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paid to the constructors for their 5 months of work while the rest he spent for materials,
transport, arranging the water supply, electricity etc.). Since Behar and Ana moved in his
house, Ana was doing all the housework while Behar was helping Dimitris with construction
and other physical work. With the help of his Greek pension, economized throughout years
and with remittances sent by his children and wife, Dimitris completed the second floor of
their house, where they nowadays live. For this he spent another 15.000 Euros. To the hired
constructors, people explain, he paid again around 5.000 Euro for five months of work. As he
was now helped by Behar and his in-law who moved with his family to Dimitris’ house in
2002, he also gave them some extra money (around 500 Euros each). At present Ana, Behar,
their two years old son and their in-laws are living in a separate part of the Dimitris’ new
house. Whenever Behar and his in-law are not helping Dimitris, they are doing occasional
work for other elderly villagers, who usually hire them for one to five days and pay them with
the money from their Greek and Albanian pensions. For their physical work Behar and his inlaw
are paid around 10 to 15 Euro per day, like the rest of the new coming workers. Behar
spends a part of the earnings for his living costs, economizes the other part, while some of the
money occasionally goes to his or Ana’s family in Shkodra and Lushnja. Dimitris has a very
good opinion about Behar and Ana and they also speak respectfully about him. Though many
of the locals do not agree with Dimitri’s cohabitation with “Albanian family”, they respect
Behar who is perceived as a good and fair worker, “not like other Turkos who came here to
steal from the locals and take advantage of them”.
It seems that monthly pensions that the majority of the locals receive from the Greek
government help to create well-being in the daily practice of the inhabitants of
Dhërmi/Drimades. They allow easier return for those elderly villagers who lived and worked
in Greece for some period and they also give young families originating from other places of
Albania a possibility of employment in their home country.
Distinctions between locals and outsiders or “newcomers” are also a constructive and
constitutive part of the identification process along with different categorizations and
continuous hierarchizations of the notion of “local”. As Gupta and Ferguson suggest, the term
“local” is not something separate from regional, national, international or global. The
perception of locality is not given but is discursively and historically constructed together
with the community (Gupta and Ferguson 2001: 6). Gupta and Ferguson suggest that instead
of studying what locality is, it is better to focus on how it is formed and lived in all its
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