Hi to everyone. We have now been "teaching" for about a month and find our days sometimes fascinating, often frustrating, mostly rewarding and, above all, exhausting. Bob has four counterparts (teachers with whom he teaches) and is teaching about three classes more than he should because he still cannot "work out" his schedule. Gill is teaching 18 classes but is giving three tutorials a week for the children who are entering the FLEX competition. The FLEX competition is for children throughout Georgia and from Soviet central Asia and winners spend one year in America with an American family and going to an American school. It is highly competitive and I am very worried about my three students who are longing to go. Of course, they think that America is the land of milk and honey and that everything will be wonderful. I am worried that they will be very disappointed if they do not get accepted. There are only 50 slots for Georgia and probably over a thousand applicants. The test is comprehension and the responses are multiple choice. The Georgian students are quite good at picking answers out of a text, but they tend to throw in every piece of information so that they can be sure to have the right answer in there somewhere. Getting them to be specific is something else. However, their enthusiasm is contagious and we are going to celebrate their attempt even if they do not get accepted.

This is our first full weekend in Tbilisi. Gill is here for the VAC (Volunteer Committee) meeting and Bob is going to try to buy a printer, as it will be very useful for school. Bob's school has an English section in the library, but Gill's has very few English books, so if anyone has any simple children's stories that do not weigh a ton, are in good condition and are not needed, please give them to us when we are in England or the U.S. over the holidays. Gill's school's librarian has already prepared a space for the books.

After the FLEX exams Gill will begin teaching the teachers at her school English. They seem to be very enthusiastic. They all speak Russian as well as Georgian. It will be interesting to see what it is like teaching adults rather than childen. Gill's youngest class is the second grade (7 and 8 year olds) where the children start English. Then, in the third grade, the children start Russian. So these 9 year olds have to contend with three alphabets. The teachers say that they actually get Russian and English muddled up, but somehow they manage to sort it out. Gill has made friends with the Russian teacher and would like to take Russian lessons next year, but first there is this huge Georgian nut to crack. There are eleven tenses in Georgian and each tense has 18 forms, because with one verb you can say the English equivalent of "he gave it to me". Also, Georgians, as in Latin, use declensions to express phrases for which English uses several words. For instance "what does she look like" is one word in Georgian. Help! Gill has an absolutely lovely Georgian tutor who spends hours preparing for the lesson and is prepared to beam with complete satisfaction if Gill manages to translate even one of her homework sentences into Georgian correctly. Bob is going to use the same tutor too.