[ Our other work - in Ukraine (Chernobyl) and in Kosova (Kosovo) ]

We first discovered Albania when trying to support the refugees from the violence in neighbouring Yugoslavia. We met Kosovans, Bosnians, and others who had fled to Albania and Macedonia and were sheltering in overcrowded refugee camps and in villages which were desperately overstretched trying to support them.

We quickly realised that Albania was incredibly impoverished in its own right. After a long period of harsh dictatorship under first facists and then a regime claiming to be communist (but so severe it was isolated even from the Soviets) the people then suffered from a pyramid selling scheme which embraced the whole country before it collapsed.

Today, many people from the mountains in the north (where the refugees arrived) have headed for the capital city where they hope to find more opportunities for work. These opportunities are not so common after all in their fragile economy. Aid Convoy is working in a shanty town which houses 20,000 people in its two square miles. It is a squatted state farm, and many people actually live in tiny concrete cubicles which were once cow-sheds. Electricity has to be stolen and so is both unreliable and unsafe. Water is not provided, and each morning children walk to the nearest proper houses to knock on doors and beg for water.

Our plan is to stock the hospital in this area which currently has some dedicated staff but no equipment. Then, once funds are in place, we hope to build on an engineering survey produced by another charity, and pay local people to dig a bore-hole. Ideally, they will be able to keep the tools we supply, and carry on similar schemes elsewhere.

Get in touch and help us to find the £8000 we need for this project.