Pretty Rocks

A common pasttime of Western Georgia PCVs is to head to the seaside. It's also a common pasttime of Georgians, as is manifest by the 30,000 times I've heard the answer, "In summer, we go to seaside or village," as a response for homework, classwork, busywork, etc. Apparently, this exodus doesn't occur til August, as I was informed by my friend Paige's host sister today.

Let's take a hopefully-brief look at a typical day at the beach, except replace typical with "short and rainy with the kind of waves you've seen on Tropical Storm reports." Hmm, mental side note: I miss the Weather Channel. Local Forecast, on the 8's of every hour! I mean, they do national weather here at 9:10 PM, but it's hardly the same; I'll admit that it would have behooved me to watch the weather at 9:10 the night before we went to the beach.


The three favorite seaside sites (not including breakaway-republic superstar Sokhumi) are Ureki, Kobuleti and Batumi. While Ureki has black, magnetic sand with healing powers, and while Batumi has a newly-renovated airport that offers flights to Istanbul for $80, we decided to go with Kobuleti because it has pretty rocks. I'm sure Batumi has pretty rocks too, but everytime I wear my swimsuit to Batumi, people suddenly develop a case of work ethic and leave to go have meetings instead of swimming. I think I'll start to be offended by this soon.

So me, Paige, Irina (my host sister, if you'll recall), Paige's host sister, and special guest star Host Mom Rusico-- who felt compelled to come because Irina is not yet old enough to travel 45 minutes away; it's not wrong or right, it's just different-- hop aboard a nearly-empty marshrutka toward Kobuleti. It is, of course, empty due to the menacing storm clouds that develop into a downpour and generally bode well for a day at the beach. I have resigned myself to visiting the US with pasty white legs (August 11th, baby!).




A quick inspection of the beach reveals it to be just as empty. Since it was raining already, though, we saw no harm in plunging into the menacing yet pleasantly warm waters. As Paige demonstrates in these three pictures, we quickly established that perhaps the waves that seemed entertaining at first (figure 1) may have been bigger than we'd estimated (figure 2), a theory which was confirmed when they started throwing us around (figure 3, if you can find her).


We took cues from our hosts sisters, who had planted their butts on the rocky shore where the waves could slap at them with foam but probably not drown anything. Here we had much gravel driven into our bathing suits. As an additional bonus, the foam was sometimes carrier of rocks that the Sea Gods used to stone us for our death-defying impudence. I would occasionally look down the beach to where my host mother stood alone, drenched in rain and sea spray, trying to unfold her umbrella that had been blown inside-out by the wind. I expressed some trite words of sympathy to my host sister, who assured me that her mom was fine and wouldn't mind staying for a few more hours.

After a grand two hours of swimming and sitting, we gave in and packed to leave. There was a pit stop for coffee and pizza (without mayonnaise!) at a cafe before we plopped into an east-bound marshrutka to leave stupid rainy Kobuleti behind. See how succinct that was? And I have no meandering cultural commentary to make either, other than to say that I drank all my water on the way home and since I couldn't get to my filter that evening, I've just drank about 250 mL of unfiltered water. I place this on the record so I can refer to it in the likely event of future parasites.


UNRELATED SIDE NOTE!!! If you're in the US, make sure you're watching VH1 at 9/8 Central on Tuesday (the 10th) if you want to see my nerdiest friends geeking out on the VH1 World Series of Pop Culture, season 2. Go Twisted Misters!!! I apologize to anyone reading this blog out of genuine interest in Georgia or Peace Corps; this kind of groupie-esque plug for a pop culture quiz show team is completely out of place and unwarranted, and in fact brings down the integrity of this blog in its entirety. Well, you know what? Your face. That's what.

A (Summer) Day in the Life of Jen

9:00 Wake up. I briefly consider rousing myself out of bed in a timely manner so I can run before my community computer class, but this thought dissolves into about an hour of daydreaming. The thunderstorm from the night before is still rattling my windows. The power's probably out.

10:30 Finally get out of bed and confirm my hypothesis about there being no power. My host family's in Tbilisi, so I go downstairs to make breakfast like an independent woman.

