Bolo Zari

Welcome to a tale of the Georgian graduation. Interesting fact of the day: It's a good thing I was invited to this Bolo Zari ("last bell") because the Ministry of Education added an extra year of school on, starting next year, so there won't be any graduating class of 2008. They'll have to wait until-- gasp!-- the 12th grade. Now I have my own views on whether it's a good idea to institute another year of mandatory schooling when the students already stop coming to class in late 10th grade... and that's about as much as I can write about that; if you can't infer what my views are from that sentence, then I guess we have nothing to say to each other.

And before I continue, I should point out that, like in the cartoons, there was a good fairy and an evil demon on either of my shoulders, whispering judgments to affect my opinion. Or perhaps I've merely lost my mind and am treading ever-steadily towards a whack-evac. Either way, here's what the voices in my head had to say about the graduation ceremony:

Evil demon: Great, they graduated. Now all the boys can go hang out in the street for the rest of their lives.
Good fairy: Knock it off! The government's practically run by men, which means at least two or three of these boys are going to get out there and do something. You don't even know them.
Evil demon: I don't know them because they haven't been to school in three months.
Good fairy: And some of them are probably going to the university after this.
Evil demon: Where they'll graduate without attending classes.
Good fairy: What a cynic. How about your counterpart's former students who work in Tbilisi, and one who works in the gamgebeli's (mayor's) office in Samtredia? And how about the one who ended up as a U Penn-educated economist?
Evil demon: ...
Good fairy: That's right.
Evil demon: Their uniforms look funny.

Barring that, it was a sane experience. Some things were different... most things, in fact, were different... but I think the main point in all of this is that I feel old now.



It starts right after school, with a concert put on by the graduating class. After they make their grand entrance from the hallway-- wearing their traditional school uniforms, which they have made especially for the occasion since no one over the age of 10 wears their uniform to school... and by the way, the girls' uniforms look like French maid costumes-- they do a little dance, make a little song, and recite poetry. If I've managed to upload the videos from the Bolo Zadi to YouTube, then I've also managed to embed them in this blog post. If not, then I've sorely disappointed all of you, and I apologize for bringing it up. Anyway, we all sit around and watch them do Georgian dances (and, inexplicably, a cheerleading dance to Spanish music) and sing for about 45 minutes.


Then, the ceremony is considered closed, and they run around signing each other's newly-purchased French maid costumes. One of the last things I saw before leaving was the director signing girls' dresses right across the chest. The evil demon reminded me that American school principals would be fired for such a thing, but let's remember-- these are still children here. They're addressed as "children" ("bavshvebo"), and despite anatomical evidence to the contrary, there's nothing inappropriate about writing across the apron on the chest of a 17-year-old girl. Seriously. Which is not to say that I did it.

After that, we come to the part that's invitation-only. This implies excellent community integration on my part, that I was invited, but actually my counterpart was invited and brought me along. I suppose I crashed their graduation party.


We went to a restaurant called Kalakis Guli ("Heart of the City"), which I'd passed a million times but never really thought to enter-- side note, when my site mate and I 'try new restaurants,' it just means we want to test the quality of the 10 items on their menu, which are the same 10 items all the other restaurants have. There were two long supra tables set up, one for teachers and one for students. As per usual, the supra table was covered in all the Top 40 Georgian Food Hits-- khachapuri, chicken in walnut sauce ("bazhe"), tomato & cucumber salad (to which I've become addicted... Georgian tomatoes kick American tomatoes' collective tomato-butt), grilled meat ("mtzvadi"), eggplant with pomegranate ("badrijani brotseulit"), et cetera. Also as per usual, there was a big plate of cakes, but let's make a distinction: these are "namtskhvari," which is like an appetizer for the main cake, "torti." Add to this the fact that big dishes of vanilla ice cream came out afterward, and you have the reason why I've gained 15 pounds in Georgia.

