Almost a month has gone by already since we closed our offices in Tirana, as per government directive, and we are all living and adapting, like the rest of the world, to different ways of spending our time and days throughout this very difficult global situation.
However, keeping in touch is, and always will be, a must and a responsibility that we all should share throughout our lives, and especially in our kind of business and during times such as these.
What I can tell you from my side today, first, is that the adjustment to a dictated locked down has not found our organization unprepared, and we are proud of it! While some of the large projects we were handling were put on hold, by our funders, partners and collaborators, and we cannot temporarily operate in outside fields, we easily reverted to work from home. All our staff is equipped with facilities of their own where they live, and our part time personnel was supplied by us with what they needed to also operate long distance. Unfortunately, our current positive operational results are strictly for our internal benefit so far because we cannot find corresponding online operating facilities from others to deal with, and the state sites and their systems are malfunctioning or not available at all.
Secondly, it was also quickly realized that this forced ‘idle time’ was not bad at all and it didn’t have to be so. In fact, it provides the perfect opportunity to get to do what we all, somehow, have a tendency to postpone at other times, and, thus, we all plunged into bringing to the front burner what was standing in the background.
There is plenty to do about this, we found out, because some of what was put aside will be needed, and, probably even more so, handier, when we shall resume our activities in full.
The related tasks include reorganizing files of all sorts, adapting and documenting procedures that were tackled and dealt with, in a scattered way due to other priorities, creating computerized management facilities for all sorts for tasks handling, and quicker retrieval of lots of data that we have now accumulated in the past two years of our new operations here in Tirana. We are enriching our Library with better inventories, and we are even transcribing, and in some case also translating, historical documents that we have researched and gathered in the past for the publishing side of our business (which we have not had the time to tackle yet). A large part of this documentation, btw, could be valuable to students, as we already know, but its printing needs financing for it to be achieved.
All the above is for us the ‘tip of the iceberg’, as the saying goes, because we now also have re-grouped our collections of various ideas that we gingerly put aside for a long while. They could be worthy to be planned and developed into projects that could positively touch the lives of a variety of public, change public situations for the better, and so on….
What remains to be seen, and personally I am hoping for, is when this global hurdle is over, the world will have more people practicing better ways of understanding, interactions, cooperation, assistance and support on a larger scale and beyond personal gains and comfort zones. We are the world that we are forging.
Keep in touch, dear friends, and we’ll do the same. Take good care of yourselves and Happy Easter Sundays on April 12 and 19th and a good Passover week for whomever are practicing them.
