Thanksgiving ...

How I spent my Thanksgiving:

I was having a pretty sad day when ...

Around 5 pm, my little host sisters burst in my room to inform me that their mom was milking the cow and they needed to come in and draw.  After that, Tako got my umbrella (she told me it was raining in my room), crawled in my sleeping bag with me, and opened it to protect us while we worked on my computer. 

Later, downstairs, Tako proceeded to take my socks off my feet and put them on hers.  Keti put my slippers on.  Because they were so big on her, she pretended she was a rabbit.  Then Keti crawled in my lap, laid down on top of me, and told me my belly was big (THAAAANKS!).  Tako then made an entire family of snakes out of the Play-Dough my mom and grandma sent her and lined them all up on my knee.  I ate mandarins, drank tea, and watched some kind of very poorly animated Barbie Nutcracker movie dubbed over in Georgian.

I missed home yesterday, but, God knows, I didn't miss it alone.  Thank you to my incredible (zany) host family.  This house is a zoo and I am proud not to be a visitor but an exhibit with the rest of you.  And thank you to my partner teacher who is quickly becoming one of the best friends I've ever had.  It's not lost on me how lucky I am to have the incredible Georgians around me that I do.

Happy Thanksgiving, everybody.  It's been a crazy 7 months here, and for that, I'm truly thankful.  Even more, I have an amazing (real) family, friends back home, boyfriend(!!!), and an incredible group of PCVs here with me in Georgia.  I am so lucky.

Love you all,
Ala, Allie, Al, Sis, Weesin, and Allison.

Who you know

"Ala, come over here," my host uncle calls me from across the street.  He is standing next to the pea-green Lotta that has just pulled up in front of my house.  "You're going to Batumi, right?"  I nod.  I know that he already knows where I am going.  I told him as I left the house five minutes ago to stand on the street and wait for a marshutka.  "To see my Georgian tutor," I clarify.  For his friends, I guess.  He nods.  "Where do you want to go?"  I tell him, and he is silent.  I pick another location, a little more central.  Silence.  Finally, I pick the biggest church on the biggest street in our regional capitol.  This brings a smile, "Ah, okay, that is good," he agrees.

"This is my girl," he tells the men in the car.  The driver is short and the passenger is thin.  They're both over forty and have the same Eastern-European droopy eyelids.  The driver nods, but does not respond.  The men in the car have salt-and-pepper stubble and tan, lined faces from the sun, from smoking, and from, undoubtedly, a copious number of days spent drinking cha-cha and playing backgammon on street corners.

My host uncle nods at me again.  "These are my friends."  I know now that I am waiting for protocol others wouldn't bother with.  "Get in," he tells me kindly.  And I do.

Wait.  Back up.  Allow me to translate this for you into America-speak.  Undoubtedly, if my father is reading this, he already has.

I just got into a car in with two middle-aged men who I did not know in Eastern Europe.  On the recommendation of another man who I have only known perhaps just upwards of a month.  In America, I would never do this.  In America, an intelligent man in my host-uncle's position would consider that his offer might look creepy.  I am stupid, maybe, for accepting.  Am I crazy?  Probably definitely, but due to the nature of the beast, that's a little difficult to self-diagnose.

However, there were four key words in the exchange above that told me what I needed to know:

"This is my girl."

This is my girl.

Once we started to get into the city, we took a turnoff that I was not familiar with.  I knew it was taking us away from the road where the church was.  A minute went by, and although I was confused, I was not yet concerned.  It was quickly clear, though, that my driver had an unusual route in mind.

"Where are we going?"

He replied, but I didn't catch the whole meaning.  Yet another shade of my life in Georgia.  However, I understood enough to know that he still planned on taking care of me.

Two minutes later, we pulled onto a busy little street, he parked the car, and motioned for me to get out.  We were still far from the church.  I looked at him, puzzled, but obeyed.  After all, we were in a very populated area that looked affluent enough by Georgian standards.

