School Days

Supra 

 My colleagues(my co-teacher is hiding in the back row) 

I’ve been in Georgia for a full month now and it is amazing how time flies. I’ve done so much and it all feels like it happened yesterday. The last time I wrote I was hanging out in Poti and I haven’t really done too much since then. I’ve been in Shromisubani. I had school everyday except for Thursday. I went anyways with the hope of being able to use the computers but that didn’t happen for two reasons. The first being that no one at school had a key to the computer room and the second being that even if I had gotten in there was no power at school today. The power is pretty intermittent in my school and at my house but it doesn’t matter during the day because there are plenty of windows that let in enough light. And if it happens at night you just pull out the battery powered lamp and hope the power comes back soon because the usual evening entertainment of the television is not an option. I’ve taken to “playing” the piano when the power goes out. I use my book light to light up the keys and a music book in English that I have borrowed from school. And by playing I mean slowly plunking my way from one key to another. I’m getting better but I will only get much better if the power continues to go out, but please don’t hope for that one.

In regards to teaching I would have to say that is it a challenge everyday. There is no such thing as planning for a lesson before you teach it. Evidently that is just how it works over here. The teacher goes in, asks the students what they remember from the last time and then continues in the book from there. Maybe it is just my co-teacher but it is frustrating. I try to at least think ahead before class starts but that only works if my co-teacher agrees with my ideas. Most of the time she has her own ideas. Which is to be expected.

The things that I am finding most frustrating is that my co-teacher calls the students who fall behind bad students, she calls slower ones stupid and then she only call on the ones who know the answers. Then they ones who are falling behind continue to fall behind. She doesn’t remember from one day to the next that little Natia wasn’t in school for the past two days so there is no way she could know the words that go with letters g-r. In all of my classes there are two girls who are special needs. One(grade 6) is deaf but has a hearing aid and the other one(grade 5) has severe development problems. My co-teacher almost entirely ignores the one in grade 5 and doesn’t expect her to learn anything. IT frustrates me to no end because when I point at the picture of the girl and ask her what it is she says “girl”. So I don’t see the problem or why my teacher ignores her.

On another frustration grades 1 and grades 3 are in the same classroom. Grades 2 and 4 are also in the same classroom. The latter is not quite a much of a problem because second graders are much closer to being fourth graders than first graders are to being third graders. I don’t understand why they do it that way. Why not 1 and 2, then 3 and 4? It would make my life much easier. We try to teach separate lessons to the 1^st and 3^rd graders but the 1^st graders just get distracted but the lesson on the other side of the room. I could totally teach the same lesson to 1^st and 2^nd graders, well minus the alphabet. My co-teacher doesn’t want to teach the little ones the English alphabet until they know the Georgian alphabet. I tried to explain to her that it doesn’t matter and that they will learn both just fine at the same time. But she didn’t understand so we’re not teaching the 1^st graders how to write the alphabet, only how to recognize it. Her English is good when it comes to school things but try and take it to a discussion that she might not have run across in a book and it is impossible. Sometimes I feel like I’m talking to a wall and that if I were speaking gibberish she would understand me just as well as if I was speaking English.

As much as I might complain about it I do l enjoy it. My 5^th and 6^th graders make it all worth it. They are smart and really want to learn English. They brighten my day. Sometimes I think that it would be better if I didn’t have a co-teacher and I was allowed to do it on my own. The students would learn more if they didn’t get yelled at for doing things incorrectly. If they were praised for everything they did correctly and praised for when they tried even if they got it wrong. My co-teacher wants them to pronounce everything 100% perfectly but that isn’t a reasonable goal. A reasonable goal is for them to pronounce things well enough to be understood by a native speaker.

Okay I think I am done venting for now. One good thing this week was the supra(aka massive amounts of food and drink) that we had at school on Tuesday afternoon. It was to celebrate my co-teacher and me in our first time teaching at this particular school. There was lots of toasting for Georgia, for America, for teachers, for friends and even for our students. It was quite a grand event. It was around 2:30PM and I definitely did not have dinner. Also in other news I have acquired a tutee for English. He is in grade 10 at the same school Kenneth is at but he lives next door to me so I get to be the one to tutor him. His name is Giorgi and he’s a good kid. His English is alright but he needs lots of practice so that’s what I’m for. Yay. This weekend I’m going to Tbilisi with some other English teachers from around my area. I will finally get to see the city that I spent a week in. I’m very excited about this idea. I hope to have lots to report when I get back. Goodbye for now.

