Natia the Great

Natia lives with her two sons and their grandmother across the street and two houses down the road from me. She must be in her mid-thirties – her older son is almost thirteen – but unlike many of the other mothers, she still boasts smooth, youthful skin the color of heavily creamed coffee. Though her body has become thick and awkward from childbearing and the heavy labor of maintaining a Georgian house, it is clear that she was once very beautiful, with rich brown eyes and thick black hair.

She greets me with her eyebrows raised, her palms held out towards me as she shrugs her shoulders dramatically, “Sad midi khar, Hannah?” (Where are you going, Hannah?)

Most Georgians don’t understand why anyone would ever want to go for a walk (I’m always being offered rides when I’m out running) so I just shrug my shoulders in return and make a walking motion in the air with the first two fingers of my right hand.

“Go,” Natia says, pointing down the road, and then, “Ak,” (here) pointing to her feet. I gather that she wants me to return here, to her house, after my walk. I do return, just as the sun is sinking behind the mountains at the back of Natia’s house, and I make my way to the kitchen because I assume that she has something she wants me to eat.

Natia loves giving me sweets and pastries that she has baked, presenting me with Tupperware when I enter her first grade class for their English lesson. The first time I visited her house with my two host sisters, she gave me an enormous pair of red and grey striped panties and laughed with delight when I taught her the English word for them. She often tells this story at school, relishing her knowledge and emphasizing both syllables carefully and forcefully when she repeats it to her colleagues, “PAHN-TEES.”

Among an endless parade of cookies, chocolates, doughnuts (not the Georgian name), and even iced coffee, I have also received a glittering rhinestone studded hairpin and a large tube of Mascara so old the label has worn completely off.

Tonight I find Natia deftly wrapping soft dough around what I recognize from my host family’s table as curds, or khacho. She shows me how to stretch the delicate disks she is cutting with an old coffee mug and fold them around a small hanful of the curds. She moves swiftly, lining uniform half-moon dumplings onto a towel she has laid out on the kitchen table and chuckles as I slowly construct a few clumsy dumplings. She retrieves my camera from the other room and mimes taking a picture of me, then gestures over her shoulder and says, “Rebecca!” Yes, I’m sure my mother would love to see a pictures of this.

As Natia is fishing the first cooked dumplings out of the large pot she has balanced over a very precarious looking gas burner, she says authoritatively, “Skverebia.” It takes me a couple of tries to get the consonant cluster correct, but after my first bite I’m determined to remember this name. The dumplings are juicy and the curds have melted into a creamy, salty heaven inside.

After some argument about how many of these I can physically fit in my body – Natia and the bebia (Grandmother) are rather cavalier in their estimates – Natia gives me a tour of the rest of her house. She takes pictures of me in the well-furnished rooms of her home. It is one of the nicer houses I have seen in the village, and has a distinct light, woody smell that reminds me of my grandma’s house in Danville, Illinois.

In almost every room there is a version of the same picture. It is a man who looks to be in his early forties smiling at the camera with a pale green backdrop behind him. He has curly salt and pepper hair and a welcoming smile. This is Natia’s husband who died in a car accident two months prior to my arrival in Lesichine. As her older son, Shotiko, sits at the table with his homework, she secretly shows me the scar across the top left side of his head where he was injured in the wreck.

Natia also informs me that her husband had applied to have an English teacher come and stay with them. In fact, had the accident never occurred, I would probably be living in one of the rooms I have just toured.  Natia and I would walk to and from school together and I would help Shotiko with his English homework and teach four-year-old Giorgi the English words for colors and the names of the animals the family keeps. I would be in the kitchen with Natia everyday, and she would laugh as I tried to figure out her quick Georgian instructions.

I am so inadequate in the face of Natia’s world. Even my wishing for her life to be different, to be better, is like the smoke of a candle going out in the face of a hurricane. I will be her friend, her small, insignificant friend because she is kind to me and because I love laughing with her, but there is no one who could be enough for Natia, no one who could give her all that she deserves. 

On the Level

I have grown accustomed to the raucous banging of the metal garage doors located right under my room, though I sometimes resent my host father’s habit of opening them just before my alarm goes off in the morning.

It actually seems characteristic of almost every door in the village to require a great deal more force and volume to open than it is worth expending to enter the rooms beyond. Most are old and wooden; thin, and heavily inlaid with molding so that they look like they were stripped from some lavish beach house where they once hung straight. Now, they lean into one another or against doorframes that have been cut crooked into the cement walls. Most are meant to open like French doors, but one half sticks or has been neglected and remains always closed: a wall masquerading as a door.

