Plague

As you may have guessed from the title of this post, this hasn’t been the best of weeks for me. I came down with a horrible stomach bug in the early hours of Tuesday morning, from which I am still in the process of recovering. For most of the first day I just hoped that it would pass quickly, but when I almost fainted and then started vomiting a somewhat alarming shade of green, I decided I’d better go to the doctor.

Because it was already evening, this meant going to the hospital, but we weren’t there for long before we were sent on to another, smaller hospital (for reasons not entirely clear to me), which turned out to be a dark, nondescript building at the end of a dirt road in a part of town I’d never been to. This made the part of me that still cared about such things somewhat nervous, but fortunately the doctor I met inside was very nice and sympathetic, and explained that my light-headedness was due to low blood pressure, which in turn was due to loss of fluids (at least I’m pretty sure this is what she was saying, and it all made sense to me). After a shot and a spoonful of some kind of caffeine concoction to boost my BP, we stopped at a pharmacy to pick up some more drugs and an IV hook-up, then went home. There, our neighbor who’s worked as a nurse gave me the IV infusion, which took about 45 minutes and went smoothly, with a coat tree standing in for an IV pole.

By Wednesday night my stomach and light-headedness problems had disappeared, but had been bewilderingly replaced by a sore throat and stuffy nose. The doctor had said she saw what looked like an infection in my throat, but at this point it just feels like a nasty cold. Maybe the cold virus took advantage of my weakened immune system? Who knows… All I have to say is that it doesn’t seem fair. I went back to school on Thursday, but I cut out early on Friday and went home.

Now, on to other matters. Other than the aforementioned plague, my time since our trip to Svaneti has been fairly uneventful, as far as major happenings go. I’ve spent a lot of time with Paata puzzling through the new official guidelines for lesson planning and student assessment which we are now supposed to be following, a process which has had its ups and downs. The biggest benefit is undoubtedly that we are now writing lesson plans for every class, which helps me to prepare and to make the most of my participation in the classroom. Because this is a pretty new idea for most teachers here, it is one of the very few cases where I actually have more experience and am able to help Paata, instead of the other way around. The benefits of the new grading system, on the other hand, are far less clear. Essentially, we are being asked to assign far more grades than the teachers here are used to doing, and working out how to do so is turning out to be pretty complicated.

Another issue taking up a lot of my attention is a school play that we’re trying to put together for the end of November. Marina, the principal, had broached the idea with me when we first met and she found out that I was interested in theater, and in the last week we’ve actually started working on it. The initial parameters for the production were basically that it should include English dialogue and that there should be opportunities for students to perform folk songs and dances along the way. After talking with Paata, and no doubt influenced by my many years of summer camp theater pieces full of aliens and time travel, I soon came up with a scenario involving a visit to Georgia by a team of Martians looking for a place to establish a Martian colony on earth. These Martians would travel around to different regions of the country (experiencing the folk songs and dances of each region, naturally), before deciding that it was far too nice a country to take over after all. Somewhat to my surprise, my proposed scenario was accepted, and I am now well into writing the script for what may well be one of the stranger pieces of theater I have ever been involved in.

The issue of language in the play—how to have English dialogue and still be intelligible for a Georgian audience—was a tricky one at first, but I think I’ve solved it pretty well by borrowing a trick from Indonesian wayang kulit (shadow puppet plays). In these plays the primary dialogue is in an archaic language that the audience can’t understand, but the salient points are translated along the way by clown-like characters, who also add their own comments and jokes. Similarly, in the script I’m writing, the Martians converse with the people they meet in English (the intergalactic lingua franca of the future), while two observer/interpreter characters who remain to one side of the stage provide the audience with translations and commentaries.

I’m hoping I don’t find I’ve bitten off more than I can chew with this play, but I think it’s going to be OK. There are only four characters with a lot of lines, and two of those are the interpreters, who will be speaking in Georgian. The music and dance components are also for the most part out of my hands, which leaves me free to work primarily on the dialogue. If I’ve learned one thing about this country, though, it’s that the most bizarre problems arise from the most unexpected places, so it’s always good to be on your toes.

P.S. It absolutely poured all day yesterday. I don't think I've ever seen that much volume of rain come down in so short a time in my life. It stopped in the evening, but then overnight we had some spectacular thunderstorms, complete with hail!