Albania’s Children Imagine a Better Life

Digital watches, T-shirts and Marlboro cigarettes symbolize the desire of Albanians for Western affluence, but their children still make do with simple toys.

Although Lego blocks and Matchbox cars may be the future, for now Albanian kids roll metal hoops down the street with sticks or use the lower branches of fir trees as seesaws. Construction sites deserted for lack of building materials become jungle gyms.

It’s not that children are unaware of the West in a society where merely obtaining the necessities of life is a daily struggle.

“My youngest son has his heart set on traveling abroad,” Diana Kristo, a professor of English, said of her 10-year-old.

The emergence of this small Balkan nation from decades of Stalinist isolation has infused the entire society with the desire for choice. The current generation of children will be the first in 50 years to grow up free of the dictatorship formed by the late Enver Hoxha.

“Communism found a way of dehumanizing Albania,” said Spartak Ngjela, a former political prisoner. “Humanism must penetrate Albanian society.”

Tens of thousands of people have fled the country in the last year, most of them young. They were unwilling to wait for prosperity and uncertain of democracy even after multiparty elections.

Nearly every family has someone abroad, and the emigres send home what they can. Young men proudly wear Bart Simpson or Levi’s T-shirts, visible signs of the dramatic change in less than a year of democratization. But many Albanians remain cautious.

“Democracy is not yet secure,” said Gramoz Pashko, deputy prime minister in the 4-month-old coalition government and a founder of the Democratic Party. “It has made quite a lot of steps forward but is not secure.”

The backlash against communism has repeatedly pulled people into the streets, most dramatically in February when thousands of Albanians toppled the statue of Hoxha in central Tirana.

Anti-Communist feeling is virulent because of “the great contradictions in Albanian society,” said Artan Fuga, a philosophy professor at Tirana University.

“People were educated with a feeling of equality. People were asked to sacrifice, while the (Communist) elite lived according to another concept--that of pleasure,” he said.

The restricted area where the Communist elite lived was only recently opened to the public. Tirana residents who survive in cramped, dirty, tenement-like housing blocks stroll past the deserted villas with their clipped lawns, gardens and swimming pools.

Drita Sefa, walking with her husband and 3-year-old daughter, gazed at a small orchard and said wistfully: “When we think of our flats with one or two rooms, and then we see all these villas and gardens. . . . “ Her voice trailed off.

“What happened in Eastern Europe showed that the Stalinist model failed,” Fuga said. “So hopes failed. For the generation about 40 to 50, it was the failure of all their hopes. The young people still have hopes.”

Ngjela, the former prisoner, said: “We must save the younger generation because the older generations are all lost.” During his 12 years at the notorious Burrel prison, Ngjela said, he read smuggled books that were passed among the prisoners for decades.

“Before the dictatorship fell, there was an old generation without character and a new generation without experience,” he said. People of the older generation lacked character because they “acted differently from their thinking.”

One monument to Hoxha is too big to pull down: a pyramid-shaped building nearly 100 feet high that housed a museum dedicated solely to him.