A city marshutka was waiting on the other side of the street and I followed my guides to it.  The Lotta driver held up a 50 tetri piece for me and made an exaggerated motion of giving it to the marshutka driver.  He was paying my fare.  He then spoke quickly to the passenger in the front seat and that man left and got into the back of the marshutka.  As directed, I got into the front.  The thin man, the passenger from the Lotta, got into the first row of seats in the back of the marshutka.  My Lotta driver nodded to me.  I nodded back and thanked him.

And in this way, I arrived at the biggest church on the biggest street in my region's capitol.  With a nod and a "thank you" to the thin man, I was able to get to my Georgian language lesson.

This is my girl.

So much meaning in four little words.  It's not the first time I've encountered Georgia's system for protecting girls, and it won't be my last.  Rather nebulously referred to as the patroni system, it gave me a lot of pause for thought on that particular windy mountain ride to Batumi. 

The rightful owner of my house is my host uncle's brother.  Who spent years as a police chief in my region.  My host uncle's son lives with us here, he's 14.  My host uncle himself is a very well-liked man, clearly socially connected.  His friends are at our house constantly.  He is recently returned to Georgia, and so in the midst of his looking for work, our house has become supra-central.  Not that it wasn't already.

What I'm trying to say here is that everybody knows them.  Thus, everybody knows us and me.  When I am in Batumi, people often ask me where I am teaching and living.  When I tell them the name of my host father, many people know him.  They nod and smile then, and it's a kind of relief on their faces, almost.  In their internal maps of their home, Georgia, I am placed.  I have a last name, and it is not my American one.  Anybody who crosses me crosses my host dad, crosses my host uncle, crosses my host nephew, even.  Once under my host uncle's care, any man in his circle must give me his utmost respect.  And in this way, I am safe.

Welcome to the patroni system.

It goes against everything I was taught as a child in America.  Don't talk to strangers.  Don't tell them your last name.  God forbid you tell a strange man where you live.  But here what is truly dangerous is to have no last name to tell.

I'm not saying that it's not dangerous to get into a car with two men that I don't know.  I am a girl living in a mountain village in a 2nd/3rd world country.  The world is dangerous.  Marshutka drivers drive like maniacs.  Half-wild dogs roam the streets.  Who knows what's in the tap water.  Taxis have only recently become safe under this government.  My partner teacher remembers days not long ago when she would never use a taxi.  She remembers days of heroin dealers on every street corner.  When everything took a bribe.

When it all came down to who you know.

This is my girl.

School Begins.

Listen up!  School has started!  You should show up, pay attention to the teacher, and do your homework.  Unless it's raining outside.  Apparently that is Georgian for "school is optional".

Oh, school.  I remember that adorable day when I finished high school and said "I'M NEVER GOING BACK THERE."  (Sorry, St. Margaret's).  Right.  Little did I know that not only would I be going back there but also back, back, back, back there.  That's right, I teach the 5-year-olds who don't know how to hold a pencil all the way to the 12th graders who only pay attention if they think it's worth listening to you.  So you better be worth their time.

And you'd better understand every age group.

Nowhere in Pre-Service Training did they teach us how to understand furious first graders.  Or the phrase, "He poked me!!" in Georgian.  This was instead accomplished by the first grader stating the crime, then lifting the edge of her shirt and poking herself emphatically.  Demonstration understood.

So, while my partner teacher and I have shuffled classrooms, planned beforehand (and then inevitably again on the fly), made our own materials, and wrangled second graders, these are the things I have learned so far:

1) If you plan any kind of activity where kids get to move pieces of paper around on a desk, you rock.

2) If you are 9th grade or above, it is perfectly acceptable to write your essay about your summer vacation on the topic of how drunk you got.  Hey!  It's in English!

3) If you make homemade Play-Dough on the stove for the younger children to model letters/words with, it will become sticky in the humidity before class and this will result in a classroom full of 2nd graders who are having way more fun than you originally intended.  And a partner teacher running frantically out of the classroom, hands covered in goo.