Much of the furniture is afflicted with a similar disfigurement. It is rare to find a cabinet door that closes, most of them colliding with each other or part of the cabinet frame, and many of the drawers are too narrow for their tracks. They collapse into the drawers or cabinets below them, creating a knot of cheap plastic and laminated particleboard. Some mornings my jigsaw of a dresser requires more problem solving skills than I have ready five minutes out of bed. But the pieces of a puzzle fit together, whereas it would be difficult to convince me that the doors of my wardrobe could sit flush even if the entire structure did not lean precariously to one side.

Today, there was a greater commotion than the usual door clanging that accompanies my host father returning to the house. I pry open my bedroom door to see my host father’s little black sedan towing what was once the back of a sea foam green pick-up truck through the front gate. The truck bed looks like a display stolen from some high school’s Octoberfest or Fall Ball. It is loaded with ears of corn. Their fraying heads poke out of the openings in overstuffed white cloth sacks sitting on a bed of loose ears that comes right up to the lip of the truck.

I try to imagine the control it must have required for my host father to drive slow enough to maintain this cargo. Certainly the usual Georgian driving attitude of accelerating until you encounter an obstacle would not have been practical with this load.

When the car has been maneuvered into the small garage, my host father and sister lift the truck bed off the tow hitch and wheel it around to the side of the house where Bebia (Grandmother) is waiting on a wooden bench. She immediately begins to shuck the ears of corn, an activity that consumes most of the family well into the evening. They pile the naked yellow ears into plastic barrels and haul the shells away in laundry baskets.

My host father holds a bright golden ear in one hand and a pale butter colored ear in the other. “American, “ he says, brandishing the golden ear, and then, “Kartuli,” (Georgian) as he hands me the paler corn.

No one can articulate to me what any one family could do with this much corn, but as it begins to grow dark the task of unloading the truck is abandoned for the day.  The family moves inside to watch a favorite soap opera. I can hear the droning Georgian voice-over overlapping the sharp staccato of the original Spanish dialogue, the Georgian phrases never completely covering the Spanish ones. The sound bleeds through the floorboards of my room, where the wooden planks can't quite reach the thin cement wall.

On the Table

Georgia is full of exciting, delicious, and sometimes strange food. As much as I want to include descriptions of everything interesting I eat, these details often get left out of my longer blog posts. My solution - a series of posts dedicated purely to all of the curious cuisine I encounter here.

This time of year is a big one for making preserves and compotes here in Samegrelo and, as I have gathered, all over Georgia. Families buy huge quantities of tomatoes, eggplants, peppers, and various summer fruits, in order to bottle or jar them in the form of sauces and spreads. 

When I returned from visiting friends in Zugdidi last night, I entered the kitchen to discover that my host mother had spent the day filling large glass jars with what smelled like the most delicious spaghetti sauce I have ever encountered. Irma informed me that this sauce that smelled as though it was made primarily from tomatoes, garlic, and onions was called ajika. We ate it that night spread across cucumber halves or hearty chunks of bread. My host mother's eye grew wide at the liberal portions I spread for myself. It did taste a little like spaghetti sauce, only there was a good deal of heat from the spicy peppers included in the recipe. 

At the end of our meal my host mothered retrieved her purse from the house and began pulling items out and placing them on the table. I recognized a packet of what is basically hot chocolate mix and a chocolate bar with Russian packaging, but could not guess what the third item she produced was. It look a little like grey mud packed into a block and then wrapped in plastic. Irma was searching for the word she needed to describe it to me and eventually pointed to the Sunflower on a bottle of oil from the kitchen. It turns out this little treat, called khalva, was made of ground sweetened sunflower seeds. It was sugary and rich. I enjoyed it but had trouble finishing the huge portion they cut of the block for me.

Rules of Engagement

Georgia has no dating culture. Girls and boys may spend time together in public if they are apart of a group, but a girl and a boy out alone attract a good deal of unwanted attention, especially from the older generations. There are many public places in Georgia, parks and beaches for example, where you could be fined for a public display of affection. Even married couples rarely touch each other in any kind of intimate way in public.

On the second night I spent with my host family, I was sitting on the couch with Irma, my host sister, and a strapping young neighbor who was resting his hand gently around Irma’s shoulder, while her mother and father conversed just a few feet away at the dinning room table. This casual intimacy had me eyeing the interactions between Irma and this young man with particular interest, but was of little interest to my Georgian family for two primary reasons.

First, as it turns out, this neighbor has been a good friend of my family for years, and Irma later informed me that she thinks of him as a second brother. The fact remains; I cannot imagine myself sitting with a brother quite that way. 

Which brings me to reason number two. Georgians are a touchy people. My friend Elie recently shared with me the his unusual experience at a school meeting. He was sitting in a room with his three host teachers and the principal. He had stacked his hands one on the other on the table in front of him. This would seem a professional pose, except that one of his host teacher’s was gently rubbing her knuckle against his as the meeting progressed, the second had entwined her arm with his at the crook of his elbow, and the third was standing behind him, resting her hands on his shoulders.  Though Elie’s discomfort was liberal, no one else seemed to notice.

