7 Months in Georgia

Welcome to week two of my January of Nothing. Don't get me wrong-- it's just enough Nothing that I can still enjoy it. School starts on Monday, and I don't remotely have the feeling I did in middle school Augusts, when the break seemed sufficiently long and boring by that point. What helps me carry on is the delightful fact that I have three trainings in a row in Tbilisi the week after school starts, so 5 days of school and then another week off. Well, "off." But "off" is better than on.

Three unrelated observations:

1) I was in Kutaisi on Saturday (for British Night with some other volunteers and an expat), which also happened to be Old New Year-- Dzvelit Akhali Tseli-- here in Georgia. The confusion, which I can't quite explain, comes from the fact that Saturday was New Year on the Orthodox calendar. I seem to remember someone explaining to me that this is because practicing Orthodox church members fast before and after Orthodox Christmas (January 7, as you know) and Old New Year was the first time of the calendar year when they could break loose and, I don't know, eat meat like it's 1999. Anyway, since I missed regular New Year in Georgia, this was a good enough substitute-- at midnight, we looked across the skyline from the expat's 5th-floor apartment to see fireworks EVERYWHERE. It was clearly not a coordinated effort, and I can only imagine that the city avoids burnination every year because it's entirely made of concrete, but for a gross violation of fire safety codes, it was beautiful.

2) Just as I was despairfully writing "nothing yet" all over my Peace Corps trimester report for most of the community-based assistance goals, a secondary project gold mine fell into my lap. Turns out this woman at an English/Computer-teaching office down the street-- whom my counterpart teacher forebade me to visit because she thought the woman wanted to kidnap me and hold me for Embassy ransom money-- has started an NGO called Georgia New Generation, aimed at helping the community youth and specifically Abkhazian refugees***, of which she is one herself. She acknowledges to us that a more grammatically-correct name for her NGO would be New Generation of Georgia, but she likes the symmetry of GNG. Anyway, she was enthusiastic about mine and my sitemate's requests to hold community-development club meetings there (specifically, a girls' leadership club from me and an environmental club from him, both with national networks started by Peace Corps volunteers; I'm impressed with my predecessors, personally) and she wants our help in getting grants and things like that so she can help people. Actually, when we left today, she said, "Good bye! I'll see you soon, and we can start helping the community." It may sound trite to you, but it was refreshing as Gatorade to us, who had despaired of finding a motivated, young Georgian in our site who was interested in community development. Score!!

3) Due to everyone and their deda asking me if I'm going to marry a Georgian man while I'm here, I've had a lot of time to think about marriage (by the way, the answer is no) and I've developed a new, untested, simplistic key to marriage for myself. What does this have to do with Peace Corps, and why is it in my Peace Corps journal? Very little, and I don't know. But here it is: I think the problem a lot of people come across is that they get married because they think they've found the best person in the world for themselves, like the best possible match. The new Oversimplified Key to Everything that I've thought of is that you can't possibly find the best match for yourself. It's like when Kim and I were violinists in St. Mary's County, and no matter how good we got, there was always someone better (and then when I went to New York, there were a million people who were better, but that's not the point). So people think that no one else can be better for them than their spouse, and then when they meet someone else during their marriage who they think might be better, they question their choice and decide they've made a mistake. I think that when you marry someone, you're telling them and yourself that you've found someone who's amazing and wonderful, and that you love them enough to abstain from going after the better person when they come along. And how would you even know the other person was better anyway, until you'd been married for such-and-such a time and found yourself in the same position with another opportunity? It might not be romantic or modern to suggest that you stick with someone the whole time even if there might be better alternatives-- and by no means am I saying that a sudden downturn in the quality of your original choice should be tolerated for the sake of a low divorce rate, i.e. abuse or emotional detachment-- but divorce sucks too. How do I know? I don't, not remotely. But with my hours and hours on Georgian and Turkish public transportation, that's what I've come up with. Think you'll just get divorced if someone better comes along? Then cut out all the "to death to us part" stuff from your wedding vows. Voila.





*** How familiar are you with the Abkhazian situation? Here's a short explanation, made as apolitically as possible. Abkhazia is a breakaway province in Georgia; its people have their own language, though their land falls within Georgian borders, and shortly after Georgia's independence, Abkhazia fought a war with Georgia for its own independence. The results of this war are many: 1) Abkhazia exists in a state of semi-independence, still held to by Georgia (who lists reigning in its breakaway provinces as a political priority) but supported and almost recognized as a state by Russia, whose citizens largely populate Abkhazia now. Both sides are still rarin' to go, if the other offers up a provocation. The United States insists that a peaceful resolution be found. 2) Ethnic Georgians fled the war-torn region in the early 1990s, creating a huge refugee problem in the areas around Abkhazia, including places as far away as my town. Many live long-term in hotels, while others enlist the help of a smattering of NGOs designed to ease the housing problem for refugees. That expat in Kutaisi works for one. 3) Just so you know, Peace Corps volunteers are not placed in Abkhazia or close to Abkhazia and cannot visit Abkhazia.