Evil demon: Fatty!
Good fairy: She'll work it off when she gets back to the US and she's free to exercise without being stared at.
Evil demon: Is this before or after she reacquaints herself with cheeseburgers and milkshakes?
Good fairy: You know she prefers tuna melts and Diet Cherry Vanilla Dr. Pepper.
Evil demon: Tuna gives you mercury poisoning.


ANYWAY, the supra continues like most supras... a synthesizer band plays keyboard demos of traditional Georgian songs, busy waitresses refill plates, people periodically get up to start dancing, and the toastmaster ("tamada"), who is one of the 11th-grade boys, and raises a glass every once in a while. We did the usual toasts (children, parents, life, love) and added a couple special ones (to their director, to their 1st grade teacher, to finishing school). Here's one of Jennifer's Moments of Cultural Contrast: the students' parents paid for this supra, at which we're toasting with very strong wine, as led by a 11th-grade toastmaster. In the US, my graduating class was carted off in buses to a rec hall on the Naval base, where we were entertained/imprisoned to keep us from slipping away into the night for a little celebration drinkie.

Another side note-- every single country I've been in has convinced me that the US minimum drinking age of 21 only makes kids more irresponsible with alcohol, and leads to more problems with drunkenness and not knowing their limits. Georgians start drinking when they're whatever age (I've seen as low as 8, but I don't really recommend that either), and when they're 16 they can drink a little without tittering like birds and chasing their wine with a gallon of Pabst Blue Ribbon. And a disclaimer: I didn't drink anything at all till I was 20, but that was a personal decision and shouldn't have been tainted by the notion of arbitrary legality.




So that's about it for their graduation celebration. I was interested to see the dance instructor Levan start dancing, since he's the only adult Georgian I've ever seen throw himself around like that (the male parts of traditional Georgian dances are usually very physically taxing), and despite my continued reluctance to show off my inadequacies, I somehow ended up dancing, too, being forcibly spun in circles and dipped by students and dance instructor Levan alike. The Georgian teachers on the other end of the table got tipsy and started singing, though there's a marked difference between American tispy singing and Georgian tipsy singing, in that Georgian tipsy singing involves vibrato and four-part harmony. About at that point, my counterpart and the other English teacher got up to leave, which induced me to follow suit as to avoid showing off another of my inadequacies, the Georgian language. We congratulated a few of the students on the way out, including the very first Georgian girl I've met who's taller than me. She plays basketball, they tell me.


Good fairy: That was a very nice journal entry. Your readers will be satisfied.
Evil demon: You pluralized "readers," that was very optimistic of you.
Good fairy: There's at least three readers, which consitutes a plural. I just wanted to point out that I thought this was one of her better entries lately.
Evil demon: That's because she figured out how to embed pictures in her posts, and she's been relying on them to the extent that her writing suffers for it. Bland, bland, bland.
Good fairy: Well I agree with that.

Skola Days

Let's go to school...

I teach 5th - 10th graders (5th - 10th form, as they say here, and as my students' US penpals pointed out in multiple letters... of course, one also pointed out that Georgians celebrate Hannukkah, and I'm not quite sure where he got that one), which eats up about 16 hours of my week. No, it isn't much, but after almost a whole year of working at school here, I'm more convinced than ever that: a) American teachers are underpaid, and b) I must have been the bane of at least three of my teachers' existences during high school. So to answer your unspoken question, I spend the rest of that time lesson planning, working on other projects (next blog entry: Writing Olympics!), and reading (41 books so far, more than I read for fun during high school and college combined).


We have our own English classroom, which is more than many schools can say (and probably due to the fact that there have been two previous volunteers at this school), with lovely green walls, and many little posters and maps gathered over the years-- or made by me. I personally think this rendition of the four seasons will go down in the annals of history with those of Vivaldi. There's also a lovely little food pyramid, as well as a family tree full of lies-- it was for a fifth form class, who probably couldn't handle the vocabulary of my real family tree. More steps than a tax manual. P.S. I love you guys!


