Translator: Reviewer: Lalla Khadija Tigha
(Albanian) Good evening.
My name is Mark Kosmo from Boston in the United States
and I am the Chairman of the Massachusetts Albanian American Society (BESA).
I am very happy --
(Applause)
I am very happy to be with you here tonight
because my family emigrated to America 100 years ago,
from the city of Korça and the villages of Trebicka and Katundi.
(Applause)
Please excuse me that I will do my presentation tonight in English,
since I only began to learn Albanian when I was 35 years old
and I began to work in Albania.
When I was young I did not learn Albanian.
We were American Monday to Saturday.
We were only Albanian on Sundays
when we visited our grandparents, our cousins,
and sometimes in the church of Fan Noli in Boston.
But now I can honestly say, that I am a born-again Albanian
My heart is Albanian,
but my head is American.
And I want to emphasize now
and forget everything I said after five minutes,
then I have failed.
I am here tonight and I hope to inspire you to act,
and to be an agent for positive change in the global Albanian community,
By being connected to it, and by giving back to it,
That’s why the title of my talk is
"We Are All Global Albanians: Transforming our Future Together".
The theme of this conference is connectivity, so what?
Connectivity is nothing new.
People seem to think that connectivity was invented by the internet.
All the internet and technology have done is speeded it up
and changed the geographic reach of our connectivity.
As Albanians, we are not just connected, we are a hyperconnected people.
We have large extended families, lots of friends and acquaintances,
and we love social media
because it’s the best way to stay in touch with all of our friends and family
who are spread out all over the world.
But because we are so technology driven,
we lose track of the fact that a very important part
of our connectivity is our ancestry – our parents, our grandparents, our customs.
That’s what made us who we are today.
And that’s why I am here today because I have Albanian ancestry.
And if you are wondering what this picture is here.
This is a picture of my grandfather from over 100 years ago.
The picture is there to depict connectivity,
but is also there to show that for me my grandparents are here tonight,
my parents are here, my brothers, my cousins are here,
and all of the thousands of Albanian friends, acquaintances, and community members
with whom I have met and worked with over the years
are here with me tonight.
I’m here because of these people.
But there is a big problem with all of this wonderful Albanian connectivity that we have.
It’s all personal, its never formal, its never institutional.
There is no synergy in Albanian connectivity,
and this holds Albanians back everywhere.
Why does global Albanian connectivity matter?
It matters because 28% of all the people born in Albania
live outside of Albania now.
This is the second highest in the world after Bosnia and Herzegovina.
It means that a lot of people left in search of a better life,
but it also means that no country has a better opportunity
to benefit from its global community than Albania does.
If you include the large Albanian Diaspora
from Kosovo, Macedonia, and Montenegro, its even more significant.
40 years of Albanian isolation made it impossible to have a strong Albanian Diaspora.
And we have struggled for the last 25 years to build a better Diaspora.
And we still have a long way to go..
Moving forward, we should try to be like countries like Ireland and Israel
that have built strong institutions inside and outside of their countries
to build up their global communities,
and to build up their countries so that they can prosper.
We should try to be like India,
which in the last 15 - 20 years has had unprecedented development
precisely because it made a great effort
to engage its large professional and entrepreneurial diaspora.
However, if we are going to be like Ireland, Israel, and India,
it means we have to have a better government policy
for promoting the Global Albanian community,
and we need to have stronger diaspora organizations.
The creation of a Ministry of Diaspora one year ago
and the increasing talk about diaspora voting rights
is a very good first step.
But much more needs to be done at the policy level.
On the diaspora side, I can say that we are poorly organized
and that we have done not very much, and perhaps even very little.
In over 100 years of having an Albanian Diaspora,
we have created hundreds of effective local organizations,
but we have created hardly any effective national and global organizations.
If you want to have a powerful and effective global community,
you have to have effective and powerful national and global organizations.
It’s not just about having local events, where we raise the Albanian flag,
we dance the valle -- I love to dance --
And we sing "Oh How Great it is to be Albanian."
There is more to it than that.
Think of the global Albanian community like a soccer team.
All of the players have to be playing in their proper positions
in order for the team to perform effectively.
Individual talent does not count for much if the team does not play well.
And we as the Global Albanian Community,
we all know that we have the brains and the talents
to be as good as any country in Europe.
What we need now is the management, the organization,
and the connectivity to make this happen.
Now I would like to share with you
two ideas I have, two visions to improve the global Albanian connectivity.
Professional networks and charity.
[Global Albanian Progessionals and Enterpreneurs Network]
The Albanian Diaspora has changed as much as Albania has over the last 25 years.
It hasn’t just changed a little bit, it has changed a lot.
Its no longer the Albanian Diaspora of my grandparents and parents
who never had the opportunity to go to college.
It is no longer the Albanian diaspora of the 90s
when people struggled to survive in new countries
so that their kids could become
among the best and most successful professionals and entrepreneurs
in Europe and the United States.
Our Albanian Diaspora now and in the future
is hundreds of thousands of successful professional Albanians and entrepreneurs
in every corner of the world.
This means that the primary value of the Albanian Diaspora
is no longer its money and its remittances,
but its brains, and its experience, and its connections.
(Albanian) It's time to focus on our brains and not our pockets.
What’s the first step towards doing this?
The first step is we have to create formal and institutional networks.
