The Hotsprings

It wasn't very long into dating the Mountain Man that he started talking about the hot springs. We were comparing camping war stories, and I told him I'd spent a lot of my memorable childhood camping in King's Canyon in the summertime. "Oh, that's a great area," he said in his casual, friendly way. It is a tone of his that I now recognize often belies much more knowledge and depth of experience on the subject than he will point out. "Let's go camping out that way. See the hot springs."

Now, we had only been dating for about a month and the thing about internet dating is that not only is it about getting to know somebody completely blind of having met them before, you also don't share any friends or a social circle. So I did the most logical thing I could (naturally) to attempt to safeguard myself against my lack of experience with this random internet person that I'd only been dating for a month.

"Can I bring Zoey?" See, because in my little world, if somebody is cool with your dog, that person is just cool. Don't ask me if it makes logical sense. Not to mention, Zoey is the dog equivalent of a 50 pound bunny rabbit with permanent symptoms of early-onset Alzheimer's. Occasionally she completely short-circuits and somehow manages to start by casually scratching herself behind her ear and end by deathgripping the base of her tail to attack "the dog kicking her ear" while violently kicking herself in the head in order to "get the dog biting her tail" to let go. Look, I can't explain her but she IS pretty cute.

Never having seen my dog before, he thought about my request for a quick moment, then shrugged. "Sure. Why not?"

Dear casual internet passersby: Don't go camping with random men just because they say your dog can come.

So, not knowing what I was getting into at all, but secure in being able to bring my adorable airheaded cheerleader, I packed to go "to the hot springs". Zoe jumps into the back of his 4-Runner like her butt's on fire and I pop into the passenger's side to go "out towards King's Canyon to the hotsprings". At this point, my little understanding of what is happening has completely evolved past the reality of the situation. 

So we drive. And we drive. And we drive. And as I do have distinct childhood memories of just HOW LONG it took to get out that way on the log scale of HOW ANNOYING my brother was the entire time, so I'm pretty much cool with this. Eventually, however, the rational pessimist in my brain manages to slither slowly up from the Swamp of Uncomfortable Truths that I have mostly managed to ignore my entire day-to-day life.

Who is this guy, she hisses, it's getting dark. 

He's fine! I shoot back. We'll be at the campground soon! There will be lots of other people because there are always tons of people at campgrounds on the weekend!

Right about this moment, Mountain Man points out a car we're passing on the 395. I know that guy, he says, I climb with him. I take this as a good sign. My rational pessimist is unconvinced but momentarily silenced. She coils up to watch this new story unfold.

It gets dark and we keep driving. Finally I ask when we're going to get there. Pretty soon, he tells me, maybe in an hour. It's midnight. Where the heck are we going? I just nod, though. I mean, I'm in this far. What am I going to do, fling open the car door and hurl myself out of the car at 65 mph? Demand to stop on the side of the road and, what, hitchhike home? We've passed Lone Pine a while ago already. I reach back and scratch Zoey behind the ears.

Another 40 minutes go by and we turn left off onto the loneliest, darkest, unpaved road that I have ever seen in my entire life. There is no ranger station along this road, no orderly campground, nothing but dim moonlight, a light breeze, and more nothing.

We have to make a right turn when you see the tree in the distance, he tells me. Look for the tree. When you first see it way in the distance, that's when we turn right.

My rational pessimist is rattling her tail and her head is weaving back and forth. Look for the tree way in the distance? Excuse me, but, what the hell?

Ten minutes down the road, nothing. Twenty minutes, nothing. Should I even be looking for anything at all or should I be furiously plotting my escape?

Thirty minutes. I am in silent panic. I attempt to console myself. It's been a good run, I think. They were 28 great years. Really. And it's then that I recognize a moment that has happened to me on rare occasion in my long and winding travels. I think, either this will kill me or it will change my life.

.........
..............
....................

We keep driving ... and driving ... and then! What?! A TREE. Off in the distance to the right.

Mountain Man, completely oblivious to my silent existential deliberations, simply brightens. There it is! He turns right off onto a near-invisible dirt path.

It isn't, however, until I see the first car or two parked along the side of the little rutted road, that I begin to truly calm down. Mountain Man is miffed, though. If it's this full, where will we camp, he grumbles. Pretty soon the road opens out to a little cleared area full of scattered parked cars.

We manage to find a back corner to park the car, unload a few tubs, and make a makeshift bed in the back of the 4-Runner. I have no idea where I am. In the morning, I open my eyes to this:

Empty BLM land as far as the eye can see.

That morning, we drove out for a hike up at elevation:

   

Exactly One Year and 11 Months Later

Well, it's been a really long time. Almost two years ago, I sat down to use this blog to untangle my complex emotions about the death of a wonderful Georgian teacher. My blog posts in Georgia came when the mood struck me--and only then. Not like it was any different before, honestly. Even after deleting my Facebook profile in a fit of emotional despair a year into my service, I didn't really consider posting more frequently to make up the difference. Sorry, mom! Sometimes this blog seems integral to my life and ability to process who I am, and, sometimes, despite all kinds of very empty personal promises and threats I make with my inner writing psyche, I just forget about it completely for years.

April 21, 2008 was my first post ever here, which means this goofy, erratic little blog is coming up on its 8 year birthday. I should do something to commemorate the day like bake a cake, then plan to bake a cake every week for the rest of my life, then completely forget about that promise until a completely random date far, far in the future.

Two years ago, I was walking with a strange sense of the inevitable out of my life in Georgia. March 1st would have been the beginning of the end of the winter, only four months before I ate my last true khatchapuri and hugged my Georgian family goodbye. March 1st was beginning of the end of my service in the Peace Corps, which has had a more lasting impact on my personality, opinions, friendships, and day-to-day minutia habits than I could have ever imagined. As I've stated in this blog before, I expected only adventure. What I got instead has redefined my understanding of the depth of human experience.

Now, two years later, The Mountain Man in my life has possibly succeeded in pestering me to document our wild, windblown experiences as we weekend wander our way anywhere we can manage to drive from OC Basecamp. Let the potentially, but not statistically likely, consistent posts commence!

Confusion

"Ala, tomorrow I am sure that there will not be the normal lesson at school."  I'm sitting on my counterpart's sofa around 8:30 pm, just another normal Monday night.  I nod, slowly, glad for the information and fighting the wave of frustration for the fact that I still need to be told at all.  Not instinctively knowing the pattern of social movement often makes me feel like I just signed up to spend two years wandering around a dark house-- bumping into every wall and step.

