Before and After!

Voila! Before-and-afters galore; you know that's the only reason you watch Trading Spaces and A Makeover Story every Saturday. Before you move on to the pictures (if you haven't already), just a quick yet sincere thank-you to everyone who donated and everyone who tried to but was thwarted by the speed and generosity of other donors who closed out the fundraising. By the way... remember this post from last year? Which resulted in this camp for ninety village girls across the country? Well, it's happening again this year, and if you find it worthy-- or if you can't sleep at night because of unresolved guilt over missing out on the last donation opportunity-- then head over here and shove $5 in their pocket.

Also, let me just make a proclamation here: this project flew just fine without my micromanagement. All of the micromanagement was done by community members, who were pinching every penny and analyzing every line item of the grant budget in a way that brought tears to my eyes.



The door locks and everything! Turns out that they used a room from a particularly secure floor (the floor where the computer room is), which has iron bars at each entrance, so the possibility of vandalism or theft is even less likely than I had feared.



One of the cutest parts of the first lesson in the new classroom was the second that my counterpart flipped the light switch, and all the students go, "Oooo!" It's not as monumental as if they had been mountain village children who didn't have electricity at home, but it was still an unexpected surprise to them.



Part of the project money went toward getting this CD/tape player, and part went toward the red Georgian-English dictionary you see here. Why, you may ask, did I decide to go all Sultan of Brunei and splurge on a CD/tape player when a simple tape player would have sufficed? The reasons are twofold: 1) It wouldn't have sufficed, since The Powers That Be in the field of English textbooks for Georgian schools are unaware that Georgia exists anywhere outside Tbilisi and Batumi, so they decided last year to switch the format for their listening accompaniments from tape to CD. Thanks for that. 2) The thing was only $50. Also note the small piles of paperback books about America, a donation from the US Embassy.



All the desks were replaced with better ones, all the chairs with better chairs, and the chairs, blackboard, and teacher's table were painted sky blue. It wasn't my choice of color, but it does provide further proof that this was a community-run project. In the end, it actually looks kind of cool to write on a turquoise blackboard. The window glass was replaced, too, and the walls were spackled and repainted.



So there you go. Perhaps this diptych would have been more effective if I had a handful of scrawny, depressed kids in the first picture, but you get the idea. They're happy to have a new classroom! They're happy to learn! There's a chance they're really happy because school ends in two weeks!



And lastly, to wrap everything up with a pretty turquoise bow, here's a clip from our first day of class in the new room. The students are filling in the words to a song blasting from the CD player as part of a listening exercise from the 8th grade book-- some grant money was used to purchase a set of listening tapes & CDs for the textbooks. Aside from the three uncooperative weasels who decided to continue to stare into space and do nothing even as the camera was rolling, things are looking pretty nice.

So pat yourself on the back if you did as much as sending good karma in our direction. We're done!