Closure...

This blog has been over for a while, as many have noticed. I apologize for the abrupt halt in my writing, but I didn't want to write any summaries or reflections or ANYTHING about Georgia so soon after I left, especially since I had a lot of conflicting feelings about the place at the time. I was also ridiculously busy preparing for my Fulbright year in Siberia whilst teaching high-school Russian all summer. So... Now that I have a minute, here are my thoughts...

You can have too much of a good thing: Towards the end of my stay in Georgia, all I wanted was to go home. I missed my real family, I was irritated by village life, and I wanted to expel 90% of the students in the school. I could NOT relate to Georgian people, I considered most of them simple and narrow-minded, and we disagreed often. I felt like I had wasted four months of my life, gaining only a practical understanding of the Georgian Language, which I considered less than useful. But...

Absence makes the heart grow fonder: almost as soon as I left my Georgian family, my village, and finally the country, I saw how much I was leaving behind. I cried my heart out (as my sister would say, I'm "a crier") especially when saying goodbye to my 6yr-old host brother. He wouldn't say anything, and I'm sure he didn't really understand what was happening. I mean, how would you feel if some girl walked into your life when you were six, you called each other brother and sister, and then after four months she left forever? My whole family, and my whole village, showed me so much love, and I will never forget that. I also realized that although the Georgian language may not be the most useful, it is the most AWESOME. I love that I can communicate in this crazy gobbledygook, and that I can share it with others who ALSO think it's pretty cool. Most of all, I've realized that I want to go back. Yes, teaching in a village school was crazy. Yes, host-family situations can be stressful. Yes, 6yr-old boys are annoying to live with. But I love them. And I love Georgia. It is beautiful and crazy and cultural and messy and fun and I want to find myself there again someday. And when I do, I will be able to speak with people, I will have connections, and I will have places to stay and friends to meet me. Sweet.

Everyone should go to this awesome place. That's all.


Check out the new blog if you still feel like keeping up! www.SiberianChaos.blogspot.com

Love,
Sarah

Last Week in Paradise

Vardzia/Borjomi: My last full weekend in Georgia, and perhaps the best one of all. Some of my favorite TLG friends and I went to Vardzia, an ancient cave city in southern Georgia, and stayed in Borjomi, a small city famous for its sulphur springs and mineral water. To my amazing friends who spent this weekend (and all other weekends) with me, thank you for a great four months in Georgia, and I hope we meet again soon.

Living off the land: Georgia is warming up, everything is blooming, and the first fruits of the summer are already ripe for picking. In my spare time these days I  just pick fruit at my house/the neighbor’s. It’s early, but we already have plenty of strawberries, cherries (big, small, red, pink, and white), bushmala (my favorite thing, I’ve never had anything like it before), tkhemali and alucha (green and red plums). Later on my host family will have lemons, oranges, citrus (like a small grapefruit), peixo (quinces?), grapes, peaches, and apricots.

This is a bushmala tree. I want one.

Other things of note from this week: I went to the swimming pool (who knew there was a pool in Samtredia?), saw a free concert of my favorite Georgian band Mgzavrebi (again, in Samtredia? Who knew?) and ate a lot of cake (because there is always an occasion for cake in this country). 

My suitcase has been mostly packed for days. I'm so ready to get out of here.

Love,

Sarah

Field Trips

I'm sorry everyone, I'm losing steam on this one. So much of sitting in a village with a consistent and slightly boring daily routine will do that to a  blogger, I guess. But I've been going on some field trips with my kids, which have been awesome!

9^th grade field trip: Ruins of Vani, Vani Archeological Museum, Galaktion Tabidze House Museum

6^th grade field trip: Dadiani palaces of Zugdidi, botanical gardens, Martvili church, and an awesome waterfall.

TLG trip: Racha, although most of this one was spent on a Marshutka (minibus).

Guria Weekend: Village-hopping around Lanchkhuti, staying with the most amazing woman from Ukraine, and eating Pizza with some guys from New Jersey.

On another note, I made chocolate-chip cookies with my host brother and they were DELICIOUS. I’m also totally ready to go home, which is why the blog has been so slow. One week and one awesome weekend left to go!

Love,

Sarah

Just some Updates:

I don’t think there will be a may review, because there are too many things I want to post about right now instead of later. Here are some.

As I walked home from school the other day, I saw no fewer than 12 huge military helicopters fly extremely low right over my village.  I was a little worried for a minute, but my host mother set me straight --- “Chveni Mesoblebi!” (Our neighbors!) Apparently we live next to a Georgian army air-base, and the warm weather means flight drills.

Kutaisi day: I forgot to post about this when it actually happened, but Kutaisi day was really cool. May 2^nd is a special holiday just for Kutaisi, and different areas of our region (Imereti) gathered in a wooded park outside the city. Each group brought dancers and singers and their own supra spread. After all the performances, there was a huge fair in the park square, where they had finally finished a beautiful new fountain and set up a grandstand for Music. I stayed out with some friends to see the fireworks and a famous Georgian singer who I only know as “That rock-star lady on TV with the long ponytail.” Maybe one of the best days I’ve had in Georgia: Georgian culture, great friends, good times. 

In relation to Kutaisi day, we found the best hot chocolate in Georgia: It’s in a bar called “Bar” next to a casino called “Totalizator.” Oh, Georgia…

The cure for my stomach flu seemed obvious to everyone but me.

