Tbilisi & Sighnaghi

This Tuesday was a national holiday, St. George’s Day, and my school decided to cancel classes on Monday as well to make a four-day weekend, so I took advantage of the opportunity to go a-traveling (while I was away they decided to have classes on Monday after all, but I didn’t find out about that until I got back).

Heading out on a Friday morning marshutka (I decided, at Paata’s suggestion, to take Friday as well), I made my way first to Tbilisi. Five hours later I arrived at the train station, from whence I took the metro into the city center. The Tbilisi metro shares certain characteristics with those in several formerly Soviet cities, namely incredibly deep stations reached by means of almost dizzyingly long and steep escalators, and I was instantly reminded of my time in Moscow. I surfaced on Rustaveli Avenue, which runs through the heart of the city and is home to, among other notable sites, the Tbilisi Opera House, Rustaveli Theater, and the Parliament building. The Avenue comes to an end at Tavisuplebis Moedani (Freedom Square, dominated by a huge column topped by a gold statue of St. George slaying the dragon), from which point I ventured off into a maze of streets in one of the oldest parts of the city.

After some pleasurable wandering I made my way to the synagogue, following directions I had gotten from the local Chabad rabbi over the phone (yes, they really are everywhere). I arrived just in time for L’cha Dodi and the end of the Kabbalat Shabbat service, which was followed by Friday night Ma’ariv. Most of the service was chanted very quickly by the cantor, but I was able to follow along with friendly pointers from my neighbors in the pews. I was surprised at how many people were there—at least eighty, by my estimate—and I would have liked to learn more about this community, but people left pretty quickly after the service. The Chabad rabbi, Meir, had invited me to his house for dinner along with a couple of other Israeli guests, and so I spent the rest of the evening surrounded by people speaking Hebrew (a change from the usual Georgian and Megrelian, but no more understandable from my point of view). I wasn’t very hungry, having eaten a large helping of khach’apuri (cheese bread) not long before, but I have to say, I don’t think I’ve ever been so happy to see a bowl of matzo-ball soup. Indeed, one of the best aspects of the whole weekend was the opportunity to eat different foods from the ones we have all the time at home in my host family.

I was hosted for the night by Nino, the amazing woman who ran our orientation in Kutaisi, and who still looks out for all of us like a mother hen despite the fact that she no longer works for the program. The next day, after a wonderfully leisurely morning that included the best shower I’ve had since I left the US, I set out again to explore more of the city. This time my wanderings took me to Sameba, a huge and impressive new church across the river from the old part of the city, and then up to Narikala, a hilltop fortress with another beautiful, old church. After a quick cup of tea back at Nino’s, I then took an evening marshutka to Sighnaghi, about an hour and a half east of the capital. There I met up with Ilaria and Seraphim, friends through both Village Harmony and Wesleyan, who are living there for the year (Ilaria is teaching English like I am).

Sunday morning we went to mass at the local church where Ilaria, along with several members of Zedashe (a great choir based in Sighnaghi), provided the chanting for the service. This was followed by an American style brunch of scrambled eggs and bacon, thoroughly relished by all. In the afternoon we stopped in to see several friends and neighbors, then took a walk to the nearby Bodbe Monastery, where St. Nino is buried. We even found time to sing some Shape-Note songs, something I’ve been missing while I’ve been here. On Monday I went to one of Ilaria’s classes at school, and went for a nice, long walk in the afternoon. Then, having discovered that there were no less than four other English teaching volunteers also visiting Sighnaghi, I had dinner with them, catching up on how they’d been faring since I last saw them at the end of our orientation.

I went for yet another walk the next morning, before getting on a marshutka back to Tbilisi. There, after looking in at another old church, I made my way unhurriedly along the riverside quay to the train station, where I boarded a marshutka that took me home. My feet, as you may be able to guess, were tired, but my mind and my camera were full, and I had mixed feelings as I rode back westward. I enjoy living in Tsaishi most of the time, but this little foray into the outside world reminded me just how isolated I am here. I feel even more confident now that I made the right decision to leave at the end of the semester, which is rapidly approaching. That said, I think that having gotten away for a few days will allow me to be more at peace spending the next few weeks back here. I needed a reminder that things like warm bathrooms, water pressure, spring mattresses, and vegetables do actually exist, and will all be waiting for me when I’m done.

