I was asked about my life here. Oh I know how I can circle around things and not ever answer anything getting lost to the sound of my own voice. Now since it is often the only voice I hear my native tongue I can get even more meandering. But a friend very directly asked me “What is it you do with your days? “ or “What do you do with your time? “ It seems in all my trying to understand how to live life here; I have not been clear about my work or life.
This is complicated by the fact that there is no knowing this place. It is a shape shifting land. I can be in one moment and TADA in the next I am in a Lerner and Lowe musical so enchanting that I anticipate fairies or something. All changes here in a moment.
I could be walking done the road and then randomly dragged into a restaurant where they ply me with homemade wine from a plastic Fanta soda bottle. I may be walking up the hill to my house and a little girl, knowing the custom of force feedings in this land tears off chunks of bread and says, ‘’Chama, Chama/eat, eat.”
I am in a constant state of confusion and bemusement.
Of course to some degree the organization TLG (Teaching and Learning in Georgia) is greatly responsible for all the bafflement.
In my prep to leave I had no departure date, no idea of the age of students I would teach, or as to what the setting would be. It was like a surreal blind date, or being at Second City in some sort of audience dictated improv. (I think my classes at Second City in Detroit may have helped me more than all those badges I earned in girl scouts)
I live in a village of 800 people. There are 180 students in the school. Each family has a least one cow, one pig, and several chickens. Some families have goats and pigs. All animals roam freely.
Some families have dogs and cats. But mostly dogs and cats are like seagulls just surviving on scraps left behind. Often a dog will randomly walk into the class, just to wag at the children or seek kid crumbs.
My village is in the foothills of the mountains. I can hike to the crest of the village and see the caps all frosted with snow.
There are really only two big buildings in my village, a school, and a church. Both are lovely and a great source of pride to the villagers. It is claimed and probably true that we have the loveliest school in the land. (But the completion is not fierce.)
All commerce for the residents takes place down the hill on the highway where little magazia’s (shacks) line the roadway. All sorts of goods are sold are sold from these stores.
There are fish shacks, bread shacks, shacks where one may go to play video games and one sells cigarettes and phone cards. This is Nona’s Magazia.
It is busiest shop in town.
She is Beyoncé hot. Though she may be cleaning the features off the grouse that she hangs from a string to sell to passing tourist in route to the sea, she is always has her lips lined and some dress the gives sway to her bootilicious self. She is a natural saleswoman. She knows how to market. All the police in the district come by Nona’s. I believe they just need diversion from the constant stream of speeding cars.
My home in this village is set between the church and the school. I live with Maia (a widow whose husband died in a car accident) and her children. The teenagers Nardoli and Geti according to my TLG contract are to be getting English lessons. I am a natural motivator. I lure them in with my laptop. Well not really the daughter Geti is religious in her studies. But her motivation is so she can use my laptop to IM her boyfriend who is 23.She is sixteen. And fourteen year old Nardoli nothing lures him. Not Lil Wayne lyrics, Snickers Bars, nothing matters like fun and goofing off. Older sister Sera is pregnant. She seems to be on bed rest and stays with her mom. She is soft spoken and placid and watches TV all day. (TV is most often American films, not dubbed, but with the entire transcription of the script read in monotone by a deep voiced Georgian man).
So that is the setting and the key characters.
And the days, well the days begin when the roosters tell us that itdoes. It is weird with roosters. You know how babies can have empathic cries with each other; well roosters just seem to be calling out to the rooster in the next farm. They may start in the dark or at dawn but no matter when they start all join in the cacophony.
And so the day begins, and there is the routine of it. Coffee, strong, black Turkish. Up the hill to school where the beguiling children welcome me at the gate (Brave souls they must be as one teacher manages to tell me in Russian as opposed to Georgian that they think me an alien).
And then comes teaching. According to all Georgian children have too much energy to sit, are lazy and things like raisings ones and or no wrestling in school and on and on and on goes this list. But what can you expect from a culture that kisses the children before they chastise them. Kiss, Kiss, scold scold, love love. (All is love in this land. No one ever asks “ How do you like it here, they only ask, “Do you love Georgia?
But school is my heart, We sing and I teach them to play “American School” And my co-teacher, the ever lovely and kind “Nanu” weary from her three month old babies colicy nights and her hour long commute in a rattle old mini van is glad for that I am able to channel the Mother Superior persona from my catholic school days. So slowly with little star stickers, soft scoldings, and engaging curriculum raised expectations and of course candy the first through sixth graders settle in.
And my heart is happy with school and at school
And life then is more coffee and more meals. And each day I walk the hills. I like to go at dusk when the villages out gathering the animals who roam about freely. I like to see the cows come home and how the sun looks on the distant mountains.
And that is life, just like home really. And just like home I might run errands (going to the crazy Gibraltar like Trade center place for food items or school supplies, this being the only way to shop) Or I meet with the other volunteers for a day by the sea. But then there are days especially on the weekend I feel like a crazed character in one of the Bronte sister’s novels. I feel I cold go mad from the silence and isolation on the moors. But then this is Georgia. And the phone rings and I am invited by the government to the opera in the resort town of Batumi and feel like Pretty Woman without Richard Gere.
Magic looms all over the land like phantom visions of water in the desert. Yet here it often manifests and quench’s a thirst.
And that is life, as I know it, until of course being Georgia it changes.
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