Sanguine Muck

Բարև, folks
Been a while, huh?

I want to let y’all know that I’m alive out here, though I definitely hit that point where writing constantly became … unsustainable? Nah, I’m just a lazy jerk. I’m still going strong out here, though the winter has taken its physical and psychological toll on me (and everyone). My carb-only diet would make Atkins shudder.

As I write this we’re getting ANOTHER blizzard coming our way. Sideways cornflake size snowflakes falling… sideways, visibility about 10m. I thought I had survived my first Georgian winter, and despite all the warnings and reminders from locals, really wanted to believe spring had finally taken root about two weeks ago. I had been out of my site, Ninotsminda, in the capital of Tbilisi for like 11 days—the longest I’d been away from Ninotsminda. More on the Tbilisi work week of heaven and hell later, but while I was gone, spring made an early teaser showing, apparently, while I was gone. Tbilisi is always relatively warm—the name comes from the Georgian word for warm, tbili, after all—and I got my first moment in 2008 of wearing sandals outside and having to yank off my jacket (done with the hugest smile on my face, mind you), but upon my return to Ninotsminda, the storks common to Armenia and this part of Georgia had returned to their huge nests on the non-functioning streetlamps near my house. The mountains were showing more brown than white—they’ve been covered from base to summit since November—and the dirt road, permafrozen and snow-covered since about the same time, was a disgusting, but sanguine river of snowmelt muck. I really, really thought that was it. I wanted to believe! Two days later, whiteout.

As I moaned in my laryngitis-ridden remnant of a voice (I’ve been getting sick here like I’m getting paid for it), my coworkers at the school all laughed and told me we’ve got a few more months of this ambiguous “what the hell season is this” junk. Snow has occasionally been known to fall here in June on a bad year. There’s a reason the locals call Javakhq, this region of the country, Sibir’ Gruzii—“the Siberia of Georgia.”

This all has other consequences: water has been a problem in Nino this year. The town laid new pipes in October, and the digging left the ground porous enough to let the cold down to freeze the pipes, leaving Ghojabek, my part of town, cut off from the mains, and the backup reservoir has been long since drained. So our water has been coming by daily runs to fill up barrels from a nearby-ish communal spigot, hauled back by sled. We’ve basically been without running water since the start of February, which has limited bathing (once every two weeks, by bucket), shaving (why bother), handwashing (thank God for Target brand hand sanitizer), or use of the flush toilet (I squat in a shack with a hole outside. Nothing says “toughest job you’ll ever love” like dropping your pants outside in 10-below Celsius weather).

Still, every other day we get a warm spell, and hit the plusses into the evening, which is a wonderful feeling. I’ve started being able to teach without a jacket at school, which is heaven for my Tucson-inbred tendency to strip off as much clothing as possible at the faintest ghost of warmth. I’ve stripped down (indoors, mind you) to a polo shirt and jeans on the occasional relatively warm day, and get scandalous looks from colleagues convinced that I wish to die of hypothermia, still bundled in Eskimo coats. Though I’m not looking forward to several months of trudging through the muck as the snow finally melts for good, I’m really looking forward to stowing my now gross and worn to death jacket, and even eventually wearing shorts.

Like I said, I was up in Tbilisi forever a few weeks ago, and while it cost an arm and a leg on my volunteer allowance, it was full of so much productivity; I returned feeling a sense of accomplishment I’d been waiting for since starting this gig in June. Finally involved in work beyond just teaching, I’ve gotten myself involved in a number of projects for my community I’m going to be really proud of when they get off the ground. The main reason I ended up there was for an in-service training with my partner teacher (“counterpart,” in Peace Corps jargon) focused around improving our team teaching methodology, better familiarizing the counterparts with the Peace Corps mission and the Ministry of Education’s larger goal of methodology reform, and, to generally inspire them to work with us on those reforms. We’re all working through a lot of Soviet past in the Georgian education system—top-down authoritarianism, language-learning-as-translation, insufficient supplies of, all the same, old textbooks, not to mention the challenges of working in relatively neglected periphery areas (some of us are in villages of less than 400 people, thank God I’m not, though we have our own challenges in an ethnic minority region).

