February 3, 2008


It is just about a month since we returned from our Christmas break and we have been living in a winter wonderland. It does look very beautiful, but it is very cold and several of the houses in our town do not have water (frozen pipes). In fact, the director of my school has not had water in her apartment for over a month. People go and collect the water from wells, streams and luckier neighbors. In Papa, where I work, I see old women carrying buckets of water every day and people dragging milk churns of water on sleds. As all the evidence of modern conveniences has been obliterated by the cold or covered by the snow, the landscape and many of the people have taken on a Breugel-like appearance and you really get a feel for what life must have been like several hundred years ago.

During the second weekend in January Bob and I watched a religious ceremony which took place in the middle of the night. Two local priests stood in the middle of a freezing river, with lumps of ice floating by, and many of the locals, the men stripped to the waste, one by one, submitted to being dunked three times into the frigid water. This is supposed to be the time when the water is at its most pure. Apparently nobody suffers from this experience, not even the priests who stood there for well over an hour. (Although, one did wear rubber gloves to try to keep his hands usable!)

There were big fires on the snow-covered river bank and people were wrapped up against the cold in all sorts of clothing. Again it looked like Breugel.

I have again been feeling the urge to hibernate and I hop into bed with a hot water bottle and a good book as often as I can. However, work has begun to increase in pace. We are both now investigating various grants for our schools (new blackboards, English books and resources, and some sort of sustainable income source for our schools for after we have left). These things take a long time to write and it is difficult to find out the cost of various items, as this often involves going to Tbilisi or trying to get information from locals for whom it is not a priority. However, everyone here has to get used to “Georgia Time” as the G6s (the people who arrived in 2006) tell us. We have met some interesting people in the course of our investigations and talked to a lot of earlier volunteers, which has expanded our group of acquaintances and made life more interesting. We have not started our “English for Tourism” course for the local business people yet, because the No. 1 School, where we hope to hold the classes, still has frozen water pipes. But we have started to give our host family some English lessons and Valer has promised to help me when I start with Russian lessons. I don’t think this will be for quite a long time, as my Georgian is improving rather slowly, if at all.

We had another weekend in Tbilisi. I went the Volunteer Committee meeting and Bob was helping out with the Alternative Handbook for new volunteers (G8s) who will arrive in June. It is strange to think that by June we will have become veterans. Our local guesthouse near the Peace Corps offices was full to the brim – not surprising at 15 Lari (just under $10) a night if you stay for two nights. Bob and I stayed in a small hotel which caters mostly to German tourists and has an Italian restaurant. Their food was really good. They even had a decent tiramisu! I had it two nights running.

It is really difficult to get fresh fruit and vegetables at the moment, especially as the snow has made transportation so difficult. We went to the local supermarket yesterday and all we could find in the fruit line were a few frozen looking bananas, rather old lemons, oranges and, strangely, kiwis. The vegetable choice was small too: potatoes, onions, garlic, cabbage, radishes and one lone pumpkin. Fortunately, there was plenty of chocolate.

Our host mother has been cooking up a storm during these lean times. She really is a fantastic baker and makes great potato and onion knishes, or possibly they are more like potato Cornish pasties. Her cakes are great too. We are certainly eating a lot of carbs, but so far I am not back to the fat self I was when we first arrived here.

I think our next vacation is not until Easter which is celebrated here at the end of April, so this is rather a long semester for us. However, it is moving fast and, looking back, we can see that we have accomplished a few things in our schools. The homework completion rate is certainly up (largely due to the domino game bribery I have going – thanks to Bob). The children are speaking more and not just reading and I think they are having more fun in their classes as I certainly don’t mind making a fool of myself for learning’s sake. I think my teachers have become a little braver also and seem to be enjoying their classes more.

We had one sad event last month: my main counterpart teacher’s brother died. He had been very ill with cancer and she had watched him suffer a great deal. I doubt they have the same access to painkilling drugs here in Georgia as we do in the U.S. Marina, my counterpart, was completely drained by this experience and is having a very hard time getting back into teaching. Bob and I, along with over 600 other people, attended the funeral supra (feast). There was a tamada (toastmaster) who toasted the departed and all the living family members. All the attending men had to stand for every toast and there were many. Women are allowed to sit during the toasts, apparently because we are weak and need to conserve our strength. This is what one of the teachers told me any way. The room where the feast was held was on the lower floor of an old Soviet-style marriage hall. It was unlit and unheated, although that did not matter with all those people crowded together. There was a huge amount of food. Must have cost a fortune. Apparently, there is a tradition that each person who attends the funeral leaves a small contribution to the expenses and it shows great honor to the dead when the attendance is very large. There were huge earthenware jugs of wine being carried around – again that Breugel image. Apparently, it is the custom for Georgian relatives and friends to bring food to the bereaved family in the days between the death and the funeral. It is also the custom for the bereaved family to make a small supra 40 days after the death and to deliver the food to the church for distribution among the poor. Georgian is such an old language with speakers who are so connected to each other that they even have special vocabulary for funerals. I suppose we do too, but theirs seems to be more extensive. For example they have an expression which means “I am sorry for your loss”, but the “I am sorry” part can only be used for funerals. I tried it out when someone was ill and was told with a laugh that they weren’t dead yet. You can see how my Georgian language skills are improving.

We would love to hear from everyone. It was hard to catch up fully at Christmas as there was so much running around. Hope all is well with our family and friends.