Starting a community, the Albanian American club drives to build a culture for teenage Albanians.
“There’s Albanians who don’t know about the culture and if you want to know about anything it’s a good thing to join because we want to bring food and do all these activities so that there’s a way to connect further to their heritage,” co-president junior Liliana Gegovic said.
On Monday, Sept. 9 Gegovic and junior Gabriella Gojacj decided to create the Albanian American club, whose purpose is to converse and build a healthy community for all Albanian cultures. They build community through meetings, sharing traditional foods, having shirts to promote the club, teaching their language and different dialects and showing difference regional cultures.
“We wanted to introduce our culture to Eisenhower and get everybody together. And it was just a way for everybody to become friends and find ways to get to know each other,” club historian junior Marina Nucullaj said.
While most events have started at the school, they have also begun plans to expand doing events outside of school to local areas in Shelby township. There are 41,000 Albanians in the state of Michigan and 4,100 of them live in the Macomb County region, according to www.census.gov.
“I feel like not a lot of them know too much about their heritage,” junior Marija Gjokaj said. “So we just found a lot of Albanians who know about their heritage, and then we made the group to teach everyone about what being Albanian is.”