Host grandfather: “What? Sarah’s sick? Well, just give her a shot of cha-cha [homemade vodka, remember] mixed with a SPOONFUL OF SALT.”

Host Dad: “Yeah, that’ll fix you right up.”

Neighbor Lady (yelling from the next house over): “Drink it, Sarah, it’s good for you!”

Host grandmother: “Here’s a boiled potato to chase it with. Drink up!”

I feel better now, but I'm still (as always) avoiding my creepy, smelly outhouse. You can't win 'em all, Georgia.


Love,
Sarah

April Review

I forgot to keep track of things during the month of April, so this month’s review will be a little bit shorter. Sorry!

1. There is no real spring in Georgia. There is winter, which is terribly cold and relentlessly snowy, and there is summer, which is hot, dry, and completely cloudless. I have sunburn. There were a few strange weeks in-between which I would sooner call “Puddle Season” than spring... We had some doozies.

2. My neighbor continues to tell me that I am not as thin as I was when I arrived. She tells me that I should exercise, but when she sees me going for a walk she tells me I’m crazy. In the meantime, everyone else still attempts to force-feed me whenever possible (thanks, guys).

3. I am afraid of going to my outhouse. Now that the weather is warm there are giant attack spiders living in the door. They scare the bejeezus out of me.

 

4. Every household has an abundance of hazelnuts, and I LOVE that.

5. Everyone in my village is so preoccupied with my leaving that I can rarely make it through a conversation without anyone mentioning it. Some of them have even counted the number of days I have left. They also have me COMPLETELY booked up until the moment I have to leave for Tbilisi: Excursions every weekend!

6. I can now go 4 days without showering (though I usually shower after 3, just to be safe).

7. Georgia is ridiculously beautiful right now. 

I've got 23 days left --- stay tuned. Love love love.

Sarah

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

Best Worst Day

Sometimes when I arrive at school in the morning, I find out that one or both of my co-teachers is absent. I am not, by contract, supposed to teach alone, but since there are not enough teachers at the school I usually just fly solo if my co-teachers are missing. These classes are not very productive...The students see me as the fun, cool teacher who likes to play games, talk, and laugh with them. With my co-teachers everything is great, but if I am alone in the classroom this can cause huge problems. Everyone wants to talk to me at once, to tell me about the game they want to play, to show me their homework so I will draw a heart on it, or else to talk to/fight with their peers in class because they don’t see me as an authority figure. This is not for lack of trying --- I’ve tried encouraging and rewarding good behavior, speaking in Georgian instead of English to get their attention when they aren’t listening, giving the silent treatment and waiting for the class to be silent, clapping my hands, separating students that are fighting, taking away items that they are hitting each other with, even yelling (which I am never proud of, but it’s the only way to make my voice heard above everyone else’s). To be fair, usually there aren’t too many issues, and eventually I can get everyone to do what they need to do. Today was not one of those days. Today was seriously awful. One of my students even started bleeding after being hit by a girl with an uncapped pen in her hand. I asked them, BEGGED them to be good, in English and in Georgian. I explained that I only had one month left and I wanted them to be good, and later on I even told them that they were being so naughty that I wanted to go to America today instead of in a month. They all cried “No, no, teacher! Good children, good!” but they didn’t change their behavior at all. I walked out of the classroom after 45 minutes of hell, while the three decent children in the class literally kissed my face and hands with apologies, almost crying. I walked into my next class, stared at the fourth-graders that I loved, and felt myself beginning to cry as they smiled and said in unison “Sarah! Hello, teacher! How are you?!” I managed to give a thumbs-down in response, and when they all asked “why?” I gestured that I would be back in a minute, and went to hide in the teacher’s lounge and chill out. My host mother and brother were there to ask me “What’s wrong? Are you sick?” to which I responded in tears and broken Georgian that my class had been awful. Koka tried his best to make me laugh and used my scarf to wipe the tears off my face, then walked with me hand-in-hand to my awesome fourth grade class. I love kids, but teaching is hard. It’s hard enough even when you speak the same language.

After school things almost completely turned around. I made myself a huge cup of coffee, talked to a good friend who could empathize with my bad day, and went on a walk down the dirt road that goes through my village. I ran into one of my 4^th graders, who joined me in my walk. I love this kid --- he’s crazy as I’ll get out, but he’s #1. Extremely funny, and #2. Extremely adorable. We passed the house of his cousin, one of my favorite 6^th graders, and she joined us as well. We kept walking and talking in Georgian/English until we reached another student’s house where we played hide-and-seek. They asked for help studying their English, so we all practiced together, played some more games, went on another little walk, and ended up at my 4^th grader’s house again where we picked cherries and I braided the girls’ hair. Then my 4^th grader brought me an album of photos on his mother's command. It was explained to me that his little brother had passed away 4 months prior. I went through the album filled with photos of two happy, beautiful children and we all shed a few more tears… I gave my students another round of compliments and they gave me a fresh batch of I-love-you’s as they started to walk me home (I had been gone for a few hours by now). We passed another student’s house, whose family invited us all inside. I sat and spoke Russian with my student’s parents and neighbors, I ate the best khachipurri I’ve had yet, and my students brought me a huge bouquet of roses from the garden. We finally made it home, where my host mother made us all coffee and I learned some more Georgian dancing from my students. Tomorrow I leave at 6am for “Kutaisi Day” to watch my host brother sing and see my friends teaching in other villages.

That’s all I’ve got for now. So happy to have good friends, great students, and an amazing host family.

Love,

Sarah