{"id":13521,"date":"2014-04-23T08:57:06","date_gmt":"2014-04-23T07:57:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.fjala.info\/?p=1023"},"modified":"2014-04-23T08:57:06","modified_gmt":"2014-04-23T07:57:06","slug":"theres-more-to-albania-than-mother-teresa-and-its-screaming-change","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fjala.info\/2009-2015\/theres-more-to-albania-than-mother-teresa-and-its-screaming-change\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cThere\u2019s more to Albania than Mother Teresa and it\u2019s screaming change\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft size-thumbnail wp-image-7236\" title=\"Dr. G\u00ebzim Alpion\" src=\"http:\/\/www.fjala.info\/2014\/dr_gezim_alpion.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" \/> <em><strong>Former BBC World Service presenter writes on the Arb\u00ebri Road online petition<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n<p>*<strong>Rashmee Roshan Lall<\/strong>, <em>22 April 2014 <\/em><\/p>\n<p>Though it is wholly unscientific and subjective, word association can be an important tool in the hands of public diplomacy officers tasked with the weighty job of deftly managing and subtly massaging their country\u2019s image abroad. Here\u2019s one version of the word association game. Which country comes to mind first when you see the following words: peace, war, violence, activism, corruption, freedom, boring, international, isolated, progressive, failure, safe, dangerous, tolerant, powerful, developed, developing, depressing, historical, valuable, influential, disaster, multicultural, cosmopolitan, misunderstood, over-rated, multidimensional, and diplomacy.<\/p>\n<p>The answers will obviously vary depending on your nationality, ideological moorings, background, ethnicity, experiences and ignorance. It\u2019s fairly likely that most non-Americans will associate USA with the word \u2018war\u2019; many Brits will associate Switzerland with \u2018boring\u2019 while the Swiss might use that word for Austria; Indians will associate \u2018multidimensional\u2019 with India and either \u2018failure\u2019 or \u2018disaster\u2019 with Pakistan. Meanwhile, Pakistanis would probably describe India as \u2018over-rated\u2019 and themselves as \u2018misunderstood\u2019. And so on and so forth.<\/p>\n<p>But for all the word association games you might play, it\u2019s probably hard to find one that accurately describes Albania. Even \u2018Lonely Planet\u2019 seems to find it difficult to sum up, in a succinct paragraph or two, the essence of a country that ended nearly half a century of isolation in the early 1990s and has been struggling ever since to deal with enormous challenges, not least soaring unemployment, widespread corruption, rickety infrastructure, powerful organized crime networks and fiesty political manoeuvring. As the CIA Factbook points out, trafficking in human beings is an enormous problem and it is \u201ca trans-shipment point for Southwest Asian opiates\u201d.<\/p>\n<p>But if Albania seems difficult to capture in a word, one might try two \u2013 Mother Teresa. Born and bred in Albania; lived, worked and died in India. But there appears to be a lot more going on in Albania at the moment than the wider world\u2019s forlorn memories of a compassionate nun who\u2019s been dead 17 years. My esteemed friend Dr G\u00ebzim Alpion, himself of Albanian ethnicity and an expert on Mother Teresa, says that social media is increasingly forcing action and accountability in Albania. G\u00ebzim should know. He teaches sociology at the University of Birmingham.<\/p>\n<p>He\u2019s spearheading an online campaign to get the government to build a road in Dibra, one of Albania\u2019s most underdeveloped regions and says the movement has gathered momentum on account of social media. As he heads to Tirana to meet the great and the good and press his case, is this change we can believe in? Should change be the word one might cautiously associate with Albania?<\/p>\n<p>The article has a photo of Mother Teresa meeting \u2018Baby Doc\u2019 Duvalier\u2019s flinty wife Michele in Haiti in the early 1980s and concludes with a quote from Jack Kerouac\u2019s famous novel \u2018On the Road\u2019: \u201cOur battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life\u201d<\/p>\n<p>*Rashmee Roshan Lall presented \u2018The World Today\u2019, BBC World Service\u2019s flagship news and current affairs programme. She was subsequently \u2018The Times of India\u2019\u2019s Foreign Editor based in London, reporting on Europe. Till June 2011, she was editor of \u2018The Sunday Times of India\u2019. She spent a year in Kabul, Afghanistan, working for the US Embassy\u2019s Public Affairs Section and six months in Washington, D.C., reporting on the 2012 American presidential election. Currently based in Haiti, Rashmee writes for leading international newspapers including \u2018The Economist\u2019, \u2018The Guardian\u2019, \u2018Hindustan Times\u2019, \u2018Christian Science Monitor\u2019, and \u2018The New York Times\u2019.<\/p>\n<p>http:\/\/www.rashmee.com\/theres-more-to-albania-than-mother-teresa-and-its-screaming-change\/<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Former BBC World Service presenter writes on the Arb\u00ebri Road online petition *Rashmee Roshan Lall, 22 April 2014 Though it is wholly unscientific and subjective, word association can be an important tool in the hands of public diplomacy officers tasked with the weighty job of deftly managing and subtly massaging their country\u2019s image abroad. Here\u2019s [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v22.9 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>\u201cThere\u2019s more to Albania than Mother Teresa and it\u2019s screaming change\u201d - FjALA e LIR\u00cb - Arkivi<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/fjala.info\/2009-2015\/theres-more-to-albania-than-mother-teresa-and-its-screaming-change\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"sq_AL\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"\u201cThere\u2019s more to Albania than Mother Teresa and it\u2019s screaming change\u201d - FjALA e LIR\u00cb - Arkivi\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Former BBC World Service presenter writes on the Arb\u00ebri Road online petition *Rashmee Roshan Lall, 22 April 2014 Though it is wholly unscientific and subjective, word association can be an important tool in the hands of public diplomacy officers tasked with the weighty job of deftly managing and subtly massaging their country\u2019s image abroad. 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