routine of teaching her the English alphabet and numbers 1-20 since her schools here had always been in Albanian until this Sept when she joined Adi and a new International school. I like to think because of this time, we developed a special bond and she has been able to adapt seamlessly at her new school performing at a level expected of her age.
Luckily, several new types of consulting work (more project evaluation than partnership building) started to emerge in the Fall just as Pranvera entered the final stages of her job working with the judicial system in Kosovo for the past 5 years. To no surprise, she only enjoyed 1-2 weeks of 'unemployment' before being recruited and ending up on 3 different consulting projects providing her expertise to new judicial reform activities. Meanwhile, I was connected to a job opportunity in the US and after several months of interviewing and negotiations, accepted a new position as Director of Strategic Partnerships and New Ventures for a relatively small NGO attached to one of the largest global dairy companies; Land O'Lakes Venture37. I am very excited about this opportunity and we were able to work out a 6 months remote consulting arrangement for us to stay in Kosovo till the kids finish school in June before we return to Washington DC in July (after 10 years of living abroad). We pray that the US will be in a much better place then and we could actually receive the vaccine at this time and settle down with the kids being able to attend school in person in the Fall. Most importantly for me, to finally see my family and for us to reconnect with SO many great friends we have in the DC area.
But until then, we hope everyone stays safe and sane and can count the small blessings among the many challenges we all will continue to face. Until our paths cross again (or our next blog), we wish the best for 2021!!
