even the water is different

The toilet at the village school

Back then, we got to spend insane amounts of time with training. Training went from Monday through Saturday, about 8 hours a day, and that was to go on for two months, in July and August. Summers in Georgia are filled with heat and sweat, time passed in the misery of blazing punishment of the sun and the stifling odor of the humidity, where most villagers hang up their tools and lift up their glasses, since such a heat saps the will to work and to live from even the hardiest folk. But we had training to do!

The first four hours of each day we spent with language and the second four or so hours we spent in discussions concerning Georgian business and NGO practices. Then I would get home, take a nap, and study more Georgian. Before arriving to Georgia, I had spent some time memorizing the alphabet, which was key to my early success in studying the language. I easily surpassed my classmates, much to their anger, and my showing off of my ability to say “gamarjoba” faster, and my intention to not waste time on the alphabet for the first three weeks since I already learned it, didn’t gain me any friends. But as soon as I got back to my host family house, no matter how much I wanted to learn Georgian, I could always fall back to Russian. Living there got me plenty of practice with Russian, but in the long term, it stunted my growth in Georgian, which was a pity. But there were others to talk to who didn’t know I knew Russian. Until at the local shop:

“Me minda tskali, tu sheidzleba,” I said, asking for water in Georgian.

“Ra – what?” the reply.

I repeated myself.

The man shook his head.

Again.

So I switched to Russian. “Vodu xochu.”

“Oh, shen ginda tsk’ali!” the clerk replied, as though he were saying, “Oh, you want water, why didn’t you say so!” I could then understand how it must feel to be an Englishman in the United States.

Inside the school

In the mornings, we studied the language in the local middle school, which had been recently renovated. There were heaters and working doors, though still no toilet – that was around the back in a fly infested shack composed of holes in the floor. Inside the school building itself was a huge courtyard, which had the main function of drainage, but at least made for a beautiful arboretum, the green climbing up the floors, and I imagine in the spring the floors would be so thick as to lighten up that place better than any bad 1970s wallpaper. 

The main street

We hung around at the local high school and tried to puzzle this language out. Then we would break to go to the magazia (really tiny convenience store) next door, buy some carbonated mineral water and ice cream. Always carbonated mineral water. They never had anything else. This was so entirely alien to me. In the States, rarely anyone drinks carbonated water. It was only for the crazy person who preferred the syrup out of his soda. But here it was all the rage and stories abound all across the country – and indeed the region – about the healing properties of mineral water. Stories of ancient queens bathing in it, to northern armies massing across the mountains so that their kings might drink from it. If Coronado were Georgian and could have given a name to the water of the fountain of youth, he would have named it “Borjomi”. It’s certainly an acquired taste, which after many years I acquired, but at first, when it’s the only thing around and drinkable, it’s just a reminder of how much a foreign land the place is. Even the water is different.

So yeah, lots of salty water and ice cream. Then we would sit around in the hot, sweltering sun for a bit, pretending that we're on a nice balmy beach in Batumi, and then we would go back to class. After that, we headed to lunch where we were told by whatever family that was serving us to “chami chami chami – eat eat eat”. Then to another class, where we would fall asleep because we ate way too much food at lunch and it was too hot.

Presenting

One project from the second sessions classes was to kind of get to know the local community. We brought about ten people in, five guys and five women, split them into two groups by gender, and then asked them about what the jobs in the village were throughout the year. The male group primarily did wheat farming, some trade, cattle ranching and vegetable farming. All of the farming and trade was done on a small local level, though they did sell to larger distributors that might go nationwide. At that time and still, cheap Turkish produce was flooding the market and killing the local farmers and which was leading them to their biggest problem of not being able to sell all of their own produce, neither on a local nor international level. Before the Russian embargo began in 2007, they were able to sell easily on the Russian market, but after that they had nowhere to turn (it's curious that the Georgians had not sanctioned Russian goods in turn, as you could buy loads of Russian made products everywhere there, thank goodness, since Russian chocolate is pretty awesome) – this is a very important thought when considering why Georgians see so much hope in their relations to Europe. Probably, they could solve the problem by lowering their own prices, to make their better quality goods more competitive with the cheap Turkish stuff, but I think they might take that as a point of denigration. Georgian produce is the best I've had, certainly, so they aren't lying on the quality. But neither do they have any sense of market economy. Blame it on Communism or just blame it on laziness, take your pick on the cliché.

Some locals sharing

Everyone at the meeting seemed pretty positive about Georgia's future and the future of their own community and they had come a long way since the days of civil war in the 90s, though they were still not quite where they were under the Soviet Union (the GDP for instance, was still only at 56% of the '89 level, but it had been rising until the recession). That day will come though, as it seemed to me that those were a pretty hard working and smart people and they were a whole lot freer now. The largest setback was the situation with Russia.



The following week, we arranged for a trip to Tbilisi to talk to some local NGOs, one of which I could potentially have been working for. Then we arranged for a trip to some touristy spot as a method of language training, then we had a week where we would teach a class to the people in our local village. We had a bunch of other training exercises in there as well, so there definitely wouldn’t be a break to get bored on. I hear that comes once service actually begins.