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I am now safe and sound back home in Burlington. I feel pretty lucky that that's the case, though, since my trip home was full of really close calls. First, I left my backpack on the bus from Zugdidi to Tbilisi. I was able to get it back only because Paata's neighbor happened to have the bus driver's phone number, and Nino was willing to get in a cab with me and track it down.

After a nice dinner and a brief nap at Nino's, I took a cab to the airport at 2:00 am, sailing down a deserted Rustaveli Avenue (the main street in the city center, with the Opera House and Parliament) decked out with Christmas lights. At the airport, however, I was informed that according to their system I wasn't scheduled to fly out until July. They put me on the plane to Munich anyway, and after that it didn't matter, since my scheduled flight to Newark was canceled due to the huge snowstorm. To make a long story short, I flew from Munich to Frankfurt, ran across the airport, and caught a flight to Boston. The storm was just starting to hit when I got there, and I got the last bus up to Lebanon, NH before they canceled the rest of the buses for the evening. There my parents picked me up, and we drove the rest of the way home.

It's been five days now, and I'm still appreciating how lucky we are here to have plentiful heat and hot water, among many other conveniences. I'm also slowly readjusting to East Coast time, waking up well before the sun and crashing around 6:00 in the evening. Hopefully I'll be able to stay up for First Night festivities tonight.

Happy New Year!

I Saw the Sea!

My final days in Georgia are flying by at an astonishing rate. It’s as if yesterday I had plenty of time left, and now I feel like I’m leaving in just a few minutes. This will most likely be my last post from Georgia. I’ll be heading to Tbilisi tomorrow afternoon, in order to be at the airport in time for a 5:00 am flight to Munich. From there I fly to Newark, then Dulles, and finally Burlington (that’s what happens when your flights are booked by a Georgian travel agency). Because of the time difference I will manage to do this in one very, very long day, after which all I’ll want to do is sleep, but probably won’t be able to because it will feel like the middle of the day. But I suppose that’s the fate of a world traveler!

At school, we’ve been in wrapping-up mode for a while now. On Wednesday we devoted the final third grade lesson to a Christmas play/party, complete with costumes (Santa Claus, Cinderella, and a number of fairies). In return for their Christmas presents from Santa, the kids sang all the songs and said all the rhymes they’d learned over the course of the semester. With the classroom was decorated with garlands and posters, and a handful of teachers and parents forming a small audience, the end result was pretty cute.

Meanwhile, the tenth and twelfth graders have finished their last textbook units, the younger grades have reviewed their vocabulary from the whole semester, and in the middle grades (where we left the textbooks aside), we’ve worked our way through my final outside materials. These are two one-page handouts I made, one about the story of Johnny Appleseed and one about winter holidays from different cultures. As I’ve said before, the kids seem to be more interested in the non-textbook stuff we do, probably owing mostly to its novelty. I also get particular satisfaction from discussing the winter holidays handout, since I feel like it’s my one small contribution to widening these kids’ cultural worldview.

Today was the last day of school, and so after an abbreviated class schedule, we had an all-school assembly. The younger grades had all prepared songs and poem recitals, which they performed to thunderous applause. In addition, students from English, German, Russian and Georgian classes made short presentations on how Christmas and New Year’s are celebrated in each country (for the English presentation the third graders reprised “Jingle Bells” from their Christmas play, and for the German one a girl sang “O Tannenbaum,” which I had taught to her).

Outside of school, I’ve been slowly going through the process of saying goodbye to Tsaishi and Zugdidi. This has included doing things that I’ve been meaning to do for a while, but somehow or other haven’t gotten around to. So, for instance, I baked banana bread last week, which was by far the most popular of the “American” foods I’ve made here (both Marika and Kravasha have asked me for details about the recipe). Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to try my hand at any Georgian dishes, but at least I got Marika to give me recipes for some of the most common ones. I also took advantage of the warm weather to go for a long walk on Sunday, all over the village (and well into the next one, I think). The highlight of this was getting up high enough on our local mountain (really a glorified hill, reminiscent of Mt. Philo, for you Vermonters out there) that I suddenly realized I could see a stripe of sea against the horizon. Seeing it reminded me of my first weekend here, when we went to the beach with our next-door neighbors. I haven’t been back there since, but I’ve gotten to know the neighbors much better, which I think is much more important.

There are lots of people to say goodbye to as well, but that’s not as easy as saying goodbye to places. I had dinner last Friday with a bunch of my fellow teaching volunteers, knowing that I would most likely never see any of them again. Saying goodbye to my Georgian friends and neighbors is even harder, especially since our actual conversations tend to be pretty limited, given my lack of Georgian. I had a nice evening last night, though, teaching rummy to Paata’s brother and a couple of neighbors (all in Georgian, too—Paata and Marika had taken Nikolozi to the circus). I wish I could tell all these people how much I’ve appreciated their warmth and their hospitality, but in most cases the language barrier makes this impossible. So instead I smile, and when they ask if I’m coming back, I say, “Yes. I don’t know when, but I will.”

