Home, Sweet Home in Tsaishi

Well, this was supposed to be posted on Monday, but various events, including a windstorm, a series of thunderstorms, two blackouts, and a horrible 24-hour stomach bug, have prevented me from getting to the internet cafe in Zugdidi until now.

The ten volunteers from my group who are going to be living in the Zugdidi area took a marshutka (minibus) here on Friday morning, where we met our host families at the local Educational Resource Center in the city (these are scattered throughout the country and serve as intermediary agencies between local schools and the Ministry of Education). There I was handed off to my host father, Paata, who is an English teacher at the school here in Tsaishi, and Marina, the school principal. It was about a fifteen-minute taxi ride to my family’s house, where I met my host mother Marika, their one-year-old son Nikolozi, and Paata’s mother, who lives nearby and was visiting for the day. Marika was also an English teacher before getting married, but she is not very confident in her English and doesn’t use it much. They are all very nice, generous and welcoming without being overly solicitous, and very interested in hearing about my life and my home in America.

Before dinner, Paata and I walked about ten minutes to a nearby hot spring, where I had a refreshing wash in the steaming water. As we walked back, the setting sun lit up the snowcapped mountains of Svateni, which rise abruptly off to the north. At dinner I met several neighbors, who toasted to my arrival and the prospect of a successful stay here in Georgia, in addition to the traditional toasts to family, to those who have died, and to many happy meals together in the future. I was encouraged to drink a lot of wine, but no one seemed put out when I only had a sip for each toast. After dinner, just in case there hadn’t been enough adventure for one day, I found myself corralled with the rest of the men to go tromping off through the brambles in the dark to gather up a litter of piglets that had been born that day and bring them back to the pen.

The next morning Paata and I walked through the village to the school. I am told that Tsaishi is one of the oldest towns in this part of the country, but from a newcomer’s perspective, it mostly just looks like some houses and a partially-roofed government building clustered around the main road that runs from Zugdidi to Kutaisi and points east. The school was just renovated this summer, which meant that we arrived to find many of the classrooms devoid of furniture, and the staff engaged in a prolonged (though seemingly not very hostile) shouting match about how to go about disposing of the piles of construction waste that filled the schoolyard. Slow progress was made in these areas over the course of the morning (my participation, as a new guest, was limited to input regarding the arrangement of desks in the fourth grade classroom), but there still seemed to be a lot to do by the time Paata and I went home for lunch. This meal ended up taking place at the house of his aunt and uncle, whose backyard adjoins ours. That evening a windstorm arrived, bringing a power outage in its wake, both of which lasted until Monday. Fortunately, life in Tsaishi doesn’t depend too much on electricity.

Sunday afternoon saw the four of us, plus our next door neighbors and their young daughter, all piled into the neighbors’ old Opel and off to the Black Sea coast. The strong wind meant stinging sand and murky water, but it still felt great to go swimming, and we found enough shelter to have a picnic before heading home. That night, however, I came down with some serious GI issues, about which I’ll spare you the details. Suffice it to say that having to use an outhouse doesn’t sound too bad, until you have to go there several times throughout the night, with a fever, in a windstorm, and with only a flashlight to find your way (remember, the power is still out).

I spent most of the next two days recovering, while the wind finally stopped and gave way to a series of extremely violent thunderstorms (leading to more blackouts), and before I knew it, it was Wednesday and the beginning of school. The day was ostensibly to begin at 9:00, but in what I am learning is true Georgian fashion, the opening assembly didn’t actually start until closer to 11:00. Everyone I’ve told about my interest in Georgian music has seized on the idea, and so a couple other teachers and I had prepared a couple of songs that we knew in common to sing when I was introduced at the assembly. After this Paata and I had a few minutes of a somewhat normal 12th grade class, talking about what we did over the summer, though the classroom we were in still didn’t have any furniture. Before long, however, we were informed that a TV crew wanted to film us, so the class was whisked off to the fully furnished staff room to repeat our discussion for the camera. I was then supposed to go to a 3rd grade class with the other English teacher, Sophie, but the TV people wanted to film me with my host family, so we all—myself, Paata, Sophie and Gocha, the music teacher—piled into the reporter’s car and went home (don’t ask what happened to the 3rd graders; I don’t know). After some “candid” family shots and a short interview, some more school people appeared, and the afternoon suddenly turned into a supra (a feast with lots of toasting and singing), which lasted until the 8:00 news, on which our segment aired. There were only a few seconds of our footage, mixed in with clips of several other volunteers, but they included a bit of us singing, so I can now officially say that I’ve sung on Georgian national television. In all, it was a pretty exhausting day, but I felt good about the time I spent with the students, and about getting to know Gocha, who says he wants to sing with me more.

I know this is an incredibly long post already, and I promise that I’ll summarize more in the future, but there are a few things I’ve jotted down during my first week with my host family that didn’t fit in anywhere else. So until next time, I’ll leave you with these thoughts:

Food:
• Cornmeal-based products seem to be a common substitute for bread here, as a filling starch and a sponge for various sauces. Examples include ghomi (think grits, but just solid enough to cut into with a fork), and small corn pancakes.
• Cornmeal also appears in a surprisingly good dessert dish, mixed with sugar and grape juice and served in a cup like a mousse.
• While I still wouldn’t choose it of my own accord, as far as wine goes, what I’ve had here is actually pretty good. Having a glass with dinner on a semi-regular basis shouldn’t be too hard.
• Other dishes so far: two kinds of khachapuri (cheese bread), roast piglet (not those ones, at least not yet), some kind of white meat in a creamy herb sauce, various eggplant-based dishes (all of which I’ve at least tried), cheese dumplings, pasta in hot, sweet milk (for breakfast), homemade cream puffs, cheeses, and fruit.

Other odds and ends:
• There is a water heater and a showerhead in the bathroom, but the toilet is a hole in the ground, located in an outhouse at the end of the garden.
• The house is large for a family of three, but has a surprisingly small amount of furniture, given that they’ve lived here for two years.
• The light fixture in my ceiling mysteriously raises and lowers itself on its cord when the wind is blowing (unless it’s the ceiling moving up and down—I’ve spent a lot of time watching and I still can’t tell). I know it sounds crazy, but I have video to back me up on this one.
• Oh, and of course, the first language of people in this region isn’t Georgian. They can all speak it, but amongst themselves they speak Megrelian, which is related, but different enough to make it almost impossible for other Georgians to understand. Learning the local language has gotten a lot more interesting.