4) If chalk is gold, whiteboard markers are diamonds of an unparalleled degree.

5) When children are missing teeth, that is when they scream the loudest.  I postulate that there is a biological connection here, somehow.

6) Grading is not necessary.  Possibly it will begin next semester?  But don't hold your breath.

7) The activity you thought would take 10 minutes will inevitably take 45.  Conversely, the activity that you planned to take half the class will take your students 5 minutes.  Then they will look at you very expectantly as you scramble to look prepared.

8) The classroom that you want to use will be busy.  The classroom that you do not want to use will be 15 degrees hotter than any other room in the school.

9) Students will answer, "YES!" extremely emphatically to any question that they do not understand.  I have learned to immediately distrust any affirmative answer that a student gives me.  Also, the more enthusiastic the YES! ... generally speaking the less they actually understand.

10) In grades 4th and under, stickers are the highest form of currency.  If you have stickers, you are God.  If you do not have stickers ... wait, what?  There was homework?

11) The bus is full.  Walk.

12) Look, if you can just make it to 4th period, you get to go have coffee with the other teachers.  You will sit in another room, scramble to understand the conversation topic (screw the details) in Georgian, but you have 5 minutes relatively to yourself.  Just make it to 4th period ... just make it to 4th period ... just make it to ....

Purtslebi

8½ by 11” paper continues to be the reigning currency of the Sharabidze household this September.  The importance of paper!!! (purtseli) cannot be over stressed.  It's fair to say that after Simba, nothing makes Keti happier than paper.

This morning Keti ran screaming out of the kitchen furious at even the thought of Tako touching HER drawing paper, which left Teona and I in fits of giggles over our morning coffee.  Because when Keti gets mad, Keti gets MAD.  The wonderful, indignant four-year-old kind of M-A-D in which you have been irrevocably wronged by the heartless trolls that you must share your life with and the only way to demonstrate it is to stomp out of the room as loudly as you can.  With all 20 pounds of yourself.

I bought paper supposedly for teaching purposes, and always, always, Keti comes up to my room asking for some.  This invariably ends in bartering.  

Keti: “Two pieces.  A red one and a light blue one and a white one.”

Me: “One piece.  What color do you want?”

Keti: “Light blue.  And a red one.”

Me: “Here is your light blue.”

Keti: “And a white one.”

Me: “Fine.”

It’s not that I mind giving her paper at all.  But if I gave it all to her, she and Tako would take the scissors to it all and, well, you see my point.  Teona tries to stop her from begging for paper all the time.  I’ve told her it’s fine, paper is cheap and I love to see Keti draw, but Keti knows she’s not supposed to come around my room all the time asking for my stuff.  So now she comes and makes small talk.

Me: “Hi, Keti, what’s up?”

Keti: “Hiiiiiiiiiiiii ……………  is this your book?”

Me: “Yes, do you want to read?”

Keti: “Noooooo …… where’s the kitten?”

Me: “Outside.  What do you want, Keti?”

Keti: “I don’t knooow ……………. What’s this?”

Me: “My medicine.  Do you want paper?”

Keti: “Yes.  Two pieces.  A red one and a green one and a white one.”

14-08-2012, 18:50

So here I am, three and a half months into living in Georgia and feeling very suspiciously like an abandoned Lassie plot twist—“What is it, girl?  What are you trying to say?  Are you hungry?  Do you need to go to the bathroom?  Is Timmy down by the river eating xatchapuri?”  … etc. etc. etc.  I study during the day and my host family helps me by correcting my atrocious Georgian spelling and suggesting words that they think I ought to know, for example, “gossip”.

My vocabulary is at once predictably absent and then completely random.  For instance, I still cannot express verbally to a guest how to work the stove (to be fair, mostly the word I need to look up is “temperamental”), but I can reliably say the phrase “elephant graveyard”, thanks to the endless showings of The Lion King dubbed in Georgian that occur right outside my bedroom door.  I drink my morning tea and watch my three and four year old host sisters dance with the giraffes and when Rafiki holds up baby Simba for all the animal world to see, they bow with the zebras.

