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.