10:40 There's three different valves on the gas pipe. I find that the first one releases a stream of gas into my face, which in hindsight makes sense, since there's no pipe attached to it. The second one turns out to be the lucky winner, and I am free to fry some eggs. Looks like the third one is attached to the gaslight, which I suppose I could be using now since it's dusk-dark in here from the thunderclouds, but since I already fear that the second of gas that came out of the open pipe is going to dissipate throughout the house and then explode and end my life, perhaps I don't trust myself enough to turn it on.

10:45 Eating some eggs with soy sauce I bought in Tbilisi a few months ago. It's Russian soy sauce, but it still livens up the monotony a bit, like that week where I had a pack of American cheese.

10:55 I go to do the dishes, but there's no dish sponge or soap. I avoid thinking about the implications of that. I decide to check the outside faucet for some cleaning supplies, but unfortunately the back door is gated and locked, like the other doors in the house, and I don't know where the key is. Great.

11:15 A break in the rain comes, and I head out to the grocery store for some food, being that there's none in the house since we were in Tbilisi for like a week.

11:20 I tell the first storelady that I want the 10-lari pack of chicken in the freezer, to which she tells me that, no, I don't want it because it's old. Never mind.

11:25 Sweet Nikora has a whole chicken for me, presumably not old. Nikora is one of the more successful chain stores in Georgia, selling meats mostly, but also yogurt and American cheese. My host family likes to buy wrapped hot dogs from Nikora. Boy, wrapped hot dogs. Mmm.

11:30 The lady at the next store is the same one who wouldn't sell me any matsoni (Georgian yogurt) yesterday because I didn't bring her a jar. Nonetheless, she hooks me up with the rest of the stuff on my list, and a Diet Coke. Time to swing by the school and see who signed up for my 2-week computer course that starts today. This class is for the trainers, and then the next two one-week classes are for regular community members and will be co-taught by the trainers. See how that works? Sustainability? Capacity building? The total four weeks of class also carries me over clear until Eco Camp in Ratcha, which is a week and a half before I leave to visit the US, so I can thus avoid the situation I was in last September, wherein common tasks were spread throughout the week so I had a reason to get up every morning ('I need to go to the bazaar and to mail these letters. I'll go to the bazaar tomorrow, since there's a concert this afternoon, and I'll mail the letters the next day.').

11:40 Strangely, someone has typed up the handwritten sign I made in Georgian and printed it out for me. The next thing I notice is that, while the community one-week classes are full, no one has put their name down for the trainer's class. Thus, I am now committed to teach a bunch of non-English speakers computers two weeks from now, without any capacity building or skills transfer to trainers. Great! At least I have something to do in two weeks. I'll try the trainers' thing again in September. It's probably better this way, since I have to go speak at the new volunteers' hub day in Gori this Friday, and I have a girls' sports camp meeting in Batumi on Wednesday. I hang my head and walk dejectedly from the school, the computer room's generator growling in the background.

11:50 I head to the bazaar for cucumbers and tomatoes. I'd like to buy them from the group of ladies who always give me free cherries, but I can't find them, and I realize I'm not exactly sure what they look like individually, since there's usually eight or nine of them that shout, "Gamarjoba Jane!" when I walk by (Jane is a name that they learn in the really old English textbooks for 5th graders, so about 40% of people call me Jane, 15% of people call me Jen, and 45% of people call me America).

12:00 I sit in the kitchen. Some things tend to get done when you have more pressing things at hand. For example, I found out last week that I'm ineligible for next year's Rhodes Scholarship competition, so I have to turn in my application this week, two and a half months late, to NYU (don't laugh at me-- my chances are .0001% greater of winning if I try than if I don't). I also gotta write a lesson plan for talking to the new volunteers about transportation safety this Friday, and I should also be starting on a handbook for next year's Writing Olympics competition and working with Bald Ryan in Dimi to draft an English textbook for 6th graders, as well as attempting to secure a donation of 20,000 English books from an American donation company for our regional public libraries.

12:05 I scrub the candles of my water filter. They don't look any cleaner when I finish.

12:15 I change my clothes for no reason and then head off to the post office to mail a letter to Mom, a thank you letter to Darien Book Aid for sending our class library new books, and a pack of letters for Aunt Lynn's 6th grade class, who were my students' pen pals.

