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