I have been really lucky to have one of the best counterparts Georgia has to offer among those I’ve seen. It may sound strange, but many of the other Georgian teachers required simultaneous interpretation into Georgian at this conference, as English skills among teachers vary in the regions, but my partner, an Armenian not at all proficient in Georgian, held her own with remarkable strength in English the whole time. I’m really blessed on this end; my Russian and her English have given us a remarkable working relationship on the simple level that very little gets lost between the two of us in communication. That helped us build a kind of camaraderie by now that has meant that we’re open about frustrations and successes on a level that I think is rare here. I think getting out of the everyday patterns of work gave us a new freedom to talk about what she really thinks we need to do at the school, and in tangible terms, resulted in two new project plans Armine and I hope to accomplish, both initiated by her—the REAL goal of all this. We hope to replace our aging and hard to find textbooks with some supplementary materials, something I think critical to the lessons, and far more bold—develop a modern, western style, students-come-to-us language classroom, with A/V equipment, student centered group seating, a mini library, and most importantly, our own space to blanket with visual aids and language materials, a little slice of an English speaking country in the middle of a small town on the borders of Armenia and Turkey. It will take a lot of work to find funding for, but it’s very doable. The main thing is to get it done with significant local contribution, at least at the in-kind level. But it will reap immeasurable benefits on students’ ability to learn here, and serve as an example of how to create an environment conducive to language learning here. My sustainable development spider sense is tingling...

I also had meetings up in Tbilisi for a project I’m completely stoked about here. I’m officially the first man on the “leadership” of Camp GLOW: Girls Leading Our World. GLOW is a Peace Corps initiative; a girls’ summer camp led and organized by Georgians with PCVs’ assistance and advice to encourage girls to take a more active and prominent role as part of Georgia’s next generation of businesspeople, politicians, local leaders, and so on. Especially from the regions, where traditional gender roles really have limited their access to prominent positions in all fields in the country, girls will—along with Georgia, really benefit from greater participation in society.

The camp offers a number of programs, from women in the media, debate, public speaking, confidence building, guest speakers, and the usual fun camp trappings, all led by female role models. It’s an incredible and incredibly popular program in the five or so years it’s been going on, but hasn’t made it into the ethnic minority areas at all—which is where I kind of came in. I somewhat snapped over the winter after getting laughed at for washing dishes—women’s work—and decided to put my frustration into action. A few conversations with friends on the GLOW board, and before we knew it I ended up joining them in planning a short pilot camp in Ninotsminda we’re hoping to run this summer. This is going to take significant work—basically rewriting the curriculum to be appropriate for a non-Georgian speaking community, finding new funding, promoting it from zero in a town that’s never heard of it, building it from the ground up, basically. (I could go on tooting my horn, AREN’T I SO GREAT AND PROFESSIONAL??? HOW’M I DOIN’? HOW’M I DOIN’?) I guess I’ve been wearing it on my face and this letter that I’m so excited about it. My good friends and GLOW folks Katie and Jess kind of form the triumvirate on what we’ve dubbed “MiGlow” (minority GLOW), and I even get the little feather in my cap of “Minority Affairs Chair.” I’m getting a little self-conscious about how much hot air I’m blowing , but I’ve been dying for big-kid work. I’ve spent the past 6 months essentially teaching and hearing “Mister Kobin, do you like a pants? I like a cheese.”

In personal news, while in Tbilisi, I got the chance of crashing at an expat family’s house—a hell of a plush experience. The first time I’d seen a microwave in 9 months, I ate the most delicious bowl of grape nuts ever, and using Tide brand (not Barf brand, yes, Barf) detergent, I washed a whole hiker’s pack of dirty laundry, and wore delightfully dryer-shrunken-to-original-size jeans for the first time since June. Life was glorious.

