The story of Besa Shapllo and Mission Possible in Albania
I was born in Tirana, Albania.
We three children – my brother, my sister and I – had a happy childhood, for our parents were very caring.
In 1968 Albania proclaimed itself atheist and closed down all churches. No one was allowed to even whisper the word ‘God’. Sometimes young women who were wearing a necklace with a cross were stopped by the police.
God was not mentioned in school. However, I remember a conversation with a classmate when I was about nine. She insisted that God existed, while I said there was no God. Then she asked: ‘But who makes the figs sweet?’ and I had no answer. There was no mention of God in our home. My parents were members of the Communist Party.
A hidden gun
While I was at school and university I worked as a tour guide. There was an atheist museum that I took tourists to visit and I saw a Bible there, the first I had ever seen. The inside was cut out and a gun had been placed in the hollow.
When I was in my last year at university, my friends and I did our annual compulsory month of military training and teased each other that none of us had a boyfriend. It was during that month that I met Agron, who later became my husband.
Hard times
I taught English in an elementary school for four years and then went to teach in a school that specialised in foreign languages. During the last years of communism, life became even worse in Albania – no food and empty, closed shops. People were escaping from the country to try to find freedom and safety. There were instances of 10,000 people in one ship, packed together like sardines, and some died before reaching Italian shores, just like refugees today.
Things began to change in 1991 and, after many bureaucratic difficulties, Agron and I were able to go to New Zealand. We were invited by friends who had come several times to our country and were called ‘Friends of the Party’, let’s say Marxist-Leninists.
An amazing thing
Agron and I came back in May that year and I think that was the darkest time of all in Albania, though some things had changed. There was one amazing sight to me. On the wall of the tallest hotel in Albania was written: ‘Learn English through the Bible.’
I had only seen two Bibles, the one in the museum and one in New Zealand. Through our friends I had met a Maori lady and she was the first person to speak to me about Jesus and God. I couldn’t understand a thing she said, but, when I returned home, the first thing that came in the mail from New Zealand was a letter from this lady with a New Testament.
I wrote to the address on the wall of the hotel. Even before the answer came I met the former President of an organisation called Mission Possible.
This is how it happened. An American couple were visiting the school and their guide/ interpreter was a pupil of mine who introduced us. I joined them to tour the school. ‘Why do you work here rather than seeking another position?’ the American asked, and then suggested I could work in the American Embassy, which was just across the street. I told him that I loved teaching; I loved what I was doing. He said he’d ask if there was a position at the Embassy. I thought that was very strange. The man was staying at the Tirana Hotel, the one with the advertisement.
At the opera
An evening or two later, Agron and I went to see an opera, which was just a two-minute walk from that hotel. The American couple were there! Albanians generally are friendly and we invited them to our home. When they came to visit, he brought a lot of books that didn’t make an impression on me. They were New Testaments, maybe Bibles, Christian books that I had no idea about. After that we met several times and talked.
One day we were in the lobby of their hotel and he was talking about Jesus and God. He asked if I was ready to become a Christian. I said ‘How?’ because I didn’t realise how to accept Jesus into my life. He said: ‘Give me your hands.’ I was excited. ‘Let’s bow our heads’, he said, and then he prayed for me to accept Jesus into my life. At the end he said ‘Amen’. That was the first Amen that I said in my life. From that day everything really changed for my life.
We were having dinner one night when our American friend said to me: ‘Would you like to work for us?’ I didn’t know anything about his work! That is how I came to work for Mission Possible, but it was complicated. First I had to make contact with different government ministries: the Ministry of Culture, the Ministry of Education, etc. Mission Possible brought me a fax machine and a computer to put in my office, which was a corner in our bedroom.
The first event I had to arrange was at Christmas 1991. Five Christian professors came from the US and we had the biggest – at that time – conference with all the education leaders from Albania. That was organised through the Ministry of Education. Of course, although all the speakers were Christians, they didn’t speak about God to these leaders, but about leadership in education. It was very well reported in the newspapers.
The first church
The first missionaries started coming to my homeland about then. I became a member of the first church, the Emmanuel Church, where we had an American pastor who had been in Kosovo and spoke Albanian fluently. He and his family lived very close to us. Most people didn’t have phones then, but I had a phone and the pastor would come and use it. I began to become acquainted with the Bible. Everything started to make sense in my whole being, not only in my mind.
Agron went with me to different churches when Albania opened up, but he has never gone regularly. He agrees with what I am doing, but it is for me to do it, not for him.
I could not go into my parents’ hearts to know what they thought of me being converted, but they never said a word. Once, when a missionary and another friend visited our home and prayed for my family, I could see my mother’s tears. I think it was hard for that generation to open their mouths to thank God, or even to speak about God, because of what they had grown used to.
Denmark and Blythswood
My work with Mission Possible was very varied. In 1992 we started receiving aid from Mission East in Denmark and since 1999 a lot has come from Blythswood in Scotland. Blythswood and Mission East were working together at the time and set up an office in Tirana during the Kosovo crisis. I was the person on the ground who could help find warehouses and things like that. We connected with the local government offices and they showed us the people and places that were most in need so that we could distribute food and other stuff to them. That is how we started.
In 1996 we started Bible clubs for kids in different churches, two in Tirana and three out of the city. They were called Miracles Clubs. We trained leaders in their churches and we visited them ourselves. Our special visit of the year is when we deliver Christmas shoeboxes. We don’t only take them to the kids but, since 1999, we have taken them to people of all ages.
Bathore
Most of our work is now in Bathore, which has a population of over 33,000. The people are mainly from a Muslim background. They came from the mountainous north eastern part of Albania, where life is very rough and hard. After the country opened up they moved to Tirana but, of course, they couldn’t afford to buy houses. So they occupied land without permission and built huts to live in. Since then Bathore has become a priority in our work because there was, and still is, so much need. The need is not only for food and clothes but also for the Word of God. We have seen some women become Christians.
