Acorns Are Not Just For Squirrels

Albania- My Very First Village

     Today is Thanksgiving. My favorite holiday. It has been since I was a kid. I think what always made it special to me was in the tradition of how my mom and dad celebrated it. I have carried that tradition now to my own family. This tradition was always to have neighbors, widows, widowers, student who couldn’t go all the way home, foreign exchange students, adults from special care facilities, new families to the area, or any other person we could find that would be alone otherwise on Thanksgiving Day. Thanksgiving Day is a day of giving thanks to God for the many blessings He has given us even when sometimes life has been pretty rough. It is also a day of being able to share what you have, which is what hospitality is all about.

     My first real clue that I didn’t really know what hospitality was all about came in a very remote village in northern Albania my very first overseas mission trip. I was part of a summer project with Campus Crusade for Christ called the Albanian Evangelical Rural Outreach or AERO. I would eventually be on ten such AERO Projekts, but this was my first.

     The goal was to reach every village in Albania with the gospel of Jesus Christ by sending Jesus Film teams into the villages no matter how remote. Now before some of you pull your hair out and scream, “Arrgh, missionaries. They invade and destroy cultures,” let me just say we were invited by the new Albanian government to tell their newly freed people about Jesus. You see the previous Communist government had declared in 1968 that there was no God, and Albania became the first and only officially declared atheist country in the world. Albanians couldn’t practice any form of religion without imprisonment and death. So when the Communist government collapsed in 1991, the new government wanted freedom, including freedom of religion and they wanted to learn about Jesus.

     So the way the AERO Projekt worked was that teams of six people would be taken to a village, meet with the mayor, or ‘first man’ and make arrangements to set up the film equipment, complete with 16mm projector, screen, lights, and generator, in a field to show that night. The next morning the team would travel any means  possible to the next village and then to a third village before returning to the base camp. In the first years the villages were so remote that we had to fly in by helicopter and get around with the equipment loaded on horse or donkey, but that is another story.

     That first day from the base camp the teams were ready to be marshaled into the villages via helicopter, and my team was the first to go. Since I was the team leader I was able to jump up into the co-pilots seat and two of my team mates along with all of our equipment loaded into the back. The scene was so frantic because the on-load and off-load had to be so quick, that we were air born and flying into the grey clouded expanse of the Balkan Alps before I really knew what was going on. I remember looking down through my feet at the rugged terrain below and thinking, “Rob Dakin, you crazy son of a gun! What made you think you could do this?”

     I eventually calmed my anxiety and just thanked the Lord for the opportunity to serve Him. The views were absolutely spectacular as we made our way through the steep mountain valleys dotted with villages perched precariously along its slopes. It took about ten minutes to get to our first village. I later learned that it would take the villagers four days to walk to the closest road in order to hitchhike, if possible, to the nearest town.

     We straffed the village and found a small clearing away from the stone houses were we could land safely and off-load before the villagers got too close to the rotors. Our half-team had no sooner unloaded the equipment when the helicopter took off and left us. We were immediately surrounded by curious villagers. Here I was being crowded in on by total strangers with two Albanian teammates that I had only just met a few hours before, only one of whom spoke English. For the first time in my life I felt totally alone, but totally dependent on God as well.

     I introduced myself to the ‘first man’ and told him why we were in his village. He and the others were extremely excited to have us in their village. I was the first American they had ever seen, and as you may well imagine they didn’t get many visitors so they were very please to have other Albanians in their village. They immediately invited us into their homes, but I told them we still had three other teammates that would arrive shortly, so the villagers brought out a chair for me to sit on and the rest of the entire village sat down in the field to wait for the rest of my team. I should point out that I was not above sitting on the ground with them, but they wouldn’t hear of it.

     After a while someone brought a bag of acorns out and began to distribute them, first to me and then to the others. I looked at the acorns rather dubiously as everyone else including my partners began cracking them open with their teeth. I had never eaten an acorn before, but the villagers seemed to be enjoying them so I put one between my teeth and started gentle pressure. When the acorn hull didn’t budge I immediately thought that I was going to break a tooth before I would get one opened. I noticed that the villagers, who had far fewer and far less health teeth than I had, were having no trouble at all.

     My partner, Bledi, who was the only one who could speak English, looked up at me and asked, “Can’t you eat those with your teeth?” I said half jokingly, “Bledi, I am a dentist in America. The worse thing I could do is break a tooth while trying to eat this acorn. My patients back home would never let me live it down.” I should point out, as many of you who have traveled well know, that humor almost never translates well.

     A woman came up behind Bledi and I and asked Bledi, “Can’t he eat those with his teeth?” And Bledi responded, in Albanian of course, “No he can not eat those with his teeth.” The woman immediately took an acorn and cracked the shell with the only two teeth she had in her mouth, one on the top and one right below it on the bottom, and handed me the meat of the nut over my shoulder. She continued cracking open nuts for me with her own teeth until we had all shared the bag.

     I realized at that moment just how incredibly selfish I was. I also realized that I really had no idea what true hospitality was until that Lady sacrificed her own health for mine. I determined right there that I had a great deal more to learn from these simple people who had no electricity, no running water, no roads, or easy access to the comforts of civilization.

     This was my first encounter, out of eventually hundreds, with the amazing hospitality of the Albanian people. I have used them for the last seventeen years as a standard for

measuring my own meager attempts at hospitality.