(As I write this, my three year old host sister is watching me type and asking a question about the Enter button that I do not understand.  She points at the screen and to get my attention says, “Onneeeeeeeeeee, tewoooooooooo, FREE!”)

Instead of attempting lengthy explanations, I have discovered that the best way to excuse any of my habits that are strange is to say, “I am American.”  This elicits the most amazing response of complete understanding and I never have to follow it with any kind of extra explanation.  Why do you put honey in your yoghurt?  Why do you go to bed before 12 pm?  Why do you get up so early?  Why do you drink that tea?  Why don’t you eat more bread with dinner?  Why do you want to walk up that village road?  Why do you take cold showers (when it’s 95 degrees Fahrenheit outside and there’s more water in the air than in Flipper’s lungs)?

“Because I am American.”

“Oooooooooooooooooohh ‘gai.” (Knowing nod.)

I am adjusting to the rhythm of my Georgian family, and let me tell you, Rule #1 is do not EVER eat unless it is time to eat.   Why?  Because the time to eat will come, and when it does you must eat.  If you ate before, at any point in time, and are not hungry at the particular moment in question … that is your own problem.  Because if you do not eat when everybody else is eating, everybody wants to know why.  What is wrong?  Do you not like the food?  Do you feel okay?  Do you want something else?  Are you upset?  Why don’t you eat more bread?  You can’t not eat!  This fish is from the river, it is very good!  Have you tried the eggplant with mayonnaise?  Here … have some bread …  I was so used to grazing at home, that I made the mistake a few times before I got the hang of it.  When it is not mealtime now, though, I do not ever eat.  Unless there’s ice cream in the freezer.  Duh.

I spend a lot of time wrangling toddlers.  Tako’s favorite morning habit now is to wander into my room before the rest of the family wakes up and go through all of the books I have on my nightstand.  Between the books passed down to me from the previous volunteer in this village, the ones I got from the PC office, and the ones I brought with me, I have quite a few (you could say that I go to the library a lot) … Anyhow … she arranges them all over my bed like blocks and then “reads” them.  This morning she was reading my thesaurus upside-down, and while she reads she moves her little mouth as if she’s saying the words.  When she gets tired of that, she tries to steal my bracelets and/or stuffed giraffe and when she gets tired of THAT she grabs a shirtful of the hazelnuts we’ve just harvested and climbs onto my bed to peacefully crack them with her teeth (no joke, she’s three) and drop the shells all inside my sheets.

When I am not pretending to be a jackal with Tako (whose “relatives” we can hear howling in the mountains at night), I am probably cooking, eating, sleeping, drinking coffee with the neighbors or shelling hazelnuts.  Or doing some strange American thing.  Like walking up a village road with no specific destination in mind.  Really, though to say that people stare when I do that is the understatement of the century.  Georgians could go head-to-head with the American schoolyard staring champions and come out with every gold medal (as long as their marshutka makes it to the Games and doesn’t, like, get lost in France or whatever).

Love,

Ala

A General Comment (17-5-2012)

Posts will come in large bunches.  Back up to early dates to read in order.  Dates are in European format Day/Month/Year.  There aren't any pictures because it takes a year and a day to upload them.  Don't worry if I sound tired or sad, I think I generally hit the whole range of emotions every week and I am overall very, very happy.

Love,
Al

PS: The dates I put on the post titles are the date that it was actually written.  I assume that's obvious!

14-05-2012

7:26 AM

Well let me tell you—I’m not going on a run without my camera for a while!  This morning while running along the main road (the paved one that people routinely do 80 mph on) we ran into two 100-head flocks of sheep and goats, a man herding his mares and foals from horseback ( maybe 12 horses total) and a LOT of honking cars and busses surrounded by horses, goats, and sheep.  We managed to run out … but not back … also!  It’s bath day!  Huzzah!