As I already feel like I've spent the whole day tripping over figurative steps, the frustration quickly dissolves into something much closer to resignation and perhaps a little too similar to defeat.  Our school's beloved math and physics teacher passed away two days ago, and my whole community is mourning.  This is the first time in Georgia that I have been to a wake for someone I felt like I knew.  Sadly, his death was caused by what appears to have been the result of a botched stomach operation, although nobody is clear on the details.  There is, at least, a theme I can cling to here-- when it comes to medical problems, nobody is ever clear on the details.  Everyone regards my pointed American questions with pity.  They know that I was not raised with the concept of resignation to lack of information.  They can see that "nobody knows" is something I struggle to accept.  In a way they're correct, of course, and in a way I think that they just don't see how much "gray area" I have already resigned myself to.

When there is a wake like this, for example, the students and teachers split into groups and travel together.  People often forget to tell me where they are going, when they are going (or that they are going at all), and even more than that I am confused as to "how" I should go.  As a student with my students?  As a teacher with the teachers?  Certainly I more naturally fall into the "teacher" category, but I am so much closer with my students both in age and comfort level that I always hesitate.  I've lived the past two years in the sidewalk crack between child and adult, family member and guest, teacher and student, American and Georgian, alien and familiar.  I am clearly independent and also clearly helpless.  I am cherished help and a huge responsibility.  I can clearly speak Georgian and communicate ... and I also clearly cannot.  In the category box of my life, I check "Other: Please Describe" and write nothing on the line below.

And so I float.  Or stumble.  Or sit static and feeling useless until I can see another path to traverse.  The first time I go to the wake, I go with my students piled in a marshutka trundling up the mountain to the house of our deceased teacher's family.  On the way back down, my seventh grade host sister sits in my lap.  The second time I go, I elect to wait for the teachers-- I am unsure as to exactly why I do it, but I think it has a lot to do with my general discomfort with the situation.  I feel less guilty when I am quiet and noncommittal around the teachers.  Like less of an awkward social burden.  I finally leave the wake alone, after seeing our math teacher in a casket in the living room.  He is so transparently white and he's dressed in an immaculately pressed iron grey suit.  It seems to me as if the suit has more substance than he does.  Seeing him lifts me from my own self-centered confusion to remember a man who was exceptionally kind to everyone and deserved far more than doctors who refused to explain their mistake.  So much confusion.

Confusion pervades life here.  

Adjara, specifically.  I have come to learn that is its own beast in terms of Georgian culture.  I remember in training we had a session on "regional stereotypes"-- one region was full of "fast talkers", one was "hick", one was known for silly things-- like having lots of donkeys.  I had just gotten my site placement, so I was eagerly awaiting what they had to say "about us".  When they got to my region, though, the people at the front of the room just shrugged.  "They were invaded by Turkey."  I remember thinking, even then, that that was a strange, distant way to characterize a region.  All of the other ones were personal, but not Adjara.  They had nothing on Adjara.

Then I got here and slowly realized that it wasn't just that Adjara didn't have a stereotype: people in other parts of Georgia have no idea what is going on in these mountains.  In my first year here, I often tried to describe social patterns and attitudes that I encountered to other Peace Corps volunteers as potential barriers to joint projects.  My understanding of my village and our culture here was often met with disbelief, puzzlement, and occasionally hostility.  After all, the rest of Georgia is quite homogeneous in terms of cultural attitudes and religious practices.  Other people naturally thought that I was crying wolf, being too sensitive, or just generally completely misunderstanding my surroundings.  Then, when my friend's host grandmother died here, he called Peace Corps to ask about local funeral traditions.  The staff replied that they honestly didn't know what they were.  The things he described were strange to them.  They could tell him about traditional Georgian practices, but what they were saying had no bearing on what was happening in his house.

It was asking about funeral practices that solidified another growing realization: people in these mountains have no idea what is going on in these mountains.  That the region has a Muslim history due to centuries of Ottoman control, everyone knows.  Most elderly people in the village are Muslim and most younger people are converting to Georgian Orthodox in order to return to their own cultural roots.  This, we know here.  After this we begin to tread on suppositions and observation.  Most people high in the mountains do not have internet and do not communicate with communities outside of this mountain range.  This means that the independent religious movement of these mountains, although vaguely self-aware, is not progressing in any kind of organized fashion.  What it is is a group of people returning to roots that their great grandparents can no longer describe to them.  Even more confusing is the fact that so many people here were forcibly converted to Islam long ago under Ottoman rule and many did not adopt a "pure" version of the religion.  Thus the practice of Islam varies from village to village throughout the region.

Even more, Georgians in these mountains have a general rule of thumb about funerals and the deceased: regardless of the religious beliefs or religious conversion of the younger members of the family, all older members should be remembered and mourned in the religion that they practiced during their lifetime.  This means that even with the conversion to Georgian Orthodox, younger family members are still socially required to celebrate Muslim holidays in order to properly honor the dead.  This causes confusion when a Christian family is unsure of how to perform an old Muslim tradition.  Even more, the middle generation acts as a kind of "gap year" and generally isn't very religious.  All questions about how to properly perform Muslim rites must be asked to the elderly themselves-- and their opinions may differ greatly from village to village.  So in light of all of this, in order to perform funeral rites that families are unsure of, what should they do?

Side-by-side with the Muslim holidays, we celebrate Georgian Orthodox holidays here-- sometimes with the reluctance of people who are only converting for social purposes and sometimes with the fervor of those who are determined to reconnect with their "stolen" culture as deeply as possible.  Sometimes one attitude evolves into the other.  To my fascination, in the span of only two years I have watched the culture of my own house shift from the former attitude to the latter, although, admittedly, we are still not particularly fervent, just noticeably more so.  

When talking with my counterpart about the passing of our school math teacher, I asked her if he would be buried according to Muslim traditions or Christian traditions.  She told me that without doubt his burial would be done according to Muslim tradition.  Within the Georgian mountain understanding of Islam, this means a lot of things, but one major difference is that Muslim funerals are closed-casket.  Georgian wakes are open-casket.

Certainly you can see where I'm going with this now, but I have even another detail to add.  As I went to the wake yesterday as well, I can tell you that yesterday the casket was closed.  Today it was open.  

And although this may sound like it has devolved into a cold, clinical dissection of the anthropological history that surrounds me, let me assure you that that is not the case.  I am incapable of being so absorbed in these mountains and not feeling tied to the lives around me.  I am constantly seeking similarities between my life and theirs because I am convinced that the more parallels I can find, the more I will feel like I belong.  I want to feel like I belong. 

