Writing Olympics!

Now that we're in Year 2 of Peace Corps, let's take a look back at the one and only secondary project I've had the pleasure of completing. It's not quite complete yet, so that first sentence is a lie, but it's mostly done, so let's just round it off and give it a blog entry.

Writing Olympics was started in 2003 locally by a Georgia Group 2 volunteer living in Akhaltsikhe (who currently resides in Tbilisi. For reasons of anonymity and privacy protection, we'll call him Gen Koff), and then it was expanded in 2004 to the national level. The 2006 and 2007 contests, in fact, involved Azerbaijan and Armenia as well, for a little Best of the Caucasus shenanigans. The participants include 6th through 11th graders, and this year we added university students, too.


Of course, all this background information is infinitely fascinating, given that I haven't explained what kind of contest it is yet. Perhaps you have a guess. Dancing and singing? No, you know I'd have nothing to do with directing that, something about the blind leading those with 20/20 vision. Debate? Beauty contest? Nah. Writing Olympics happens to be, actually, a creative writing contest, something near and dear to my failed-author heart. The chilluns get one hour to write about one of three or four topics specifically geared toward their grade level, and then we take all their essays from around the country and grade them-- no small feat, since there were 1,813 entries this year. The judges* are instructed to ignore spelling and grammar mistakes as much as possible, and they choose the winners based entirely on creativity. Let's look at some examples of questions, with little explanations with creative extracts:



Q: What makes you happy?
A: "I'm really happy when I find old money. I think it's a part of history and makes you know a lot of interesting things like: what kinds of money was made in different countries in different years, what raligy is the county there the mony is made."

This essay was written by a 6th grader, and was incredibly impressive-- 2 pages long, very few mistakes, and jillions of creative ideas. Most of the 6th grade essays said "My family makes me happy" and things to that very admirable yet not quite creative extent.


Q: Describe an interesting dream you had.
A: "In my dream I was in green grass and around me was many kinds of flowers, trees. Here I was scear because all around me was speaking. One flower say at me, 'Girl you are in nature's royal.'"

This is an example of creativity with grammar and spelling mistakes. Being English teachers here, it's easier for us to know what they mean, so that helps them out in the grading area.


Q: What would you do with a million mandarins?
A: "'Now, I am gonna make a prize for a man who will jump from five meters height and fall in the middle of the basin of mandarines.' I have imagined what the man would be like after falling down. But I think the man will smell well. The man will not be able to open eyes. Well, this idea is dangerous."

I met this writer at a language competition in Lanchkhuti earlier in the year. Obviously very creative, and obviously has had much speaking contact with Americans.


Q: If you could be someone from history, who would it be? Why?
A: "I'll do anything to be Yoko Ono. I hate her, but still I want to be in her place. I'd do everything right and it won't be my fault that now Beatles are only a history."

Some sentiments cross oceans and iron curtains.


Q: Which country do you most want to visit? Why?
A: "Of the most countrys I want to visit CHINA BECAUSE there is very interesting traditsions. It as country of Samuraies, and a fighting. They fight very cool."

Georgia has an influx of Chinese shops and such right now, so for some kids with little other exposure to Asian culture, it all gets filed under China, though I imagine Chinese samurai would fight very cool. We had a bit of a problem with this question since Georgian kids are good at memorizing, and quite a few of them wrote us lengthy memorized passages from their textbooks about the ancient pyramids of Egypt and the gleaming copper of the Statue of Liberty. There was also a special on a newsprogram about Brazil, so we heard bunches about carnivale.


Q: Which would you want most: a car, a helicopter, an airplane or a boat? Why?
A: "I would want most a airplane because when I have a airplane, I will be able to begin a bessunes ...When I have many bessuneses I will have much money and I will be able to buy a car, a helicopter, a boat and all wich I will want to have."

Aww, capitalism. He went on to describe how his dad's friend had a taxi business but that it didn't pay well, so that's why he wants an airplane business. Smart kid. We had many essays for the mandarin question where people started businesses too, which I think bodes well for the unemployment rate.


