THE HOMELESS BOY — A Memoir
Engjell Vrapi

Chapter One: When the Wall Fell

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I was twelve when everything changed.

Not just in Albania. In me.

My grandfather was the village doctor. My father worked oil by day and sewed cotton pants by night. We were good people. Muslim by birth, not by choice — the way most things were in communist Albania. You did not choose your religion. You inherited it like a name.

God was illegal. Churches were warehouses. Mosques were barns. Nobody talked about faith — not openly, not even in whispers. I did not know what a Bible looked like. I just knew I had questions. Big ones. And nowhere to put them.

Then communism fell. Loud, sudden, messy — like a brittle tree crashing in the middle of the night. And in the chaos that followed, something unexpected appeared on our streets.

Missionaries. People from faraway places with strange accents and kind eyes. They handed out little papers. They smiled at you like they meant it.

We called them the Jesus people.

In a small town where everyone knows everyone, that was enough to make you an outcast. Kids made fun of them. Adults whispered. My grandfather would have had something to say, I am sure.

But I was drawn to them. I do not know why. I just was.

One of them invited me to a gathering. It was held in the basement of a house on the edge of town. Folding chairs. An old rug. A guitar with only five strings.

I was scared walking in. Scared someone would see me. Scared of what they would tell my family.

But I went anyway.

A man stood up and spoke Albanian — simple, clear words, not like the way grown-ups usually talked. And then he said something I had never heard before in my life.

"God loves you. Not because of what you have done. But because He made you."

I sat still. My legs were trembling.

Nobody had ever said that to me. Not like that. Not as if they meant me specifically — me, a twelve year old boy from a small Albanian town who did not know anything.

He read from a book I had never seen. He said Jesus died for our sins. He said Jesus was alive.

I did not raise my hand. I did not walk forward. I just whispered something in my heart. Three words.

Jesus, save me.

I walked home that night under a sky full of stars. Same dirt roads I had walked a hundred times. Same trees. Same silence.

But everything looked different.

I did not have words for it then. I still struggle to explain it now. I just know that something shifted inside me that night — something I have never been able to unshift, no matter how hard life tried.

I was still a boy in a country clawing its way out of darkness.

But for the first time, I was not alone.

That night they gave me a small blue New Testament. Albanian. Dhjata e Re.

It is on the dashboard of my Suburban right now.

It has been across borders, across oceans, through kitchens and hospital rooms and the backs of trucks. It has survived everything I survived.

It is the one thing I have never lost.

Chapter Two: The First Snow

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My earliest memory is cold.

Not the cold of a winter coat and a warm house waiting for you. The cold of a country that did not waste heat on children. The cold of frozen creek beds and bare hands and a rubber container hanging by the fence at my grandparents' house that we called the mustlluk.

It was a small thing. Just a container filled with water, hung on the fence with a little spigot at the bottom. You turned the spigot and the water came out. In summer it was lukewarm and fine. In winter it was so cold it made your teeth ache just to look at it.

Every morning we washed our faces there. Outside. In the freezing air. No warm water. No bathroom sink. Just the mustlluk and the winter and your own breath making clouds in front of you.

Nobody complained. This was just what morning was.

I was four or five years old the first time it snowed the way I remember. Not a dusting. A real snow — the kind that changes the world overnight. You go to bed in one place and wake up in another. Everything you knew is white and quiet and completely new.

I stood at the door of my grandparents' house and could not move.

I had never seen anything like it.

The creek behind the house was frozen. Not just icy — solid. You could walk on it. We did. A group of us, the neighborhood children, sliding across it in our shoes, falling, laughing, getting up and doing it again. Nobody told us to come inside. Nobody worried. Children were left to figure out the world on their own most of the time.

The cold did not bother us. We were too young to know we were supposed to be uncomfortable. We just knew the creek was frozen and that was extraordinary and we were going to be on it until someone made us stop.

My grandparents' house was made of mud. Real mud — packed and dried and layered until it became walls. It sounds fragile. It was not. Those walls were thick enough to hold the cold out in winter and the heat out in summer. They smelled like earth and old wood and something I have never been able to name — the specific smell of a house that has held a family for generations.

The well was in the yard. A real well, the kind with a rope and a bucket. My grandmother would lower the bucket and bring it back up full, the water cold and clear and tasting like the ground itself.

