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As we drove further away from the city lights and into the dark countryside, I started to wonder if I had made the right choice to visit a remote village in northern Albania with my boyfriend of three months. It had been my idea to travel to his hometown; he did not share my enthusiasm. For me, the trip was an exploration of unfamiliar territory, a new experience. For Dorel, it was a journey back to his childhood, to the town where he'd grown up under communism. The road leading to Reç was long and turbulent. Unaccompanied by streetlights, Dorel seemed to have known the way home from memory. He pulled into the driveway meticulously, careful to avoid the deep ditch in the middle that had been there his whole life. As he parked the car, a ray of light shone from the front door of his family home. His mother came out to welcome us and hugged me tightly. Inside I met his 15-year-old sister, Anjeza. She looked up at me with a grin on her face and said, “The whole village is waiting for you!” The next morning, as Dorel and I made our way to the main restaurant in the village owned by the only people who live there - his family, we were stopped at every house by his smiling aunts and uncles and cousins offering coffee, food, homemade raki, a local brandy made from fruit – anything they had. The first woman I met just stared at me. Anjeza, one of the few who spoke English, explained that their aunt had never seen an American before. The woman quickly ran inside her home and came back out with a tray of juices, coffee and snacks. The ten-minute walk to the restaurant turned into two-hour journey with lots of coffee and laughter. Walking through his village tucked into the rough-hewn mountains felt like walking through a postcard I had never seen before. Situated in Malësia e Madhe, which means “great highlands” in Albanian, Reç seemed to be protected by nature. As I looked around, in awe of my surroundings, Dorel pointed to a field where he used to play soccer with his friends. He told me that when he was nine years old, a chestnut tree began to grow in the middle of the field. The chestnuts it dropped made it too difficult to play barefoot. To remove the source of the spiky inconveniences, he got a bomb and placed it by the chestnut tree. Then he ran up one of the mountains with his friends and blew it up. They told no one, and the village thought they were being attacked. “Where did you find a bomb?” I asked. He laughed and said, “They were so easy to find. They were everywhere.” When I was nine years old in Oregon, I wasn’t allowed to go outside without supervision. As I looked around the now barren field in awe of his story, he showed me the fruit trees that were too high for him to reach as a young boy. He used to make slingshots and hit branches while one of his friends stood below to catch the fruit. They would collect berries on branches like skewers for a snack. When they couldn’t eat any more of the fruit they had collected, they would give the rest to the village cow. “She loved me,” he said with a shy smile. Dorel was guiding me up a mountain as he told me stories of his childhood when he stopped and said, “Emma, why did you want to come to Albania?” The look of genuine curiosity in his eyes stopped me. I didn't know where to begin. The untouched landscape filled with mountains that seem insurmountable, but somehow a nice Saturday morning hike in Dorel’s eyes. The locals who made me feel more welcome than anywhere else in the world and loved me, a stranger, without hesitation. A country with so much generosity and tolerance masked by its poverty and scars. And the stories I heard of unity among all Albanians; a feeling I’ve never experienced in America.