I’m not sure if you all got wind back then, but I took a great trip with two of my close friends here, Kelly and the same Jess of GLOW renown, to Armenia’s capital, Yerevan back in January. While it was cold as saruits (ice), it was amazing. Yerevan is up in my list of favorite cities ever, stateside or abroad. While it lacks some of the living history feel of Tbilisi, it makes up for in an almost European (but not quite, which adds to it all) cosmopolitan feeling. I guess put short, Armenia’s diaspora has really helped it out. A foreigner doesn’t quite feel so much like a freak to be gawked at there, and there are offerings from other corners of the world in cuisine, music, and art, that don’t seem to be understood through distorted goggles (example: Pizza, Georgian style, is an inedible contraption in many restaurants that involves mayonnaise). Well, while in Yerevan I managed to not spend much more than $150 over four days as a tourist, yet I saw amazing live Jazz, ate the best pasta I’ve had in many, many years, regardless of geography, along with seeing a Sunday service at Etchmiadzin, the “Vatican” of the Gregorian Christian Church, touring the Armenian genocide monument, a modern art museum, a gorgeous piece of public architecture called The Cascade (a giant staircase up a long incline lined with fountains), eating remarkable Persian food, (real Persian food… Armenia borders Iran) and toured fascinating stone architecture all throughout the city. Along with this, I had my own nice benefit of seeing the center of culture of the ethnic group I locally serve in Georgia, and hearing and speaking the high-falootin’ city dialect of the language I’m learning, and the one I’ve learned as I’ve begun to forget Georgian at site.

Being surrounded by so much Armenian with the diversity of conversations of a city was awesome, it did for my spoken Armenian what weeks of tutoring might have over just a few days. Speaking in restaurants, transportation, stores, etc, etc. There’s only so many different conversations you can have in a very small town, so it’s hard to stretch the dialogue. So using Armenian in a capital really helped. But really the place is awesome. I’m definitely going to go back. Next up this summer, hopefully, is a bus trip to Istanbul (like a day and a half of driving by bus from Georgia’s black sea port, Batumi… masochistic in the extreme).

CURRENT DISTRACTION FOR SANITY:
Reading: Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi and a December ’07 issue of Rolling Stone (thanks to my Country Director for that contribution)

Grab-bag-o-thoughts, Episode I

1. I've lately found out that the –jan suffix-thing of endearment ("Mama jan," "Ryder jan," "hey babycakes jan") used in Armenian has its roots in Persian and likely the various Indo- languages of the Indo-European family, including Pashto, as is repeatedly depicted as well in The Kite Runner, a novel that takes place in Afghanistan, one I'm reading right now. The fact that I'm learning a language that has stuff in common, however few, with Pashto is freaking awesome possum.
   
2. Georgian TV just ran a spot for some sports show coming up this weekend, using the Star Wars theme. I don't think that would fly much in the states. I feel like that'd be like your local news opening with the theme to Indiana Jones.
   
3. I just got called up for jury duty. Classic! I'm sure they'll let me out of it, but if not, you all might be seeing me a lot sooner, and I want to go out for a drink at a place with microbrews on tap, and I'll be spending lots of time at Target just… having a religious experience. And reveling in the concept of flip flops in January.

One Dry Sock

I just wrapped up my first semester of teaching at Public #2, and more or less, depending on what exactly I'm measuring "success" to be, I'd call it a success. It coincided perfectly with my site visit by Peace Corps staff, and turned out to be a good week of professional introspection.

My Program Manager, Eka, the PC Country Director, and the NGO sector Program Manager came to Ninotsminda to touch base and see how I'm getting along with my counterpart and school in general, a routine part of service, and I think they were quite impressed. So was I, unexpectedly. I'd been out of the loop with my own school for about two weeks, due to a volunteer conference I had to attend near the capital, and a nasty bout with bronchitis that kept me up at the office in Tbilisi on medical for a few extra days, so I'd been a bit unprepared for the whole spiel by the time that it came around. That said, hats off to my counterpart and supervisor, who took the surprise of a staff visit well and were wonderful about it being a surprise (not an intended one; I just seemed to miss every opportunity to give them a heads up about it.

I was a bit worried that they'd come in and observe one of my older classes, where I'm still struggling with a terribly uphill battle of classroom management with the teenage boys. Not that it's bad for them to see my rough edges; Peace Corps Georgia has been at this long enough to know that well, teenagers are pretty much unmanageable around the world unless you happen to have a "horse whisperer" ability to get into their heads. I don't. Still, I had hoped to tell them of my worst challenges, but show them my greater successes. I lucked out. They came when I was to teach my fifth graders.