And by the fence — the mustlluk. Our morning ritual. Our cold water on cold faces. Our way of waking up.

I think about that mustlluk sometimes now when I am in my Suburban in Pasco and I turn on the tap and warm water comes out immediately. The distance between that rubber container on a fence in Roskovec and a heated vehicle in Washington State is not just geography. It is a whole life.

But the cold — the specific cold of those Albanian winters, the frozen creek, the mustlluk, the breath in clouds before you — that I carry with me still.

Some things do not wash off no matter how warm the water gets.

Chapter Three: The Mud House


My grandfather's house was made of mud.

Real mud — packed and dried and layered until it became walls thick enough to hold a family for generations. From the outside it looked like it could collapse in a heavy rain. From the inside it felt like a fortress. Those walls were cool in summer and held warmth in winter. They smelled like earth and old wood and something else I have never been able to name — the specific smell of a house that has absorbed decades of cooking and argument and silence and prayer.

My grandfather Refit was the village doctor. In Roskovec that meant something. People traveled from villages away for him. He performed circumcisions. He knew the old remedies and the new ones. He had strong hands, steady hands, and a voice that filled a room before he entered it.

He also worked with leeches.

I watched him do it more than once. A patient would come to the house — someone with high blood pressure, someone with a headache that would not leave, someone whose blood needed drawing the old way. My grandfather would bring out the leeches, living things, dark and small, and place them on the skin. They did their work slowly. Quietly. Drawing out what needed to come out.

It sounds medieval now. In Roskovec in the 1980s it was medicine.

My grandmother Habibe assisted him. She was not squeamish about any of it. She handed him what he needed, prepared the patient, cleaned up after. She was his partner in the practical work of keeping people alive. The leeches, the bandages, the herbs — she knew all of it.

For the cases where blood needed to be drawn differently, my grandfather used a shaving razor. He sharpened it on a leather strip — back and forth, slow and deliberate, the sound of it particular and precise — and then he would draw the razor lightly across the forehead. Just enough to let the blood come. Just enough to release what the body was holding too tightly.

I watched his hands during those moments. They never shook.

Most people were scared of him. I was too, sometimes.

But I was also his favorite. He would call me to him and I would go. I changed his diapers when he was paralyzed — oil soaked foil, because that is what was available. I helped him when he could not help himself. I was small and quiet and I asked for nothing.

I learned that from him without him ever saying a word. You do not ask. You endure. You serve. You stay quiet and you carry what needs carrying.

There was a fig tree in the yard. I remember the figs more than almost anything else from that house — the way they split open in summer, the sweetness that felt almost violent after months of plain food. My grandmother would pick them and we would eat them standing in the yard, the juice running down our chins, and for a few minutes everything in that complicated house felt simple.

That was the mud house. That was where I came from.

Chapter Four: Suk — My Mother's Story


My mother came from a village called Suk.

Smaller than Roskovec. Quieter. The kind of place where your family name was your whole identity and everyone knew exactly who you were before you opened your mouth.

She was shown my father's face once. One meeting. Chaperoned. Formal. The two of them sitting across from each other with family watching from every direction.

Her parents said no.

Whatever she saw in that meeting — or whatever she sensed, the way mothers sense things before they have words for them — she called it off. She did not want this marriage for her daughter.

But then my grandfather came to Suk.

He did not send a message. He did not summon them. He came himself, with my father's sister Keze — his third daughter, the one he was closest to — and he traveled to that small village and he sat down on the rrogoz.

The rrogoz is a mat woven from straw. Every Albanian home had one. You put it on the floor and you sat on it when you wanted to show respect — when you wanted to say, without words, I am coming to your level. I am not above this. I am sitting in your house on your mat and I am asking.

My grandfather Refit — the village doctor, the man whose voice filled rooms before he entered them, the man people were scared of — sat down on a straw mat in a village smaller than the one he came from and he asked.

My father's family was poor. People did not always know that from the outside. The Vrapi name carried weight. My great-grandfather had ridden a white horse. But inside the house there were nima — wooden bed frames strung with gomërdare, strips cut from the inside of old tires and stretched across the frame like springs. Not real springs. Tire rubber. Because that is what was available. Because you made do with what you had and you called it a bed and you slept in it and you did not complain.

Two poor families. A straw mat. A man with a strong name and wooden beds at home sitting across from a family that had already said no.