On with the Show

After several bouts of uncertainty and postponement, our school play finally went up this Thursday, but not before it almost deprived me of my sanity. You will know, I assume, that I am not generally one to bellow, but by two o’clock on Thursday afternoon, my throat was definitely sore. I’ll spare you all the details, but I can’t resist one example of what I had to deal with. The singers insisted on having microphones, which I grudgingly consented to, only to learn that the man who would run sound wasn’t planning on coming to work with us until the morning of the show. I know how many potential problems there can be with mics and sound systems, but what could I say? Then, with the show scheduled for two, he didn’t show up until twelve. Thus, we found ourselves still sorting out the inevitable sound problems with ten minutes left before the scheduled curtain time. Fortunately, the show started about forty minutes late, since at that point I hadn’t even talked to the person who was going to run the lights.

After the time I’ve spent in this country, none of this should have come as a surprise to me, but in my experience, mounting a theatrical production is a case where organization and planning really do matter, and the absolute lack of them was maddening. Still, I really can’t complain too much, since in the end the show was a great success. We had a large audience of students, teachers, parents and guests, many of whom came up afterward (and in the following days) to tell me how much they enjoyed it. Most importantly, the kids in the show were all really proud of what they’d done.

After the performance, I would have loved nothing more than to go home and get in bed, but the day’s excitement was far from over. The powers that be had decided to celebrate the play’s success by having a relatively large (50 people) supra at our house, which Marika, Kravasha (Paata’s mother), and several neighbors and fellow teachers had been working hard to prepare for the past two days. This too had its obstacles to overcome, including a clogged woodstove, a dry well, and a table that broke about twenty minutes into the supra under the weight of all the food, but in the end it too was a success. I realized that despite the large number of people in attendance, I knew most of them at least a little, and that thought helped give me the energy to get through the evening. Among the guests were a couple of the singers from Polikarpe Hubilava’s ensemble, who had sung in the play, and so I got to sing a few songs with them, too.

Paata finally succumbed to the pressures of the week and didn’t feel well enough to go to school on Friday, which left me to cover the day’s classes, some with help from my other co-teachers and some alone. I wasn’t sure I was up to it after everything else I’d gone through, but I made it somehow, and was extremely happy to get home for the weekend.

Saturday I went into town and spent the day with other volunteer teachers, a perfect release from the stress of the week. We had a big birthday party for two of them, which involved roasting a pig and a chicken, as well as some really good pumpkin cake. I also finally found out about my flights home, and can now report that I am scheduled to arrive in Burlington at about 11:30 pm on the 26^th. Many of the other volunteers are leaving around the 20^th in order to be home for Christmas, but I’m glad that I’ll be staying for the end of classes, so I can have plenty of time to wrap things up and say goodbye.

Uncharted Waters

Paata and I discovered last week that we were far ahead of where we were scheduled to be in the textbooks in three of our classes. This was due to a number of factors, including, I’m sure, my dismissal of many of the textbook exercises as either stupid, irrelevant, unintelligible, or too advanced for the students (as you may be able to guess, I’m not a big fan of these particular books). The upshot of this situation, however, is that we decided to put the textbooks aside for the remainder of the semester in favor of a mixture of supplementary grammar exercises when Paata is in the class without me, and more creative activities whenever I’m there.

The prospect of planning new curriculum on the fly has been daunting, especially with the play also still on my plate (the date keeps getting pushed back—it looks pretty well settled for this coming Wednesday, but I’ve said that before…). For inspiration, I thought back to some of my favorite activities from my own days as a foreign language student, and after talking them over with Paata, we’ve started putting some of them into action. In the eighth and ninth grades, we’ve been learning the words for rooms and furniture, drawing floor plans for both our real houses and for our dream houses. This last allowed us to practice using the “unreal conditional” construction, “If I had the house of my dreams, I/it would be/have…” It also provided a stark reminder of the material conditions that these kids live in: several of them completed that conditional sentence with phrases like “I would have my own room,” or “I would have a soft bed.” After some encouragement I had them dreaming up Coke fountains and rooms full of candy, but it took a while to get there.

In the seventh grade, meanwhile, I took our last unit in the textbook, which dealt with physical descriptions of people and clothing, as a jumping off point to apply those descriptions to monsters (with the added helpful vocabulary of claws, horns, spines, fangs, and the like). From there we’ve moved on to talking about fall and winter holidays, starting with Halloween (another nice thematic transition, in my opinion). Today we even carved a jack o’lantern in class, something I never thought the textbook-centered school environment would ever be flexible enough to allow.

In other news, the main excitement in the past few days on the home front has come from Operation Wean Nikolozi. This has been nominally ongoing at least since I got here, but it went into high gear this week. The first night was pretty rocky for everyone in the household, but things have slowly but steadily been getting better since then. The presence of Paata’s mother is a big help, but even with her here I can tell it’s been an incredibly taxing week on all of them.

I’ll end for now by noting that it's at least 70˚F here again today, at least in the sun, which still hadn't gone down last night even by 6:00, since we’re not on Daylight Savings Time. Definitely doesn’t feel like December (although the flip side of not changing the clocks is that the sun doesn’t come up until after 8:00). I’m enjoying the warmth, but I’m also looking forward to some nice, cold, snowy New England winter when I get home.