Let me tell you, I love my fifth graders. They're sweet, innocent, disproportionately bright, and just plain fun. I teach the class more than half in Russian since it's their first year of English, and while I can for sure hold my own in that language, I have plenty of silly mistakes, and they giggle forgivingly through each one. Every day when I walk in I get a dissonant blast of wholehearted "HELLO MISTER COBEAN! GOOD MORNING! HOW ARE YOU!" and it picks me up and pins a smile right to my face. I love these kids. Well, this morning I tell them "we have guests!" and they all excitedly stand up and smile for the Georgian and American that walk into the room with me. As I'd been out for almost two weeks, I didn't plan a lesson with my partner teacher, but she had totally come through for the both of us. Now, I've found that when the class is cooperative, I can totally improvise in such a situation and deliver a good lesson and make good use of myself (it's happened a few times before where we haven't been totally on the same page walking into the classroom, and I know how to turn that lemon into a decent glass of lemonade already). Still this time she was set for us. We gave a lesson on "I like/I love" along with fruits and vegetables and describing them with colors, and as usual was blown away at how good my youngins are. They were at their best despite two surprise visitors in the back of their room and soaked up the lesson. Two delightful highlights came when one child inadvertently professed his attraction to pears ("I love you, pear!") in response to my question "what fruit do you like?" and another informing me adamantly that apples are tasty when gray.

Anyway, following the lesson I had a series of meetings with the PC staff and my counterpart to discuss progress to date, and I realized that I may have been overcritical of my progress so far here. I think I set, without knowing it, really high standards for myself in the first semester, and got disappointed and guilty when I said to myself that homework turn-in is still low, test results are pretty bad, and my students aren't behaving themselves.

Then I realized I'd been basically just focusing on the challenges in my upper grades. My 5^th and 6^th grades are absolutely amazing. Success comes slowly, but more importantly, I know that more than half the kids in both those grades look forward to English with Mr Cobean, and smile with every right answer they get. Whether that's me, the lessons, or just the enthusiasm of youth I don't know but I'm pretty sure I'm helping at least contribute a positive feeling to a difficult language to pick up in a tiny mountain town in the South Caucasus.

I was going to bring up the glass half empty/half full metaphor, but something more appropriate came to mind. I walk home in snowmelt mud-puddly dirt roads about half the time of each week, and rarely come home with two dry socks. For some reason it's always my right sock that gets wet. Nonetheless, I still have one dry sock.

Keeping your head on straight in a teaching job like this is all about recognizing the one dry sock. I've got tons of dry socks at site: my school is very professional, well kept up, my faculty genuinely respects me as a peer, and those students that haven't caught the bug of malevolent puberty give me good effort, and will probably eventually start showing fruits of their toils. In general, I've got lots to be thankful for at my school. My counterpart and I occasionally have misunderstandings, most connected with language miscommunication, but we have a great and open working relationship.

I think I'm going to teach the younger grades more next semester, all the same; they just make me really happy even on the challenging days.

Plus, I get a kick out of realizing to myself every once in a while that my college degree landed me a gig where I can legitimately blame getting stuck behind a herd of cows for being late every once in a while.

Ninotsminda is mega cold these days, and I'm battening down the hatches for the winter months which obviously have already started (oh a good two months ago). But I've stockpiled music (you'll note the recent celebratory comment on facebook about finding some Talking Heads on the internet… not kidding), am teaching myself guitar, and am intensely immersed in learning Armenian these days, all winter lockdown pastimes, in case I get snowed in. So far, so good. Right now I'm dosing myself with one of my few mp3s of NPR's This American life, and if you guys want a good care package idea, a burned DVD full of podcasts from this show would probably make me weep with joy. Weep.

Weather and political situation permitting, I'm hoping to make a trip sometime soon enough to Erevan, and am really looking forward to it. I hope to get up a post about how Georgia-not-Georgia compares to Armenia-not-Georgia.

I'm sorry it's been so long since I've chimed in, but I'll be honest, life is pretty simple and repetitive, and it's hard to make a blog post over the injustice of the Donor Kebab place in Tbilisi going from 3 lari to 3.50 or the merits of rabbit shashlyk at the Ossetian restaurant. I mean, that was seriously a good 20 minutes of recent conversation, right there. I love it here, it's just

Still, I recently found a bar in the capital where a live Georgian band played the Dire Straits. I don't know if I've ever been happier.

