I’m reading through notes I took from conversations I had with people I met along the way. This morning I’m trying to decipher some cryptic entries made during various meetings with missionaries, political officials, the Albanian Defense Minister and an old man I met along a rural highway near Pogradec.
There are notes about a blood fued in Shkoder, an attack on a radio station transmitter site near the Bosnian border, a rat infested slum where I was served Turkish-style coffee by a kind gypsy woman...
...and a taxi ride through Dubai at 135 KPH. There is an entry reminding myself to research and write about something called the AEP, the Albanian Encouragement Project, and another note to write about trying to press the wrinkles out of a very dirty shirt I had to wear during a meeting at the Albanian Defense Ministry.
This after my week in Afghanistan. Everything in my bag was filthy by the time I got to Tirana. (By the way, I did a pretty good job getting the wrinkles out of the shirt but was a sad fashion statement as I shook the hand of the Defense Minister a short time later.)
Small world story. The Defense Minister actually knows a few people with whom I’m acquainted in the United States. He was invited last year to attend the Washington Prayer Breakfast, the annual event in DC where the president speaks. Various international dignitaries were invited and he was one of them. He calls friends several people that I know in Denver. He also has a son who has been quite ill and he has traveled as far as Dallas looking for treatment options for the boy.
Listening to him talk about searching for help for his son in hospitals in Europe and the U.S. I thought, we are not that different he and I. How far would I go to help my son? How obsessed would I be with getting good treatment? He may command a nation’s military forces while I make my living talking on the radio 5 mornings a week but a father is a father. A father loves his children. To have a nation’s armed forces at your command and yet still be desperate; to have all sorts of worldly power yet be helpless to cure your own child...
When I was 13 my older sister was injured in a terrible accident. She spent the next few months in a hospital, doctors fighting to save her life. I remember her crying out in unbearable pain day after day. My parents would ask us to wait down the hall when things were particularly bad. One of the most poignant memories from that time, though, is not of my sister in the intensive care unit, it is of my father pacing the halls outside her room. Occasionally, lost in the reality of his helplessness, he would wander into the waiting room where my brother and I would be sitting, reading or staring out the window as the hours and days and eventually the entire summer slowly passed. He would walk over to the far side of the room trying to find a place where he was alone and unobserved, and he would, for just a moment, be unable to hold it in. He was a strong man. Sometimes scary strong. The sight of tears streaming down the face of the strongest man I knew was something I was not prepared to see. I remember one such time walking over to him and taking hold of his hand. He gripped my hand so hard I thought it would break. It was the desperateness of the grasp that I have never forgotten.
It has been said it is not flesh and blood but the heart that makes us fathers. I was glimpsing the heart of the father in a man of flesh and blood.
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