PS: In a major win moment for me, I can now reliably unlock the front door in the morning!  This is no small thing!

8:19 AM

Spongebob in Kartuli (Georgian).

8:16 PM

There are definitely difficult days and moments here.  All of this newness and change sometimes makes me feel on the spot—which makes me feel alone.  If that makes sense.  Right now, during our intensive language and teacher training, there is very little time to take a minute to myself to collect.  Sometimes I just feel so overwhelmed.  In those moments, it’s hard not to really, really feel the fact that this is over a two year commitment.  Yesterday, I was flipping through a teacher resource book and I found Shel Silverstien poetry in the back.  It made me so suddenly, achingly homesick, I started to cry.

“Rain”

I opened my eyes

And looked up at the rain,

And it dripped in my head

And flowed in my brain,

And all that I hear as I lie in my bed

Is the slishity-slock of the rain in my head.

I step very softly,

I walk very slow,

I can’t do a handstand—

I might overflow,

So pardon the wild crazy thing I just said—

I’m just not the same since there’s rain in my head.

Love,

Al

PS: My host mom says it’s more Georgian to be Ala, rather than Allie, so,

Love,
Ala

013-05-2012

 9:48 AM

Letter to a Friend,

This is a bit of a long-shot but I have a friend who is going back to the states in a few days and I might actually reliably get a letter through … IF I can find a stationary store in time to get an envelope (in the city) and IF I can figure out the stamp situation.

I got your message finally a few days ago on a “hub day” in the main city when we all got together to have meetings and get our rabies boosters.  It made my whole day.  I haven’t had any contact with anyone, really, since I left orientation.  I wanted to answer you, but I didn’t have any real time and now my computer is dead.  The adapter I brought is the right shape, but the plugs in this house are very old and they are too small.  Charging it with a smaller, borrowed adapter makes me nervous because I don’t want to forfeit the surge protection.

As for the mail here … there isn’t much of a postage system—most people in the villages don’t have postal addresses.

12:00 PM

I have a whole, whole new appreciation for what is actually clean and what is dirty.  I just finished washing 2 weeks of laundry by hand.  My host mom very quickly realized that I very, very little idea how to really wash clothes by hand … and no idea at all how to do it without a sink.  She thought the whole thing was pretty funny.  She kept coming down do ask me if I was tired yet …  I said I wasn’t tired (of course!), but … I forgot to wash my towel so now she’s heating more water on the stove.  I wanted to explain that I was using it as a bath rug and that my other towel is still clean, but how?  I’m dreading the thought of handwashing even one more thing.

12:40 PM

Towel is very clean now.

… Everybody is going into Telavi (the main city) to meet up for a social. I don’t think I’m going to go.  I want to stay here and bake bread with my host mom.  I don’t really like Telavi, anyways, mostly because every time I go I have to sit through hours and hours of meetings.

There was a crazy thunderstorm last night, too!  The kind of storm everybody wakes up talking about … even for here.  We’re at the base of the Caucus mountain range and we get thunder almost every afternoon.  Tbilisi (the capitol) is flooded.  It’s terrible, but, even so, I don’t think I will ever get tired of the sound of thunder.  As a side note, I have never lived—or been—anywhere where the mountains from a distance look SO big.  Maybe it’s because we’re in a valley here and not in them?  They literally disappear into the clouds.

8:00 PM

About 8 cups flour

2 Tbs salt

1 Tbs yeast

Mixed with warm water until wet and sticky but not runny

RISE 2 hours

Punch down

RISE 1 hour

Then bake at a high temperature

Then lower

(bake time roughly 25 minutes)

After making bread, let me just say that I didn’t realize what a luxury warm bread is.  That wonderful  smell of melting butter.  Enjoy your toast for me.  Or your bagel.

Love,

Al

PS: This letter did not get to my friend.  No clue when I’ll be able to get mail out.

07-05-2012 6:00 AM

I’ve been trying to learn to be quiet here in the mornings so that I don’t wake my host mom up.  This exercise is not going well.