A great deal of the appropriateness of any touch here is determined by circumstance and location. As previously mentioned, a boy and girl sitting in a public place should not be touching, or even sitting particularly close, but are granted a great deal more freedom if they apart of a group. In a similar way, I think, school is a place where intimate touching just does not occur. Therefore, touching that occurs in school just isn’t intimate.

Another factor playing into Elie’s situation is that the affection that many of our colleagues feel toward the TLG volunteers, particularly because we are foreigners, is similar to the affection an American might feel for a pet. The other teachers at my school often approach me, pet my hair, and say, smiling, “lamazi, Hannah, lamazi.” (beautiful, Hannah, beautiful)

Finally, the arena that is the most immune to any familiar touching rules is public transport. In the marshutkas and buses it is perfectly acceptable to lean on, sit on, cross legs over, and for all intensive purposes cuddle with the person sitting, standing, leaning, or holding on for dear life next to you. This can get particularly unpleasant if your fellow marshutka passenger happens to be an individual that doesn’t put much stock into the idea of bathing. It happens.

And so it was on Friday, Sept. 23^rd that I set off, via marshutka, from Chkhorotsku to Zugdidi. For part of the ride I was sandwiched into the back row between two slim young Georgian men. When one of them got off, a much larger and older man lumbered back to take his seat. This man did not remotely fit the small space left by the younger man, and suddenly I was trapped, half of my right leg serving as extra seat cushion for Mr. Suit (he earned this nickname during the ride by sporting a scratch brown suit coat at least three sizes to big).

Seeing my discomfort, the young Georgian I began my journey with extracted his arm from between the two of us, reached around behind the seat, and gestured for me to move closer and fill the space his arm had been taking. I hesitated, but only for a moment before I decided that any effort I might have to make later discouraging this Georgian youth was well worth the thirty minutes left of our marshutka ride during which I did not want to be sat on. In the end, other than advocating to our driver to give me all of the change he owed me, this young man showed no interest in me after our cozy ride into town.

Only Hemingway

My friends Natalie, Adam, Eli, Aly and I are sitting at a small round table at Café Press. The café looks out over a wide road running parallel to where the Black Sea meets the rocky shores of Batumi. It is Sunday morning and we have spent the past two nights in this historic resort town. I am sipping an Americano, a cup of coffee someone actually had to brew, and we have just ordered what promises to be an incredibly satisfying brunch of pizza and club sandwiches when Adam, lounging in his chair in the late morning heat, says, “Only Hemingway could have had a better weekend in Batumi.”

Tequila Mr. President?

I leave school slightly early Friday afternoon to catch the two o’clock marshutka from Chkhorotsku to Zugdidi, where I will join Natalie and Adam on another marshutka to Batumi. Crammed into a van designed to hold fifteen people but holding about twenty-five, I marvel at how quickly and easily this excursion came together after I received a phone call from my friend Nic at around 9pm Thursday night.

“I don’t know. I’m pretty broke, but I guess I could call Natalie and see how much it is to get there.” I said, my host sister eyeing me across our abandoned English lesson.

“Yeah! Call Natalie. I’ll see you tomorrow,” Nic said, just before hanging up the phone.

When Adam, Natalie, and I arrive in Batumi, Nic informs us that he has found a hotel room for 70 Lari that will sleep five people. We are thrilled by this bargain, and quickly drop off our things before heading to a local bar for 2.50 Lari beer.

Adam has ingratiated himself with some people in the peace corps who are also enjoying cheap beer at the bar. He accompanies them when they leave for a party at a nearby apartment, and they invite us all to join them later at a bar called The Quite Lady.

After beer, we find a restaurant on the beach and enjoy some kabob and French fries. It’s not the most Georgian meal we’ve eaten, but it’s delicious.

Toward the end of the meal Natalie pulls out her phone and says, “Adam says he’s doing shots of tequila with the president.”

If you received this text message in The States, you would simply assume that your friend had consumed an egregious amount of alcohol, and was probably making some kind of scene. However, this wouldn’t be the first TLG volunteer to meet president Saakashvili. Only a few days before, one of the other volunteers in our training group was visited by the president at his school, shook the president’s hand, and made the evening news.

Having finished eating, we decide to try and make our way to The Quiet Lady, where we would supposedly be able to enter unquestioned into the same room as the president of the country. And that is exactly what happened.

Though we became thoroughly lost on the way to the bar (we were taking directions from someone with multiple rounds of tequila under his belt), we arrived at The Quite Lady to find a smattering of army guards and men in jackets with plastic earpieces popping out of their collars. No one tried to stop us, or even took a second look at us as we took a table right next to Mr. President himself. His table was littered with glasses, his shirt slightly un-tucked in the back, and he was leaning slightly sideways to address a rather lovely woman seated next to him.

