Duchess, 1994-2007

To any current or future PCVs reading this, feel free to skip this entry as it has nothing to do with Peace Corps or Georgia. For lighter fare, check out the essay from earlier this week, a tour through the Pioneer Palace.

Still reading?


This entry is dedicated to the memory of Ms. Duchess McFann, a.k.a. "Miss Fluffy," "Geefren," "Badeena," "Lardbutt," "Duchess Roo," "Snaggletooth," "Porkchop," etc. She was a lousy guard dog, snarling at friends who'd given her treats the last 50000 times they'd seen her, while allowing strange men into the house unpestered if none of her masters were home to protect. She wasn't very obedient; she never learned any tricks beyond "sit," and even this was a display she would only deign to perform if there were treats involved. Every time she was left alone in the house, she would knock over the garbage can, communicating in her own irritating way that she missed her family.

But she was adorable.

Duchess and her brother Duke lived together with a family who pampered them until the age of 5, at which point they were given up for adoption. In 1999, a woman and her two daughters came to Duchess's foster home, where her appearance elicited many squeals of delight and adoration, and she was adopted immediately. Initially, Duchess was shy; she never barked, nor did she wag her tail. She didn't know how to play (and in fact, never really learned very well) and spent most of her time laying around (that didn't really change).


As the weeks passed, however, she grew to become a full-fledged member of the family. She discovered that this role, while it led to many treats and too much petting, also demanded of her that she engage in the following tasks, which she did with a minimum of protest:


- dress as a farmer for Halloween, and in fact wear whatever ridiculous bows or handkerchiefs her family happened upon
- ride a jetski at full speed
- ride on the bow of a kayak and be tipped into the water
- go sledding down a hill on an air tube
- accompany family members on errands around town
- have hundreds of pictures taken of her


Et cetera. Duchess faced a crisis in her life in 2006, when-- after one member of her family left for the Peace Corps and another left for college-- the third family member also had to leave for grad school and could no longer house Duchess. Duchess was heart-breakingly and reluctantly returned to the sheltie foster system from which she'd been adopted. But all was not lost: a month later, the grad student's landlady's cat died, and Duchess was offered a place in her home. Aside from the uninformed chidings of a third party who'd intended to adopt Duchess and who accused her family of neglect, the process went through swiftly, and Duchess took a plane ride to Minnesota, where she lived the remainder of her life with her one family member.


Duchess was 13 years old on Monday, when she suffered a stroke and was put down. While her owner in the Peace Corps wishes nothing more than that she could have seen Duchess one more time, she's secure in the knowledge that Duchess had a full, unique life, and that very few shelties can claim to have gone jetskiing. And despite what the Bible Club faculty sponsor told me in 9th grade, I think Duchess knows that I miss her and that I didn't abandon her when I came to Georgia.



*pours wine onto a piece of bread*
Duchess kargi dzaghli iko, da dzalian momenatreba is. Ksona ikos.

O Young Pioneer!

Let's take a quick trip to the Pioneer's Palace in Chiatura (and maybe after five or ten entries about Chiatura, I'll introduce you to where I live).



First, you get into the cable cars and ride up to the side of a mountain. The cables in the picture are actually from another set of cable cars that are in place for the convenience of the manganese miners and offer an infinitely more harrowing experience-- though Heidi assures us they've never fallen. I will take that at face value because any evidence to the contrary would induce me to foreswear the most quirky public transportation system in Georgia. That, and the miners' cable cars are free.

At the top of a hill, from which you can see the former majesty of all the proletariat attractions I described in the last Chiatura entry, there stands mud. The mud has kept me from gaining entry to the Pioneer's Palace the previous two times I'd tried, but not yesterday. Yesterday we discovered that a kind soul had placed crude stepping stones so that one could tiptoe onto former Soviet grounds with a minimum of mud engulfing one's shoes.

Oh, time out-- do we all know what the Pioneers are? For those of you in America who haven't had the notion to look it up, the Pioneers were like Soviet boy scouts, except for both genders participated, of course-- equality for the workers! There's a former Pioneer meeting house in many towns, including the one where I live, and they offered the usual stuff... cultural education, clubs, excursions, patriotism, indoctrination, etc (just like Boy Scouts, right?).


Now we come to the purpose of the Pioneer Palace, which was like a giant meeting place for good little pioneers on good little pioneer excursions. You can sort of picture it in its days of glory, a vast marble structure with columns and arches and stairs, overlooking the socialist perfection of Chiatura. You can almost hear the little Russian voices ("Yes, Russian, stop clinging to your former Georgian identity; you're Soviet now!") lifting the tune of L'Internationale and heaving it over the cliffside where it would warm the cockles of party members everywhere, even reaching as far as the all-marble KBG building. A portrait of Lenin crowns the landscape, framed by trees against a background of Chiaturan socialist harmony.