P.S. As if to illustrate what I wrote before, dinner last night (Friday) hit what may be an all-time low. The plan was to have the ubiquitous pasta “kashi” (porridge), pasta served in its own cooking water with milk and sugar mixed in. I had a hard time with this dish initially, but over time I’ve gotten used to it. Last night, however, we realized too late that we were out of sugar. I suggested draining the pasta, forgetting about the milky broth, and eating it with some combination of butter/salt/cheese/tomato sauce, all of which we had. This idea proved to be too foreign, however, and we sweetened the concoction with a cornel preserve, which I have tried and failed to acquire a taste for, and which was also, under the circumstances, the only enhancement available for both the bread and the tea that rounded out our meal. C’est la vie!

Gaacheret!

I’ve mentioned traveling by marshutka (minibus) a few times in previous posts, but I think it would be worthwhile to discuss the phenomenon in more detail, as a way of giving you a glimpse into one small but important part of life in Georgia.

My “village,” Tsaishi, is more like what in Vermont we would call a town in the rural sense, in that it is spread out and encompasses several smaller population centers. There are thus three different local marshutkas to choose from, plus the long-distance ones going to places like Kutaisi or Tbilisi, so choosing the right one can present a challenge. In addition, many of them run on no fixed schedule (they wait in town until they are full before leaving for the village), so you never know how long you may have to wait. Experienced locals can identify many of the individual vehicles that run the local routes from a distance, but I, the ignorant foreigner, have no recourse but to wait expectantly by the side of the road until I can read the small sign (in Georgian) propped against the windshield. By this time the marshutka is almost upon me, and I have to wave energetically as it goes by, then run up ahead to where it has stopped.

On board, people are often packed in so tightly that it is almost impossible to move, let alone see out the window to know when to get off. As far as I can tell, the locals have a remarkable ability to a) magically be at the front when it’s time for them to get off, and b) tell the driver to stop with a few mumbled words I can barely hear even sitting right next to them. Needless to say, these abilities are far beyond me, and I find myself drawing even more attention than usual as I call out “Gaacheret!” (Stop!) loudly from the back of the marshutka, then literally climb over the other passengers, bags of groceries in hand, to get to the door.

Paying presents another challenge. On trips to and from Zugdidi, the price is established at 70 tetri (cents), and when boarding in town, you actually buy a ticket. For shorter trips, however, there are no clear guidelines. Paata seems to decide how much to pay using an algorithm based on the distance traveled, how much money he has on him, what sort of mood he’s in, and whether he likes the driver. I generally limit myself to the first criteria. That said, often I don’t actually get as far as paying anything. Either the driver refuses to take my money, or one of my neighbors or fellow teachers pays for me. I drew the line the other day when one of my students tried to pay for me, even though this meant physically pushing her out of the way so I could hand the driver my money.

Despite these many challenges, I’ve only taken the wrong marshutka once, and I figured it out quickly enough to get off and catch another one without a problem. I’ve also gotten to know the woman who sells the tickets in town (to the extent possible given the language barrier), and she now asks me how I am when I see her. I’ve even started being able to recognize a few of the more distinctive marshutkas (the big, bright green one, for example), but I still double-check the sign in the window before getting on. Give me, oh, a few more years, and I might just have the system down.

And now, in other assorted news:

• I went with my host family to a wedding supra for one of Paata’s distant relatives on Tuesday. There were at least 200 people there in a huge tent, with an astounding amount of food on the tables. It was fun for a while, and I’m glad I had the experience, but I was ready to go by 11:00, and we didn’t end up leaving until after 2:00.
• Nikolozi, Paata and Marika’s toddler, has latched on to the idea of eating with a fork. Now, he doesn’t have enough fine motor skills to actually use the fork to put food in his mouth, but he’s not about to let that stop him. He’s perfectly content to bang it on the table, use it to mash around his food, or just hold it in his hand, while other people feed him, but he will often refuse to eat anything unless he has at least one fork in his possession.
• The maple syrup I brought from home is starting to grow mold around the lid (owing in part to the long periods when the fridge is off, either because the power is out or because they’ve unplugged it for reasons I haven’t been able to understand). With this in mind, I made pancakes from scratch last night, which came out pretty well, although I used a little too much baking soda. Marika was making a cake at the same time and had some left over chocolate sauce, which, when eaten with the pancakes and syrup, almost evoked chocolate chip pancakes. Almost.
• And speaking of pancakes… I had three kinds of wheat product for breakfast this morning: Georgian style pancakes (denser and fried in oil), bread with jam, and a slice of Marika’s cake. This sort of meal hardly bothers me any more.

