50-year wait to go to Albania

How on earth did I end up going to Albania? Most people would have difficulty pinpointing this small country on the Adriatic between the old Yugoslavia and Greece.

Yet I have always had a fascination for this former isolated Stalinist dictatorship.

It started as a youngster when I was an avid stamp collector, which was a brilliant education to learn about the history and geography of countries.

I was told then that the two countries it would be impossible for me to go to were China and Albania, both of whom had then closed their borders to visitors.

That became even more impossible when I started training as a journalist in 1972. Albania’s leader, Enver Hoxha, certainly did not want foreign journalists travelling through his country looking for stories.

When Hoxha declared his country the world’s first atheistic state and that he wanted to abolish God I became more interested in what would happen and how God would respond.

In the mid 1980s I moved to Stone where with friends, Pete and Liz Mason, we ran a youth group. While on a weekend away at Cloverley Hall in Shropshire, another group at the conference centre at the same time were praying for Albania and I joined them at one of their meetings.

I continued to follow what was happening in Albania and China in the 1980s.

Then in 1986, while I was editor of the Leek Post and Times I was invited to join five other editors on the first ever exchange between the British regional press and the Chinese press.

We had a fascinating ten days visiting Beijing, Anshan, Dalian, Shenyang, Nanjing, Suzhou, Wuxi, Shanghai and then Hong Kong and the following year a group of Chinese editors visited the UK, including Leek.

One forbidden country visited, one to go.

But I had to wait another 20 years before making it to Albania. After 38 years in journalism and 12 as editor of the Shrewsbury Chronicle I was made redundant in February 2008.

What should I do next? I wrote to six missionary societies offering my services and the first one to reply was Richard Tiplady, the then chief executive of the European Christian Mission, inviting me to join a small group going out to Albania. He didn’t know of my interest in the country, and of course I jumped at the opportunity.

So in May 2008 my feet set foot on the tarmac of a very modern Tirana Airport and after more than 50 years this stamp collector from North Staffordshire had achieved his dream of travelling to China and Albania. I am pictured below in Lushnje, Albania.

Over the next few days I will continue the Albania story and report what happened next.