You have no doubts that you are right?
I am more cautious when it comes to evaluate my own culture.
I would note that American and German family values were historically extremely similiar, no doubt at least partially because descendants of ethnic Germans and related ethnicities are the largest self-reported ethnic group among Americans, numbering 44.3 million according to the last census. As an example, if we consider our two primary military leaders in Europe and the Pacific in WWII, General Dwight Eisenhower was of Swiss descent and Admiral Chester Nimitz was of German descent.
Both Germany and the US place a very high value on families and healthy family life. And unfortunately, starting in the second half of the twentieth century, this family life came under increasing pressure in both countries, with tragically high divorce rates and related social problems.
Now Albania is an interesting and special case, because the Adriatic people, like most Mediterraneans, place enormous value on extended family, whereas in the US and Germany there is greater emphasis on the nuclear family. I myself was greatly blessed to grow up in a strong, dynamic extended family in which I benefitted from closeness even to my second cousins, great aunts and uncles, and had a two parent household. This has become unusual.
However, Albania is also a former Communist regime, and as you might well know from interaction with older Osties who had the misfortune of living under the DDR, Communism is not very supportive of extended families, to put it mildly; even nuclear families faced severe strain, and the USSR in particular was known for among other social problems such as widespread alcoholism, extremely high divorce rates.
Now, of the former Communist countries in Europe, Albania had by a considerable margin the worst dictatorship under the radical atheist communist Enver Hoxha. Indeed, in its totalitarianism it was rivaled only by North Korea. The severed relations with Yugoslavia for Tito’s anti-Stalinism, then with the USSR after the anti-Stalinist purge under Nikita Kruschev, and was supported for some years by the People’s Republic of China, but then Hoxha broke off relations with Chairman Mao after the historic meeting with President Nixon. So Albania became, as is widely known, the most isolated country in Europe, amd to this day, regions of the country are covered with concrete pillboxes and other fortifications, because Communist Albania regarded all of its neighbors as a threat.
Domestically, the Hoxha regime completely outlawed religion. I am most familiar with the experience of the Albanian Orthodox Church, which almost ceased to exist; I believe there were at one point just thirty priests secretly ministering to underground communities of believers, and those caught by the secret police were killed. The traditions of the Albanian Orthodox Church, and indeed the means by which it was able to rebuild so rapidly, was the expatriate Christian community in the US, whose Orthodox members were led by Archbishop Fan Noli, who I greatly admire. Another Albanian Christian who I am sure we all admire is Mother Theresa.
Given the pure chaos that characterized much of Albania’s history after the downfall of the barbaric Hoxha regime, in which massive organized criminal empires parasitized the country for many years, the family emerged as something Albanians could count and depend on, and indeed in some cases appears to transcend even religious identification. Uniquely among Islamic countries, Albania has a large number of multifaith households in which some members are Christians and some are Muslim, and much like Ghana, Togo and Cote d’Ivoire, there is remarkably little religious strife. In the particular case of Albania, I think much of this can be attributed to the influence of the Bektashi Sufi Order, a semi-monastic group related to the quasi-Gnostic Alevi Sufis of Turkey, with certain crypto-Christian elements; Bektashis are probably more powerful in Albania than anywhere else (although their holiest site, in neighboring Macedonia, has been occupied for several years by a radical Sunni fundamentalist sect).
So the experience of family life, and its meaning to people in Albania, has been very different from the experience in any part of the United States, except perhaps to a very limit extent among the Albanian diaspora and the large Orthodox Christian communities in Pennsylvania, Oregon and Alaska, or the Federal Republic of Germany, Austria, Liechtenstein, or German-speaking Switzerland, Belgium and Luxembourg,* or even the German Democratic Republic. I personally think missionaries in Albania should seek to encourage their children to not be shy but to immerse themselves in the Albanian family life, and to develop deep bonds with Albanian children who desire their friendship.
*I have been blessed to spend time in all German speaking regions of Europe except the Italian Sudtirol area around Trieste, which was formerly the main seaport of Austria.