… Until I stepped out to my house's entry and looked out the big window at the stars. Just caught two meteors running through Taurus and Orion—I wonder if there's a shower I'm not aware of this time of year. I love the sky at night. Being from Tucson, I thought I was lucky to have such a bright night sky there. Now I'm living in a town of 6,000 people; the nearest "big" city of 30,000 is two hours away and behind a mountain so I've got the best view of what's above ever. It's hard to make out the constellations there are so many stars. Oh! Awesome! Lila just by chance told me it's actually the best shower of '07, and it's coming on the 13^th. I'll be ready for it.

 

On Russian TV

Okay, I don't often hear myself speaking any language other than English. I don't hear much Russian because I haven't been around an american friend who's studied the language for a good year and a half. That means that the only Russian I hear is good Russian.

I'm watching some cop drama with my host brother and this episode features an ill-treated American. Yes there are plenty of things to be said about how ... "great" the acting is or the ridiculous Cold War motif, but mostly I'm all self conscious about how I must sound when I speak now. This guy sounds like a doof. I don't want to sound like a doof. This is the international, patriotic or something version of hearing your own voice in a tape recorder and saying "Why do I *sound* fat? Can someone *sound* fat? I sound husky."

On another TV note, I watch a lot of RuTV, Moscow's answer to MTV, as we've got a 12 year old teenager in the house. Some of the family hits include "The Greater the Love, the Lower the Kiss," interpreted as some kind of tantric Victoria's Secret ad in a Gothic cathedral, or the one with the girl riding a gigantic flying washing machine in the desert as a computer animated house with chicken legs parades around in the background. Where's the wholesome Christina Aguilera drrrty video when you need it?

There's this show that I watch on the Russian gov't channel, forgot the name, but it's essentially the grand epic sportsman battle of the millennium, at least as far as it's billed. Except it's mostly a show designed to demonstrate Russia's team of former olympians and various performing artists' athletic prowess against a broad sampling of international competitors. That means the USA, China, and ... Kazakhstan. Yep.

The events, treated with all the seriousness of the Boston Marathon plus a baptism or Freemasons initiation rite, include dressing up like a sumo wrestler and throwing beach balls into a hula hoop while an angry bull tries to gore you, dressing up like a mouse and running through a spinning obstacle course, and dressing up like a hillbilly and running on a conveyer belt, catching bread in a basket from a fishing pole. After such an epic competition, I will never watch the olympics again.

When the Americans started losing I started rooting for the Kazakhs, as there were a few cute women and a nice guy on the team and I had to find at least one reason to keep watching despite the number of sumo wrestlers I watched get gored by a stressed out bull in a godforsaken arena somewhere in France. (Yes, the show is recorded in Paris. The neutral ground venue adds a certain World Cup/No Man's Land je ne sais quoi touch to the whole affair). My host family told me I wasn't being patriotic enough. I'm sorry. When we can get our act together and learn to catch a freaking loaf of bread from a fishing pole while wearing a straw hat and black tooth wax, I'll be the first to take off my hat and sing You're a Grand Ol' Flag. Plus, rooting for the home team felt like somehow sanctioning the whole experience, elevating it from "guilty pleasure" to "hallowed feat of brain and brawn"

...And then I remembered that we televise bowling.

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Hail like Hell

If there’s one thing to convince an agnostic about the fire-and-brimstone vision of god, it’s golf ball-sized hail.

I often tag along on my host mother Marina’s work runs to nearby villages to meet with school officials. It’s a nice way to see familiar but different scenery. Really, they’re the same; Armenian villages in the south of Georgia can only be put together so many ways. You have your potholed dirt road, run-down buildings, haystacks, large-brick walls and tin roofs, all clustered together in the middle of nowhere. But then there’s the other side; in each one you don’t feel at all taken aback, overwhelmed; each feels made of the same stuff, so each feels homey. Then there are the little differences. Patara Khorenia has a lake, men washing their Лада cars at the bank on a Saturday afternoon. The nearby (and even closer to Turkey than Ninotsminda is) Orlovka is populated by “Old Believers,” a small sect of Christianity averse to the direction the East and Russian Orthodox churches evolved toward. Still, it’s fascinating that no matter how far out you go, still, there’s that “Enjoy Coca-Cola” sign hanging over the local market.

