Georgian on my Mind

I don't know how much I'm going to get to write this summer.  In the wise words of Calvin and Hobbes, the days are just packed.  I have to write 2 blog entries for American Councils for my scholarship, so I thought I'd share it with you as well.  Mostly, I just freak out and geek out about Georgian.

They’re not kidding about this program being intensive.  Somehow 15 hours of intensive lessons seemed so much less intense when I was sitting in America.  Now that I’m in Georgia, I find that my brain is thinking about Georgian most of the time.  When I’m lying in bed at night, I’m thinking about whether the word for woman starts with “k” or “k’” and other such issues that are suddenly important to my grasping this language.

I lived in a Georgian village for the 2011-2012 school  year and picked up some Georgian by virtue of living there.  I tried self-study, but between the emotional toll living in a village where no one speaks your native language and the ease with which I could communicate my needs and wants in Russian, I did not put much effort into my self-imposed Georgian lessons.  It did not help that anytime I started a conversation with a taxi driver, salesperson, or practically anyone in Georgian, it would take less than a minute for the conversation to switch to Russian, usually initiated by the other person, nor did the fact that the Georgian verb system looked terrifying and incomprehensible.   After going home to America and feeling Georgia’s magnetic pull for a year, I decided I needed to get serious about learning Georgian.  My career goals involve Georgian down the road, but some days, I just want to know enough Georgian to understand my Facebook news feed.  Thus, I thought a summer of intensive lessons on top of whatever I had gathered via immersion would give me a solid foundation in Georgian.  I knew that was a good decision when just hearing Georgian at the Munich airport made me grin.

As I could only really use the verb “to be” and the commands necessary to keep a classroom of Georgian children relatively under control, I knew that this summer what I really needed to learn was verbs.  I was actually looking forward to it, to be able to say complete sentences instead of using nouns, adjectives, adverbs, and pantomime.  Two weeks into my program, I’m swimming in verbs.  (As of yesterday, I can even say “I’m swimming”.)  The linguist inside of me is thrilled.  As an agglutinative language, there’s a compact brilliance to Georgian verbs.  As someone who just wants to be able to explain where she went last weekend, the verbs are maddening, as there are prefixes and suffixes aplenty to remember.   Some days I think Georgian is simple and logical.  Other days I think no one in their right mind would put such consonant clusters together.  I’m confident I’m using jaw muscles I never knew I had, trying desperately to get through words that seem unpronounceable at first glance.  I’m also reminded of a linguistics group project I did as a freshman where we created a language and the rules we developed created words I was convinced were impossible in reality.  Some Georgian words sound a lot like my made-up language, except they were not created by freshmen in a mental exercise but a real group of living, breathing people who actually communicate this way.

Learning Georgian is definitely a challenge, but one I’m really enjoying.  When my teacher explains to me the roots involved in a word that seems both far too big and entirely impossible to say, it’s like she’s giving me a password to get into a club where people get this language.  Those moments feel good.  Even though some days I fear I might drown in Georgian verbs, I love spending hours getting to learn more of the language.  Almost every day I learn something and think “So that’s what they were always saying!” or “Why could I not have learned this when I lived in the village.  This is so useful!”  Having lived surrounded by the language for a year, it’s a wonderful feeling to be given keys to communicate with the people around me in their native tongue.  While it would have been nice to have all this knowledge while living in Georgia before, I’m also fully aware that I’m learning so much because I have great teachers who are teaching me how I learn best.  While I’m still learning beginner phrases, my teachers are also explaining the linguistics behind certain suffixes, which both help me feel more like an adult and aid my understanding, since knowing the rules helps me understand the language better.  My teachers, with my blessing, have me running through the lessons in my book, so that I’m being constantly challenged and also seeing a real expansion of my knowledge and ability despite only having eight weeks of lessons.  I’ll finish the first level book at the end of my third week and feel like I finally have skills to have real conversations instead of simply being able to explain who I am and what I am doing in a Georgian village.

I went back to my old village this weekend.  I felt so proud to be able to explain why I was there in Georgian instead of Russian.  My former host family, friends, neighbors, and colleagues were all so delighted that I was learning Georgian, and it was also great to be back and realize that I already understood more of what was going on than I ever had before.  When I lived in Georgia before, it was not hard to fall in love with the country, but the language always seemed like a thorn in my side.  Now, as I start to understand it, I’m starting to fall in love with the language too.