The variety between the classes is hard to keep up with. Pictured here are some of the girls from my tenth form class, who probably speak English better than I do. I'm under the impression that, having been taught by the two previous volunteers, they're over the whole "volunteer" thing, and are quite underwhelmed by my presence. In addition-- I'll admit-- I feel a lack of authority when I'm telling them to stop goofing off, knowing that I was in their exact position 7 years ago. 7 years! It'd be easier for me to get annoyed by the fifth graders, but they're too adorable. I've included a video of them asking questions about a text to each other (not bad for 9 months of English study). It's as my counterpart told me, "I always have to yell at him... but he is so cute!"



Oh, and speaking of my counterpart... this is Tsira. She's been teaching for over 30 years, and she's been the counterpart for all three volunteers at my site. She's also my Georgian teacher, and she lives about ten minutes away, just past the bazaar (you know the place). In addition to teaching me the nuances of Georgian language and translating the Georgian newscasters for me, she also indoctrinates me with a love of the bygone Soviet era, a time when she could fly to Moscow on the cheap, and when her family had two cars and central heating. So now she has zero cars, but she does have two daughters who are both doctors, and one grandchild with another one on the way. She was very surprised when I told her my sister and I weren't going to move back in with my mother when I get back to the US. Another fun fact: she learned enough English in 5 months to pass the university entrance exam back in the day.

Side note, though-- the book she used then is the book we still use to teach the 5th and 6th graders. I'll reserve my opinion on those, only to say that this summer, some of us are getting together to write new elementary-level textbooks, which we hope to pilot this coming school year. And then my vendetta against the 6th-form book will be complete-- uh... I mean... at least we have books.

Much as I tend to whine when I'm on the phone with people, that's just because we generally don't get the urge to call America and tell them how great things are going when they are. So, to counteract that, we're going to cram all of my grievances into one sentence and then spend the rest of the entry on pluses.


I can't stand the amount of cheating that goes on in my class, since cheating is overlooked in most classes and it makes it really hard for me to enforce anti-cheating rules since the children don't understand why it's wrong to help each other; furthermore, it doesn't make much of a difference if I lower their grade as a punishment, since only the university entrance exam scores decide university enrollment.


Plus #1: The 7th form class. They were my least favorite at first, since-- a la TV-- they spent my first day of class beating each other with notebooks and throwing paper all over the classroom. However, they've mellowed out a little, and I've come to appreciate the fact that their... er... enthusiasm translates into excellent participation. They're still a little out of control, but I prefer that immensely to the classes I have where the students stare at me and wait for my counterpart to translate what I've said. Take a look at the picture. See the coats? This is the frigid winter (albeit not as frigid as most parts of the country), and they're still reading dialogues. Nice work, Nino.


Plus #2: The 5th form class. They're a bunch of little geniuses who are now ahead of the 6th form class, I'm pretty sure. As one of the other volunteers here said, the younger students love any activity with little pieces of paper, hence this picture where Papuna asks questions in English about the little picture taped to his forehead. They absorb words like little lexi-sponges, and they try hard to make me understand them when I miss what they say in Georgian, which is no small feat for someone with a 200-word vocabulary.


Plus #3: Extracurriculars. Although I only had one club this year, a Fitness Club with an average attendance of 3, the students have been very participatory in things like applying for summer clubs that Peace Corps puts on. For example, five of the students from our school were accepted to attend the GLOW club (Girls Leading Our World) this summer, which is quite a few for us-- nobody's ever gone before-- and I was so proud! The girl pictured, turned in the most elaborate application I've seen in my life, where she listed that Parliament Speaker Nino Burjanadze was her hero because of "her refined manner of speaking, with which she can convince anyone." This is translated from Georgian, but still. Way to go.


