I was getting to know my colleagues, ‘Where are you from?’ ‘From Manastir’. Another says, ‘From Mitrovica’, and one was from Vuthaj. We finished introductions and started working. One week, two weeks, we were working, going to work, meeting up, having coffee. However, I notice that when they are talking and I approach, they stop talking. I thought to myself, what have I done to deserve being gossiped about, what did I do?
I said to one of them, ‘Lume, please tell me what the problem is, you talk about me, but when I approach, you stop. What’s the mystery?’ She hesitated a bit and said, ‘Emel,’ she said, ‘please tell me why you left Manastir.’ I said, ‘I left because of the children, where would I educate them?’ She did this {grabs her head with her hands}, ‘Wow,’ she said, ‘you even had children in Manastir?’ That’s when I got it.
I said, ‘Did you think I was a nun,’ I said, ‘and that I came from a monastery?’ ‘Yes,’ she said. I asked, ‘Did you finish your education in the Albanian language?’ ‘Yes, in Albanian.’ ‘Did you learn about Migjen?’ ‘We learned about Migjen,’ ‘And where did Migjen finish high school? In Manastir,’ I said, ‘Manastir is a city.’ That’s when they understood that I was from the city of Manastir and not from a monastery as a nun (laughs).
Emel Pashoja was born in 1945 in Kyustendil, Bulgaria. In 1977, she graduated from the Higher Pedagogical School in Skopje. She worked in the administration of the “Sami Frashëri” high school until her retirement in 1996. She lives with her family in Prishtina.