I can’t say that I was magically cured of my frustrations and loneliness by meditating on the confusion of funeral practices in Georgia and how they relate to my own perspective, but in dealing with my own despair at being the only one in my little world who doesn't instinctively understand the culture that I have so long been immersed in, the understanding that nobody around me is instinctively sure either calms me.

Rest in peace, Enveri Mas, you will be greatly missed.

What Do Chickens Follow?

Chickens follow spit.

At least, that's why my grandma tells me.  That's what her mother told her.  And if Grammy says it, well, it must be true.  Apparently, according to my grandmother, my great-grandmother once caught a chicken by going outside and spitting methodically closer and closer to her house.  She spit a trail right into the hall, then the living room, then the bathroom, then BAM!  She slammed the door!  Dinner's here, kids!

I have tested this theory by spitting out my bedroom window after brushing my teeth in the morning, and, dude!  It's true!  The chickens totally come running across the yard to check out my spit!  They must not like mint flavor, though, because they always seem disappointed when they get there.

Note to self:  Buy corn-flavored toothpaste.

Anyhow.  This occurred to me today as I was walking down a sidewalk in Batumi.  There I was, minding my own business, when my easy stroll became the site of a struggle for the ages.   

Squak!

Above my head was a chicken hanging by one leg from a second story apartment balcony.  Two Georgian ladies were trying to conceal their peals of laughter as one lady was on her hands and knees holding on to the last leg of a chicken who clearly did not want to be named Lunch.

Unfortunately for Lunch, it was not her lucky day.  I don't know her fate after she was retrieved from her epic jump, but I like to think that perhaps she is an excellent egg layer and she will be spared another day to hatch an even better plot to escape.  Pun intended.

Really, though, I think somebody must have spit on the sidewalk below.

Lunch wanted lunch!

Part II: The Fate of Ratsaurus, The Beginning of the End

*** A note to the reader:  If you have not read the first part of this story, scroll down two posts to the post titled, "Jim".  This is not the Star Wars Trilogy and you will gain nothing from of reading this story out of order.


It's been hard to sleep since Jim's been gone.  There's something about sleeping alone in a cold bedroom that gets to you after a while, and while I can't exactly say I miss him, more than one night lately has found me suspiciously eyeing the chewed-up corners of my top blanket.  I wonder where he is, I wonder if he is warm.  I wonder if he is dead.  God, I hope he's dead.

I mean.  Um.

Sure, we spent an unforgettable night together.  Sure, his existence brought me even closer to my own understanding of reasons I would be willing to die a painful disease-ridden death in a third world country.  Forged bonds like that are not to be forsaken lightly.  I mean, having another living being poop under your bed and chew on your underwear is about as memorable as it comes.  

Yeah.  I hope he's really, really good and dead.

But what of his compatriot?  What of Ratbominable?  Where did he go the night after he single-handedly consumed fifteen generously proportioned zombies before being so rudely interrupted by the awakening of my host family?  Well.  Sit criss-cross applesauce, my dears, while I spin y'all a village yarn ...

It was a few weeks ago now, by the dim ochre light of the harvest moon (that's right, it rose in January just for us), that I first grew aware of that little eater of the undead's presence in my own bedroom.  I was on my computer doing Really Important Things like playing spider solitaire and reading Yahoo! Answers for "Can my flesh-eating fungus cure cancer?" when I heard The Scuffle.  Don't know what a rat scuffle sounds like?  Live my life and you will begin naming rats by their scuffle sounds.

Mr. Shuffle-Paws
Mr. Squeaky Argument
Evil Tap Dance
Maradona
Aw, It's a Little Tiny Mousie
The Attic Birjha Boys

And those are just the first uncles on Squeaky Toes' mother's side.

I tried to convince myself that it was coming from the ceiling.  I do that a lot.  Try to redirect the origin of rodent sounds with my psychic powers.  But although I was wholeheartedly rooting for the relatively safe location of directly above my head, alas, it was not to be.  I had a visitor.

Scuffle, scuffle, bump.  Shuffle, sidle-waltz, squeak.  I'm pretty sure the soundtrack of my bedroom visitor's Unknown Location Symphony played backwards while watching The Wizard of Oz would be terrifying high (On life, guys, ok?  On life.  Relax).

I slid my laptop off of my stomach and padded silently towards my door to get my host mom.  I locked It inside.  Because if I was going to start a bedroom rendition of 28 Days Later, I didn't want to scare away my brains-munching co-star.

My conversation about the rodent with my family went, as so many of them do, in a relatively productive direction if you aren't a stickler for semantics:

Me: "I have a rat in my room."

Host Mom: "Really?  You have a mouse?"

Me: "Yes, I have a rat."  (I have learned, in Georgia, to answer "yes" regardless of whether something is true if I think it will get me what I want.  Oh, language, you tricky minx.)

Host Aunt: "What's wrong with Ala?"

Host Mom: "She has a mouse in her room."

Me: "Yes.  I have a R.A.T."


Act II: Scene I

Host Mother and Awkward Volunteer enter stage left through a bedroom door with no handle.  The room is in extreme disarray.  Everything is piled on the bed and looks about to topple off as if Awkward Volunteer had not made such a casual, sly exit as she clearly had wished to portray.  Both are both bundled up quite tightly as if it is very cold and while on Host Mom this looks rather normal, it makes Awkward Volunteer look distinctly homeless.


Host Mom: Taking in the scene.  "Are you sure you heard the mouse in your room?"

A.V.: "Yes.  There is a rat in here."

Host Mom: "Okay, where did you hear it?"

A.V.: "In the corner inside the wardrobe."

Host mom looks towards wardrobe.  It is closed and a chair is pushed in front of it.  The chair is piled high with books and other heavy objects as if Awkward Volunteer is attempting to cage a small bear.

Host Mom: "Ooooooookaaaaaaay.  Well, let's take a look, then."

Awkward Volunteer makes a show of being brave by walking forward one step for every two she takes back.  She appears to be performing some kind of African moon dance.  Host Mom ransacks wardrobe as A.V. pretends to help.

Host Mom:  "There's nothing in here.  I don't see the mouse.  Are you sure you heard it?"

A.V.:  "There is a RAT IN THIS ROOM."

Host Mom: "Well, it's not underneath the wardrobe ... and it can't get behind it ..."

Host Aunt enters stage left.

Host Aunt: "Are you sure you didn't hear that noise?"  Host Aunt points to the wood burning stove crackling across the hall.  Awkward Volunteer's pride is clearly wounded and she appears to be growing quite defensive.

