MISSION ALBANIA / A Special Report : Forward Thinking in a Backward Land : O.C. Volunteers Are Among Those in Peace Corps’ Fledging Albania Program Helping The Tiny Balkan Nation Recover From Decades of Isolation and Communist Rule So Its People Can Embrace the Future

It is another exhausting, depressing morning for American Peace Corps volunteer John Crust, a high school English teacher in this impoverished town, as he struggles to control successive roomfuls of unruly teens.

In one class, several students yell at each other in an angry debate about democracy and communism. In another, Crust races out repeatedly, trying to catch the kids who broke three windows that period in the hallway outside his room. And throughout the day, he must shout above the din of students talking and stools scraping on the concrete floor.

At day’s end, Crust, who is among a handful of Orange and Los Angeles county volunteers assigned to this tiny Balkan nation, tries hard to sound upbeat. This wasn’t so bad, he says. Far worse was the time a student flung open the door and slid a flaming textbook across the floor to his feet.

“They’re not bad kids,” Crust, 33, says gently. “They’re good kids, but a lot of them seem to equate the freedom they have now with anarchy. They’re just caught up in something beyond what they can comprehend.”

Classroom discipline is among a host of challenges for Crust and other teachers assigned to the Peace Corps’ fledgling Albania program as they try to help this nation recover from decades of isolation and hard-line Communist rule.

Now democratic, Albania remains Europe’s poorest, most backward land, a Rip Van Winkle country trying desperately to catch up.

“The fact that this country had been isolated until the last few years pervades every aspect of life here,” says Patricia Johnson, the Peace Corps’ country director in the capital, Tirana. “They are 50 years behind.”

For the volunteers, who come to Albania for two-year stints, that translates into unpredictable hardships. At the most basic level, their lives--like those of all others here--involve a series of daily challenges: Will water flow from their rusted taps only at 4 a.m., or at all? Will the electricity, with no warning, go off for days at a time? Will telephone lines--if there are any--be clear enough for someone to make a call?

The volunteers have adapted with equanimity. They learn to do without faxes and phones, and joke about their water-saving systems of buckets, pitchers and pots.

But life here also means coping with more insidious difficulties.

Cheryl Cox, 27, who grew up in Mission Viejo and graduated from UC Irvine, speaks of the “giant fishbowl” in which she lives, of students and neighbors so curious about the rare American in their midst that they look through her garbage.

Kerry Byron, 23, of Laguna Beach, and other women in the group tell of attitudes toward women that test their patience and make them angry. And Crust and others detail the behavior problems in their schools, an annoying outgrowth, most say, of this repressed society’s fervent embrace of freedom.

“It’s really hard sometimes,” admits Crust, a former newspaper reporter who lost his Sherman Oaks apartment in the Northridge quake. His Peace Corps assignment in remote Bajram Curri makes him the most isolated of the Albania volunteers.

“There are some days I hate it. I think everyone goes through periods of wanting to quit, but then you have a great day when the kids are great, everything goes right and you think, ‘Yes! This is why I’m here.’ ”

The volunteers say the friendship and boundless hospitality of many Albanians also has helped them through the tough times. Soon after Byron’s arrival in the town of Gjirokastra, for instance, her new neighbors appeared en masse to scrub down her apartment, leaving it cleaner, she says with a laugh, “than it was before or since.”

The neighbors who live across the hall from Crust in a run-down Bajram Curri apartment house, meanwhile, have become “my Albanian parents,” he says. Rukija and Sulejman Berisha invite him in frequently for lively games of dominoes and treats like bourreck , puff pastry laden with butter and cheese.

The Peace Corps workers also gain strength from some of their students, many of whom view the volunteers’ service in Albania with gratitude and a touch of disbelief.

“Teacher John, he surprises us because he can choose to live in Los Angeles and he comes here,” Jertishta Qerimi, 17, says of Crust. “We can’t believe why he wants to live in Bajram Curri, but we are happy.”