12:30 The woman in the post office greets me as "good girl" as her coworkers sit around a table behind her. There's always a herd of women there, and I haven't figured out what they do yet, but maybe it's like the pony express, and as soon as I leave one of them grabs my letter and runs it to Tbilisi on foot. Things take an annoying turn as she pokes the large pen pals' envelope and asks what's in it. I tell her it's letters and pictures, but she keeps poking it, since apparently it has the texture of contraband. She has her friend poke it, and then they agree (out loud) that I'm sending something that I'm not telling them about, but that they should okay it anyway. She weighs and prices all three envelopes and praises me for giving her 17.20 lari in exact change.

12:45 Seeing as I've decided to institute a policy of sanitation during my stay alone in the house, I stop at a small store and buy dish soap and scrubbies. There's something on the shelf that looks like packs of American cheese, but with pictures of fruit on it. It piques my curiosity for a second (usually, you know in advance everything that's going to be in a Georgian store), but not enough to buy it. It could be fruit cheese. Ew.

1:15 I've nearly run out of ways to postpone working on the Rhodes application or the security session lesson plan. My sitemate's in Kutaisi for the day, and while he did leave his Iraqi bootleg James Bond collection DVD here (very high quality, seriously, and it has every single movie on four disks... we're on Thunderball), it'd be polite of me not to watch them all while he's not here, I guess.

1:20 With the pretense of copying down the Rhodes essay requirements, I turn the computer on, only to write a blog entry (this one! my God!) for thirty minutes, despite the fact that I have another unpublished entry on my jump drive already (the Writing Olympics one! my God!).

1:50 I finally buckle down and work on the Rhodes app for a little while.

2:50 The power goes out. Fortunately, I anticipated this and saved the document approximately every thirty seconds. I head downstairs to make tuna salad with the last pack of sweet 'n' spicy tuna my sister sent me in a care package.

3:15 Tuna salad + cucumber + tomato turns out to be delicious. Time to use the extra beans and rice in the cabinet to make... beans and rice. To avoid the debacle that was my crunchy-bean chili, I decide to boil the beans for several hours, playing Donkey Kong Country 2 on the Game Boy that Andrew gave me in the meanwhile.

6:30 Still no power, but the beans are decent. The rice has somehow become a mashed-potato-esque white blob. I'm surpremely glad that my host family isn't here to see this and tell me that I'm making lobio da brinji wrong. They always guess that I'm making something Georgian, despite the fact that I have yet to do so. Then they add a handful of salt to it.

7:15 I'm sauteeing chicken in mayonnaise since it turns out that there's no oil in the house. It doesn't seem to be working. I add a handful of salt to the concoction in the hope that my host family knows something I don't. The chicken carcass is boiling into what I hope will become soup, or at least that was my intention when I threw the noodles in there. Or are you supposed to skim the fat first?

8:00 I dine on chicken (with more Russian soy sauce), beans, and rice-blob. I debate turning on the fridge and storing the leftovers in there, but it's not that hot this week; they'll keep.

8:30 The power comes on, so I get to working on the Rhodes resume and activity list. Somehow this list makes me look more like a dilletante than a focused student of international relations who wants a prestigious scholarship. I don't think College Bowl is going to earn me any extra points... but at least I know who MC Skatkat is.*

9:40 An NPR podcast launches itself in the midst of my work. Or perhaps I turned it on. In any case, it turns out that 'Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me!' is my new favorite podcast, behind 'Foreign Dispatch.' Can I include listening to 'Foreign Dispatch' on my Rhodes list of substantial activities?

10:25 Back to work.

10:35 The power goes out again. I slump in my chair and unplug the computer.

10:37 After feeling my way into the bedroom and grabbing my flashlight (reserved for such occasions), the power comes back on. I return to the computer and my incomplete application.

10:40 The power goes off again. Must be fate. I re-unplug the computer and change into my pj's for bed, despite the fact that it's not even 11 and I woke up late in the first place.

10:50 I lay down in bed, only to notice that the light in the next room is on: the power's back. Rather than tempt fate, I turn the light out and return to Donkey Kong Country 2 and the delicious escape of my off-brand mp3 player. The same kind of tree-felling thunderstorm as last night is raging again outside. I fall asleep counting my meager accomplishments for the day, determining a plan to space out tomorrow's meager accomplishments, and hoping that the backyard water tower doesn't blow over and fall in through my window.

*MC Skatkat is the cartoon cat who sings with Paula Abdul in the "Opposites Attract" video, who went on to have a solo album sans Paula. I've often said that it's the only thing I learned from College Bowl.

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!)

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!

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?