brenna journeys.

Tuesday

Day to day life shots..

Projects that started this summer & dealing with the winter..

Well here we are, literally 6 months after we started and the final logo was decided on today. After many, many numerous revisions, meetings and decision making, the mayor and the Kukes Regional Council decided on a logo for the municipality of Bajram Curri.

I learned many lessons during this project. I've worked with picky clients before with my design work, ones that think they know what they want but really don't or have a vision and want exactly that even a trained design eye thinks differently. This was definitely one of those times where I had to swallow my personal preferences and opinons and give them what they wanted and envisioned. I realized that while my time is short lived here, this logo will represent this municipality and town for years and years to come and I should give them exactly what they want, even if it goes against what I think looks the best.

I've only been living here a short 8 months and who am I to say what would represent them the best. I also learned how it feels to not be involved in the design decisions but just be given orders after the decisions have already been made with no input. I believe that this would happen in bigger design and marketing firms and I think is a good learning experience because it's not always an easy thing to do, especially since I put so much time into the design work I do. That's not an experience I have had yet, outside of school, because all of the design work I've done I was either the sole designer, begging for any kind of constructive feedback, or a freelance designer, only taking direction from the client.

So now that the logo has been decided on, it will be in the letter head of all of the documents that the Bashkia circulates out, locally, nationally and internationally. My new project is designing a flag for the logo that will represent the city as a whole. It's really great to be doing work here that actually relates to what I studied in school and I think after doing this logo and the tourism website my opportunities will open up to more projects. I had the mayor of Bujan, a small village outside of Bajram Curri, approach me at a Cafe last week wanting me to design a logo for the village of Bujan.

It's hard getting back into the swing of things after being gone for IST and the GAD conference for over a week, probably because it's about ten degrees colder up here than it was in Plepa. Nothing like getting up in the morning and the buckets of water you use to flush your toilet with are frozen over.

Also, nothing like the fire going out in the middle of the night and waking up and being able to see your breath in your living room that now serves as a bedroom.. that'll really make you want to get up in the morning let me tell you what. I've officially started buying items that should be refrigerated and putting them outside on my porch, it's really effective. Doing dishes kinda sucks because I can't feel my hands when I'm done and I'm at about 1 shower a week. But overall, it's not that bad.. I mean it could be worse.

Sunday

Developing and organizing communities..

C.O.D. volunteers of group 14 in Plepa for in-service training last week.
It was good to hear what other volunteers in my sector have been doing and share ideas.

Saturday

Selective abortion in Albania..

It's been a problem for generations and now is just skewing the population even more. Selective abortion can be explained by the parents finding out the gender of the baby and then deciding to abort the child solely based on its gender. I have heard horror stories, women going through procedures over 10 times because the ultrasound turns out to be a girl and the family doesn't want a girl. It has been suggested by private European companies that Albania, along with some other Balkan countries take away the option completely to tell the parents the gender of the child. It is something that stems from traditional beliefs and believing that the male of the family is more important and powerful than the females.

According to a recent report from the Council of Europe, in Albania 112 males are born for every 100 females – a rather disproportionate figure compared with the ratio of natural demographic growth. Albania has a similar situation to some other Caucasian countries, while Kosovo is among the most problematic countries in the Balkans.

“Selective abortion is not a new problem in Albanian society,” states a sociologist, active in women's rights. “In the traditional patriarchal system, daughters are thought to be born to be given to a husband, and therefore are in some way external to the family. And traditionally they don't carry the family surname. If a family only has daughters, they say that family will become extinct,” she explains. Read more here..

Developing genders..

Last weekend was the Gender and Development conference in Plepa/Durres. Over 50 kids from all over Albania were able to attend this conference due to a grant won by the G.A.D. from Vodafone. The conference was three days and included activities that brought awareness to gender issues in Albania, ways to talk to people about them, how to promote gender equality and fun activities to encompass all of these ideas.

I chaperoned two boys from Kukes, Ditjon and Erjon, because Emily is still out of the country. I left at 6:00am Friday morning and was dropped off on the side of the highway to scale the stairs to Kukes. I checked out Emily's apartment to make sure everything was still good since she's been gone, picked up some materials for the conference and I left with the boys around 12:00pm. We arrived to Plepa and got settled in, had dinner with the rest of the participants and had one session that night where the kids were split up, boys on one side, girls on the other, to make collages on how women and men are portrayed in the media by cutting out magazine pictures. We then had a discussion about it and it was so inspiring to see how passionate the kids were about the topics.

The next day we had our first session on role playing gender scenarios and discussing solutions to the problems. Once again, just hearing how opinionated and passionate the kids are, boys and girls, was so refreshing because these kids, are the next leaders of their communities, and coming to events like this only pushing them further in that direction.

An Albanian woman came and spoke about domestic violence and gave her personal story about her abusive spouse and the repercussions she faced when filing for divorce here. There is still a very shameful attitude towards divorce here and it is not very common. Domestic violence is more prevalent than statisticsc may show because most women do not report the abuse because of no trust in the police and for fear the abuse will only become worse.

I really think the conference was a success and hope the kids go back to their communities with a mission. We finished up the conference with interviews for the documentary. The only downside is the kids that participated were volunteers, all from the southern part of Albania (which is more liberal and progressive) and they all were very passionate, not a bad thing, but just gives common answers and not a lot of diversity for the interviews. Once again, I was so impressed with all the kids that attended the conference and all the volunteers support in order to make the conference go as smoothly as possible.

Gender & Development Conference in Plepa..

Role playing session where teens acted out scenarios on gender issues..

Conference room at Hotel Tropikal..

Project design session. Each group of kids developed a project to do when they returned home.

Gender roles session. 1 person makes the salad, 3 people eat and 1 person cleans up. Open
discussion after about work at home and why women are the only ones doing it.