I remember how, in the thick of that hyper-medial Albanian stupidity of spring 1997 – when the population spent lifesavings in Ponzi schemes, then blamed the government on their collapse, and the government preferred to sink the country into civil war than admit responsibility – a British friend came up with the unofficial Albanian anthem: “Let’s —- (a four-letter word, the one you are thinking of- A.R.) Albania and let’s all go to Brindisi!”

I agreed and laughed, but had a tic. I did try to strike back and make him change the providential action in the third line of the Royal British national anthem along the same lines of the Albanian national anthem, but did not succeed. That year, the country kneeled down, about 80,000 Albanians would get on old ships and high-powered rubber boats for the Apulian shores.

Three-million-strong Albania probably produced the highest outflow ratio to the population in Europe the past twenty years. One in five Albos, mainly male in heat, is out of the country. More than half a million are in Greece (which has a population of about 10 million). A quarter of a million left for in Italy, at par with Romanians and Moroccans in the top of the migrant population.

In that male-in-heat group, the 16 to 25-year-olders, two-fourth of the generation of the 90s left the country.

Back home, about two in five Albanians had moved to other areas in the country, mostly to larger cities.

This was Albania’s biggest mass movement, coming after fifty years of total control of movement during Communism.

Its effects were everywhere in my own life. Only a third of my journalism class at the University of Tirana, which graduated in 1996, is in the country – About five of us are still doing journalism, but that is another story. My in-laws are living now in Italy, with no desire to return. I have a sister living in London, cousins in Switzerland or Italy.

My neighbors come and go all over the world.

One of them, when I was a kid in the early 80s, was teaching us how the Labor Party of Albania fought hard to make the country a heaven, which of course had made the Italians, Yugoslavs and Greeks didder with envy. A couple of years ago, he asked me to translate some Australian emigration papers for him with the same ordering tone of my childhood days.

Another one, half the age of that elderly gentleman, was among the first to leave the country in 1990, jumping across the fence wall of the Embassy of Germany. His life is split between Albania and Germany now, and when in Albania, he runs a small business selling used cars that are parked on the sidewalk of my apartment building. When the municipality built new roads and sidewalks, and, of course, had dented the sidewalks with space for garbage bins, he filled the one in our apartment building with cement, and threw away the garbage bin, so that he could park one more car on the sidewalk and a slightly higher contribution to the national and individual economy.

We had a park on the side of my apartment building, which is now a new block of high-rises which, in twenty year’s time, will look as ugly as any concrete housing block – it looks just ugly now. A hairdresser has set up shop there, after leaving ten years of life in Italy behind. Her aunt has taken over the opposite shop, a bakery, after leaving for Greece. They even share a generator when electricity goes off and it had done so a lot this summer. The other bar is owned by a 23-year-old kid who returned from Italy because he missed his country. His family is still in Italy. In the buildings themselves, many emigrants have bought apartments.

In my apartment building entrance, two siblings from one first floor live in Emilia. In front of that apartment, one worked as a cook in Greece for a few years and now cooks spaghetti at a main Tirana restaurant. In the second floor, five people have gone to the United States, one to Austria and another to Germany. In the third floor, the younger man in one of the apartments does seasonal work in Greece comes back and renovates his apartment – they have a new bathroom, for what I can tell. In the topmost floor, the girl in that family lives in Denmark.

Emigration brought home one billion Euros, a seventh of what the country produced in 2006. And it used to be a quarter of the GDP only ten years ago.

I guess this is the lay of the land, for now. More tomorrow…