Aunt Keze told my mother years later what she had noticed that day in Suk.

While the men sat on the rrogoz and talked, Keze had quietly lifted the corner of the bedding in the room where she was sitting. Just a small gesture. A woman's way of reading a house.

The sheets were clean.

In a village that poor, with nothing to spare, the sheets were clean.

She told my father's family: this is a good family. Poor but clean. That means something.

My mother never knew she had been evaluated that way. She found out long after the wedding, long after the mud house, long after the boiling water pot.

But I think about it sometimes. A young woman in Suk who had no idea that her clean sheets were the thing that brought my grandfather to her door. That her mother's discipline and her family's dignity — expressed in nothing more than a piece of clean linen — was what tipped the decision.

You never know which small thing will change everything.

My mother left Suk and moved into the mud house and became Nusia. The bride. She was not asked if she wanted to go. She was told the family had decided.

Nobody told her about Ballsh. Nobody mentioned the fracture in my father's mind. Nobody said this man has been carrying something broken since he was seventeen years old and it will fall on you.

She found out the way you find out everything in that kind of marriage. Slowly. After it was too late to leave.

She never left anyway.

Not because she could not. But because she was built from the same thing as that rrogoz — plain material, pressed together under weight, made strong by the pressure of everything that tried to flatten it.

My mother came from Suk with nothing but her name and her hands and her will.

That was enough. It was always enough.

Chapter Five: The Metal Train


Uncle Fatos came to visit with a metal toy train.

He was nineteen years old. My mother's youngest brother. Still in school in Fier at the time — just a teenager, really, not yet the man who would later cross into Greece with cowboy boots and stories and a promise of a supermarket job.

That came later. In 1989 he was just Fatos. A young man from Suk visiting his sister's family in Roskovec, and he brought something for me.

I do not know where he found it. What mattered was that he produced it — a metal toy train that caught the light and made me stop breathing for a moment.

It had real metal wheels. They turned. You could push it across the floor and feel the weight of it in your hands — real weight, not plastic, not cardboard, not something improvised.

It was the most beautiful thing I had ever owned.

I kept it under my bed at night. I played with it carefully, the way you handle something you know could be taken away.

My mother watched him give it to me. Her youngest brother, nineteen years old, handing her five year old son a metal train. I wonder what she felt. Pride in him maybe. The particular tenderness of

watching someone you love be generous.

Fatos would leave for military service after school. Then after the military, somewhere around 1994 or 1995, he would cross into Greece for the first time. He would come back with cowboy boots and Greek songs and stories. He would go back again. He would get deported. He would go back again. He would eventually take me with him on a promise of a supermarket job that never existed.

But in 1989 none of that had happened yet.

In 1989 he was just my young uncle from Suk who came to visit and brought me something beautiful.

I still remember the weight of it.

Heavy. Real. Mine.

Some people give you beautiful things long before you understand who they will become. You learn the rest later. When you are five years old and your nineteen year old uncle puts a metal train in your hands, all you know is the train.

Chapter Six: My Father

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My father was quiet.

Not peaceful quiet. Absence quiet. The kind of silence that fills a room and makes everyone walk carefully around it.

He worked long days at the oil fields in Marinëz. He would leave before we woke up and come home smelling of crude and exhaustion. At work he stayed late, picked up other men's jobs, stayed until the light was gone. I understand now what that was — a man filling his hours with labor so he did not have to sit inside his own mind.

At lunchtime he ate alone.

My grandmother Habibe stretched everything. Bread with eggs and extra flour — as much flour as the dough could hold and still be bread. There were many mouths. You made do. But my father could not let his coworkers see what was in his tin. A proud man from the Vrapi family, the doctor's son, the man who worked harder than anyone — he could not let them see the lunch that poverty had made. So he turned away. He ate alone. He carried that dignity the only way he knew how.

After work he went to Sadush.

Sadush was his uncle on his father's side. Fifteen children of his own plus a grandchild he was raising. A barber with a shop that smelled of raki and cigarettes and the particular warmth of men who have nowhere better to be. Sadush called my father his favorite nephew. He made kukurec — lamb intestines wrapped and roasted on a spit, an old Turkish dish that smelled like everything good and dangerous at once. They would sit together and drink raki that my father was not supposed to drink. With his condition, the doctors had said no. Sadush did not care about conditions. Sadush cared about his favorite nephew sitting across from him in the barbershop after a long day.

