Alcohol and Holidays

I'm currently home in America, enjoying life's little luxuries and being very lazy as I recuperate from having my wisdom teeth removed.  To keep you updated on life in Georgia, I thought I'd share this email my program just sent me.  How many jobs feel the need to warn you about alcohol poisoning "on the job"? Also, the title is from the title of the email.

Dear volunteers,

First of all we wish you happy holidays! 

We hope you all have the chance to attend Georgian New Year "Supras" which really are one of the most exceptional experiences you can have in Georgia.  And of course, what is a Georgian Supra without copious toasts?

As you already know, Georgian alcohol is quite strong and people are quite hospitable, especially when it comes to drinking.  While you celebrate the holiday season, remember that drinking large quantities of alcohol can cause serious problem like alcohol poisoning. Alcohol poisoning is a serious — and sometimes deadly — consequence of drinking large amounts of alcohol in a short period of time.

Do not forget about your health and safety and about representing our project.

We also want to remind you that your TLG-provided Insurance does not cover accidents caused by and/or somehow related to alcohol.

Have safe and fun Holidays and we wish you a prosperous New Year!!!

Thank You for Making a Difference…

Best,

TLG Team

Manglisi Moments

My ninth-grade neighbor just left our house, telling me “good morning”.  While my family got a kick out of this, it still made my heart warm.  This is the same girl who after 4 months, will always tell me “hello” but if I ask “How are you?” she responds in Georgian.  My 1^st graders are already beyond that. I still really like her, but tonight was the first time we really got to communicate, generally with my broken Georgian and help from my host family.

I haven’t gone anywhere since my last blog, but village life seems worthy of its own report this week.  I made burritos for my host family on Tuesday.  I had to substitute a few ingredients, but they were still delicious.  And by I, I mean my host mom, neighbor, and I, with my host mom still doing a lot of the work.  Thanks to a recipe I got from my Peace Corps friend, we made refried beans from scratch.   

Beans in progress...we had a lot

Being Georgia, we didn’t buy ground meat.  Instead, my host mom cut some meat off some part of the bull that we have been storing in our house and gradually eating the last week or two.  She then ground the meat herself before I cooked it. 

Freshly ground meat

 It was pretty awesome.  

That's right, cooking on the pechka.

 Once they were cooked, I got to add them, cheese, tomatoes, and sour cream to lavash, which substituted for tortillas.  They had me be the master burrito maker.  In true Georgian, what’s mine-is-yours fashion, they then cut up the burritos so more than one person could have part of each one. We made enough that everyone got their fill.   

Some of the awesome burritos

Everyone from my host grandma to my host brothers to the neighbors liked them.  Hoping to make chocolate-chip cookies tomorrow.

The next invasion of American culture came in the form of a package from my father.  I came home from school on Wednesday to find another package underneath the TV.  My host mom told me that someone had brought it by.  It had come in 16 days, far sooner than most people even in Tbilisi get their mail, and they usually then have to pay a feel.  My village rocks.  I knew that the package contained gifts for my host family that my father had gotten together for me.  He even individually wrapped each person’s gift.  

Potatoes and American care package

 However, only my host mom and grandma were home when I opened the package.  They appreciated the gum and candy, but my mom was too interested in finding out what everyone got to wait for everyone to get home.  So she unwrapped all the gifts by herself. 

This surprised but did not phase me, while my father was shocked when I told him.  I think this is a symptom of a massive cultural difference. Within the family, very few things register as belonging to only one person.  Personal property doesn’t really exist here.  Even my kids at school are constantly sharing pencil sharpeners (normal), erasers (understandable), colored pencils (also reasonable) but also pens and pencils.  When a kid doesn’t have paper, 2 or 3 other kids tear paper out of their notebooks for their classmate.  You might think communism encouraged this, but I think this is far deeper rooted in Georgian culture than that.

I don’t think they ever wrap gifts either.

My host family appreciated the gifts a lot.  I also stuffed myself with Butterfinger bells and felt a little closer to Christmas.  At 6 days, I am definitely counting.  I can’t wait to be home again, much as I love Georgia.

School has also been an adventure.  Today, I read a dialogue for my 2^nd graders for the first time. I was in a good mood, so I hammed up the characters a bit more than usual.  They kept begging me to read it again.  It was one of those moments that TLGers often get where our kids make us feel like rock stars.

That was a big improvement over my 3^rd grade class on Wednesday.  I was flying solo since my co had gone home to take care of her sick husband.  The kids were rambunctious from the start, so I knew it would be a challenging class.  Then one of my girls got a bloody nose.  Nothing like taking care of a sick kid when you can’t really communicate with them.  In all honestly, it was not that bad.  The other kids offered plenty of tissues.  I don’t know why they also offered her “spirt”, which I take as some form of alcohol used for medicinal purposes.  Usually people rub it on an area that hurts. I have no idea why they thought it would help, but I didn’t use it.  I was also intrigued when the kids put wet tissues on the girls head.  We clearly have different ideas about medicine.  She recovered, and I tried to keep teaching.  I’m pretty sure the lesson only got worse from there. I threw one kid out of class and had another who misbehaved in the hope that I would throw him out.  Of course, I didn’t.  The rest wouldn’t sit still and frequently got up to pick fights with each other.  I was very happy when that bell rang.

Gori, Goodbyes, and Gunpowder

Ten days...and definitely counting.  This also means that I have 10 days before I want my Michigan apps done, so I’m ignoring that fact and trying not to salivate at the thought of Taco Bell, fresh fruit, and Apple Barn toffee.