Burial Ceremony

Today was an interesting day. I was told yesterday that I would be going to a funeral for an uncle. I'm not sure whose uncle it was, or how he was related but we were going anyways. I went to school and did "research and planned" aka was on the computer all morning. My co-teacher is at a different school on Tuesdays and Thursdays so on those days I don't do anything too important. The most important thing I did today was tell the music class that there is a difference between "Jingle Bells" and "Jingle Bell Rock". Yep, super important. Anyways. At 12:30 I got a call from my host mother who said, "Leslie, go." I knew this meant it was time for me to leave school and head to the preschool. She then got ready to go to the funeral and we walked to the store where we would wait for the family to come pick us up.

About an hour later they finally arrived. We all said hello and did the usual greetings. Then we hopped into the car for what I assumed would be at least a 20 minute drive. Well it wasn't. We could have walked to the house we were going to. It took less than 5 minutes in a car. We drove around the corner from the preschool.  I didn't see the point but I think it had something to do with us all arriving together as a family. We all walked toward the house and then up the stairs. There were some women singing softly in the first room we walked through. In the second room was an open casket in the middle, lots of flowers and lots of women sitting around the edge of the room. We walked in a circle past all of them. I felt very awkward because it wasn't anyone I knew and I couldn't say anything to comfort them even if I wanted to. They wouldn't have understood me. The whole thing just made me want to cry but I didn't have any reason to. Except that I'm just an emotional person and people crying and wailing has a tendency to make me want to cry. I think that is the first open casket I've seen in about 15 years. It definitely startled me but I couldn't stop staring. We eventually went back down the stairs and waited around. There were many tables set up in the front yard. I sort of counted the plates that were arranged at the tables and came up with a number near 200. I know that at least 150 of those seats were filled when we finally sat to eat. After much waiting the casket was brought down the stairs and we began the procession to the cemetary. It was about a mile away. Some people walked behind the casket, others rode in cars. I was in a car. We got there, some woman cried a lot and said a lot of things(well more like screamed). I'm assuming she was talking about the man but she kept saying deda(which means mother). I didn't make any sense to me. Then after about 5 minutes we left. The casket was still above ground and still uncovered when we left. I'm still confused about that too.

After we got back to the house we sat down at the tables and started to eat the food that had been set out. The man who was in charge of leading the toasts made several. The men all stood up at the end of each one. The women just sat because women aren't required to drink for toasts. I couldn't understand anything that was going on. I just ate the food and asked questions about the food.What is this, what is that? I recognized most of it. I finally found a cheese that I really like. It was almost like eating string cheese. It even tasted like string cheese. Even the cheesy bread had the yummy mozzarella cheese in it. I could eat that stuff everyday, but at the end of the eating I really didn't want to eat ever again. Too much food.

We went back to the house and then I left with Eka, Mari and Gocha to go to Poti. There is internet there and  they speak English. Double bonus. I am here until Sunday. I probably won't do much more than I would have in the village but it is nice to have the option to go do something. When we arrived in Poti I was talking about the ceremony with Eka and she told me that the body is laid out like that in the house for a week. I'm not sure what I think of that but I know that is how it used to be done. I am also wondering where the priest was in all of this but maybe after last rites they don't have to do anything else. I don't know, I'm not too informed on the ways of the Georgian Orthodox church.

I also have a feeling that in approximately 40 days there will be another gathering of this sort at that same house. But that is just a guess. OOH one more thing. I got my camera back today!!! YAY! So hopefully some pictures will be coming soon. Farewell for now.

My Location

I was pretty sure I posted this somewhere but it obviously was not on my blog. If you want to see exactly where I live you can find my village at http://www.openstreetmap.org. In the search bar you will need to type Shromisubani. Under the area where it says results from Geonames you will need to click on the first Shromisubani. It is the one closest to the Black Sea. You can also use the map to see the other places I have visited. I am hoping to be able to go visit another new place this weekend, but we shall see.

Also in my rush to write about going to Batumi I forgot to mention that I went to the beach on Saturday. Ureki has the only true sand beach in all of Georgia. I went there the week before for a meeting with my regional representative. It was very busy in town that day but when I went back on Saturday there was hardly anyone there. It appears the official beach season ends when school begins. Even some of the restaurants there were there the week before had closed shop. Ureki is about 10 kilometers from my village. The sand is black and has supposedly is magnetic. Kenneth and I made an adventure of it. His host dad drove us there. We spent a couple of hours on the beach and then we made our way back to our village after having a snack at a local restaurant that was still open. We got directions from a couple of locals. We ended up taking this one Marshutka(bus) to get us from Ureki to the main highway then we caught another one from there to Supsa. Supsa is the closest town to us. It even has an Internet cafe.