Q: What is the biggest problem in Georgia?
A: "On the fourth day he was found dead in his bed. He cut venus ....They found a letter to his mum. He wrote: 'Dear mum, Instead of that you left me here and didn't visit me even once, I love you very much. But I have to go. Please don't cry when you receive this letter. I'll be ok, I'll live in the world of phantasmagory. The pigeon in my mind died, 'cause he was bored of human's positions and lies.'"

This was from the Best of the Caucasus 1st place essay. Pretty good, right? It blew the judges away so much that we had to have a discussion about whether it was plagiarized, and then the same question came up again with the international judges. Thank God we took her word for it, since she brought copies of a poetry collection she wrote to the national ceremony, and all of it and this essay are clearly her own original work. The essay goes on to talk about how drugs are the biggest problem in Georgia, as told through the story of a drug addict named Kurt, who commits suicide in the above passage. The author (shown here with the ambassador), in addition to being a talented writer, is also a member of a punk band named "Hell's Sisters." Good for her.


That's it for serious excerpts. I do have one more, which is from the university contest. This writer didn't win, but I found her essay the most memorable.

Q: Do you agree with the following sentence? 'People are never too old to attend college or university.'
A: "I think that person who is high of 25, for him it is late. To go to college or university, it give him nothing. Everything has his time and his time is over. I know many people who attend college and university forty, but they are more stuped as they were. I don't agree with this sentence. I don't like this sentence."



So there you have it. There were some heartfelt essays, some cute essays, some funny essays, some weird essays, etc. The first place winners will be published in an anthology this summer (that's the part that we haven't finished yet), and all the national winners were invited to Tbilisi for a ceremony at the DCM's house (the 2nd in charge at the embassy). It was pretty sweet; I've never been to any party where waiters carried finger food and drinks around on trays, much less one for a contest I directed. All in all, it went wonderfully, and that's gonna be the first notch on my belt for project directing. I like to take all the credit for it, but really it involved all the volunteers who held sessions in their sites, brought prizes back and forth, retrieved photos and phone numbers for me, the director from last year (thanks, Chris!), the Writing Olympics committee (Ian and Ahneka), the embassy employees who set up the ceremony, and especially the graders. Speaking of which, it's time to resolve that asterisk I wrote earlier...


* The judges who rocked the Writing Olympics world were Ariana, Erica, Aaron, Heidi, Seth, Ryan, Lyssa, Maritza, Nicholas, Van, Ahneka, Amil, Eve, Sara and Jason. Special thanks to Caroline for donating a pastry to the cause.

Things to do with your money

Before you buy that Fantastic Four 2 ticket (or whatever you Americans are doing these days), take a moment to think about whether your $10 might be more appreciated by 90 Georgian girls, aged 11-13. I can think specifically of three of you who just decided you'd rather see the movie, but for the rest of you...

SELF Camp-- Self-Esteem and Leadership through Fitness

In Georgia, girls in the villages (and sometimes in general) are discouraged from doing sports or exercising, since it's something more associated with boys. Also, there's a lot of health misinformation that they're subjected to-- i.e. water makes you fat, drinking water after exercise hurts your heart, etc-- that promotes unhealthy living. To try and combat this a little, several Peace Corps volunteers (yours truly included) are working together with 12 sporty Georgian women to put on three regional camps, 3 days and 2 nights, for young Georgian girls. We'll have guest speakers, like doctors from international NGOs, come to speak with them about health issues, and in addition to learning about female athletes in Georgia and abroad, the girls will also spend a good portion of each day playing sports and learning new sports techniques-- for example, at one camp they'll learn soccer techniques and practice them as a group, but they'll also do individual exercises like Pilates and taekwondo (guess who teaches the latter?).