A.V.:  "No.  I heard a  rat. in. this. room."

Host Mom:  "There is no mouse in this wardrobe."  She shakes all of A.V.'s clothes to make her point.  She looks ready to leave, but, sensing A.V. is rather unusually unhappy, she decides to sit on the bed instead.

Host Mom:  "Shhhhhhhhhhhh ..."  She waits.  And waits.  And waits.  As the silence continues, A.V. looks increasingly frustrated like one of those people whose dog won't do a trick in front of strangers.

Host Mom: Consolingly "If you hear it again, let me know, okay?"

Host Mom exits stage left.  A.V. shifts from foot to foot, then begins to unload all objects from her bed and dump them on the floor in a heap.  She appears quite used to cleaning with this method.  A.V. eases herself onto her unstable cot, grabs her computer, and begins to search Yahoo! Answers again.

A few minutes pass.  Suddenly A.V. starts, then stills.  She clearly hears something coming from the same corner of her room ...

To Be Continued ...

What it's about

So I guess it's up to everyone to figure out what they're going to get out of their Peace Corps service and it's hardly a thing that is a written law anywhere, you know?  Sometimes I think about what I was expecting to find out here and my first, most honest thought, was adventure.  Of course, I was in middle school then and perhaps I had more complex, serious reasons at the time that I can no longer remember, but I'm pretty sure that's not true.  Adventure.  This idea of adventure grew slowly into a desire for understanding.  I wanted to understand another culture and another lifestyle so completely different from my own that it would be impossible to achieve by simply entering the corporate world and requesting a move to a foreign hotspot.  I wanted to see behind the curtain of  the life that I was born into.  This is the most honest, driving desire that I had for joining Peace Corps.  Curiosity and determination.

I never joined Peace Corps to save the world.

Honestly, I didn't join to work at all.  Don't take that the wrong way, I certainly always intended to do the job I had promised to do, but it was a sideline to my genuine intent.

I don't know what I thought about making bonds with the people in the country I moved to.  I can't claim to have thought about it much beyond the idea of an African hut and a moonlit ritual dance.  Or whatever.  That thing that all of us think.  Lots of curiosity and misguided imagination ... and a lack of imagination in the area of human bonds-- the place where imagination is almost always the most worth having.

A lot of volunteers comment on how difficult it is to blog while you're here.  It's not for a lack of time.  It's not for a lack of available paper and pens, or, for that matter, computers in this age.  Our families ask for updates and emails and it's the strangest sensation to desire to explain and then to be stopped by the force of your own experience.  Certainly, a lack of description in this case isn't for a lack of things to describe.

Peace Corps encourages us to take the time to reflect.  We get weekly emails that invariably contain this reminder somehow.  They send us quotes, tell us stories, make contests for our blogs, and make it an actual part of our biannual paperwork.

Are you telling your family?

Are you telling your friends?

Does everyone at home know that secret corner of Georgia like you do?  Are you telling them?

Although it's certainly not a bad idea to encourage this (it's a great idea), it seems a little unfair.  Certainly volunteers twenty years ago out on an island who were alone for months on end were not required to give constant updates on the alien world that they inhabited, nor understand and express clearly their personal growth and emotional change on a day-to-day basis.  I think it's a great idea to try, but don't blame us if we struggle in silence.

It's kind of like this.  Imagine that you've lived your whole life the way that you understand it now, and then, one day, you begin to wade into very dirty, murky lake.  At the beginning, you can swish your feet around and see them as the mud swirls around them.  You wade a little deeper and you can't see them anymore, but you just saw them a minute ago so that isn't really a big deal.  Then, you keep going deeper.  You can't see your legs now, or your torso, either.  You're not sure what you're doing anymore, but you keep walking in.  It seems like you've been doing this for a long time, but honestly, it's hard for you to say.  You wade a little deeper and begin to submerge your collarbone when somebody from America calls or you get a peppy email from Peace Corps asking you to describe in detail the effect of the lake on your feet.  At this point, you could have flippers and you wouldn't even know it.  "Wait!" you cry.  "Hold on, I'm just not sure anymore!"  "What's the big deal?" they ask.  "Just look down."

One thing Peace Corps is beginning to show me me is that you often don't know how something has changed you until strange, late moments.  Until a thought you have months after an event strikes you and you take the time to track it back to the experience that founded it.  Until you suddenly realize that in this landscape of difference, you are no longer constant yourself anymore.

They ask you that question, you know.  When they interview you.  In a little office in LA, a little man asked me how I planned on coping with being in a completely different culture.  How exactly, he asked, did I view my personal identity?

I told him that I had been through it before in Argentina.  That immersion in different cultures forces you to consider what makes you different.  That you come up with a core understanding of yourself, of your values and your likes and dislikes and that you take that as who you are.  This is too bald of an explanation, forgive me that.

And it's true, what I said, and that dude probably heard some variation of that day in and day out at that job.  He told me about building a computer lab in Moldova and I privately wrinkled my nose (no African moon dance?), although now I can appreciate what an accomplishment that really was.  I can also appreciate that it didn't invalidate his experience in the slightest.  Turns out it isn't all about those moonlit dances after all.

I think it's about not knowing what the hell it's about.

But I don't really know.

Jim

So my mother has been on my case about this blog and all (Hi Mom!) ... and I guess, according to her, the New Year deserves a post or two.  Personally, I wasn't so sure.  2014 had to prove herself worthy of my energy first.  You know, it's awfully hard to rouse myself from doing nothing but stare at the snow outside my window.  I feel like I could write a whole chapter on January so far and title it, "In Which I Shift My Butt".

Anyhow.  The story I bring to you today is one that I have told a few of you with certainly more humor and flair than I was feeling at the time.  This is the story of The Rat, who, for the purposes of my US government monitored blog, we will refer to as Jim, although I won't pretend that I don't have a more private name for him.

Three days ago, I was awakened from a dead sleep when a rat ran across my leg in the middle of the night.  I freaked out so bad I think that my body actually momentarily levitated from my bed before I kicked my leg as hard as I could and sent the rat flying across the room.  Panicked, I sat up, teeth chattering, and pawed frantically along my window ledge for my PC-issued cell phone and flashlight.  By then, Jim had sequestered himself neatly somewhere in my bedroom, God Knows Where.  I tucked myself under my covers again, staring at the eerie vision of my bedroom by flashlight.  Now what?