Let's take it forward about twenty years, to yesterday when Stalin cried in his grave as four Americans stomped their way across Pioneer Palace grounds, taking pictures to send to their bourgeois families. No one from Chiatura really visits the palace, for understandable reasons of bad memories most likely, but we still think that even in its current condition, it'd make an excellent tourist attraction, as would the entire town. Soviet Disney! To boot, the aforementioned KGB building was blown up in 1989 by Georgians encouraged (communists prefer "confused") by democracy protests in Tbilisi, who then used the marble rubble to rebuild a monastery the Soviets had torn down.


So as you can see from this picture, the condition of the building is somewhat... unkempt. Even as the three Americans look bravely toward the future-- with rocks in hand to throw at the hostile feral dogs which call the palace home-- the palace behind falls apart, wishing for the past. No more little internationalist hymns singing down from the music rooms, no more excited groups of Soviet children trickling in and out of the doors.


Could we have in fact trickled into the door (it's locked), we most likely would have fallen through the floor. The walls are all sorts of lovely, tacky colors, which have only become tackier as the layers of paint peels away and one can see what lovely, tacky colors were plastered on before. Like history through layers of sandstone or tree rings, except with more lead.


The majestic cliffside view is still as majestic, if you're not bothered by things like rows upon rows of empty apartment buildings and half-finished hotels, but Ilya Ilyich's bald head no longer guards the palace. Its absence is marked by five holes on the monument that held the picture, though without the picture there, it's more apparent that this monument is weird. What shape is that? And what color, for that matter? As in the case of many Chiaturan post-Soviet modifications, we think it would have been cool if they left it the way it was; of course, our country wasn't left helpless in 1991 with an unduly complicated and shoddy infrastructure and an unsustainable economy, so perhaps our dreams of kitsch are somewhat outweighed in importance.

I hereby promise not to devote any more posts to Chiatura until I write one about my site-- which, you may have noticed, I haven't once mentioned by name in this blog. I was under the impression that to do so would be frowned upon by safety & security staff, but all the cool kids are doing it, so stay tuned for that.

Jesus is Risen, gately

Welcome to a wrap-up of this year's Georgian Easter ("Aghdgoma," or "the rising"). I've never tried to post pictures to this blog before, but we're gonna give it a shot.



In the first place, you have an Easter supra in the morning. This is just like Easter brunch in America, except for it's in a graveyard with your dead relatives. I realized belatedly that there are tables all over the place in Georgian cemetaries for this purpose (and also for Tslis Tavis, if you remember from a previous post). My host family and I took a marshrutka to the town of Vani-- also famous for being the home of the Golden Fleece, yes THE Golden Fleece-- where my host mother's parents and cousins and grandparents et cetera are buried. There we ate some khachapuri and boiled chicken, made some toasts with 2.50-lari (~$1.47) bottles of wine, and poured some wine on the graves so they could imbibe too.



The dead are the life of the Easter party. In addition to getting their own day, which is the day after Easter, they also get special treatment on Easter. You'll note in this picture that there's little cakes near the headstones. These are called "paska," and they're special Easter cakes. Every dead person gets a paska and some candles-- no candles at this grave, unfortunately, but I think that's because the whole family died (check out the dates... that guy died when he was 29). Well, that's depressing. But don't you think the graves are a lot more personal with the portraits etched on them? Maybe that's why it's easier for Georgians to frequent their cemetaries than it is for Americans; all we see is names and dates.



Georgians dye hard-boiled eggs red a couple days before Easter-- only red, since that's the holy color here. Every dead person gets an egg on their grave as part of their party favors, and then children eat the rest. There's a game that goes along with eating an egg: two people each hold an egg in their hand, and then they hit them together. Whosever egg breaks is the loser (see picture for example of losing egg, i.e. mine). This happens approximately ten million times and never loses its appeal. My host sister from the village told me that some little cheaters make wooden eggs and paint them red so they win every time. Now at first blush, this seems like a lot of effort to win a game that is, to say the least, simple... but then you think about our exciting Easter game in America: FIND THE EGGS! Not much better on the excitement scale, but still suitable for children with low attention spans.

One more thing: there's a traditional Easter greeting, which when translated goes as "Christ is risen," with the response, "Indeed." In Georgian-- "Kriste azdga," "Cheshmaritad." That latter word-- cheshmaritad-- is the more important for volunteers to learn, since usually we end up responding to greetings from strangers rather than initiating them. The big problem for me was that "cheshmaritad" sounds like other, more familiar words that I already knew, like "ishviatad" ("rarely").

Georgian person: Christ is risen.
Me: Rarely.

I also kept coming up with "chishkari" (gate) and then turning it into an adverb. "Chishkaritad."

Georgian person: Christ is risen.
Me: Gate-ly.

Hopefully that didn't happen too often. To conclude, I'll point out that not only is the day after Easter a holiday for the dead in its own right, but this day also happens to fall on April 9th this year, which is a holiday to commemorate the people who were killed by the Soviet army in a democracy demonstration in Georgia in 1989. When I came downstairs at 9:30 this morning, there was a glass of wine waiting for me so we could do all the necessary toasts for both holidays. Other than that, though, the rest of today looks to be normal, minus the fact that everything's closed so I can't get any work done.

And of course, you didn't forget that today's my birthday, right?