Albania

In one of Albania’s Roma villages, gospel living is changing the face of the town and people’s outlook on their future.

Latif is a leader in the Roma, or gypsy, community. He has served God for more than 15 years in his village, and his home has become a community center and church where people from the village gather. Everyone knows his door is open anytime, and God has done incredible work to heal many of his hometown’s troubles.

Merushe didn’t want to go to some Christian church. She’d been a Muslim all her life, and she’d die a Muslim.

There was just one little problem: the church had children services with skits and stories from their Bible, and her darling granddaughter loved it.

What was a poor Muslim grandmother to do?

She’d endure anything for her sweet mbesë, even these Christians.

World Challenge partners in Albania help one Roma woman with a disability find a new home after she was the victim of a crime.

The Roma community in Europe is often classified as the most economically depressed.

Many young, educated Albanians leave their homeland in search of a better life, and Vera intended to be no different until she met God.

Mynevere Saliu, more often called Vera by friends and family, was born into a Muslim Roma family in the city Peqin. 

A World Challenge partner followed God’s call to offer support to a boy and those like him in one of Tirana’s grittiest neighborhoods.

I live in Rruga-Ura, a suburb of Albania’s capital, where most residents are Roma with a Muslim background. 

This is one of the poorest neighborhoods in Tirana, and it was difficult growing up here. People got into fights practically every day, and alcohol was almost everywhere

After growing up Muslim under Albania’s Communist government, a widow found spiritual and economic freedom in Christ.

In 1953, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. preached a sermon where he stated, “…the methods of communism are diametrically opposed to Christianity.”

God is raising up leaders to help heal his people in the Balkans.

Loving society’s most marginalized can often feel like an overwhelming task, but for Blerta Kamberi, it has become her heart’s desire and her full-time job. 

Blerta is a leader of CHE Albania, one of World Challenge’s ministry partners in the Balkans, and she focuses on serving the Roma community, sometimes called gypsies. 

God is reaching the Roma community in the midst of poverty and prejudice

Recently, a member of the European Parliament pointed out, “There is not a single European country where Roma people have equal rights to non-Roma people. They are treated as a problem...”