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