Sadush was bad news for my father. I knew that even as a child without having words for it.

When my father came home he was different. Not drunk exactly. Just more present in a way that was worse than his absence. I learned to read the apartment the moment I walked in — the quality of the silence, the position of things, whether my mother's movements were quick or slow. I learned to make myself invisible.

There was a sewing machine in the apartment. It had belonged to my uncle Namik who bought it but never learned to sew. My father had inherited it and taught himself. In the evenings men would come with fabric and measurements and my father would stay up late making pants. Cotton pants, the kind everyone needed, the kind that kept us fed when the oil fields did not pay enough. The sound of that sewing machine at night — the rhythm of it, steady and relentless — is one of the sounds I most associate with him. Working. Always working. As if stillness was the enemy.

He beat me twice.

The first time I was playing in the rain with Ermela. He called from the balcony of our second floor apartment — come inside. I knew from the way he said it that what was waiting was not good. I went up the stairs and walked through the door and he hit me across the face so hard I saw red and then stars circling my head like a cartoon. One blow. He did not need more than one.

The second time was worse.

Ermela and I were fighting the way siblings fight — the kind of fight that has no real beginning and no real ending, just energy that needs somewhere to go. I pushed her. She fell against the metal bed frame and her thigh was punctured. Blood.

That bed. I need to tell you about that bed.

My grandfather Ramis had carried it on his back all the way from Donofrosa. A metal bed frame, carried by a man on his own back, because my older brother Buran had died of pneumonia at six months of age. He had been sleeping between two chairs that my grandmother Habibe had pushed together to make something like a cradle. There was no bed. So Buran slept between chairs and caught cold and died and after that my grandfather put a bed on his back and walked.

That bed was in our apartment. Ermela slept in it. And I pushed her into it and her thigh split open against the frame.

My father did not use his hand that time.

He found a copper pipe — about a quarter inch thick, the kind used for plumbing — and he hit my thigh with it. Once. He did not hold back his anger or his strength. I have never forgotten the specific pain of that pipe on bone. The way it went past hurt and into something else entirely.

He was not a cruel man. He was a broken one. There is a difference and it matters.

The breaking happened in Berat.

He had developed ulcers — years of oil fields and raki and worry had eaten through his stomach lining. The surgery was arranged. Sadush knew the doctor and brought a whole roasted lamb as payment — that was how things worked in Albania then. A favor, a gift, a connection. The lamb was enough to get the surgery done.

But in the examination Sadush did not mention Vlora. He did not mention the mental institution where my father had been sent at seventeen after the affair at the oil company in Ballsh — the arrest, the shame, the fear of his own father, the fracture in his mind that never fully healed. Sadush probably did not remember. Or he was drunk. Or he thought it was not relevant. Whatever the reason — he said nothing.

So the doctors put my father under full body anesthesia without knowing what they were putting it into.

My father woke up during surgery.

He pulled out his own tubes. He got up from the operating table. He walked through that hospital in Berat like a man who had crossed to the other side of something and could not find his way back.

He came home different.

We did not recognize him.

The man who had been quietly terrifying became openly terrifying. He made an axe by hand and kept it by the door. He told us stories about men who had done terrible things to their families and never been punished for it — told them the way you tell a story to make sure the listener understands what you are capable of. He was physical with my mother. He terrorized us.

I had been scared of my father before Berat.

After Berat I was terrified.

They took him to the hospital. We visited him at the park during visitations and he hit my mother there in front of us in the open air with other families watching. He would come home medicated and quiet and then the medication would shift and the cycle would begin again.

This is my father.

Not the monster. Not the villain. A man who ate his lunch alone so nobody would see his poverty. A man who carried a family on a sewing machine at midnight. A man whose mind was broken by a system that never gave him a chance to heal — not after Ballsh, not after Berat, not after the anesthesia that nobody warned the doctors about because the one person who knew was too drunk to remember.

He died in 2024. His mind had gone before his body did — the fog came first, then the physical decline, then the end. My mother cared for him in his last months. I was not there.

The last time he saw me I had black eyes from New Year's Eve.

He saw me broken.

I hope he is with Jesus now.

God have mercy on his soul.

He was a good man.

Even Kaleigh said that.

NEW CHAPTERS COMING SOON !