Plus #4: Lesson-planning freedom. Since my counterpart doesn't lesson plan (don't tell Peace Corps), I get a lot of freedom in the kind of activities I bring into the class. For most of the year, this was somewhat stifled by an all-consuming need on the part of the teaching staff to complete every activity on every page of the book-- minus things that required "conversation"-- but now that we're starting to finish the books, I get more leeway. This chalkboard represents an atypical lesson even for me, but it was in our quarterly TEFL newsletter Mas! Mas! Mas! so I thought I'd give it a shot. I'd like to point out that "crap" was not originally on the list, but it's such an integral part of my vocabulary that I added it, along with its subsidiary, "piece of crap."


Plus #5: Seeing students outside class. As I was wondering out loud to someone who may or may not have been listening yesterday, it's hard for me as a non-native teacher to picture the students who goof off in my English class doing well in any other subject. However, it wakes me up and fills my heart with sheepish delight when I find out about the accomplishments of the students who don't share the same affinity for English as some of their classmates do. For example, the kid in the picture is Vakho. Vakho sometimes knows the answers in class, sometimes not. He sometimes has his homework, usually not. But he turned in an application for BLOC camp (Boys' Leadership Organizing Committee) and wrote that he's a good singer. This piqued my curiosity, and at the 11th form's last day of class (also a future entry, already written but awaiting video upload) Vakho strode out with a microphone and belted out a Georgian tune. My faith in the world thus restored, I now hold out hope for that other kid who takes out notebook paper during tests and writes fake answers on it just so he can hide it on his friends and get them in trouble.

So that's what's going on at my school. As mentioned in the title, this is my primary project-- to instruct the students in English, and to make the new methods sustainable by imparting them to the teachers I work with. Stay tuned for the next entry, where we enter the realm of secondary projects, and namely my favorite one, Writing Olympics, because I can use my title as director to take credit for the work of at least thirty volunteers and ten members of the Embassy staff. Yay!

Meet the Parents

Imagine that you went to New York University for four years, living in a university housing apartment with your friends, paying your own bills, making your own food, and generally living a semi-independent existence supplemented by pity bank-deposits from your parents when they find out you've been eating canned corn for dinner. Imagine that you are then placed with a host family in not-Tbilisi Georgia, where girls are not considered women until they're married, where married couples tend to live with their parents, and where even younger boys are free to boss around their sisters and mothers. Sounds like hell? Well, it's not. While I've found that all of the above are true statements, I've also found that there are ways to live a peaceful co-existence with my host family. It helps that my host-family is a little unorthodox...


To be sure, they demonstrate the stereotypical Georgian characteristics, like yelling a lot and being quick-tempered, though they take pride in these, as it gives them a feeling of kindred brotherhood with the Italians. Or so they tell me.


For those of you who knew me in the US, you know I wasn't prone to talking much around people I didn't know well. My host sister, Irina, is perfectly content to practice her English during that vacuum of silence, or just to sit awkwardly and wait for me to say something. I appreciate that infinitely. She also takes my side during cultural battles, such as when I say I don't want anymore eggplant, and her mother-- being a good Georgian hostess-- tells me to eat more eggplant again, and Irina yells something like, "Aren't you listening?! She doesn't want anymore eggplant, woman!!" Irina loves Bruce Willis, Will Smith, Monica Bellucci, and Jennifer Lopez, and she's understandably the best English student in her class.


Irakli lives in his own apartment in Tbilisi, but he sometimes/rarely comes to visit. In this picture, he's mowing the lawn like a good man-of-the-house. Lucky boy, he's leaving in two months to go study English in London for a year, so he can add to his existing array of scattered English, such as "because," "boy," "not at all," and an assortment of anatomically-based swear words. I'm under the impression that certain of his habits-- ordering his female family members around, driving like a lunatic, smoking 3 packs of cigarettes a day-- will either cease in London or force him to return. I'm hoping for the former. Irakli likes Russian music, driving, and Tbilisi night life.


