Andon responded to an ad he saw for a Bible correspondence course in the newspaper. Fascinated, he read Bible stories for the first time in his life. He’d grown up in a world ruthlessly purged of anything supernatural. All churches and mosques had either been closed or destroyed in 1967.

In 1994, Andon received his first Bible and met his first Christian. Then a year later, Andon and his wife Angelina went a step further: they opened their home for a Bible study led by newly-arrived EMM missionaries Glenn and Martha Zimmerly, who had moved to their city to begin agricultural and church development work. Glenn, a farmer from Orville, Ohio, threw himself into assisting farmers in villages around Lushnje, and Martha focused on visitation and home Bible studies.

When a collapsed pyramid investment scheme plunged the country into anarchy in 1997, Andon, a school principal, fled to Greece with his family. Even his beloved school was vandalized along with many factories and businesses. It was a traumatic, shaking time for this new land which had just begun to taste a measure of freedom.

Disillusioned, Andon thought he’d never come back, but after a stint of work in a Greek factory, he came home to Albania in February 1999.

That’s when Glenn invited him to begin working with the revolving loan fund started under the Albanian Mennonite Missions Foundation (AMMF) as a way to encourage small business development – a job he’s been doing ever since.

After the crash in 1997, many farmers just gave up – like I did,” Andon explained. “They no longer planted their fields. But the Mennonite Foundation birthed the Farmers’ Association that now includes 200 farmers from four villages. This is giving people hope and a reason to stay or come back.”

Andon explained that Lushnje has a lot of available land and good climatic conditions for early crops, making it an ideal location for the Farmers’ Association. Even though Glenn left in 2000, he helped to begin the Association and preached the benefits of cooperation – something the former collective farmers of the communist era were not always happy to hear.

The loan fund has been a tremendous blessing to these communities,” Andon said, explaining that the size of the average loan is $2,500, loaned at eight percent interest, compared to the 13.7% interest charged by the bank or other non-governmental organizations.

When EMM’s representative to Europe, Keith Blank, visited Goricaj in April 2005, Ylli and Majlinda Stambolliu proudly showed off their new greenhouse of early cucumbers just ready for the second picking of the season. Ylli said that the greenhouse loan had enabled him to come home and be reunited with his family after he’d worked in Italy for most of a year.

He picked up his guitar and began strumming an Albanian folk song. “I want to write a song in appreciation for the Mennonite loan that helped our family get back together,” he grinned.

If all the farmers were like Ylli, this program would be continuing,” Andon confided. “He even paid back the loan ahead of time!” But he explained that because some of the farmers have abused the generosity and defaulted on their loans, new loans are not being given out except in giving to the Farmers’ Associations to help them as groups with services they offer the communities.

The loan fund has given the Mennonite Mission a wonderful reputation,” Andon said. “It’s easy to see the connection between spiritual awakening and economic rebirth. There’s a church here in the village, and last year the greenhouses of Goricaj, a village of 185 families, produced 4,800 tons of cucumbers, tomatoes, and melons – earning $250,000 for local families.”

In 2002 the three farmers’ associations Glenn and Andon had helped to create organized into a Federation that now rents a central warehouse. The Federation is working proactively at quality control and marketing internationally. They also facilitate trainings through the current marketing project to help the associations continue to function as viable organizations and to learn improved farming methods..

During the visit, Blank commented that EMM and Virginia Mennonite Board of Missions, who form the AMM partnership (Albania Mennonite Missions) are committed to the health of the farmers’ associations and the loan fund. “We are as committed as ever to a holistic ministry of word, deed, and being in Albania,” Blank said. “But we need to keep a healthy balance between the three in our work, life, and ministry.”

With the departure of VMBM missionaries Dan and Mary Hess of Broadway, Virginia, this summer, Sonya Harnish of Washington Boro, Pa., becomes the sole EMM worker in the Lushnje area, where a small church meets in two of the local villages and Andon leads a Bible study group in the city. (EMM workers Willie and Barb Keener, who served in the Lushnje region from 1998-2003, are returning July through August 2005 to lend short-term assistance to the AMM team.) In the northern city of Lezhe, EMM workers Paul and June Kropf lead another small Mennonite church.

The evangelical church in Albania is now 20,000 strong,” Kropf said. “Mennonites are a small part of that – but we are a part. I used to get discouraged seeing all the promising young people who were raised up in our churches – going abroad in search of a better life, and never returning. While I still wonder when and how that trend can be more decisively reversed, I now like to think that we’re sending out Albanian missionaries to Greece, Italy, and America!”

Our church and agricultural development work in Lushnje is a ray of hope – helping to make it more possible for Albanians to stay in Albania and for the church to be strengthened,” Blank said.

Much of the produce raised by the Farmers’ Federation finds its way into the Lushnje Wholesale Market. Photo credit: Sonya Harnish.