SUNDAY PROFILE : A Slow but Steady Course : In newly democratic Albania, change doesn’t come easily. Peace Corps volunteers have their hands full helping a repressed society catch up with the rest of the world.

It is another exhausting, depressing morning for American Peace Corps volunteer John Crust, a high school English teacher faced with 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 in and out, trying to catch the kids who broke three windows in the hallway outside his room. And throughout the day, he has to shout above the din of talking and stools scraping on the concrete floor.

At day’s end, Crust struggles 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 the teachers assigned to the Peace Corps’ fledgling program in this tiny Balkan republic recovering from decades of isolation and hard-line Communist rule. Now democratic, Albania remains Europe’s poorest, most backward land, a Rip Van Winkle 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’ Albania director, from the capital of Tirana. “They are 50 years behind.”

For the volunteers, who come for two-year stints, that translates into a variety of sometimes unpredictable hardships. Will water flow from 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 have learned 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, a UC Irvine graduate, speaks of living in a “giant fishbowl,” of students and neighbors so curious about the American that they look through her garbage.

Other women in the group tell of sexist attitudes that test their patience. And Crust and others describe the trouble 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 friendship and boundless hospitality of many Albanians also have helped the volunteers through the tough times. Soon after Kerry 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 couple who live across the hall from Crust in a run-down apartment house have become “my Albanian parents,” he says. Rukija and Sulejman Berisha invite him in frequently for lively games of dominoes and such treats as bourreck , puff pastry laden with butter and cheese.

The volunteers also gain strength from the many students who view their work here 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, launched its first program in Albania in 1992, 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 one arrives, spending 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, the volunteers live with Albanian families, first in the capital and then in the villages or towns where they will work. Most then choose to move to their own apartments, but a few, enjoying the Albanians’ legendary hospitality, have stayed on with host families.

With few exceptions, the Americans now here requested assignments in Albania or elsewhere in Eastern Europe, says program director Johnson, with many attracted by the region’s rapid political changes. Those who homed in on Albania cited its spectacular mountain scenery and the sense of mystery that clings to a nation so long unknown.

The group of 27 volunteers that includes Crust, Byron and Cox have become close friends, united by shared idealism and joint travails, since arriving last summer. Every month or two, they gather in Tirana, commiserating and trading tales about the often-baffling country that has become their home.

One evening, half a dozen of them meet at the Stephen Center, a pleasant restaurant opened last year by American missionaries near Tirana’s outdoor vegetable market. With hamburgers and other American fare on the menu, it has become a favorite of the tiny expatriate community.

When the conversation turns to the Peace Corps experience, the boisterous group falls silent, briefly, as John Hunter, 56, explains why he joined.

“Look, I’ve been lucky all my life,” says the former San Francisco State professor, pouring a little more Albanian red wine that had been purchased elsewhere. (The missionaries tolerate alcohol but don’t sell it.) “I’ve done everything I’ve ever wanted. This is a pay-back really, a pay-back against the fates.”

Hillary Bennett, 31, nods.

“I came to fulfill this humanistic need I had,” says Bennett, who lived in Monterey before coming to teach 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.”

Several volunteers say their time here has 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 world, stifling its progress.

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

A democratic government was elected in 1992, but public anger about the past remains strong. In one of its manifestations, the writings of Hoxha, so long revered, are put 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 from grimy Bajram Curri near the northern border to picturesque Gjirokastra in the south, the lack of order is evident in schools.

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

Even more disturbing are the teens who simply destroy their schools, including shattering windows that insulate the battered, unheated buildings 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, a picturesque hilltop town of 56,000 where Byron teaches at a high school specializing in foreign languages.

One spring afternoon, she leads a tour of the school’s dilapidated girls’ dormitory, which houses out-of-town students ages 14 to 18. When she steps into the dimly lit foyer, a strong sewage smell from barely functional toilets greets her.

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, vandals poured cement down the toilets, and the shower fixtures were stolen.

“It’s still incredible to me,” says the one-time Laguna Beach resident, 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.”

She is frustrated that the authorities have made little effort to find the culprits. But the locals tend to shrug. Patience, they tell her, must be a way of life here.

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 Byron. “Albania, really, it is changing so fast now. Kerry cannot change it all in one day.”

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

Byron was stunned to learn that her young women students must wash out the clothes of their male classmates, and that they are locked in their dorms at 3 p.m., while the young men stay out until 8 p.m.

Although she has been unable to change those rules, she takes pleasure in a small victory: The young men now help clean her classroom, a chore previously required of the girls.

Aware that sex crimes have soared here since the collapse of the old order, Byron and the other women have learned to stay 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 some friends fought back.

Such incidents incite anger, but also strengthen the resolve 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 classes, Cox walks to the nearby beach, where 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 this nation gets to be too much, Cox says, she thinks of the students who share their dreams for the future as well as 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.”