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!

Svaneti

It’s 9:00 in the evening, and I’ve just finished a light evening snack of bread (never absent from any meal), cookies, and kisiri. This cousin of Jello is a gelatinous concoction made from a powder, but thin enough to be drunk from a teacup. It is made in Russia, and apparently prized enough by Georgians to be smuggled across the border from Abkhazia, which explains why we haven’t had it until now.

This, however, is not the main reason for my writing. As the title of the post suggests, I want to tell you about our trip to Svaneti! On Friday fifteen teaching volunteers, plus two of our hosts (both named Dato and therefore distinguished in speaking as “Big Dato” and “Little Dato”) hired a minibus to take us the approximately 150 kilometers to Mestia, the nearest major town in Svaneti, the remote and mountainous region to the north. This journey, despite its relatively short distance, took us about six hours, and included stops to change a flat tire and to move the debris from a recent rockslide out of the road. The road itself was in horrible condition, and in many places we found ourselves plowing through mud six inches deep, if not more. Once in Mestia, we checked into a hotel, where we celebrated our safe arrival with a large dinner that included, among many other dishes, the famous kubdari (stuffed break like khachapuri, but with meat instead of cheese inside).

On Saturday morning, despite our hopes, the rain that had persisted all through our drive up to Mestia was still coming down, and for a while it was unclear what we would actually be able to do without putting ourselves at risk of being killed by an avalanche or flood. Eventually, however, we were cleared to go on the hike many of us had been looking forward to, up to the edge of the nearby glacier. This hike took us six hours, almost entirely in the rain, and involved crossing several streams, only some of which had stepping stones or logs to assist with the process. If you look at my pictures, though, I think you’ll agree that it was definitely worth the trouble. Through the rain and mist we had stunning views of craggy snowcapped mountains, and when we got to the end of the trail, we saw that the rive we’d been following actually flowed out from underneath the glacier. By the time we got back to town it was getting dark, and I was incredibly grateful that (a) I had dry clothes to change into, (b) there was a space heater in my room, and (c) I could eat dinner in the hotel and thereby avoid going out again for the rest of the night.

Sunday morning I got up early and went for a walk around the old part of town, which is dotted with centuries-old stone towers. The area around the hotel, by contrast, is a flurry of construction activity (including the hotel building itself), all aimed at making Mestia a skiing destination for tourists. Before that happens, though, they’re going to have to do something about the road. It had gotten even worse over the weekend, and at several points the prospect of our making it back to Zugdidi that day seemed somewhat dubious. In one spot a big tanker truck had gotten stuck, and we had to wait while a tractor essentially plowed a new road through the mud, one that cut even closer to the cliff edge than the original route had done. In another spot a large tree had fallen across the road, and we teamed up with the drivers of several other vehicles to roll it off the cliff, then watched as it fell several hundred feet to the river below.

Despite all these obstacles, however, we did in fact make it home, tired, wet and sore, but entirely satisfied with our adventure. Since then several people have asked me how my trip was, and my standard answer has been: “K’argi! Bevri tzvima, magram dzalian lamazi” (“Good! A lot of rain, but very beautiful”). It’s not much, but it’s all in Georgian, so I’m proud of it.

Gaumarjos!

Well, I wasn’t going to post again before going to Svaneti this weekend, but then the trip was postponed by a day, and I had something to write about, so here it is.