We are not there long before President Saakashvili collects his entourage and leaves.

The next day we spend some time at the beach before eating a large afternoon meal at a small restaurant near our hotel. Our numbers have increased, our friend Mushood having arrived late the night before, and Kristine and Elie are fresh off the noon marshutka from Zugdidi. I am sitting at the far end of the two tables we placed together to accommodate everyone when my phone rings. It’s Nikole, another TLGer and friend stationed in Kutaisi.

“Well, I guess I’ll see you in Batumi tomorrow,” She says.

I’m not sure how to respond. I want to say a combination of, “don’t bother we’re leaving tomorrow,” “what made you want to come so late?” and “huh?” I manage a hesitant, “What” as I try to shake off the confusion.

Nikole explains that she just received a call from one of the TLG representatives who informed her that all of the TLG volunteers living in west Georgia have been invited by the president to attend the premier of an opera Sunday night. The opera is a famous Georgian story called Keto and Kote, and hotel and transportation will be provided though, in true TLG fashion, no details are available as to where we will be staying or how we will get there. 

“You guys should get a call soon,” Nikole finished.

The next half hour was a round of musical chairs as our phones begin to ring and invitations are accepted. It was during the barrage of phone calls that one of us was told that the invitations to the opera had only come into TLG an hour before. What could have made the president decided to bring us all down on such short notice?

It Half Works

Having accepted invitations to a free night in Georgia’s premier resort city, we pay the bill for our meal and head back to our hotel. Some of the group wants to go shopping for opera clothes. I, however, am tired and much too poor for new clothing. I remain behind with Elie for what he dubs a “pre-party nap.”

A flimsy wall with an arched glass door divides the hotel room. Kristine and Adam have also decided to stay at the hotel and are talking in the other room. When I get up to shut the door in order to muffle the sounds of their conversation, it moves haltingly and lacks a latch to keep from swinging part way open. Elie laughs a little at my struggle with what should be a simple task.

“Everything in this country half works,” he says, as I use a shoe to wedge the door closed.

This is actually an amendment to something that Elie told me during our orientation in Tbilisi. We were walking back from a bakery at lunch when a large truck rumbled past. It looked so old it was surprising that parts weren’t dropping off as it bounced along the uneven road. “Nothing in this country should work, but it does,” Elie had said then.

It’s true that most of the systems that this country takes for granted would sound absolutely ludicrous in the states. For example, lets take a look at the marshutka: mini buses running routes within and between cities. As far as I know, they have no set schedule, nor do you have to have any kind of special license or permit to drive one. All you need are willing passengers. But this system works; most of my travel within Georgia has been via Marshutka.

However, this system seems less appealing when something goes wrong. On his way to Batumi, our friend Mushood ran into some trouble with his marshutka. Road work prevented the driver from taking his usual route, and as a result the driver got lost, adding a couple of hours to Mushood’s trip.

The schools are another good example. Many of the people I have met here, are well educated. My school however, lacks usable toilets, running water, backs to about half of the chairs, and has floorboards that shift under my weight when I cross the room. Though all the TLG volunteers received training with an English textbook that was to be provided at no cost by the government to teachers and volunteers, we have yet to receive our books and have no curriculum for grades 1-3 since this is the first year those grades are participating in English classes. It works…kinda.

In any case, this fact of life of Georgia can be endearing when my host sister laughs at me trying to figure out how to hand wash my laundry, frustrating when a hotel can’t figure what room you’ve been booked to because they don’t know how middle names work, and frightening when the flimsy panel on the floor of your bus that separates you from the engine is forced open by a gust of wind.

However, recognizing this fact has been cathartic and for the past few days I have found a new mantra. When it seems that things have gone wrong, or something is off just a little, I remind myself, “It half works.”

Singing in the Rain

After our nap and the return of some of our comrades to the hotel, we decide it is time to venture again into Batumi nightlife. The cheap-beer-bar we visited the night before is overcrowded due to a musical performance that will start there soon. Someone suggests we buy beer at one of the local shops for cheap and stand at the back of the crowd gathered outside the bar to watch the show. But why take beer to a bar, when you can take beer to the beach?

Not long after this we are sitting in a circle on the beach taking significant swallows of beer that seem to have little to no effect on the 2.5 liter bottles we purchased. I have just laid back against the smooth rocks of the beach when an unforgivingly large raindrop lands precisely on my eye. Soon we are running for cover, the rain stretching out into the sea where it seemed a moment ago the skies were clear.

By the time we reach the hotel again, we are soaked. We begin draping our clothing over the small television and wardrobe doors. When the rest of the group returns we are forced to reconcile the fact that our five-person room will now be sleeping ten. By the end of the night, it seems the room is hung in equal parts with clothing and bodies. We are hanging off the edges of the beds and sprawled across the floor. Bottles of champagne, beer, and chacha (Georgian vodka) pepper the scene. It is this scene that inspires Adam’s comment the next morning, something about that room and the whole weekend is significantly Hemingway-esque.

