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.

Pictures

I just tried to make a link over on the right to a photo album, but I'm not sure anyone will be able to see it. Please let me know if it works. Thanks!

Shuki Ar Aris

Following up on my initial posting of basic conversational Georgian, I offer here a selection of phrases I had no idea would come in handy until experience taught me their value:

“Shuki ar aris” – This useful phrase translates as “There’s no electricity,” and is one that I have heard rather dismayingly often. Sometimes there’s a reason, usually related to the weather, while sometimes there’s no apparent reason at all. The best reason so far, however, was that someone hadn’t paid their electric bill. Apparently this happens every month (always the same man), and as there are no individual meters on the houses, they turn off the power for the whole village until he pays. This may seem like punishing the innocent, but it can also be seen as a way of leveraging community influence, since everyone knows who this man is and pesters him until he pays up and the power goes back on. In fact, it seems to have just come back on as I’ve been writing, judging by the happy chant containing the word “shuki” coming from Paata downstairs and the sound of the evening news on the TV.

“Kartveli ts’oli ar ginda?” – “Don’t you want a Georgian wife?” I was warned about this one during orientation, and sure enough, it has cropped up twice in conversation with village residents. It is the follow-up question to be expected if one reveals that one is not yet married.

“Bavshebo, ramdeni ts’ignia?” – “Children, how many books are there?” One challenge of teaching in a Georgian village school that I hadn’t considered was that the kid’s families have to buy their own schoolbooks, and this process takes a while. Thus, many classes in the first week began with this question immediately after preliminary greetings (especially in the younger grades, the kids all jump up when we come in the room and shout, “Good morning, teachers!”). And while the books themselves have their limitations—more about this in a later post—it makes it very difficult to do any work in the books when only a handful of students in the class actually have them.

“Bavshvi!” – Grammatically, this is simply the singular form of bavshvebi (children, as in the previous phrase). In practice, though, in a house with a resident one-year-old, it means something like, “Watch out, the baby is coming your way, so try to keep an eye on him and make sure he doesn’t fall down/touch the stove/stick his fingers in an outlet/try to eat the chicken feather on the floor.” I should perhaps explain that there is a constant low-level war going on against the chickens, who will exploit every opportunity to get into the house, and are in constant need of being chased out.

“Soplis Harmonia” – The literal translation of “Village Harmony,” used in the dubbed footage of my second TV interview. This one was for a local Zugdidi station, and was a considerably longer segment, focusing on my interest in Georgian culture and folk music. The crew was very nice, but insisted on some rather contrived shots, such as one of me playing the panduri, even though I don’t really know how. I’ll admit to being relieved when they didn’t ask to come back to the house, thus avoiding another interview/supra extravaganza. Incidentally, while I’m on the topic of music, it turns out that one of the few other foreigners to spend any amount of time in Tsaishi was none other than ethnomusicologist and Village Harmony collaborator Carl Linich, who was here collecting songs from some of the older villagers.

Despite knowing these handy phrases, most conversation still passes straight over my head. I would have thought I’d be used to this, from the amount of traveling I’ve done, but I’ve come to realize one important difference: people here very often sound like they’re arguing, even when they’re not. Perfectly mundane exchanges quickly escalate to raised voices, emphatic gestures, exaggerated facial expressions (shock, disgust, scorn), and banging on tables, but then are just as quickly laughed off. I’m hoping I’ll get used to this, but as someone who ordinarily feels uncomfortable just being around an argument, let alone engaging in one, I’m finding it kind of stressful to be surrounded by so much conversational tension. I’m not sure if the fact that I have no idea what they’re saying makes the situation better or worse.

Lest all this sound like I’m feeling overwhelmed, I should say that on the whole, I really am enjoying my time here. School is certainly stressful, but I would be crazy not to expect it to be. It’s a new job, a new language, a new culture, and new rules to follow, all wrapped up together. And while I don’t think that it will necessarily ever become easy, I know that it will become less unfamiliar with time, and that I’ll eventually work out certain patterns and strategies to work my way through it. In the mean time, I just have to remember to treat everything as a learning experience, and consider how to use what I’ve learned going forward.

Lastly for now, I want to give you the closest thing I have to a mailing address, in case any of you feel like writing me on paper. The Georgian postal service is notoriously unreliable, but if you write to the following address, there’s at least a good chance that it will get to me:

Ben Sachs-Hamilton
Zugdidi, Village Tsaishi
Samegrelo
Georgia

I’m the only person in the village who could possibly be receiving a letter addressed in English, so if it shows up, they’ll be sure to bring it to me. I look forward to hearing from you, by whatever means you prefer!