I can't promise this to be exactly true, but I'm pretty sure it was at least a million hours before I drifted to sleep again, having nightmare after nightmare about rats.  I remember one in particular where I was sure that I was awake, but unable to move as rats came closer and closer and closer.  I was then jerked into real reality by an enormous crash which was Jim knocking large things off of my bedroom shelves as he attempted his own personal scale of Everest.  I am sorry to say that this story does not end with him buried in an avalanche as that certainly would have made me happy at the time.

Panic.  Flashlight.  Nothing.  Jim's gone again.  And I'm awake.  [CENSORED].  Now, in the silent wake of Jim's clatter, I hear a second noise.  Outside of my room, there is a second rat.  There is a loud second rat.  In fact, I can hear it gnashing away at something, and, gauging from the level of noise, I judge this rat to be roughly the size of a rabid wolf.  It's so loud, in fact, that it wakes my host aunt and uncle up and I can hear them opening their bedroom door across from mine and discussing in hushed voices what to do.  They wake my host nephew.  All three of them stand in the hall outside of my bedroom as if they have any hope at all of finding Ratsaurus on the completely unheated second story of our house at 4:00 am in the morning.

I lie silent in bed.  I have four options:
a.  Do nothing.  Sleep with Jim for the rest of the night.  Pray not to die of Hantavirus.
b.  Alert my host family that I've got a rat too.  Invite a 4:00 am forensic exploration of my bedroom.  Pray host uncle does not find feminine products.
c.  Wait until host family goes to bed, then attempt to go sleep downstairs, which is also unheated.  Most certainly die of exposure in transit.
d.  Open my bedroom door and hope Jim leaves.  Offer up firstborn child to God to gain assurance that this act will not simply invite Ratzilla in.

In an obscure throwback to Pokémon and the 90's, I choose Hantavirus.  I've read that it has a 1 to 5 week incubation period, which is significantly longer than I would live in any of the other situations.  (Dear Peace Corps: I'M KIDDING).  Dear family: But really ...

The next morning, I stagger down to the kitchen to tell my host mom all about Jim.  Her solution?  We wait until the sun comes up over the mountain high enough so that the house warms up a little (this is about 2:30 pm), we open my East-facing bedroom window, and we place a rat trap on the floor.  Then we lock my bedroom door with Jim inside for hours so that he DIES.

We attempt this, but no Jim.  His location became a mystery until this morning.

This morning I awoke to World War III: Rat Edition as my host mom and my host aunt ripped the entire upstairs apart.  Apparently Jim had managed to keep my aunt up all night this time and she was less than pleased.  To hear her gleefully tell the story, my host uncle is terrified of rats and actually made her get up first this morning to bang on every item in the room and declare the space "all clear" before he would agree to get out of bed.  But, that's beside my point.  I listened to the chorus of screams and bangs and horrified cries of "I SAW IT!  AHHHHHH I SAW IT!" for a solid twenty minutes until they apparently managed to drive Jim out into the cold of our balcony.

And that, my friends, is the heartwrenching story of Jim: A cold, lonely plague rat looking for love.  If you are finishing this story with an uneasy sense of closure, if you are pondering about the whereabouts and home base of The Ratinator Largest Unseen Rat Known To Man And Loudest Eater Ever, let me tell you ... so am I.  SO AM I.

July is gone already?!?!?

Where did July go?  Here I am looking back in this sorry, rainy excuse for an August looking back at a month that went on forever just as much as it flew by.

LIFE Camp was all kinds of incredible and rewarding ... and completely consumed my existence for three straight weeks.  Three other volunteers and I traveled from town to town putting on the week-long camp with many a guest star from the rest of the volunteer crowd.  What have I learned?  The dangers of saying the word "condom" to a 12 year old, how incredible some 15 year olds can be given half the chance, how to throw both a football and a rugby ball, how to survive being tackled by 10 Georgian teenage girls, and what it smells like when 7 Peace Corps volunteers stay in the same old Soviet-era one bedroom apartment together for an entire week while they conduct a kids sports camp all day long (hint: think biological warfare).

Here are a few cute pictures from the camp.  This was just the warm-up, too!  Our funded camp is two weeks from now!  We're editing our resources and gearing up!  In the first picture, the kids are acting out a scene about what they would do in a situation where everybody is too drunk to drive home.  Nika's on the phone calling a friend.  The second two are rugby!

Today is my 3rd night back in my village after having been gone for almost a month working on LIFE Camp and hoo boy did I miss The Mafia!  Tako asked me over and over why I left and where I'd gone for two straight days after I came home.  All in all I had to agree with her-- what the heck was I thinking?!  We're back to our usual routines now, thank goodness.  Today I carried her out of my room as she beg-moaned for more paper.  She has books full of blank paper now and doesn't have to ask me anymore, but don't think that changes anything!

To combat the effect of the old Russian spring mattress on my back, I've started doing yoga in the mornings and evenings to the fascination of my host family.  Even though I do it in my room in private, I'm invariably interrupted at some point by someone knocking on my door for one reason or another.  Thus in the span of two days home, my routine has been well discovered.  So tonight Anuki and Keti came in to exercise with me.  I wouldn't call that hour of my life the most productive ever exercise-wise, but it was pretty dang funny.

Near the end of our yoga session I passed my camera off to Keti and this was her take on the situation.  I'm posting representitive selection of her pictures.    I didn't post the picture she took of my computer screen, hower, where the lady in the yoga video is just lying on her mat because that was just way too creepy.  You'll notice the Bananagrams set that Janell sent me and Keti LOVES and broke out soon after she got bored with the weird poses.  She likes to just group all the same letters together ...

Anyhow, enjoy the world through the eyes of my 5 year old Georgian host sister!

Work? I work?

It's come to my attention that I never talk about work on this blog.  That seems strange to me because sometimes I swear work is all I think about.  Really, I wonder if my family just thinks I'm off in another country partying and speaking a language that I will never need again a year from now (except to continue communicating with The Mafia and possibly write some really awesome grocery lists).  It's possible that they've been whispering "it's just a phase" behind my back my whole life.

"Hey Mom, I'm a vegetarian."

"Hey Dad, I'm a Spanish major."

"Hey family, I'm leaving for The Republic of Georgia for the next 27 months."

In defense of my spare moments not spent drinking wine and learning how to make cheese AND in a huge THANK YOU to all of my friends and family that donated to our LIFE Camp PCPP grant which was recently FULLY FUNDED (that's a lot of caps, I know, deal, we're so happy!) ... here is a blog post enumerating all the other Peace Corpsy goodness I've been up to lately.  Dear friends and family, this is what you're supporting! I swear I work too!