The other day on the way back from a quick visit to another school in Orlovka, black clouds appeared on the horizon. The kind that actually make you nervous, no matter how many Tucson monsoon seasons you’ve done. Tucson might put on quite the lightning show, but Ninotsminda has it beat on the “oh Jesus, find cover” factor. By the time we returned to Nino, a downpour had begun, but not a drop of rain was falling from these black clouds. Hail. All hail. Golf Balls. Pouring golf balls like the water comes down in Tucson in July. Aghas drove the rest of the length home tree to tree, hoping that a big one wouldn’t dent the roof or shatter the windshield. I love that the entire time, all I was thinking is this will be how I open late September’s blog post. Thanks God; you’ve just furthered the unhealthy self-absorption.

I’ve been teaching now for a week and a half, and it’s exhausting but good work. I’m pretty sure I’ll be working with the eleventh, tenth, seventh, and fifth graders, haven’t yet decided on whether I’ll also pick up the ninth or sixth graders as well. There’s more challenge and more work with the older kids, as I have to cut through the thicket of puberty to get anything in their heads; the flip side though is that there are those few really brilliant ones I’d really like to have a chance to work with before they’re off to university, if they go. If they’re not planning on it, I’d like to get them to the point of reconsidering that, or even applying to an exchange program that’d likely change their lives if they went. I won’t lie, there’s a bit of a saccharin “Dangerous Minds” plot in my dreams here. In all seriousness, though, that time abroad would be a career accelerator that I’m not sure many have thought much about. And it’s not like there aren’t hundreds of ways to study something in America on someone else’s bill. I’d really like to help the strongest ones find a way.

The fifth graders are a blast for mostly the opposite reason; they’re total blank slates with English. I taught them their first English phrases in Cyrillic and the Armenian alphabet, and teach in the class in Russian. They’re still young, so like children all across the world, they’re really loud, but they’re not yet too cool to learn.

We’ve been teaching without a schedule for the past two weeks, as it’s hard to figure out how to allocate the resources the right way in the beginning here. Due to this, I haven’t really been able to plan any lessons; rather I kind of do a tag-team improv thing with my counterpart teachers. It works more often than it doesn’t but it’s really really tiring. The daily process involves me “observing” until something gets really boring from the book and I scramble to come up with a communicative activity to save the day. Hopefully we’ll come up with a structured way of doing this once the schedule is finalized, so I can give my stomach lining and head a bit of a rest.

I’ve had some trouble with discipline lately, and find myself taking to all the tricks teachers have used in my upbringing with mixed results to handle the problems. I’ve had to break up teenage boys, I’ve guilt tripped, I’ve threatened with summoning the principal, but so far my favorite has been just shutting up and standing there. Silence is deafening, and it saves my own voice.
Still, each class has its gem student, and I love teaching to see what they’re capable of. I’m trying to get the eleventh graders comfortable with writing; I want them to start writing what will essentially become journal entries. It’s been an uphill battle to get them to do the homework, but I think eventually I’ll find the right difficulty-challenge level where they won’t mind taking care of it once a week. I have an ulterior motive, prompted by reading a book written by a Peace Corps volunteer in China, who learned tons about his site, Fuling, from the writing assignments of his university students. I hope to keep giving them assignments that kind of open my eyes to how they think and live here. It’s sneaky, but this is the whole mutual learning thing I’m after out here in the boondocks.

As far as family life goes, all’s more or less really well. Host dad and I bicker and laugh as much as always, and I really appreciate all the reality I get to taste. It’s strange to say, but I like hearing my host family get into quarrels, mom yelling at kid over homework, host sister with teenage eyerolls, etc. they’re so wonderfully real. There are people in the village that have begun referring to me as Aghas’s son; not totally sure what I think of that. It’s sweet, but I hope it doesn’t eventually interfere with my independence. Still, I love them all and feel really blessed to live exactly here for two years.