My host mother Rusico (on the left) takes care of these two old children, with the occasional assistance and visitation from her sister and neighbor, Darejan (on the right). Rusico spends much of the day taking care of the house, shopping in the bazaar, and chatting with her friends over coffee. She also has an insatiable love for "serialis," the Latin American soap operas which I believe I described in the last blog entry. Serialis run from about 6 PM to 11 PM, and then they rerun the next morning so you can see them with fewer commercials. Her favorite seriali is "Meore Sitsotskle," or "El Cuerpo del Deseo" in Spanish.


My host father Alexander lives and works in Russia as a businessman. He's made the occasional cameo, namely once in July when I was first visiting Samtredia, and once in February. He's a typical Georgian "mamakatsi" (man's man), and he loves to bring back presents for his kids. He's also tried to teach Irina how to swim and how to drive, though the latter resulted in a 400-lari ticket, as we happen to live down the street from a police station, which was probably not the best place to put a 15-year-old behind the wheel. I don't know what Alexander likes, but Russian music is probably a safe bet, as is vodka. That's not a jab at Russians (or is it?)-- I recall excessive vodka presence in the house during the month of February.


So how do I fit in here? Well, first I had to establish a niche for myself as a strange member of the family who eats their food but isn't subject to their rules (hey, they get reimbursed for it). This is not to say that I flounce around the house in booty shorts and get home every night at 3 AM, just that I don't ask permission before I go places... though I do inform them, which is something I won't miss when I get home. Furthermore, I also transformed myself into the most docile person on the planet. For example, I like to be in the same room as everybody-- that's the family, and also the 10,000 neighbors who come over every day-- but I don't like seriali, so I read while they watch them. This led to my host sister labeling me with her new vocabulary word "bookworm," and to her mother saying that she'd let her daughter be as free as I am if she knew her daughter was going to read all the time like I do. I smiled at the mental picture of myself in New York reading from 8-10PM and then heading off to bed, but I didn't protest.

That's another thing to get used to. You know on a conscious level that there's different common opinions and practices in Georgia than in the US, but there's still a visceral reaction to things that seem unjust to you. For example, when we're watching Lost and the character Michael is identified by a word that vaguely translates into "negro." Instinctively, I want to write everyone in the room off as bigots. Logically, I know that they're not saying it out of hate, but rather that in a mostly-homogenous culture like Georgia's (or one that purports itself to be), identifying people by their differences is to be expected. It's not a mark of backwardness, either, since Korea does it too. And I know the reason they identify the characters Sun and Jin as Chinese rather than Korean is because there's an influx of Chinese people and stores here, and they're more familiar with what Chinese people look like than Korean-- though if her cousins ask about the Chinese person on Lost, Irina starts smacking them and pointing at me, hissing "KOREAN!" My defender.


That's about it for my family for now. As a last note, I've included this picture of my host cousin Gia, who asked me to put his picture on the internet because he's looking for an American wife. So, ladies... this is Gia. He has a master's degree in economics, and A JOB in Kutaisi (don't underestimate the value of that; there's 80% unemployment here). He's 26 years old, and he's said repeatedly that he's willing to do 50% of the housework, since that's what I told him it would take. Gia has a good sense of humor, and he can somewhat play the piano. He's looking for a lovely American wife to take on moonlit walks along the Black Sea. Leave a comment if interested!

It's Samtredia!

Wondering where I live? That's only natural. Since everyone has already spilled the beans on their own blogs, I may as well tell you: I live in Samtredia.

That's right, THE Samtredia. Its name, as you know, means "three pigeons."


Samtredia is the transportation hub of the west; all main roads and railways converge at her paved feet, and passengers and drivers alike duly pause to admire/ignore our town before they continue their commute east to Tbilisi or west to Batumi. Despite what the tourist pamphlet that I have says-- and, by the way, the tourist pamphlet is complete with a map, which would be handy if the roads were labeled-- there's not a whole lot of reasons for a visiting foreigner to stop in Samtredia, which makes it a greater mystery that I've seen German tourists with backpacks being led into our town bazaar. Why would you come from Germany to Samtredia? If in Samtredia, why would you visit the bazaar?