The Peace Corps, the U.S. development and goodwill agency founded in 1961, launched its first program in Albania three years ago, bringing an injection of American-style hope and idealism to a nation suffering through a chaotic transition to democracy.

Each summer since then, as one group of volunteers departs, a new group arrives. The new recruits spend two months in intensive language and cultural training in Tirana before taking up posts around the country. Most teach English, but others are involved in less traditional Peace Corps activities, including banking and reforestation projects.

For the first few months in the country, the volunteers live with Albanian host families, first in the capital and then in the villages or towns where they will work. Most then choose to move to apartments of their own, but a few, enjoying the Albanians’ legendary hospitality, have chosen to stay on with host families.

Virtually all those here have requested that they be sent to Albania or other Eastern European countries, with many expressing interest in the region’s rapid political changes, says Johnson, the director. A few specifically asked for Albania, for reasons ranging from its spectacular mountain scenery to the mystery that clings to a nation so long unknown.

In their months here, many of the volunteers have become close friends, united by shared idealism and joint travails. The bonds are especially tight among the program’s third group, the 27 volunteers--including Crust, Byron and Cox--who arrived in the summer of 1994. Every month or two, some of them gather in Tirana, commiserating and trading tales about the often-baffling country that has become their home.

One evening in April, a group meets at the Stephen Center, a pleasant restaurant opened last year by American missionaries near Tirana’s outdoor vegetable market. The center serves hamburgers and other American fare and has become a favorite of the capital’s tiny expatriate community.

The boisterous group falls silent, briefly, as John Hunter, 56, explains why he joined the Peace Corps, enduring its inevitable hardships for the adventures it offers. Hunter, a former San Francisco State professor who grew up in Long Beach, is among the older volunteers here.

“Look, I’ve been lucky all my life,” he says, pouring himself a little more of the Albanian red wine that had been purchased elsewhere; the missionaries tolerate alcohol but don’t sell it at their restaurant. “I’ve done everything I’ve ever wanted. This is a pay-back really, a pay-back against the fates.”

Hillary Bennett, 31, of Monterey, nods.

“I came to fulfill this humanistic need I had,” says Bennett, who teaches at the University of Korce in southeast Albania. “Basically, you can really only ‘take’ for so long. We all want to try to give something to a Third World country. But maybe it’s also partly to ground ourselves.”

Clustered around the crowded table, several volunteers say their months in Albania have helped them gain perspective on the United States.

“I’ve spent a great deal of my life apologizing for America,” Hunter says, fingering a string of wooden beads around his neck. “But you spend some time in a place like this--you hear the things this government did to its people--and you realize we really don’t have to apologize.”

For nearly half a century, the Albanian people endured one of history’s most paranoid, repressive regimes. Religion was banned. Foreign music, literature and broadcasts were forbidden. And people were imprisoned for infractions ranging from littering to staying in touch with relatives who had fallen from political favor.

Most significant, Enver Hoxha, the Stalinist dictator who ruled here from 1944 until his death in 1985, kept his tiny nation cut off from the rest of the world, stifling its progress.

In the late 1980s, Hoxha’s successor embarked on a slow course toward reform, but the Albanian people grew impatient for more rapid change. In 1990 and 1991, thousands fled to neighboring Greece and Italy. Others rioted, lashing out at anything that was connected to the hated regime.

A democratic government was elected in 1992, but public anger about the past remains strong. In one of its most pointed manifestations, the writings of Hoxha, so long revered, are put these days to the most ignominious of uses: Pages torn from his collected works kindle fires and in many village outhouses, serve as toilet paper.

These days, in towns ranging from grimy Bajram Curri near the northern border to picturesque Gjirokastra in the south, the Peace Corps volunteers say the decline of public order remains evident in their schools.