Over the past few years,
I have been working with a wonderful organization in Kosovo called Germin,
and it’s the only organization in the world that is engaged for global Albanian issues.
And we are beginning the process now
of mapping out a global Albanian database of professionals and entrepreneurs.
Right now we have over 10,000 people in the database
and we expect to triple that to around 30,000 by the end of the year.
We will create networks of Albanian lawyers, doctors, finance experts,
technology entrepreneurs, Albanian teachers, musicians, artists, professors
and much much more.
Germin’s approach is a bottom-up approach
it will engage both new and old generations of Albanian professionals and entrepreneurs
because all generations have something to share,
And we need all of these networks,
because the Albanian diaspora is not going to come parachuting into Albania and Kosovo
to solve all of their problems,
no matter how much people want to delude themselves that that’s actually possible.
We need to all agree on one important fact though,
Albanians in the diaspora are no smarter or better than Albanians in Albania or Kosovo
or anywhere else in the Balkans where Albanians live.
And at the same time, Albanians that live in this part of the world
are no better or smarter than Albanians in the diaspora.
We need to start thinking about "we" and not "us and them",
if we are going to move forward.
If we keep thinking about us and them, we’re going nowhere as a global community.
We are one soccer team, not two soccer teams.
I know I just said we need to start thinking more about brains
and less about money.
But you can do a lot of good things with money, too.
And if we are going to start doing and thinking about "we"
then what a better way to start
than with charity and helping those of us who are in need?
We need to start thinking about how we can transform all of Albanian remittances
that have been sent back over the past century into charity.
Albanians abroad are not going to be sending money back to grandma anymore.
At the same time that people are not going to be sending back to grandma, the
the international donors are going to put less money into Albania and Kosovo.
What does this mean?
This means that the global Albanian community,
has to step up and fill this void with a 21st century concept of charity.
Because that’s the only way that countries like Albania and Kosovo
can truly become a part of the European family.
But many Albanians are cautious about donating.
They are worried about corruption, about mismanagement.
And at the same time there is a practical issue.
Nobody is going to go down to their local bank in New York
and spend $35 for a wire fee to donate $100 to charities in Albania or Kosovo.
So, I am happy to announce tonight that myself and some others
are in the process of creating the Global Albanians Foundation (GAF) in America.
It will be a foundation --
(Applause)
and online platform for Albanians all over the world
to donate for the causes that they care about,
for the organizations that they care about in the places they care about.
It will be for health, environment, education, children.
It will be in Tirana, Kukesi, Prishtina, Peja, Ulqin, Tetova, Presheva
and thousands of other places,
because people want to give for the issues they care about,
in the places that they care about.
Our experience so far in 2018 proves that people are willing to donate.
So far in 2018, we have raised over $60,000 from 600 donors in 15 countries.
We have supported children with Down Syndrome,
we have supported mothers and children with health issues,
and supported free health clinics in Albania and Kosovo.
And we have also helped to promote
(Applause)
we have helped to promote the Albanian diaspora engagement.
A lot of you might say $60,000 is not a lot of money.
But to me it’s a good small start..
As my mother once said "a flower that blooms overnight is sure to die."
And from our slow grass roots approach, we are thinking big
because our plan is to raise $1 million in 2019 from thousands of donors.
And we know we can do it.
We know, because we know Albanians are compassionate people,
and with their big Albanian hearts they want to help people in need.
BESA is not some sort of accident,
and neither was Mother Theresa.
["The Albanian Century" - When the people Lead, the Leaders will follow-Ghandi]
I’d like to start my conclusion with a story from 25 years ago
when I was working at the World Bank in Washington DC.
There were some protests out on the street
and there was a big hippie van, very colorful,
and it said “When the People Lead, the Leaders will Follow”.
So we have to all ask ourselves
are we going to be one of those people or not?
I get emails and comments all the time that say,
"Mark, this is going to be our century,
this is going to be the Albanian century"
And I always say, “well, I hope so,
because the last Albanian century didn’t end so well”.
I know, I was living here in March 1997 when Albania collapsed.
I was living here in 1999
when nearly half a million refugees came from Kosovo into Albania
So what does this mean that we, as Albanians,
have to do if this is going to be our century?
It means our thinking has to be as borderless as possible.
We need to be more global in our thinking, and less Albanian in our thinking.
It means we have to be inclusive in our leadership and in the way we work.
And this means to be especially inclusive of Albanian women
who, we all know, are the best like my mother was.
(Applause)
It means we have to stop blaming everybody else for our problems,
The communists, the politicians, corruption, Nastradini,
the Serbs, the Turks, the Greeks and on and on and on,
and we never accept that blame should be on Albanians.
Albanians created Albania.
Not God, not the western powers, and not individual Albanian leaders.
And finally it means that we need to be more sharing and caring.
We need to share more knowledge, and we need to help people in need.
Because that’s the only way that countries like Albania and Kosovo
are going to be one day members of the European Union.
It's time for all of you to lead
in whatever way your hearts and minds tell you to.
And that’s the only way we can create a better future.
We might live in many different countries,
but we’re one Albanian nation and we’re one global Albanian community.
(Albanian) Let us all work together for a better future for Albanians
everywhere in the world.
Please do your part for our collective Global Albanian transformation.
Thank you.
(Applause)