What is a great way to forget about American food?  By going to see the origins of one of the biggest monsters of the 20^th century, of course.  Stalin was born in Gori, a town about an hour’s drive from Tbilisi.  As the Wikitravel article on Gori explains it, “relatively few people in the world "cherish" the memory of one of the 20th century's greatest mass murderers, Joseph Stalin, but most that do live in Gori.” 

Three guys from my training group and I decided to take a day trip to Gori, mostly to see the Stalin house-museum.  Stalin was born in a one-room apartment his family rented in a small house.  His father, a cobbler, had a shop in the basement of this house.  Since the 1930s, this house, still in its original spot, has been memorialized as part of the museum.  It is surrounded by a nice roof with a glorious Soviet design and surrounded by marble pillars.   

The guys in front of Stalin's encased home

Me in front of Stalin's family's room

 Behind this humble building is the museum.  It cost 10 GEL to get in, which seemed incredibly steep, so the extra 5 GEL for the English tour guide and tour of Stalin’s private railroad car did not seem like much extra, so we opted for the tour.  Our guide was a twenty-something young woman with a decent command of English.  Perhaps because the museum is unheated and was cold enough that you could see your breath, or perhaps because of the inappropriate comments by one of the guys in my group and the others on our tour, our tour guide probably gave us the fastest tour of the museum humanly possible.  It did not help that soon after we started, we were joined by three Polish men who worked in Tbilisi.  As Kelley, one of the guys who was with me put it succinctly, “nobody hates Stalin as much as the Poles”. 

They joined us after learning about the promising poet that young Stalin was.  One of his poems even became a regular part of elementary school curriculum (before he became a revolutionary) and during the Soviet Union, several of his poems were used in school under a pseudonym.  It wouldn’t fit a dictator to write poetry, now would it?

Still, while we got to admire a model of an underground printing press and look at a map of Stalin’s exile and return, the Poles were literally cursing Stalin.  It definitely added another dimension to the trip.  They were so pleased when we saw a copy of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which was when Stalin and Hitler agreed not to invade each other.  While that obviously did not last, the pact also carved up Poland between the two of them, a knife in the back, as the Poles put it. 

Most of the museum was filled with old photos that were blown up like lots of other Soviet museums, but they also had his office furniture, pipe collection, mother’s china, and gifts he had received from people around the world.  Perhaps the best exhibit inside the museum is a gloriously displayed death mask, 6 of 9 created after he died.  After seeing these normal exhibits, we followed our guide downstairs to a locked room which briefly touched on the “repression” during the Soviet Union (they never blame it on Stalin).  It is replete with letters sent home from Siberian exile, a secret police’s interrogation desk, and a recreation of a prisoner’s cell.  At least they acknowledge something terrible happened under Stalin.  That’s something, right?

The best part of the tour came last, when we went outside.  We got to go into the house, which has the original Jugashsvili (Stalin’s family) furnishings, or so they claim.  Then we toured Stalin’s very swank private railroad car.  I took pictures of 2 of my friends on Stalin’s toilet (his personal bathroom had a toilet and a bath!) before a tour guide yelled at me.  

Kelley on Stalin's personal toilet

 

The rest of our trip included walking up to a snowy Gori Castle (it’s a fort that isn’t that special) and warming up in a café, where some drunk Georgians bought us xachapuri and beer because they loved one of the guys I was with.  It was a reminder of how different male-female interactions are in Georgia because the two men wanted their picture with Kelley and wanted the boys to drink with them while they totally ignored me, not even asking my name.  (More Gori pics are on Facebook; the link is on my "Pictures" page.)

The next morning, one of the guys and I played tour guide to a German we met at our hostel.  He was very appreciative and bought us breakfast and tea, which for a German is quite extraordinary.  If you think I’m being mean, he regaled us with stories of German stinginess.  I, however, was playing tour guide simply because it is one of my favorite things to do.  (If this whole grad school business doesn’t pan out and I can’t stand the idea of another year of children shouting “Hannah teacher” ad nauseam, I’m looking into being a tour guide.)  It was also very cool to realize how much I’ve learned about Georgia

This weekend, I was back in Tbilisi to say goodbye to some of my group members and other friends who are not coming back.  Most of my group got together, which was a great time.  We went to dinner at the restaurant next to our training hotel, “where it all began”, which was a lot of fun, especially to think about how much had changed and how much had not.  We still received terrible service but this time it was not due to our linguistic inabilities.  We discussed what we had done, where we still wanted to go, what we missed at home, our plans for break, and our respective school experiences.  In four months, strangers with various reasons for coming to Georgia had become good friends, a sort of “family” for me.  I will miss those who won’t return but look forward to another 6 months with those who will.

The night turned out to be very interesting.  Knowing that there was a new group at the hotel, we went to introduce ourselves and invite them to join us in our night out.  Things worked out that I found myself in charge of getting 10 newbies downtown from the hotel by myself.  I have never taken a bus in the city, but I led all of them fearlessly onto a bus and walked them down the main street in Tbilisi to meet up with the rest of my group.  We soon went to another place, where a few of my friends got themselves and therefore the rest of us invited to a supra (Georgian party) for some stranger’s birthday.  It was so very Georgian, I loved it.  In the States, only drunken college students and twenty-somethings invite perfect strangers to their private parties.  In Georgia, I’m not even surprised anymore.

As far as school is concerned, the most notable event is the addition of firecrackers to daily life.  Last Wednesday, I walked into the school yard for my first class (2^nd hour) to see a gaggle of my 5^th grade boys clearly up to no good.  When I went to investigate, I saw one of them had a lit firecracker in his hand.  As a sign of my cultural assimilation or an affirmation I am not meant to be a teacher, I simply shook my head at him and kept walking.  Now, booms are regular parts of breaks, and the halls smell like gunpowder.