Special thanks to Laura and Darlene who are the only people I know to thank!  Your names both came up on the donor's list and if anybody else donated but didn't leave their names, I don't know who you are!  Thank you  Darlene and Laura and to the rest of you awesome (but apparently quite shy) donors!

SELF CAMP (June 29-July 2):

First of all, the dates listed there are something of a joke.  I mean, those were our camp dates, yes, but two other volunteers and I started working on putting that camp together last November.  Talk about a long time coming.  But I think the most important point about those dates is that they're ooooooooovvvvvvvvverrrrrrrrrrrrrr!!!!!!!!!!  Hoo boy, are we ever excited to have one successful camp behind us now.  Huge shout-out to Merissa and Brittany without whom I can't even imagine conducting such a huge endeavor.

SELF Camp is a girls-only fitness camp that's about equal parts lectures on health topics (hygiene & communicable diseases, mental health, reproductive health, drugs & alcohol awareness, gender based violence awareness) and sports and exercise (running, stretching, yoga, ultimate frisbee, soccer, basketball).  We stayed with 40 girls, 2 guest speakers, 2 new trainees, and 8 counselors & jr. counselors, and 1 head counselor in a large renovated school in a small town near the Black Sea.  The school had a cafeteria (?!?!) a beautiful auditorium (!!!!!!!!!) and showers with hot water (!!!!&^$%#!).  The staff set up beds in the rooms and we just stayed there all 4 days.  The camp was embassy-funded and completely free for the girls (many of whom would have not have been able to attend otherwise).

At the end of the camp, the girls had a talent show and a dance party and oooooooooooh were they ever sore!  They traded phone numbers and signed their notebooks like yearbooks and my great hope for them is that they begin to form a network of women who advocate for their own health, who recognize that they deserve to be treated with the utmost dignity and respect, and who take an active role in deciding their own futures.  Very most of all, I want to watch them crush the concept of "taboo topic" under their heels.

This isn't the camp you funded, but it's super important too.  LIFE Camp caters not only to co-ed education but, also, naturally to more liberal open-minded families that are willing to allow their daughters to travel so far away from home alone and stay in a co-ed situation.  SELF Camp is there for girls who aren't allowed to go so far.  Even to get girls to come and stay at SELF Camp (which is a 3 GEL travel distance from my village), it was such a circus.  Every single eligible girl at my school filled out an application ... and we had to re-choose girls 3 times to come up with two whose parents would allow them to come.

(Never fear, I have my LIFE camp campers set up and locked-in already, it just takes a little more legwork and a lot more persuasion.  I ended up getting a girl camper for LIFE camp from the same family that allowed their younger daughter to come to SELF-- when they told me her older sister could come to the co-ed camp with me near Tbilisi, I about fell out of my chair.  What a nice family!)

Here's a link to the pictures Brittany took of our camp with her super awesome camera.  I've still yet to get mine back-- I gave it to one of my students to take pictures with her friends during the camp.  I've got a trek ahead of me to upper Makhuntseti today to get it back ...

https://plus.google.com/photos/113108152858433535181/albums/5897446772708850897?authkey=CLySi_mxqvbqnQE

We also had a videographer at the camp and when we get that video, I'll share it too!  I can't wait to see footage of that talent show!

The Gym Project (forever ongoing):

When I came to this village on my site visit waaaaaaaay back when over a year ago now (so crazy to think about that!) ... my school told my unequivocally that they wanted help renovating their gym.  Now, the blanket advice I got from Peace Corps before I moved to site was to thoughtfully take my time figuring out what my village wanted me to do to make sure that I wasn't just picking some "American Idea" that nobody else here considered to be important.  Ha.  Ha.  Ha.  They were like:  "We want a gym.  We want a gym.  WE WANT A GYM."  I'm forever grateful to my school and village for taking ALL of the guesswork out of THAT process!

Then came the grant.  And the realization of how truly expensive new wood flooring would be.  And, oh, the agony.  Do we still write the grant for what we need or do we work on the blacktop outside (which would be cheaper but certainly not helpful in the winter)?  I actually wrote the whole grant before I learned that for a tiny village like mine, the unofficial cap for grant money is $2,500.  Shaved down to the barest minimum construction-wise we were at $3,300.  We didn't even ask for wall paint.  Any more and we would have been compromising the integrity of our project.  On top of the grant money, we had 44% community contribution through reduced cost labor and a ton of money from the school's budget.  I called Adam (poor Adam!) on the grant committee over and over.  I turned that grant in and we all collectively held our breaths.  In the passing weeks, I answered the "deadline" question to my villagers far more times than I could count.

"We'll know in two weeks."

"We'll know in a week and a half."

"Just a few days now, I swear."

I was in Istanbul checking my email 3 times a day waiting when we got the news.  WE GOT FUNDED.

Well, as every volunteer knows, getting the money is just the beginning.  Then came the wait for the money to come in from both the Peace Corps and the school itself.  One month later, everybody is "rich" or poor.  However you want to look at that one.

The gym teacher bought materials in Batumi yesterday and construction is set to begin today.  Cross your fingers for us, I'll be headed up to the school this afternoon to check it out.

Gulnara (every dang night!):

This woman deserves her own darn category.  Gulnara is my main English teacher counterpart and boy is she ever a trip!  Now, we're all supposed to lesson plan with out counterparts.  Lesson planning, aside from being great for a smooth day at school, is key for working on English with your counterpart.  Now, there's a range of "lesson planning" for every volunteer-counterpart pair ranging from "What's lesson planning?"  to a very steady schedule.

And then there's Gulnara.  Whose "lesson planning" work ethic is so legendary that she earned herself a spot on the most recent Embassy exchange program to America.

Between her and my other English partner teacher, I lesson planned upwards of 1.5 hours every night during the school week for the entire school year.  But, to be fair, "lesson planning" is a broad term that encompasses actual work, drinking tea, eating dinner, gossiping, and potentially dancing to Gagnam Style with surrounding small children.  And I, in my infinite naivety, thought that this schedule would end with the school year.

Hahahaha.

Well, now we have the Teacher's Exams on the 10th.  And Gulnara has been going to exam prep classes 6 days a week in Batumi.  And our lesson planning has just morphed into studying for the exams.  Now, I'm happy to work if she asks for help, but on top of that, I feel a huge responsibility to support her because she tries so hard for her own sake.  I found myself coming home for the afternoon on the 4th of July to write essays with Gulnara before leaving to celebrate America's birthday with the other volunteers.