Since the Communist government fell, Albanian students--and even teachers and staff, the volunteers suspect--have taken to helping themselves to public property. Maps, furniture, roof tiles and electrical wiring still disappear from buildings with regularity, the Americans say.

Even more disturbing, they add, teens like those who shattered the windows near Crust’s classroom have no apparent qualms about simply destroying their schools, including the glass that helps insulate the battered, unheated buildings--and them--from the winter cold.

Crust blames himself, in part, for not doing more to combat the trend.

“I’ve got to figure out how to make them understand that they can’t do these things--they can’t destroy their school, they can’t miss class all the time,” he says. “Everyone knows it’s a problem; we just have to figure out how to fix it.”

The worst vandalism may be in Bajram Curri, a community of about 10,000 with a violent, rebellious history, even under the Communists. But there are similar troubles in Gjirokastra, an Ottoman-era hilltop town of 56,000 where Byron teaches at a high school specializing in foreign languages.

One spring afternoon, the Laguna native leads a tour of the school’s dilapidated girls’ dormitory, which houses out-of-town students from ages 14 to 18. She steps into the dimly lit foyer, where a strong smell of sewage hangs in the air, emanating from several barely functional toilets nearby.

Nearly two years ago, Byron says, a British relief agency built 20 Western-style toilets and hot water showers for the dorm. But before they could be used, the bathrooms were deliberately destroyed. Cement was poured down the toilets, and the shower fixtures were stolen.

“It’s still incredible to me,” Byron says, gesturing to the bleak building and the hopeful faces of the young women who live there. “They have no hot water here, and no electricity unless they rig it somehow. They needed these bathrooms so badly.”

Byron, a forthright young woman whose facility with the Albanian language is the envy of her colleagues, says she is frustrated that the authorities seem to be making little effort to learn who was responsible. But others, including students and administrators at the school, tend to shrug. Patience, they tell her, must be a way of life here.

At such times, friends such as Meti Bakalli, 33, an Albanian banking executive with experience abroad, try to boost Byron’s spirits. “She’s always in a hurry,” Bakalli says fondly of his friend. “Albania, really, it is changing so fast now. Kerry cannot change it all in one day.”

But Byron and others among the Peace Corps volunteers also find themselves chafing under the restrictive customs that govern women’s behavior in this still tradition-bound society.

Byron was stunned the day she learned that her young women students are required to wash out the clothes of their male classmates and that they are locked inside their dorms at 3 p.m., while the young men are allowed to stay out until 8 p.m.

So far, she has been unable to change those rules but takes pleasure in a small victory: Her male students now help clean her classroom at the end of each day, a chore typically required only of Albanian girls.

The female Peace Corps volunteers, aware that sex crimes have soared here since the collapse of the old order, also say they have learned to take measures to protect themselves from harm. They stay mostly indoors after dark, wear conservative clothing and avert their eyes from men on the streets.

Even so, a number say they have been verbally harassed, fondled on buses or followed around town. In one particularly frightening episode, a man picked up and tried to carry off one of the American volunteers, but dropped her when she and her friends fought back.

Although the volunteers say they are angered by such incidents, those interviewed say they have no thought of leaving Albania before the end of their Peace Corps tours. If anything, they are more determined than ever to stay on.

“We’re just not going to let these guys beat us down,” says Cox, who teaches in the coastal city of Durres. “It could happen probably anywhere in the world. It’s just something we’ve got to deal with here.”

Between her classes, Cox walks to the nearby beach. She rests against an old concrete bunker, an enduring symbol of Albania’s years of repression. The bunkers--there are 700,000 of them in this nation of 3.3 million--were built during Hoxha’s dictatorship in preparation for an invasion that never came. When it all begins to seem too much, Cox says, she thinks of some of her students, who tell her of their dreams for the future and personal, painful stories of the past.

“I get down, but then I think about them and how they manage to be happy, despite what’s happened here,” she says, turning back toward the school. “I think of what we’ve all managed to do here, already. And I know I have every reason to be happy.”