I think I got maneuvered into making burritos for the host family this weekend, the small and agreeable price to pay for bragging about the glory of Mexican cuisine. Hoping I don’t set the kitchen on fire. The nice thing about living in an Armenian village is that we actually have a plentiful tortilla equivalent. Armenian լավաշ (lavash) seems like it’ll make a really nice substitute. Hopefully I can line up an appetite with my time as honorary chef; my desire to eat is so erratic I can barely figure it out. Sometimes I’ll skip an entire meal and find myself starving, putting a Fanta and a Snickers in me between lessons to keep from crashing. Other times I down my weight in bread and cheese (death by հաց և պանիր). I’m sure that’s one of the many things that will eventually stabilize. I miss khachapuri; is that bad?

Dust off, bandage up and get back on the tskheni

So starts a new chapter of my life. That carries a number of meanings; beginnings and ends. I no longer live in Khidistavi; I am no longer in Georgia, even though I am in Georgia. I made it; the roughest part of Peace Corps (or so I am told), the mental boot camp that is pre-service training, is finally over. Though I've yet to begin anything I'd really call work, the past week has been sufficiently rough enough that the rest of this will be a comparative cake walk.

I swore in among some of the best friends I've ever had last Friday, the 24^th. The ceremony was held at a large, Soviet-ly beautiful theatre in Tbilisi, our oath (the same oath the President recites—moving up in the world, I am) presided over by the American embassy's Charge d'Affaires. Speeches were given, along with the usual song and dance (literally); it was a nice event, marking a fairly important point in my life. I just gave the government two years of my existence. This isn't the army; we can go home any time we want. Still, leaving after this point, having committed to long term development work and real personal relationships in places Americans don't often trek, being THE face of the United States, early departure is basically tantamount to a dishonorable discharge and a guilty conscience court martial.

For all the crap that's gone on in my personal life lately, I'm really, really proud that I made it up to that stage in Tbilisi. I'm in.

Aside from Peace Corps and US Mission staff, our audience was filled with the various training host families, new permanent site host families, and host organization (business, NGO, school) directors. It felt a bit like a second graduation, my host mother Irma and host brother Lasha from Khidistavi in the crowd, as well as my new host father Aghaz and school director Artush, having made the trip all the way from Ninotsminda to see me swear in.

The meeting between host family members during the reception was quite a moment. Remember that I'm serving in an area of Georgia that really doesn't speak Georgian; for my Arizonan friends, I'm working in Georgia's South Tucson. My host father here in Ninotsminda, though very eager to improve (we're talking about starting a Georgian speakers' club here already), doesn't speak very well, his main languages are Russian and Armenian. Irma, my host mother from Khidistavi, speaks comparable Russian; not very well, and Georgian is her first language. So one side says in far-too-fast Georgian how great a person I am, the other says he agrees in far-too-fast Russian, while leaving everyone in the dust (especially me) while sharing a word with my director in doesn't-matter-the-speed-I-can't-freaking-understand-Armenian Armenian.

I'll backtrack for a moment while I'm on my linguistic woe-is-me to say I really did well during training with the Georgian; I'm pretty happy about that. Though I definitely lost steam toward the end, me ukve saertod normalurad vlaparakob qartulad, da me es ena dzalian mik'vars—dzalian saintereso, dazhe lamazia. ukve upro msiamovnebs laparaki qartulad, vidre rusulad. Somkhuri—ekhla es skhva kitkhva, magram praktika aq iqneba. I'm already speaking pretty well in Georgian, and truthfully I actually have more fun using it now than I do my Russian. I managed to hit Intermediate-mid in Georgian, which, considering I only had two months of it, is a promising portent for what may come with Armenian. As of yet I haven't had my eureka moment with it. Still looks like a bunch of typos when I see it written, and it still sounds like a bunch of threatening gibberish to my ears. But, so did Georgian two months ago, and Russian sure as hell did when I was a freshman in college. So I'm sure I'll get over it.

I've been in Ninotsminda already for six days and am experiencing a bit of the culture shock that comes from having been Georgianized quite efficiently, while the bun is still in the oven as far as Armenianization goes. But I've noticed my frustration waning a bit, and realize that if I just land a tutor for the Armenian, it will come before I know it, all the while as I lean on the Russian to prove I'm not linguistically retarded. A few months and all will be fine. Still, right now, I get pretty cranky pretty quickly, as I try to figure out what the hell is going on each time I hear "Inche! Skuzkuzenk gnatselem hamar voj karogh uzum em haryur vraastanum e! Vostegh! Enkerenere!" (most of these are actual words, some are random sounds I keep hearing and feel like I should know, but don't). Thank god almighty I speak Russkiy.