Marina, our school director, put together a big supra last night, ostensibly in honor of the successful renovation of the school over the summer. She invited several people who worked on the project, the few male members of the school staff (don’t ask me why), me (possibly as one of the previous category but also because I’m Someone Special in the community), and a few people from the regional Resource Center in Zugdidi. Then, in what was essentially a gift to me, she invited Polikarpe Hubilava, a beloved 88-year-old local singer, from whom Village Harmony actually gets some of its Georgian repertoire, and some other older folks who sing with him. Thus, in between the many toasts that passed around the room, our end of the rather long table was engaged in a lot of singing, which made me very happy. I got to listen to a number of great songs, and with Paata’s help, I figured out what songs we knew in common, so I got to sing with them too! Marina explained that while she was very sad that I was leaving in December, she wanted to give me one really great day, and she certainly did. There was so much food on the table that it was both beautiful and almost disgusting, with some plates piled on top of others for lack of space, and we didn’t leave until after midnight.

This morning, we were summoned back to the same house for what is apparently a traditional part of a big supra that I hadn’t heard about, namely eating leftovers and renewing the drinking and toasting for another couple hours.

In other news, we, that is, about fifteen volunteer teachers and a handful of Georgians, leave tomorrow morning for a long weekend in Svaneti. There’s not really much of a plan, which bothered me at first, but then I just decided to give up and go with the flow, so we’ll see what happens. A lot will depend on the weather, so I’ll have to wait and tell you more about it once we get back.

I’ll leave you for today with a little reflection on one of the unexpected obstacles of teaching in a Georgian classroom: the kids all have the same names, and the names are all really similar. The vast majority of students in any class will be called Giorgi, Giga, Gega, Gio, Nino, Nini, Nana, Nata, Natia, Nika, Lika, Lana, Lasha, Vasha, and other maddeningly indistinguishable names. A few names, like Salome, Irakli, Zuriko, and Shotiko, are more distinctive, but no less abundant. This problem extends to the staff as well, which contains, as far as I can tell, two Ninos, two Nanas, and two Nunus. I’m doing pretty well at remembering the names of the kids in the oldest grades, who I am able to communicate better with, but in the younger grades, it’s pretty much a lost cause.

Planning Ahead

When I signed up for this program initially, I signed on for one semester, with the understanding that I could, and probably would, extend my contract for the full school year, provided things went well in the first month or so. Well, the time has come for me to decide, and after much soul searching, I’ve come to the conclusion that one semester will probably be the right amount of time, and that I won’t be coming back in January.

This has been a very hard decision to make, because I know that I am still very much in the process of adjusting to life and work in this country, and that many things may change between now and December. And I am happy, for the most part. However, I didn’t realize before I came just how difficult it would be to have so little contact with other English speakers, when I don’t speak Georgian or Megrelian, and even more importantly, how difficult it would be to try to teach kids when I don’t speak their language. I had thought that any sort of classroom teaching experience would be good for me in my quest to become a history teacher, but it’s become very evident just how big the gulf is between the kind of teaching I want to be doing professionally and the kind of teaching I’m doing here. For these reasons, and for many others that I don’t need to go into, I think that I’ll get the most out of this experience if I limit it to four months.

That said, I hope to do a fair amount of traveling in the time that I have, since the different parts of the country have very different physical and cultural characters. A nice first step was a weekend trip with my host family to visit Marika’s family in a nearby village. I got to see the local castle, and to meet the 82-year-old family matriarch, who remembers when Stalin spent the night in the village when she was a little girl. There are also plans afoot to visit the mountainous Svaneti region before it gets too snowy, but I’ll wait to write more about that until the plans are more definite.

I’m also certainly not giving up at integrating myself better into the family and the community. I’m determined to learn my way around the kitchen, to start with, so that I can make some food myself, as well as hopefully learn how to make some traditional Georgian dishes. I’ll let you know how it goes!

Independence

I have been building up my independence in small increments. The first stage in this process was discovering how little independence I really had, at the start. When I went for a walk in the fields and was gone for not much more than an hour, Paata and one of the neighbors came looking for me, worried that I had gotten lost. And when I mentioned for the first time that I might like to go into town, it turned into a group expedition that included a neighboring household as well as our own (and didn’t end up going until evening, after all the stores were already closed).