We were going to take another bus from there but decided that we had plenty of time to kill so a walk would be nice. It is at least 4 km to our village from Supsa but that's practically nothing. We were over half way there when my neighbor saw us walking down the road and made us get in his car. Walking anywhere is almost impossible because the second that someone in a car recognizes you they force you to get in their car and they will take you where you want to go. So taking a nice stroll through the village is pretty much out of the question, especially for a girl. Lots more things are also out of the question for a girl in a village. I did appreciate the ride home though. Kenneth stopped in at my house for a bit and my host mother fed us. Food is pretty much guaranteed if a guest comes over. After a bit Kenneth headed to his house and I was left to do what I want for a while. My host mother asked me to help corral the cows into the pen so she could get set up to milk them. Then I had to track down the calf(small cow as my host mom likes to call him) and get him to the pen as well. I watched her milk the cows and she asked me if I knew how. I don't, but I have a feeling I might be learning sometime in the near future. It was an overall good day. I went to bed that night knowing that I would be going to Batumi the next day to see an opera.

Batumi

After very short notice about 100 TLG(Teach and Learn with Georgia) Volunteers were shuttled to Batumi to see a play courtesy of the President. The play was Keto and Kote. It is like Romeo and Juliet but with a happy ending. It is a very old Georgian play but the version we saw at the new opera house was a new modern take on the performance. It was okay as a performance. Nothing great. It was kind of weird and entirely in Georgia but they did have English projected above the stage so we could kind of follow what was going on. After the play we were taken to dinner(this being around midnight of course). It wasn't great but it was food. About 10 of us stayed up almost the whole night just talking and drinking wine. I think I finally fell asleep around 6AM. And now I am up and waiting in the lobby of our hotel. We were supposed to leave about 30 minutes ago but that didn't happen so who knows when it will actually happen. I wish we had more time to actually see the city and take pictures. I also wish the president had even acknowledged our existence while we were at the play but that didn't happen either. Our coordinators were slightly upset about that but it's okay. I think we're leaving soon. So peace out. Until next time.

No, there is too much let me sum up.

Okay. I really wanted to make long daily posts but there is way too much for that so you will have to take the condensed version. I arrived in Shromisubani late at night and ate a bunch of food. The next day I went to school for some more food and to meet some of the other teachers. Then we go back home and do a lot of nothing. Thursday is spent lounging around the house. We watch an unhealthy amount of Spanish soap operas that have been dubbed in Georgian, we eat, we sit outside, we talk. Kenneth came over with his host sibling and we ate some more. On Friday I went to a TLG meeting in the town of Ureki. It was a pretty pointless meeting. I don't even know why I had to go. I did learn on thing though. My school only has 96 students.yeah.

From the meeting we had some ice cream and then my host family and I headed up to Poti to go visit some family. Another sister, her husband and two kids. After a short discussion it was decided that I would be staying with my host sister in Poti for the weekend. I was not prepared for that. Things happen on a very short notice here. So the fact that I did not have a change of clothes or a toothbrush was not important. I was given clothes from the other sister that I could wear. Poti is a city right on the Black Sea. The father of the family we were visiting works as a pollution inspector of the Black Sea. He goes around picking up illegal fishing nets too. Poti was interesting but not to much there. It has a giant church but it is being remodeled like everything else in Georgia so I couldn't go in.

After a weekend of Poti we came back home and did some more nothing. On Monday I went to the neighbor's house to help set up for an Orthodox memorial service. The husband had died 40 days prior and according to Orthodox tradition you gather as a family after a period of 40 days and then you eat a lot of food and talk a lot. My family isn't related to them so that is why we went over there to help set the table and prepare the food. I even got to try to make kachapuri. It is a cheese bread of sorts. Slightly difficult to master the correct way to do it. I wish my camera wasn't broken so that I could take pictures of what happened but I cannot. However we set tables to feed about 60 people. The food was on plates and those plates were stacked on top of each other because there was not enough room on the table for all of the food. It was like Thanksgiving times 1,000. In total I think there was something like 80 people in and around the house. We all got fed and there were still leftovers. I don't know how it works. It is crazy.