Host Family, Round 2

In my first week, I’ve thought of a hundred different things to write.  Obviously, I’ve written none of them.  I’ll try to remember a few.  First, my host family is great.  

I’ve got a little host “brother” Niko who turned six on Wednesday.  He’s absolutely adorable and speaks a steady stream of Georgian to me despite me understanding about every tenth word.  We also play Legos, a ridiculous card game, paper airplanes, and other things that remind me of the joy of an imaginative childhood.  My host family and I joke that he is my Georgian teacher.  I’m trying to teach him a few important English words and phrases, like “high five”.

His mother Nino is 25 and works too much as an import manager for a company that sells furniture and housing stuff.  I think she’s the one who agreed to host me.  Her English is the best.  In general, all the women speak English.  Their grammar and sometimes vocabulary is almost always off, but we still can communicate pretty easily and have real conversations.  Nino is a wonderful mother and driven individual, who wants to start studying Chinese (in addition to knowing Russian and English) because, as she says “I like difficult things.” 

Niko on his 6th birthday

Nino and Niko cutting his birthday cake

Her sister Anano is 20.  She is an art student and also has a job as a graphic designer.  She is incredibly sweet and generally just seems to love life.  She’s very nice to me and is wonderful with Niko.

Their mother Maia is in her late 40s but is essentially retired and babysits Niko.  When she can’t think of a word in English, she speaks in Russian.  I’ve really loved listening to her talk.  I also just love that she’s got so many plans for her family.  When her girls were little, she got them Russian and English tutors.  She plans to do the same for Niko, plus get him to take swimming and chess lessons.  She wants him to be an architect.

One day Nino and I were sitting at a nearby playground while Niko played, and she said, “Sometimes I just think and I can’t imagine my life without him.”  I know she got married young and is divorced, but I don’t know the whole story.  From what I can tell, Niko’s father has never been in his life, but all three women love and take care of him.  That’s a definite plus to having multigenerational families living together, especially since they seem to share various responsibilities.  Before Anano started working as a graphic designer, Nino’s salary paid for Anano’s school, as well as all other expenses.  This is probably something they didn’t think twice about, but coming from America, it’s still surprising.  In case you’re wondering, the girl’s father died two years ago, so Niko is the man of the house.

It’s really nice living with this family.  After a week, I already feel more comfortable than I did with my old host family, even though they were nice.  Speaking English helps so much, since I feel like I can express myself, which encourages me to speak more, so that I don’t feel awkward trying out my Georgian or asking questions.  Also, life in Tbilisi is just easier and more similar to my life in America than life in the village is.  This host family is amazed that I lived for a year in the village.  They have hot water (all the time!) so I can easily take showers (which is good because it seems like now all I do is sweat as soon as I leave the house, or even before then), good internet, and TV that has English-language channels and DVR.  My host mom (Maia) got a recipe for making blini in a bottle from a friend on Facebook.  They were delicious, plus it was just a cool thing to do.  I think that’s a big difference.

Blini (they're like crepes) and the Fanta bottle we made them in

In the village, you have TV, maybe internet, but the outside world seems fairly unreachable, like a dream.  It made me guilty to talk about my travels or life in America because I can do so much more than they can.  Here, I don’t feel that way.  Nino says she will have to travel abroad for work, although she also says she doesn’t ever want to leave Georgia.  She’s trying to find a better job and she wants to buy a car by the end of the year.  They’re not rich, but they’re not poor, and they are a very happy family who clearly loves each other very much.  They have also been incredibly nice to me.

It’s been an adjustment coming to them in a nice part of Tbilisi after the village, but it’s nice to see what life is like here.  Even though they’re comfortable now, Maia has talked about the early 1990s a bit and it sounds terrible.  I researched the Georgian economy in the early 1990s this past semester, so that time really interests me.  It’s also terribly depressing.  I asked Maia where she used to work, and she told me she worked at some scientific research place (she has a degree in Chemistry) for six years.  Then, in the early 1990s, she said she just sat there.  She said everyone just sat.  Basically, in the early 1990s, there were no jobs, no gas for heating, no light.  She said she and friends helped each other through those times.  They shared food when they got it.  They shared tips on how to clean clothes without power and other things that they suddenly had to face.  She said it was terrible as a parent during that time to see her girls cold and hungry.  In simple, broken English, she’s brought the facts I studied (and hope to work into my master’s thesis) to life, which has made it both more interesting and more heartbreaking.  Obviously, the family, and the country, has recovered from those bleak days, but the economy isn’t easy.  Maia has done a fair amount of things and her last job was as a manager at a pharmaceutical company until last year they told her they didn’t need grandmothers working there and let her go.  She’s not even fifty.  