Night at the Opera

Sunday morning begins with some helpful advice from Elie. “Be sure to check your shoes,” he says.

“Why?” says Natalie.

“You know those holes in the bathroom ceiling?” he says.

“Yes.”

“That’s a scorpion nest.”

It had clearly been fumigated, and a close inspection revealed pincers protruding from some of the holes. I had told myself that they only looked like giant nasty bug parts, but were probably harmless. Well, they were mostly harmless, though Elie does also point out a very small live scorpion on the wall. The room had seemed pretty nice for how cheap it was. The bathroom alone is a huge step up from where I am living, but there were scorpions.

It half works.

After our meal at Café Press, we make our way to the beach. We swim in the Black Sea while our clothes finish drying in the sun. In the afternoon we receive a call from another TLG volunteer looking for her hotel roommate. The fact that they have selected a hotel is news to us and we rush there straight from the beach and dripping wet.

It’s a short walk. We have been put up in one of the nicest hotels in the city, just a few minutes walk from the water. From the hotel we are taken to dinner in buses with no air-conditioning. It was sort of like riding in a large moving greenhouse: hot and sticky. At dinner we wrinkle our noses over glasses of green soda and nibble khachapuri (it's good, but it's also everywhere).

The Batumi Arts Center is a large building made mostly of glass. When we are finally allowed inside (we rushed through dinner in order to wait outside the center for about an hour) it feels as though we have walked into a crystal palace. The glass is strategically lit from the inside and sparkles further in the orange sunset. Our seats are in the third row and when the president enters with his guest of honor, the Prince of Monaco, he catches Adam’s eye and gives him a slight wave.

Keto Da Kote is as surreal an experience as any of the rest of the weekend. The costumes are surprising and whimsical in a Dr. Seuss kind of way. There is a large digital screen on the back of the stage that is used to set the scene several times, but only portrays an awkward kind of digital animation. Finally, though English subtitles are projected for our benefit, the translation is lacking and the transition from one plot point to another alarming. It feels a little like being in someone else’s dream. At the end of the performance the volunteers look around suspiciously as the Georgian crowd applauds in time with one another to the beat of the song playing over the bows.

When we return to the hotel we are disappointed to find that someone has cleverly cleared the mini-bars while we were gone. We are soon off however and arrive at the beach carrying more large bottles of beer as well as a few bottles of wine. One brave group of people has even bought more chacha.

There must be fifteen of us now, most of our orientation group having been brought in for the opera. We sit in a large circle on the beach. We talk and drink, sing and swim naked in the Black Sea. Sometime after 3am we trek back to the hotel and assign ourselves to the beds most convenient for us; some people sleeping in their assigned rooms, others simply sleeping where ever there is space.

In the morning we say goodbye in front of our respective buses as we are shipped back to our various regions of the country. Lesichine and my host family’s house feels a world away, and it takes a good part of the day to get there since our bus requires several stops for maintenance.

As I get out of the car TLG hired to return me to my village, my host mother emerges from the house and yells, “Hannah! Batumshi!”

In Georgian, postposition “shi” can mean both “in” and “to.” I’m still not sure what she meant when she called this to me but it seemed appropriate as a simple but sweeping synopsis of the past few days. The combination of “to” and “in” seeming to imply that the city had collected us, drawing us to it and folding us inside it.

The Break Room

“I have been out of school for a very long time,” I realize washing my face before bed on the eve of my first day of school.

My student teaching semester ended in May and it is now mid September.  This has been the longest summer vacation I’ve ever had, and feels especially lengthy since my first few weeks in Georgia have been spent in relative leisure.

I have been to Lesichine Public School Number 2 several times since I moved in with my host family, but mostly what I do there is sit. “Dajaki, Hannah” the other teachers, and even students, are always saying to me, indicating a chair they pulled into the center of the room. We sit in the various classrooms and drink sugary instant coffee while students hang new curtains, or in the teachers’ lounge eating bologna and fresh baked bread, passing around a large bottle of Coke.

The first day of school begins very officially. Everyone gathers outside the front of the school to sing the national anthem, the principal (called the director here) addresses the students, and I introduce myself very awkwardly in English while one of my fellow teachers translates for me.  However, this is the only part of the day marked by any remote semblance of order. As the rest of the day progresses, bells ring to mark the beginning and end of lesson periods, but students constantly filled the hall. They barrel down the hall at a full sprint calling loudly to their friends and occasionally pausing to greet their teachers with a kiss on the cheek.