There's no escaping it.  I will be "lesson planning" every night until the day I leave this village!  Yesterday we studied together all afternoon, I went home for a while, then I went back to correct her essay, put antivirus software on her computer (arghhh fixing virus-ridden computers in Russian ... I think every volunteer could write a soliloquy on that) and my favorite to do a prenatal yoga video with Gulnara (who is a few months along now), her niece, and her 4 year old son sandwiched between us and crawling under our jungle gym of legs and arms.

On the quick topic of yoga-- thanks to Brittany at SELF Camp (who led an awesome "hot yoga" session) and to www.yogadownload.com (which gives free 6-month subscriptions to yoga video downloads to active duty military and Peace Corps Volunteers-- SO AWESOME), I have started doing yoga in my room here.  Why didn't I do this a million years ago?!?!?!  I feel SO much better.  My bed is an old Russian spring mattress that is akin to a very lumpy hammock (I imagine the hammock would actually be more comfortable) ... and after a year of that, now I'm dragging the mattress to the floor every night in a desperate attempt to save my newly creaky back.  Am I old?  Can that happen to me?!?  Enter yoga.  Such.  A.  Huge.  Difference.  Now my host mom wants to learn how to do it.  I need to grab a blank DVD in Batumi somewhere so I can burn her a video to do.

LIFE CAMP (gearing up):

This is the next move.  I leave on July 9th for a dentist appointment in Tbilisi and a Gender Equality Committee organization meeting.  From there, I will be gone from the village for an entire month (woah) traveling from camp to camp.  The first three camps will be free in different larger towns around Georgia (so that we get good attendance) and the last one is FUNDED NOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!! and will be conducted near Tbilisi in tents in true camp-style.  We got a new partner organization (Charity Humanitarian Abkhazeti), so now we have two.  The new organization deals solely with Internationally Displaced Persons, so instead of the original 20% of IDP involvement in the funded camp, now the vast majority of campers will be IDP kids and many of them will actually be coming from an IDP children's group home.

Obviously, when we get photo and video footage, I'll be putting it up for you all to see the end result of your donations!

Sorry for the infinitely long post about work, but I just really, truly want you all to see where your donations went and to know what a huge, grateful community is benefiting from your help.

More to come for sure!

Love,
"Aluchka"

Family Abroad

I haven't written for a while again, so hello.  I feel like I owe the world at large a story here, so I will tell the story of my host uncle and my real family.

My host uncle is a cool guy.  He's a big dude, especially for a Georgian, with a big broad face and a wide, very charming smile.  He gets away with stuff.  He's one of those people that, even though you know that he would never harm a hair on your head, you're still never sure if he's going to do what he says he's going to do.  In other words, a politician to the extreme.  I don't think I'm saying anything that's not generally known here-- his own wife prefers to refer to him using the Georgian word for "devilish".

When my family visited, he requested that I translate for them that he works in Parliament.  He always says this.  He works in a hotel.  Now, I certainly don't see the shame in working in a hotel, but I think he was a "bigger man" back in the old government and the change is rough on his ego.  Still, I suppose these niceties should be preserved.  Parliament it is.

He's always searching to let me know that I am a daughter and, more than that, my American cultural differences are OK (although he is clearly disappointed that I don't drink chacha more often).  He emphasized that my strange American ways were OK by letting me know that I could stay for free at the hotel he works at with my, ahem, male companion.  He renews this offer semi-regularly and I appreciate it-- while I'd never accept (my relationship status notwithstanding).  As a consequence, he's always seemed miffed that I don't appear to trust him.

So, when my mom, brother, and grandma came to Georgia, I saw the perfect opportunity.  Family!  Family is socially safe!  We can stay a night at this hotel, allow my host uncle to show us his hospitality, and everybody will be happy!

Fast forward.  We are all on a marshutka going through the backstreets of Batumi.  Looking for this hotel.  We find it.  It's not that far away from the main street.  Cool.

It's kind of a funny building and it looks like it may contain more than one club.  The floors on the steps inside are marble, though, and the stairwell is full of stained glass windows.  The hall containing the door to our room is dimly lit, not decorated, and infinitely long.  How long is this building?

Our room has a big screen TV, no light in the bathroom, a shower that leaks considerably and sprays water in very awkward directions.  This, however, is Batumi and none of this fazes us so much as the very interesting lighting and color scheme of the room.  When you turn on the lights, they're white in the middle with a colored strobe light around them.  Every wall is painted a different, bright color.  The room is relatively large and does not look like a bedroom, even though it contains a bed.  The other "bedroom" is partitioned off by a curtain.  In fact, this definitely looks like a party room with a few beds in it.  Hmm.

There are only 3 beds and my host uncle very much would like to put my brother in his own room.  I tell him it's fine and I can sleep in the same bed as my grandma.  He's miffed.  Man, this dude is miffed at me a lot.

We take pictures, we laugh at the very strange lighting and, exhausted from a weekend in the village, we go to bed.  My brother can't sleep, though, and decides to check out the club downstairs.

 The next morning, he tells us we are staying in a brothel.  After a few comments from the bartender, the club containing only smoking girls in normal "club wear" took on a whole new meaning.  My bro bailed after being offered new friend with good English skills.

... my host uncle put my grandmother up in a brothel.  And didn't think twice about it, either!

Seriously, I live with the Mafia.

And a few pictures

 My (just turned!) 4 year old host sister in her new favorite evening routine of coming into my bedroom while my host mom is milking the cow and rifling through all of my clothes to try on anything that is pink or red.  Those are also my slippers.

 The springtime view out my bedroom window.

 An "old" volunteer trying on the traditional Georgian hat that she got as a parting gift.  These fools are leaving in a week and then I'll be "old"!  How 'bout that?!

 

 A particularly beautiful sunset in Kobuleti overlooking the Black Sea.

 

Trainers and trainees (minus 2) standing outside of the Batumi USAID office after SELF Camp Training of Trainers.  Go us!  Go SELF!  (If anyone from my family is reading this, this is not the same camp as the email I sent you, but it's awesome too!!!)

#2

"You will be sick all the time."

Counting backwards to the top, here are the worst (best) moments:

5. Gulnara's party "For the Americans".  Now, don't nitpick my definition of sick.  I told them I should have stopped drinking roughly 5 shots beforehand.  For those of you who know my drinking (in)capabilities, let the magnitude of that sink in.  The upshot?  I threw up out my bedroom window, the chickens ate it, and I didn't walk for a day.