This echoes other things I’ve heard.  In some ways it makes sense that companies would be reluctant to hire older workers who were educated in the Soviet era, aren’t necessarily adept with technology, are used to older ways of doing things, and have probably had their skills atrophy from lack of use in years when jobs were scarce.  Young people know computers and probably know English as well as Georgian and Russian, plus they’re prettier and have a host of other superficial things in their favor.  Of course, as Nino and Anano have assured me, jobs are hard to find for young people too.  Companies want to hire young people with low salary expectations but with lots of experience.  I regretfully told them that it was the same in America.  At least we get paid on time, which is often a problem here.

Bye America (A day in rainy DC)

Another airport, another blog post.  This time I’m in DC, waiting to fly out to Tbilisi by way of Munich.  It’s Friday night.  I’ll arrive in Tbilisi on Sunday morning.  I know you’re already jealous.

I flew into DC yesterday and had a short orientation with American Councils and the four other brave souls going on the Eurasian Intensive Language Program.  It was really interesting getting to know these people who will be experiencing similar and yet very different things over the course of the summer. We’re all going to our own chosen post-Soviet country: Armenia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Georgia (clearly the best!), and we all come with vast but varied experience.  Our pursuit of graduate degrees and interest in these countries that fly below most people’s radar made it easy to connect for the brief period we were together.  It was a taste of what I hope is to come; in Georgia, befriending other expats was far easier than making friends ever is.  Seriously.  Where else does the line “Hey there, fellow native English speaker,” actually serve as a great introduction?

I had the afternoon off.  Everyone else had earlier flights so we were given lunch to go and they shipped off.  As DC has been enjoying a nice spate of rainstorms care of Andrea, I decided to forgo another venture up Old Abe’s steps and hit the Smithsonian.  Since I definitely did not pack an umbrella and shunned the multiple offers, I looked like a bedraggled rat by the time I got there.  It was not a problem, since I had left Foggy Bottom, where the hotel and GWU are, and far too many well-dressed young people milled around, all of them carrying umbrellas like sensible people.  Umbrellas and ponchos abounded on the National Mall, but here they were carried by tourists in flip flops, hats signifying their tour group, and t-shirts from high schools and colleges across the nation.  There were plenty of teenagers clearly trying to be cool but failing in a way they will only see when they look back on these photos in several years.  This made me appreciate that I have no idea where pictures of my 6^th grade trip to DC (basically just the Smithsonian) are hiding.

DC, and especially the National Mall, with tour buses waiting on all available streets and people milling around even in the rain, provided some excellent people watching.  As I’m gearing up my traveler’s skills of observation and analysis, it was fun to turn a critical eye on my fellow countrymen, to try to view Americans a little like I view Georgians.

I was actually left with a pleasant picture.  After seeing hundreds of benches to eat lunch, which promised a soaked dress for sure, I was very relieved to find an empty event tent with a few chairs where I could sit down after strolling the American History Museum and finally eat my lunch.  About halfway through, I thought my little piece of heaven was about to be destroyed when an event truck rolled up.  The man smiled and quickly brought out a table!  His friend teased him that he had never seen him work so fast before, to which he replied that I was cute and his friend was not.  A compliment and a dry table!  Between that and watching cute kids try to take pictures in front of the Capitol, I was quite pleased with my countrymen.

Obviously not the Capitol.  It makes me sad the Washington Monument is STILL encased in scaffolding.

I hurried through parts of the National Gallery, finding Van Dycks, Rembrandts, and Titans lurking just around the corner.  Wishing I could stay, I headed back to my fancy hotel in the swanky part of the city.  I’m not sure if it was cocktail hour, their normal MO, or what, but in the lobby they were giving away free mojitos, so I grabbed my bags and a drink and waited for my shuttle.

Since my program arranged for me to arrive 4 hours early, I had plenty of time to do everything I needed at Dulles, including eating Mexican as my last American meal in 2 months.  DC gets definite props for having free wifi in both airports, even if they do charge an extra dollar each way (each way!!) for paper tickets on the metro.

Goodbye America!  I’ll see you in August.  If you could improve the weather by then, I’d really appreciate it.