I am passed from teacher to teacher to parent to student, in a blur of swift smiling introductions punctuated by my companions talking in Georgian about me behind their hands. Sometimes they would even tell me, “You’re such a good girl!” I always try to take this particular remark as a compliment, though it often makes me feel like a dog begging for a treat.

The day passes quickly in this manner and it isn’t long before I am surrounded by my fellow teachers in the office, just sitting. They are conversing quickly, and sometimes very loudly, in Georgian about how the students have changed and complaining that not all of the new books have yet come in. As my host teacher stops translating the conversation for me, I lose track of what the other teachers are talking about and return to my realization that summer is finally over. It is time to begin something new, and after this quick and dirty introduction to Lesichine Public School Number 2, I am beginning to realize just how new this thing will be.

Buzi

Quick update on previously mentioned mosquito problem.

The number of bites on my body is quickly moving toward catastrophic levels. While sitting in bed writing the Ojakhi post, I literally received eight new bites.

The chacha remedy that my host mother gave me yesterday works pretty well to stop the itching and swelling, but only lasts a little while. My host sister Irma informed me that the smell of it also keeps them away (they seem impervious to regular bug spray), but I don't know how appropriate it would be for me to reek of vodka on a regular basis.

If anyone has any remedies/ideas/would like to come restrain me from scratching myself, please let me know.

ოჯახი

I’m sitting in the kitchen of my host family’s house. It’s a wood building with two rooms and an attic that you can only access by a very precarious looking ladder. I’m sitting at the small round table where we eat all of our meals, in the chair closest to the window (I sit here because it is the most out of the way).  I’m surrounded by my host family; not just the seven that I have been living with for the past few days, but a swarm of cousins, an aunt, and even a neighbor (I think). My host mother’s sister has come to visit from Tbilisi because it is the anniversary of her husband’s death. They buzz around me, pecking me on the cheek in greeting, reaching over me for cheese or grapes from the table, or practicing the one or two English phrases they know on me.

This is the fifth-ish meal we have had today. Usually my family has breakfast between 8:30 and 9am, super between 2:30 and 3:30 pm, and then a small dinner or tea with bread anywhere from 7pm to 10pm. I like this system so far, though it might become a problem when I can no longer snack off of the numerous fruit trees goring in our yard. Today however, all we have done is sit down to meals. Every time another family member arrives or returns home from running and errand, we eat. We stop by a neighbor’s house to say a quick hello, and we eat. My host aunt remembers some other treat she brought for us all to share, we eat.  It’s actually pretty surprising how much and for how many reasons a person can eat.

The women in the room, there are rarely any men in the kitchen, are all talking over each other, laughing and eating and teasing their children or younger siblings.  My host grandmother (the mother of my host father, that is) is sitting on the sofa/bed next the door with two live chickens under her arm. Suddenly the oldest cousin sitting next to me begins singing. I immediately recognize the song and finish the line with her.

“Crazy for feeling so lonely,” we sing together. Her voice is sweet and low.

She looks over at me surprised. I have found that my host family is usually equal parts pleased and surprised when I can sing part of a song they are listening to. Georgians, in general, enjoy singing. This is the stereotype anyway, and they do have a rather rich culture of folk music.

Later that evening we all pile into my host father’s car and head to Khabume, a neighboring village and the temporary home of my friend Natalie. My host mother’s parents live there in the house where she and her sister grew up, and where Salome and her cousins spent a great deal of their time as children. Since her parents had no sons, they live alone, their two daughters having moved in with their respective husbands’ family when they married. I feel sad for Larisa’s parents when she explains this to me using some very creative pantomime. Though it is not uncommon for elderly couples to live alone in the US, the situation here seems somewhat more desperate. 

Larisa’s father was a chess master, as in he won trophies for it. Which explains why eleven year old Saba doesn’t even have to try very hard to hand me my ass the two times we have played. Nonetheless, he sits down across from me as one of the cousins sets up a huge chess bored in front of us. I know that my family means well by offering to play with me, but I can’t help feel I’m being made a spectacle of. They know my skill level by now, but continue to want to play me, and then talk about how the game is going in Georgian. In any case, this game is quickly over. The things that this old man can do with a pawn; it was illuminating, to say the least.

Part of my hasty loss on this occasion (a very small part) was due to the arrival of yet another meal part way through our game. Larisa’s mother made Khachapuri, and the whole family was raving about how it was absolutely the best Khachapuri there ever was. You will hear no argument from me. I was made to eat at least three pieces of this. The third I used to chase my first glass of chacha, a Georgian moonshine somewhere between vodka and whisky. One of my host cousins toasted to me and I took the rather large shot she had poured from an old plastic water bottle. It burned but not in the way whiskey or vodka usually burns. It was more like what I imagine a shot of gasoline would feel like. (Later my host mother gave me a cotton ball soaked in this to treat my mosquito bites.)