We gave most of the applications to girls from small villages and towns, who almost never have the opportunity to leave their homes without family members. As they are approaching times of many changes, as the euphemism goes, we think this is a very important age to begin to tackle not only issues of health and fitness, but also self-esteem and leadership roles for girls. We want to encourage them to create sports clubs in their own towns, and to take what they learned at camp back to their homes and share it with their friends. We want them to feel unashamed when they play soccer in the local stadiums, and we want them to be able to go running without being told that it's shameful.

And what is a pitch without an internet link? Our grant is online at the following link: https://www.peacecorps.gov/resources/donors/contribute/projdetail.cfm?projdesc=242-033®ion=europe and you can click on that page to donate (any amount!). All donations are tax-deductible, too. Most of the money will go toward making the camp free for the girls-- free lodging, food, and transportation-- and some will go toward purchasing supplies like soccer balls and air pumps.

Anyway, if you have any questions about SELF camp, please post them here or (if you know my email) email me. We're hoping to raise this money by August so we can hold the camp in September before school starts, so if you're interested, please click away! In fact, here it is again for your viewing convenience...

https://www.peacecorps.gov/resources/donors/contribute/projdetail.cfm?projdesc=242-033®ion=europe

A year later...

No pictures on this one...

I just read Georgia Diary by Thomas Goltz (an EXCELLENT book on Georgia in the 1990s and early 2000s, btw), and now I'm much more informed than I was about the civil wars that busted up this country in the early 1990s. It leads me to wonder...

... Is this entire blog an irreverant, disrespectful stab at a country so recently torn apart by civil war? Is it right for me to poke fun at the educational system and the antics of my host family when a little over ten years ago people like them were sitting in cold rooms without electricity waiting for the gunfire to stop long enough so they could get water from the spring? Back in 1993, I was 9 years old. In the grand scheme of things, that's pretty damn recent.

... Should I consider their recent history when dealing with Georgians on a personal level? Before I criticize someone in my mind for being late, should I remember that they lived in a violent, broken country for years of their lives that are not even fogged by memory yet? When I'm rolling my eyes as the roof gets blown off the new airport on a windy day, should I think about how Rustaveli Street in Tbilisi has been restored from piles of rubble? As I grind my teeth on days when the internet is down, should I give thanks that a country with war-torn infrastructure has come so far that internet cafes can spawn in a town as far from the capital as Samtredia?

Given these circumstances, I can't really explain why I'm going to continue to write the same kind of blog entries that I've been writing the whole time. In the first place, nothing has changed between two weeks ago and today, except for that my level of ignorance has been lowered somewhat. In the event of another civil war (KNOCK ON WOOD), my tune would change. One argument I've given myself is that part of the healing process is the ability to laugh at situations, but that's a better argument for a Georgian who starts a blog than for an American who toes the water for two years and then ships back out. One better argument I've given myself is that this blog isn't that offensive. Naturally, it walks the double-black line that the US government has set for my freedom of speech (being a representative of said government, I understand the need for that), but nobody would read it if it were a collection of breathless, awe-struck fascination by the beauty and purity of Georgian culture.

By the way, breathless, awe-struck travel writing about cultures is crap. I love Georgia, and I hope that comes through in my blog, but the way some travel writers take a culture and place it on a shiny culture-pedestal above all others only ensures that the travel writer himself will look knowledgeable and cultured, while the culture itself becomes exotified, and people who run away from their own cultures to seep in the exotic culture's harmonic utopia will be confused to find the same familiar problems in the latter. To say it as any hippie Peace corps volunteer would, exoticized travel writing accentuates and exacerbates the differences between cultures, rather than pointing out the similarities. That, and it's boring.

In conclusion, out of respect for the Georgian culture as one of real people and not one of exotic, fragile caricatures, this blog will continue in the same irreverant, mediocre-quality vein as it has followed for the past year. To all four or five people in the world who read this, I make this proclamation with a resounding echo: More sarcastic posts about my unaccomplishments await you! More descriptions of Georgia from a restrained western viewpoint! More love for my temporary home country, sans saccharine paragraphs of obsequieous adoration!

I have to believe that if this blog were that truly awful, Georgians wouldn't read it. (holla, Nico!)