Around early November 2019, we loaded up the car and headed toward Tale, Lezhe, the site of an ongoing investigation into the arrival of Moustached Warbler in collaboration with AOS’s Hungarian partners, the very same project I had seen on YouTube a year ago! However, it was not the birds that impressed me the most, but the level of effort displayed by AOS to fund such project. Here I was, living with three people I did not know two days ago, hanging out on the beach for 14+ hours a day, talking, joking, listening to music, singing traditional music, and trading stories. I felt like I had known Erald, Klea, and Admir for a lifetime. Most importantly to me, we were Albanians doing much-needed science in our own country. In my head, we made Albania a better place that week.