After the gathering my family and I headed home and in that time a cousin had arrived and is now staying with us for the next couple of days. He really wants to practice his English and  he also wants to marry me but I think I've finally got it through his head that I'm not interested. 1st marriage proposal down, who knows how many to go. One of the things they told us in training was that we should expect attention from everyone even if we don't want it. A former TLG volunteer said the best way to keep the Georgian men from asking to date you is to set the standard that you want a man who can cook and clean. Those don't exist here. They are like unicorns. You might hear about them but you'll never actually find one.

Now to yesterday the 13th. We traveled to Kutaisi for a birthday party. Sister #3(my host mother has 4 daughters and likes to refer to me as #5) lives there and it was her daughter's 13th birthday. We arrived and then just as quickly we left and my host sister took me for a tour around the city. We spent about 2 hours shopping at a bazaar and it was so overwhelming. Things everywhere. People everywhere. She kept grabbing my hand and just pulling me through crowds of people to get to the next area. I imagine this crowd was because of back to school shopping but I cannot say that for sure. It might always be like that. We then took a bus to the old part of the city and walked past the theater, parliament, the opera house, the main public school in the city. We also met up with one of Salome(my host sister's friends). We then all walked up a lot of stairs(about 200) to an old church that was being remodeled and it was also next to an old small castle. I cannot remember the name but the view from up there was spectacular. Up close Kutaisi is not the most beautiful city but from up there I could not have known that. We returned to the house just in time to eat cake and drink wine. We has a Supra(toasting ceremony) for the birthday girl. We toasted to everything and everyone. I even made a toast. It was a lot of fun. The best part is they don't force you to finish your glass except on certain toasts. So if I only wanted to take a small sip that was okay. After concluding our toasts we headed home and I went to bed almost immediately. It was a very long day.

So far today I haven't done much except walk to school on my own. I was of course told about 100 times to not get lost but it would be nearly impossible to get lost in this village. There is only one main road. All of the possible side roads are driveways. Overall things are going pretty well for me. School starts tomorrow. I don't know what time. I don't know how many students and I don't think we have our textbooks yet. My co-teacher is in Poti today doing school shopping with her children so I can't even meet with her. Oh well. Such is life. I will know what I need to know when I need to know it. I hope things are going well for everyone at home.

Georgian Family

It's just me, my host mother and my host sister in our house. There are three other sisters but they are older and living away from my town of Shromisubani. My school is very old but it does have internet. However my house does not. It will make things more difficult to communicate with you all through my blog. But I will try to update as often as possible. I'll write more later. Nakhvamdis.

Leaving for host family

They are coming to pick us up today. I'll post more when I am back in the world of internet. Im going to be in the Guria region about 6 miles from the coast. I'll be living in a village and the closest city is Supsa. The closest big city is Poti but that is a different region. Very excited. Nakhvamdis.

It's been a long couple of days.

I haven't quite been in Georgia for 48 hours but it has been pretty amazing. Before getting here Kenneth and I stopped over in Istanbul for a couple of hours. It was pretty cool. We spent time in the tourist area around the Blue Mosque. Ate some street food. Went inside the mosque. Very awesome. 4.5 hours isn't nearly enough time to truly see Istanbul but I liked everything I saw and I can now say that I've been to Turkey.

I'm staying at a hotel in Tbilisi, Georgia for the next week. We have lots of training to do and lots of things to learn and discuss. 

Training started today. We go all day from 9am - 7:30pm. We get little breaks every two hours or so. And an hour and a half for lunch. We start the say off with Teaching orientation, then we do two sessions of Georgian language, lunch, then two sessions of intercultural training. It is a crazy busy day but I'm learning a lot about Georgia or as I should say sakartvelo. I can now introduce myself in Georgian and ask people how they are doing. I also know 15 of the 33 letters to the alphabet. Here is a wiki link to Georgian language. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgian_language. Pretty cool stuff. It looks way more complicated than it is. Once you learn the letters you can pronounce anything because it sounds like it is spelled. In my opinion those are the best languages.

After class today I went out to dinner with some of the other teachers. We traveled down to Rustaveli Avenue found a restaurant that serves Georgian cuisine. Delicious food. Khatchapuri(cheese bread), khinkali(dumplings), veal kebab, tripe soup(yes I tried the tripe, no I don't ever have a desire to do that again), garlic chicken. SO much delicious food.

After dinner we walked around town for a bit. We found this really cool garden that had a musical fountain show. There was even a projection inside of the water. It was next to a very modern glass bridge with lights all over it. We all decided that we needed to go back during the day to really take everything in. But unfortunately with our training schedules we don't have much time for that. Hopefully I'll make it back out into Tbilisi before we leave but if not then I'll definitely have to make a weekend trip back to the city with my host family.