Neighbouring, the verb: 6 lessons from Elvir

Elvir and I have a running joke about my time-keeping. He is the driver of The Ideas Partnership NGO* and if I arrive early at the appointed place for him to pick me up, he calls me ‘angleze’ – an Englishwoman. If I’m late then he calls me a Kosovar. (If I arrive even later than the five-minute delay I warned him about, he calls me a baker – from a local belief that bakers’ estimates of time are unreliable).

Today, I was an ‘Englishwoman’.

Elvir has never been to England, and I fear that it could be a disappointing experience for him.

But my punctuality meant that we had plenty of time to talk as we set off together in the kombi minivan through the Prishtina traffic towards The Ideas Partnership’s centre. He told me about the progress on the new well we have decided to drill after a month of the water cuts every afternoon that were making it hard for our pre-school team to maintain hygiene; tough for the staff keeping toilets and kitchen clean; difficult for all our staff to keep the professional environment they needed in order to do their jobs.

Elvir is from the Ashkali community our NGO serves, and as well as his job manoeuvring our vehicle through the streets of the Kosovan capital (and beyond), he has a business renting out marquees and chairs for large community events. As we weaved through the city’s back streets, he told me about having been woken up last night, at 3am and again at 5am, by a grieving neighbour. The man’s mother had died and would, in accordance with Muslim custom, be buried before nightfall. The neighbour knew that there would be guests coming to pay their condolences in the traditional way and he’d wanted to book the marquee for them - at 3am. I teased Elvir that he was like a priest or hoxha: present at all his neighbours’ major life events whether weddings or funerals.

Elvir has worked for The Ideas Partnership for thirteeen years. The previous night, we’d driven together to the airport to collect a group of volunteers coming back for the fourth time to Kosovo to create murals at our community centre, together with local volunteers and children. When they saw Elvir at the arrivals gate, they all flung their arms round him: for our volunteers, too, Elvir is a bit like a priest or hoxha. He may not offer spiritual support but he helps them navigate a foreign city; he hefts their luggage; learns their taste in music to play on the kombi stereo; teaches them their first words of Albanian.

On the way to Fushe Kosove today Elvir stopped three more times to pick up groups of volunteers coming to work with the children who attend our centre. The four arrivals from the previous evening, after a short night in an Airbnb; a couple of British volunteers I’d met when they were backpacking through Kosovo as students last year; a young volunteer from San Francisco; a local teenager giving up her time to translate for the group. My flip comment about Elvir’s role with the marquees made me see him differently today; made me notice how he set the nervous newcomers at ease as they found their place in the van; how with those he knew better, he teased them into a smile or a laugh; how he improvised greetings and pleasantries in the various languages he knows to varying degrees - Albanian, English and German, sometimes all in the same sentence.

We stopped at a supermarket for the new arrivals to buy some lunch. Elvir was gasping for a can of his favourite revolting energy drink, Golden Eagle. He knows I won’t drink it, but he offered to buy me some water.

And that did it - the full house of the six basic skills that I’ve isolated for being a good neighbour. I’ve been looking for a definitive list of these as I’ve interviewed and researched for the book I’ve been working on, due out later this year, about Prishtina’s First Bllok neighbourhood. Elvir manages them all on one short drive through the city and its suburbs:

• A good neighbour always greets you.

• A good neighbour finds ways to communicate

• A good neighbour passes on local intelligence.

• A good neighbour helps you when you’re scared

• A good neighbour invites you out to play

• A good neighbour offers you hospitality

How do you measure up to Elvir? Your neighbours are not just those who live next to you - they’re those who pile into a minivan with you; the community that’s formed when you’re on a journey together, whether literally or figuratively. Think of those who are adjacent to you in your work – not part of a team with you, but people you could still benefit from greeting and surmounting communication barriers with; sharing with and reassuring; finding some playful point of connection with, and the forms of hospitality that work in your environment - whether that’s sharing food, or the cold comfort of inviting them onto the cc line of an email.

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*The Ideas Partnership is the NGO I co-founded in Kosovo. The money from paid subscriptions to this Substack goes to enable the charity to continue its health and education work with 600 women and children across two community centres and one school-based learning centre. Huge thanks to anyone who can pay for a subscription and support this much-needed work