4. Marshutka rides.  I never know where to put this "sickness", but it makes the list for sure.  At least I know I'm not alone.  The sight of a pulled-over marsh for a sick person is one we all know well here.  Sometimes I travel back and forth to Batumi every day for a few days straight and then the nausea just sort of follows me like a haze. 

3. That time I got food poisoning at site visit (when I visited my village for the first time).  Not the last time I'll have food poisoning in Georgia, but surprisingly it was the first.  It makes the list for the intense embarrassment that I felt.  I was so sick that I had to end my welcome dinner in Batumi and make my new host family take me home.  Everybody was all freaked out.  Then I went back to training, still sick.  Bad news all around. 

2. I made it through the first HALF of winter without getting sick.  I was, like, the SuperKali of Georgia.  Until I came back to my host family after break and walked right into a sea of people who cough and don't cover their mouths.  Because being cold makes you sick.  And then it began.  And continued.  And never ended.  For months.  And months.  And after a course of antibiotics and a slew of cough medicine, it persisted.  Maybe I was the cough and the cough was me and there was no separating us.  Ever.  And then I had to get my chest x-rayed in Tbilisi.  After which, it cleared up in a matter of days with no extra medicine.  Wtf?  Magical x-rays?

1. Because it's a law for me in Georgia that I always get the sickest when I have to travel long distances, it makes sense that #1 happened right before I left to go halfway across the country to job shadow another volunteer.  This was the monster disease, The Big One, the disease to cough and fever all other diseases away.  I remember feeling so faint and so determined not to complain that the entire end of the first day shadowing turned into just a series of moments where I was focused on staying upright and walking forward.  Then I gave that disease to like 10 other volunteers.  Because I should have stayed home.  Sorry guys!

My rating for this platitude? 7.  I can't give it a 10.  For as sick as I've been, it doesn't amount to the horror stories I've heard from other people (and my God the pictures Africa volunteers post of their parasites ...).  Guess I'll remember to take my vitamin today ....

#1

Our one year mark here in Georgia is creeping up on me.  To celebrate, I will write about a Peace Corps Platitude every day to see if I've measured up to the propaganda.

"You'll experience your highest highs and your lowest lows." - I don't agree with this at all.

A case could be made for the highest highs.  Off the top of my head?  The times I've spent laughing with my counterpart-- and the times I've spent with her getting schooled on the things nobody talks about here.  Watching my little host sisters do insane things and having them imitate me in ridiculous ways.  I started quite the trend carrying a water bottle around.  I've never seen a four year old protect a water bottle so fiercely before.  Successfully teaching something mildly challenging on my own.  The look on my partner teacher's face when she found out she was going to America.  And then hearing her complex take on it when she returned to Georgia. 

The lowest lows?  No.  Thankfully, I don't think that this is true.  I've hit a few serious lows here, mostly loneliness in one form or another, but not the lowest I've ever been.  I think you can feel just as lonely when you're surrounded by people in America as you can when you're physically alone in the village halfway across the world.  Sure it's hard to be here sometimes, but loneliness takes a certain commitment to the idea that you're actually alone, as opposed to accepting the fact that human connection is not always easy.

My grade for Platitude #1: 6 (or a 9 if you're living in the village and this platitude is your coworker's nephew)

And in other news ... also known as regular news ...

Okay, let's get honest here.  I watch the frogs.  That's right, I'm a crazy frog-watching person.

Every day, I walk up and down about a 1/4 mile stretch of my riverbank back and forth, back and forth.  The path is too rocky to run, the roadside is incredibly dangerous, and in the other direction is the weird neighbor who stops me to ask questions about my "village lover" and otherwise thoroughly creeps me out ... so this is what I do because I go crazy* in the house if I don't.  I can pace along the same path for hours.

In my defense, it gives me a lot of time to think about things.  Not in my defense, there's not always a lot new going on so I spend time thinking about ridiculous things.  Like, what I would be doing on Facebook if I wasn't out pacing a riverbank trying to scrape my sanity up out of whatever is left of my sanity.  Or whatever.  I think this blog is developing an alarming theme.

ANYWAYS.  The frogs.

They're pretty cool.  They give me a measure of time.  I watched all of the eggs hatch into tadpoles, I watched the tadpoles grow, and now I'm watching this unusually warm spring dry up all of the little ponds before the tadpoles can turn into frogs.  Looks like rain tonight, though!  Is it weird that I hope for the rain because I'm worried about the frogs?

In other news, I befriended a horse grazing in a field and fed him two old apples.  Here's to hoping that if I end this post by talking about cute ponies that I will sound less weird.

**crazier

Nope.  Not happening.

Dilam Mshvidobisa

Hello, it's been a while.  How is the life you're leading?

And that is how I feel lately about everybody who does not live in my village.

To the people in America: How was that margarita?  How was your drive to work in the morning?  How was that Starbucks latte?  Your paying job?  Your family?

To my fellow PCVs: How was that night of supra and cha-cha?  How did you get out of teaching those crazy 7th graders?  Ah, really?  You faked appendicitis?  And your bowel movements?

To other PCVs around the world: Are your jeans dry yet?  Now?  How about now?  Now?  Now?  Now?  Because I assume this is a question that we ALL have in common.

Long stretches of time in the village causes me to take up curious routines.  Take my morning one, for example:

Wake up in the morning, refuse to get out of bed.  Snuggle down the bed (literally lengthwise) as much as possible to reduce the "hammock" effect of the Russian springs.  Hit snooze but stare at your phone.  Don't sleep.  Just wait.

Get up, finally.  Easily 30 minutes after you've actually woken up.  Slip on slippers and fleece.  Wander downstairs.  Spend far too long mulling over tea.  This may cause your 3 year old host sister to ask you if you've "gone senile".  In response, stick your tongue out at her.  This is the adult way to react.  Really.

Get up, go into high-gear, dress as quickly as possible.  Fix hair and brush & floss downstairs.  Give a piece of floss to your 5 year old host sister.  Floss together.

Purposefully wait until everybody else has left for school so that you can walk on your own.  Call it Zen, call it antisocial, call it whatever you like ... just try not to get hit by a car careening around one of the multiple blind corners.  Walk as close to the guardrail-thing as possible and accept the potentiality of your imminent death.

Get to school.  Say hello to every student under the age of 15.  Go to your classroom.  YOU HAVE YOUR OWN KEY NOW.  You are still celebrating this and doing a mental happy dance every time you unlock the classroom door with YOUR KEY.  It's the little things.

Or the noticeable slippage of sanity.

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.”