So, I thought, I’ll have to start small. When Paata had to stay at school for a meeting after our last class one day, I suggested that I could walk home myself. Well, sure, why not? Then, when he was going into town last Saturday morning, I asked if I could come along, just to wander around and see the city in the daytime, and maybe get on the internet. We took the marshutka (minibus) together both going and coming, but other than that I was on my own. Incidentally, it was on this trip that I got my hands on a deck of playing cards, with which we have been teaching each other Georgian and American card games at home.

Finally, on Thursday, I was able to make an entirely independent trip into town. Fortunately, since we live on the main road connecting Zugdidi with most of the rest of the country, almost any passing marshutka will be going the right way. My only real hitch had to do with the Georgian concept of time. For the return trip, I bought a ticket for a marshutka that I was told (in German, which has actually come in handy several times in communicating with strangers) would leave in half an hour. I returned promptly at the appointed time, got on, and then sat for almost another half an hour while the driver waited for more customers to fill the bus. Still, I suppose it’s always better to be early and have to wait than to be late, though I suspect that many Georgians would hesitate to agree with me.

I should probably explain why independence, and particularly the ability to get into town when I want to, is so important. Tsaishi is a lovely village in many respects, but aside from houses and the school, there’s very little here. There used to be a sort of village center, with stores, a barbershop, and a few other small businesses, but these were all completely destroyed in fighting in the early ‘90s, and none of them have been rebuilt (the same is true of a hotel that was built for people coming to visit the local hot springs). This part of the village is full of crumbling foundations, and feels almost like a ghost town. The closest thing the village has to stores is the occasional shack by the side of the road, no bigger than the size of an outhouse, with an old woman sitting inside who sells bread, rice, canned foods, and a couple household products. In addition, no one I know has internet, and there’s none at the school (the school doesn’t even have water at the moment, though I think that this, along with the lack of light bulbs, is due to the summer renovations and may eventually change). All things considered, then, if I ever want to buy something, use the internet, eat out, use an actual toilet (not really a priority, but I figured I’d include it in the list), or meet up with a fellow native English speaker, Zugdidi is the place to go.

Now while I’m writing, I should also say something about teaching, since that is primarily what I’m here to do, after all. I have 21 45-minute class periods each week, in all the grades from 3^rd to 12^th, and I’m dividing my time working with Paata and with the other English teacher, Sopho. Once a week I’ll go help in a 3^rd grade class in Tsatskhvi, the next village over.

The classes, and the students in them, are a real mixed bag. The 10^th grade, for example, is probably the best in terms of their engagement in learning, while the 11^th grade is probably the worst. Within each class, there is a very wide range of competence, which makes it difficult to teach at an appropriate level for all the students. Some students are significantly behind the majority of their classmates, but because everyone in any given grade has to study the curriculum for that grade, these students seem destined to fall farther and farther behind every year, unless they get the kind of extra help that the school really isn’t in a position to give. Some of them clearly have learning disabilities and other special needs, but the system is completely incapable of giving them the accommodations they need. Unfortunately, this isn’t my area of expertise, and there’s really not much that I can do, so I’m following the other teachers’ lead in basically letting them fail and focusing on the students who can actually do the work and learn the material that they’re supposed to. I have to invest my time and energy where I actually have a chance of making a difference.

In each class, we mostly follow the textbook, making changes where we see fit (or where, for example, we can’t do a listening exercise because we don’t have the tape, and we don’t know where the teacher’s book is that has the transcript). Some of the textbook material is pretty good, but there are a number of pieces I’ve found that seemed too artificial or contrived to be of much use, and I’ve tried to skip over these whenever possible. Once I get a little more familiar with the structure of the classes and have a better idea of what parts of the curriculum are actually required, I hope to be able to introduce some more activities that encourage the students to be creative and spontaneous, especially in speaking. I know that this will be an uphill battle, though, since for most of the students speaking is one of the things that they find most difficult in English. Given that most of them have never even met a native English speaker, I’m actually impressed that some of them can speak as well as they do (and I’m very impressed by teachers like Paata and Sopho, who have had very little contact themselves with native speakers).

I think I’ll leave it at that for now, but I’ll certainly write more about how my classroom adventures proceed in the weeks and months ahead.

P.S. I've finally gotten my pictures to be visible to everyone (look over on the right)! You can also see them here.