The one problem I had with Samtredia when I got here was the organized...ness. The organizedness. Check out this picture to the left, and you might see something that you won't see in other people's Georgia blogs: gridded streets. That's right, after starting out as a mere speck next to two intersecting rail lines, Samtredia was planned into existence, something few of Samtredia's neighboring cities can claim (as the others average in age around 1500 years, so perhaps we can give them a break). Some houses actually have numbers, like my sitemate's. Some houses, like mine, have "numbers" which are unknown to all except those who live there, since they're not written anywhere on the house or on the gate, of course.


In addition to the grid, Samtredia also features other marvels of city planning (okay, Soviets, you did this one right, but that makes the score like 1-45278938), such as rectangular parks and a definable city center. There's Momavlis Parki ("Future Park") and another park that my sitemate and I creatively call "Screen Park," which boasts a large projection screen on which Russian music videos are broadcast during summer nights from the back of a Lada (watch for a future post on Ladas, the car of the proletariat). There's a 4-story city hall, a library, quite a few internet cafes, some restaurants, 1394 pharmacies, and a hundred zillion little grocery stores. The guy on the right, who was ignorant of my presence until the flash went off, is a local store owner, diligently packing a roll of Russian toilet paper (by some PCV accounts, made of gravel).


This qualifies as the ugliest hotel in existence, I think. Did you just look at it and agree, laughing to yourself about the squalor that some people call sufficient for overnight stays? WELL, shame on you! It's technically a hotel (it says "sastumro" across the top, a.k.a. "a place for guests") but its tenants are mostly permanent ones, and since there's not actually a shortage of quality housing here, most of those tenants are refugees from Abkhazia. I apologize for setting you up to laugh at refugees; I take back the shame on you and place it on myself.


To get back to the point, though, my initial impressions of Samtredia were skewed, as many initial impressions tend to be. Although it felt when I got here like I Wasn't really in the Peace Corps, rather that I was living in an American suburb but without the precious Wal-Mart, there's some aspects of Georgian culture that have risen to take the place of the cultural immersion I experienced during training, when I lived in the village (and I requested to be placed in a village, for the record). For example, I still get to dry my clothes outside, and there's still a rooster in my yard, though this one has half the IQ and one-eighth the time perception of the roosters in the village.

Rooster: 3 AM! Cock-a-doodle-doo!
Rooster: 7:59 AM! Cock-a-doodle-doo!
Rooster: 4:30 PM! Cock-a-doodle-doo!


The sense of neighborly camraderie among Georgians is alive and well here, too. Despite having lived in California, MD for 15 years of my life (put away your maps, random internet stalkers, we moved away right after I left for Peace Corps), I couldn't tell you the first name of the residents of 4 of the 5 houses within the immediate vicinity of my house. Here in Georgia, the neighbors come over every single day to watch Latin American soap operas-- the big one right now is El Cuerpo del Deseo since Montecristo just ended, though La Viuda de Blanco might be an up-and-coming hit-- and in fact, one of the neighbors is my host aunt. There was a wedding down the street (note: Georgian weddings last 2 days, and if I ever get to go to one, you bet there'll be a blog post rife with semi-witty commentary) and whereas I had never met said neighbor, we still went to their place to assist with the creation of enough food to feed an army with and then with which to bury the army up to their necks. This picture is of some of my host relatives and neighbors, caught red-handed (ha) butchering chickens. And then my host sister decided it might be nice to hold a turkey up to her face.


So that's your official introduction to Samtredia, almost 11 months after I got here. No, I didn't write anything about school, thanks for pointing that out... perhaps another entry is due. And then perhaps a show-offy entry about the successful completion of the Writing Olympics project, if it ever gets successfully completed. Maybe then a trite entry about the life-changing miracle of Peace Corps developmental work, or a 10-paragraph discussion of local weather patterns. The future is wide open!