During the car ride home I was drowsy from the chacha and the four dinners I had just eaten. I drifted in and out of sleep as we made our way back to Lesichine and was happy to arrive home. 

Tech Wave

As much as I am ashamed that one of the things that frightened me the most about my new home was the distinct lack of internet access, it is really nice to blogging in bed right now.

Thanks to my handy-dandy wireless modem, I have internet where ever I can think to use it.

Boy did I earn this sleek little portal to the web, though. Natalie and I waited in line for upwards of five hours at the Magti store in Zugdidi (Samegrelo's capital) and had to literally fight our way through a rowdy crowd of Georgian women. At one point I thought there might be a squirmish between some of our fellow que members, but thankfully they were able to work it out.

Now that I have internet I wanted to note that some of my posts are back dated to the day that I wrote them. I don't always have time to post something, or time to type it up if I hand write it first, but I want to maintain a kind of intellectual timeline. So if you suddenly discover that I have five new posts in the last four days when you just checked in a few hours ago, never fear. You have not lost your mind...yet.

Diaspora

The lobby of the hotel is as full as I have seen it when I enter with Eteri after a short walk the morning of our last day in Tbilisi. We quickly recognize the small clusters of people gathered in the waiting area by the door and the front desk as families; the host families that we will be living with for the next several months, and they watch us make our way to our rooms with curiosity and trepidation.

“They’re here.” I inform Natalie, my roommate, as I begin to frantically toss my things about the room. In only five days, I have managed to completely unpack and I am sweating rather profusely by the time I am able to zip my large suitcase again.

We wheel our luggage into the lobby where most of the other volunteers have already gathered. It is a mess of suitcases and volunteers milling around nervously in small groups, much as the host families had done just a short time before. I’m not nervous at first, but it doesn’t take long for the waiting to take its toll. When I am approached by an elderly woman with a scarf tied over her hair and a small girl clinging to her skirts repeating the name of another volunteer, I feel the bottom drop out of stomach. This is really happening, right now.

The families are released from their informational meeting in shifts, and move through the volunteers reading names off of forms they have received only a few minutes before. I help several families pair up with their respective volunteers and even watch a few of my friends ushered away by their hosts before I am approached by a pair of very pretty girls and a stately looking older woman.

“Hannah?” They say, holding the “a” sound out like the Georgian letter *****

I nod nervously and shake each of their hands.

“I’m Tica,” says the girl closest to me.

“Salome,” says the other pointing to herself, “and this is my mother Larisa.”

Salome and Larisa have light brown hair that curls into tight ringlets and flairs out around Salome’s shoulders and on the sides of Larisa’s face where it is coming loose from her ponytail. We chat haltingly. Larisa is having a conversation with Natalie’s host father. Their two villages are close together, and it appears that Natalie will be coming with my family, for now, and meeting up with her host father again later. Although where he will meet us and how much later is hard for us to tell from the snatches of English we can make out as we are hurried out of the hotel.

In the taxi, they inform us that they are taking us to their flat in Tbilisi. I learn that Tica and Salome are cousins and that they are both studying at the university in Tbilisi. The apartment is further outside of the city than we have been before. The rolling hills are covered in huge cement apartment buildings adorned with whimsical arches, decorative balconies, and gazebos that blazingly out of place amid the see of rigid cement block towers.

When we arrive at the apartment building, I am embarrassed as my family helps me haul my enormous suitcase up three floors to their flat. Thank God they live on the third floor. Their building had at least twenty and hardly amenities enough for a light in the hallway – Salome fought to locate the correct key in the dark – let alone an elevator.

We share a meal at the apartment but they won’t let Natalie or me help prepare it. Instead, they sit us down in front of the computer to watch an English movie they have and bring a large bowl of plums white peaches for us to nibble on. When they call us into the kitchen we eat short hotdog-like sausages with Mayonnaise (it took us a while to reconcile the language barrier for this word; eventually, I just smelled it), crusty bread, tomatoes, fried eggplant filled with onions and garlic, watermelon, and instant coffee. The meal is simple, fresh, and satisfying. 

The journey from the apartment to the family house in Samegrelo is a long one. We catch a marshutka (a kind of mini-bus/van) at the train station in Tbilisi and ride crammed in the back with luggage piled on our laps for five hours. I lean over the person sitting in front of me occasionally to catch glimpses of mountains rolling in the distance, or lush farm land spreading out across the plains.

The whole family is waiting at the house. Salome has a younger brother named Saba, and a seventeen-year-old sister, Irma. Their cousin Oto also lives with them and is asleep on the couch when we arrive at about eleven. I am also greeted by her father and grandmother who kisses me on the cheek and nods approvingly.

I’m so tired the first night I don’t have energy for much after my tour of the house (my room is huge!) besides drinking a cup of tea and collapsing into my freshly made bed. Though I am tired, I am suddenly full of dread. I’m afraid that I won’t be able to live in this new and radically different home that has been so graciously offered to me. I feel alone and trapped, despite my welcome.