If there's going to be one big psychological challenge for me it's the remoteness from my closest friends in the group. Since the closest person I had to a sitemate decided to go home, I'm left without anyone nearby—she was to be twenty minutes away in Akhalkalaki. There are a few people in Akhaltsikhe about two hours away, but my nearest good friend is a 7 hour, 17 lari marshrutka ride away up in Gori. That's going to put me on edge. Peace Corps offered me a site change after Colleen left but I really want to try and make it work here in Nino. My host family is positively wonderful and my school is a real diamond in the rough. They say you usually only get two of three things how you want them in a Peace Corps post: family, job, site. So I'm very thankful for having two of them perfect and will give it a very determined and committed shot, which probably just means I'm staying but don't want to say that yet.

The family. This is a great group of people. I swear to god Aghaz and I are going to be an interesting pair for two years; my host father and I jokingly quarrel in that "welcome to the family, go cut the grass" kind of way about 30 times a day. I do something American, thus wrong, or in my own patent OCD Ryder way, and blame it on my American upbringing, and then get a lecture about how I'm ridiculous. I then, being myself, proceed to explain to him that I've been doing this or that my little American neurotic way for 23 years and nothing he can say will convince me to change my behavior, at which point he tells me he will stop feeding me or he'll go out back and get the sickle, which usually proceeds to us fake boxing in the living room, which usually leads to a coffee break and a hell of a lot of laughter. This man is awesome. He's as pushy and argumentative as I am, and you can tell he loves to bother me about my unsettling American ways of doing everything as much as I love unsettling him with them. Hard to put it, but there's just a really fun bond I've got with the guy already. Our relationship is something akin to a constant mutual international noogie.

Marina, the host mother, turns out to not just work for the local Educational Resource Center, but is actually its director. She speaks fluent Georgian (that's a bit out of the ordinary here), and just finished up a "night school" class teaching hopeful future police officers critical conversational Georgian. She's really smart and is positively a great person, and plays along well in my constant spar with Aghaz. Every once in a while I'll just fire a smile about whatever the current topic is—my sandals, the way I eat bread, my distaste for sugar—her way and she'll give me one back. Some kind of "yeah, he thinks I'm crazy for not liking the orange ones either. Knock the brim of his cap…that always works for me."

In general, this is my kind of family: warm, intelligent, happy, and already comfortable making fun of me for all my weird particularities. Basically, I don't at all feel like a doted-on guest, which is SO refreshing. I make the coffee, and tonight I helped Aghaz chop wood out back. I'm still cringing over the teenagers' (Mania and Vladimir) taste in music—mostly russkiy pop, but we've got two years to get used to this. eventually I'll be shamelessly singing along to Via Gra and Ruki Vverkh, and they'll be moping to Elliott Smith in no time.
School doesn't start for another three weeks, but I do have a summer camp to plan (basically after-school day-care style activities). I'm likely going to teach 'em kickball, capture the flag, and play as many games as I can come up with with a bag of water balloons as possible. Dylan, I'm eating my words of polite ridicule about Ultimate Frisbee. I'd get such exotic American sports brownie points if I had a disc and the knowledge of what the hell to do with it to make it "ultimate." Oh well.

So, life is churning around, I suppose a bit more violently lately than normal. Oh well, that's how it works I guess. Having it all happen again is starting to show me that what we had, while not a mistake, was just not right for the long run. We were passing strangers that met on the doorstep to new lives, and that never ends well if you don't admit it.I can immediately throw myself into work, real, productive, bigger than her crap work. That's huge for me. So, I'm really looking forward to tomorrow, when I officially declare my summer "vacation" over.


Awesome. I freaking live in the Caucasus. I just met my first Chechen. Awesome.
I'll write again when I've got more news from the front.

Հաջողություն,
Ryder-jan (Րայդեր ջան).

PS: INTERNET UPDATE: The satellite dish on the net café in Nino broke, so I'm cut off unless I take a cab to Akhalkalaki or quickly use my host mom's computer at work. That said, the new date for internet at home sounds like late September, so get your Skype paraphernalia ready and I'll see you on facebook, as I stalk your profiles while you all sleep. Creepy.