Conference?

I woke up this morning to go on a Teacher’s excursion to Tskaltubo, a town which I knew nothing about. I asked my host mom over our hurried breakfast:

“Where are we going, again?”

“Tskaltubo. It is very beautiful there.”

“And what will we do?”

“I’m not sure, (insert some Georgian I don’t understand), our president, Saakashvili.”

“Misha is coming?” I asked, because everyone here calls the president of Georgia by his first name.

“I don’t know…”

“Should I dress up?”

“Well, I guess. The teachers always dress up for these types of things.”

“What types of things? Is this a Conference? Should I wear my new skirt?”

“Yeah, wear your skirt. It will be something like a conference, I guess.”

I had bought a new skirt the day before, a teacher skirt as I think of it. Really it’s the dressiest thing I have here in Georgia, so I was basically going all out for this “Conference.” We met all the other teachers in the street, and my host mother was having second thoughts about her own outfit when our bus arrived. Combined with teachers form other nearby villages, we filled every seat. Apparently no one knew exactly what we were doing at this conference, but they were all happy to be dressed up and on a bus that was going somewhere. A man in front started talking into a microphone, but it was all in Georgian so I understood almost none of it. All I understood was the word “Excursion.” We drove through the city of Khoni and then turned around to head back towards Kutaisi, in the direction of Tskaltubo. Before I knew it, we were on a dusty forest road and surrounded by fields. Are we going to a supra in the woods? Are we going to a fortress or an old castle? The answer came when the bus stopped in the middle of an ordinary field: No. We are not here for a conference. We are here to examine the irrigation system of some blueberry plants. I was surprised to see that everyone looked really interested in the topic of our excursion, and my host mother had lots of questions about the hoses running underground to water the blueberry plants. Why was this so fascinating?

We got back on the bus and continued on to Tskaltubo, where we stopped this time to walk through several greenhouses filled with Dill (above), Cilantro, and Squash. Once again, everyone was amazed. Why?? Everyone stole a handful of herbs to bring home, and we got back on the bus. The scenery was beautiful, but our next stop was a common cool storage unit. We walked in, walked out, got back on the bus, and drove on. We had made a giant circle now, and our last stop was in Abasha (also really beautiful, from what I saw out of my bus window) where we parked in the middle of nowhere to see a row of silos and watch corn being shaken loose from the cob by some simple farm machinery. As we walked up to the silos, my director looked to me and said “Come here, Sarah, they are going to tell us what these big things are!” I didn’t know how to respond. Was she joking? I asked her if this was the first time she had seen something like this. Yes, she said, this is the first time there had been anything like this in Georgia. The designs had come from America, she said. Now everything was making sense… Georgia had never utilized so much agricultural technology before. A farmer from Abasha told me with pride that the operation had begun the year before and that they had already begun exporting corn to Armenia. Anyway, I don’t know much about Agriculture, but it was kind of cool to see all this agricultural development. Georgia is a developing country, after all, so I shouldn't be surprised that the development of agriculture falls into that category. I wanted to ask where the funding came from, and what the influence on smaller farms would be now that large-scale farming was taking place, but the language barrier made that impossible. Rats.

After the silos we were taken back to Samtredia where everyone basically attacked a room full of sandwiches, shashliki, and khachipurri. Then the ministry gave each of us a gift bag of freebies with the Georgian Ministry of Agriculture emblem on them (pens, notepads, calendars, etc.) The gift bags also came with a bottle of red wine because, after all, this is Georgia.

Getting ready for another field trip tomorrow, this time with students. Once again, I have no idea where we are going or what we are doing, so you'll just have to wait for the post. Wish me luck!

Love,

Sarah