It is about three in the morning, when I finally give up and make the long trek to the outhouse, in the dark, twice. I remember all the times I have made similar treks on camping excursions with my friends holding a flashlight behind me, that I realize this is just a house, and the village just a village. And these are only people, living normal lives. There is nothing here to fear (except perhaps mosquitoes, I’m covered in bites).

Please Send Workout Videos

Food in Georgia is disgustingly cheap and equally delicious in an eat-until-you-truly-feel-like-you-will-burst kind of way.

Though the other volunteers and I make a point of exploring the city during our first few days in Tbilisi, we always return to the hotel for the free meals provided by the TLG program. This food is not bad, but it’s not great either. My favorite part is the consistent presence of dishes of assorted pastries (including cream puffs!) provided with every meal and coffee-break. The meals, however, are tiring in a way only mass produced food you serve yourself out of troughs can be, and we eventually reach the point where we must branch out.

We decide to try a small pub that some of the group spotted during one of their treks through the city. We refer to this establishment as Chaplin’s because of the spray painted picture of Charlie Chaplin on the side of the building, as well as the fact that the stylized nature of the restaurant’s sign makes it impossible for us to read the Georgian letters. 

Chaplin’s is a small cave-like establishment. From the sidewalk we descend a flight of steps to enter and the eleven people in our group along with two other small parties max out the capacity of the humid dinning room.

Nic, our resident Georgian expert, orders for the table. He and the bashfully smiling waitress huddle with their heads together choosing dishes for several minutes as the rest of us sip happily at our two-Lari beer. Some of our group orders and incredibly high quality bottle of wine for seventeen Lari and none of the dishes are priced at more than seven.

When the food arrives I indulge in a kind of gluttony unknown to me before this night. Everything is fresh and hot and incredibly flavorful. We have hen salad, eggplants rolled with walnuts and a creamy dressing, gritty biscuits and cheese, pan bread filled with beans, and, of course, Khachapuri. Khachapuri translates literally as “cheese bread.” It is thin hearty bread topped with delectably pungent cheese and baked until it is crispy on the outside and creamy and salty on the inside. It’s like Georgian pizza, if the pizza in question had been made by angels.

We eat family style, sharing every serving several ways and still leave clutching our stomachs in the hope that we might be able to hold them together at the seams.

We quickly learn that we simply can’t go back to the mass produced hotel food. There are several bakeries in the area surrounding the hotel selling delicious street food for a steal (a loaf of bread here costs about 60 tetri/cents). At these hole-in-the-wall (I mean this very literally) establishments, we buy pizzas with a kind of creamy mayonnaise, puff pastry with mushroom filling, or a kind of calzone style khachapuri. We eat on the sidewalk sipping bottles of coke in between bites, or cutting our salty bread product with apples or peaches we buy from tubs on the street. The days are warm here now, but the breezes are cool and we are too wrapped up in our meal to care how many stares our street picnic is attracting.

Going Nowhere

The first two days in Georgia I spend walking, endlessly walking, walking more than I have ever walked or wanted to walk. Most of the time the other volunteers and I wander aimlessly. I’ve never really understood the meaning of that term before now. We walk without a destination, without time constraints, and often without thinking.  Occasionally, we catch sight of a notable church or are given suggestions from a local on where to go, but mostly we just walk.

The first day we all go out together, we try to make our way to Rustaveli Avenue, a popular tourist destination lined with restaurants and shops. The twenty or so of us who set out that night are quite a sight, walking single file in the street when the side walk runs out, or huddling around the one map of the city we have between us.

We walk for about an hour before coming up on some posh looking restaurants and strange brick domes built low to the ground like rolling hills.

“They’re baths,” Someone informs the group, slowly deciphering a nearby sign.

           

Later we learn that they have been built over natural sulfur springs. This is where Tbilisi gets its name.  It means warm.

We make our way through a garden toward a bathhouse with a mosaic front. While the rest of us are taking pictures, some of the group breaks off and heads up a narrow staircase crowded between the bathhouse and the houses next door. From here we forge a path through a maze of back alleys, cobblestone walks, and rubble paths carved through gutted buildings in which families have made their homes. We catch glimpses of kitchens and living rooms with skeletal walls, only rotting support beams holding up the roof.

When we emerge, we find that we have climbed a hill overlooking the old, historic section of the city. Behind us the great brick wall of a fortress rises, the steeple of a church just breaching the sightline of the wall. We follow a wide road through the door in a large wooden gate, and climb to the top of the fortress. We climb the crumbling brick, making our way up stairs so rotted they are barely recognizable as such. At the top the city stretches out before us, the golden roof of the cathedral across the river glittering in the orange sunset.