O.C. Priest Braves Bullets to Stay in Albania

As hundreds of Americans evacuate Albania, a priest from Orange County messaged his family Monday that he is staying in the violence-torn nation to help keep the faith among the people he has been trying to help.

Father Martin Ritsi sent his family home from this Balkan land last week to stay with a relative in Tustin. But he chose to stay behind even as gunfire ricocheted around him, because he didn’t want the Albanians to lose faith in the Americans who had come to work with them, he told his father, George Ritsi of Laguna Hills, via e-mail Monday.

“If we all had left . . . how could we ever preach to them again about our concerns for them and [to have] trust in God and faith that things will get better?” Ritsi messaged. “They would just think, ‘Sure, you can say that, because when troubles come, you can leave.’ Instead, many people have come up and thanked us for staying.”

Ritsi went to Albania in 1992 with his wife, Rene, and their children, 11-year-old Stephanos and 10-year-old Nicole, to revive the Greek Orthodox church and work with the poor.

His father said he is at least somewhat relieved to know his son is unharmed, “but I wish he was out of there. [Yet] I can certainly understand that his presence is really quite important.”

A Laguna Beach woman also was relieved Monday, after hearing that her daughter, a Peace Corps coordinator, was evacuated from Albania to Romania last week.

Until her daughter Kerry, 25, called Friday, Marilyn Byron said, she had been a bundle of nerves.

“I was really upset. I was watching CNN . . . and I was getting all sorts of news, but nothing about my daughter,” Byron, 56, said Monday.

Finally, Kerry called Friday to say she was OK--and more importantly, that she and other volunteers had been evacuated from the fire zones of Albania to the safe harbor of Romania. About 700 Americans have been evacuated over the last few days.

This year, anarchy has gripped Albania as a result of the collapse of fraudulent pyramid schemes in which hundreds of thousands of Albanians lost their life savings. The Albanians, holding the government responsible for their loss, have rioted, police have abandoned towns, armed demonstrators have taken over and seized army weapons in the process. Thousands have made a mad dash for the sea to escape the political violence and economic disaster.

All this Marilyn Byron knew from news reports. What she didn’t know was whether her daughter--one of about 2,000 Americans living and working in Albania--was among those airlifted from the capital of Tirana last weekend as the insurrection escalated.

In his e-mail message to his father about his decision to stay in Albania, Ritsi described scenes of terror.

The 38-year-old priest wrote that after he took his wife and children to the American Embassy, “the gunfire got worse and worse. I didn’t have too much time to be sad. I got scared instead.”

“The guns were going off all around, right in front of our gate,” he continued. “I locked all the doors and went into the living room and shut the kitchen door. This way, if any bullets came through the windows, I was in a place in the house where I wouldn’t get hit.”

As unnerving as the description was, George Ritsi finds himself especially grateful for the high-tech world of e-mail.

“I’m telling you, just being able to send off a message, sometimes two or three times a day and getting response was a real comfort. It was the not knowing that was the most stressful.”