Every Single Thing I Did This Summer

A bus stop in between nowhere and nowhere, Khulo.

So it was summer and I’m a school teacher… so I didn’t have to do anything, right? No. Despite many warnings that I would be bored out of my mind during these last two months (I arrived at site on July 7th and school started on September 15th), I was very busy.

My host sister Diana & I by the very historical bridge near my house.

The main thing I was busy with was ~*integrating*~ into my community, which overlapped with the other main thing, work. Peace Corps likes to tell us that this is a 24/7 position, in which we are constantly working towards the three goals of PC: supplying qualified people to address the country’s needs (in my case, an English teacher), representing and teaching about the United States, teaching Americans about Georgia, and the PC way of doing those three things focuses heavily on integration. Integration basically means being accepted as a member of your community, and being able to use that position to stay safe, content, and effective. And of course, a large part of being able to integrate comes from learning to speak the language, so I have been studying Georgian for an hour a day on my own, and trying not hard enough to find a tutor. In addition to that, I spend a fair amount of time drinking coffee with my host mom and grandmother, doing yoga with my host sister (everyday!), wandering around my area, and picking fruit in one of the family’s many gardens/fields/vegetable gardens/other fields (I know how to name all of these in Georgian).

Learning how to make compote, a fruit drink, from my host mother.

Aside from all of that integration, I also had work duties. The week after arriving the new Keda volunteers and our counterparts were invited to help out at a camp organized by the local Education Resource Center, were the supervisor of all of Keda’s schools works along with a bunch of other people and a Peace Corps Response (PCR) volunteer. The camp was mostly planned before we got there, but it was a good opportunity to work with my counterpart, other volunteers, and some locals interested in education. My counterpart and I were responsible for the daily reading hour, which was perhaps not the most exciting camp activity, but the students seemed relatively engaged. I also helped out at another volunteer’s summer school later in the summer, where I taught a lesson and activity related to hobbies and taught a lot of extremely useful vocabulary, like “bird-watching” and “cacti.” My final collaboration for the year was at another volunteer’s girls basketball camp, where, thankfully, I was responsible for taking photographs and not playing basketball.

Keda Camp students with posters they made about (a very abridged version of) The Tempest

Another big side project of mine is GLOW, short for Girls Leading Our World. GLOW is an NGO started by PCVs that is slowly moving towards being Georgian led, and deals with girl’s empowerment through summer camps and conferences. I was selected to be on the grants & finance committee with a G16, and will be writing grants and dealing with other aspects of GLOW’s finances. This summer I also had the opportunity to attend one of GLOW’s two camps, and worked with a group of 7 girls over the course of the week. It was a very interesting experience, and I really enjoyed getting to know the girls and the Georgian counselors, who are all university students close to my age. At the camp girls learn about a very wide variety of topics that are minimally covered in Georgian schools,

We made a bunch of cheesy posteri to decorate for GLOW

A found supply fashion show! The fish dress didn't win but it should have.

Me, Analise, and Cherish, some of the G17 GLOW team.

Another thing that kept was busy was the 15 hour summer camp that all first-year volunteers are obliged to hold at their school. Mine was 3 hours a day over the course of 5 days, and required 3 or 4 planning meetings with my counterpart and director beforehand and a trip to Batumi to buy supplies. Our camp was an English camp with a focus on environmentalism, with an hour of English, an hour of environmental education, and an hour of active activities planned for each day. As with so many things, much did not go according to plan but I would still call it an overall success. My counterpart took the lead for most of the English lessons, teaching more formal grammar content while I provided some games and fun activities. I led sessions on environmentalism, pollution, and appreciating nature and also made the children pick up trash with only small amounts of candy bribery. We also played volleyball, went on a poorly planned hike to a very beautiful but also very distant waterfall, and had a potluck picnic at the historical bridge nearby, featuring a lot of potatoes and some wildly dangerous bridge jumping.

The English part of camp, featuring my classroom & one of my counterparts, Nineli.

A nature appreciation activity that even my director, Inga, got excited about.

They were already tired, and none of us knew how much hike there still was to go...

But also! Who knew such a beautiful & giant waterfall was here?

I spent a lot of the picnic picking up trash and putting it into a trash bag that someone else took away from the site, but the next time I walked to school I saw that it had been thrown on the side of the road into my host family’s field. It was very disappointing, because I felt as though nothing that I said during the five hours that week when we had talked about environmentalism and appreciated nature had gotten through. I couldn’t bring myself to pick it all up again. It’s still sitting there, every time I walk by. Maybe I’ll bring a bag down tomorrow, now that everyone who reads my blog knows it’s there too. And then I will try to teach it again, but differently, and try to remember what was said to me to make me care.

One weird picnic picture, and then all of my devices died and I went swimming.

I am also on a Peace Corps committee called the Diversity Working Group, which deals with issues related to volunteer diversity. We are still figuring out what exactly we are going to do for the next year, but we are hoping to provide opportunities for PCVs and PC staff to talk about their experiences, learn from each other, and learn about diversity related issues. Our last meeting was in Borjomi, which was a nice place to meet.

Olivia (a DWG member) & Annie, the education volunteer lucky enough to live in Borjomi.

Finally, during the month of September teachers are required to go to school every day, so I went too. Generally they seemed to prepare a little and chat a lot, but it was a good opportunity to get to know some of my new co-workers and use the school’s wifi before school started. Everyone usually stayed for about one or two hours around 11-12, and sometimes there was coffee and snacks. I was told to be there at 10 but nobody else was ever there that early. I kept coming at 10 because the weather was nicer for walking and I can get a fair amount of work done in a silent building with wifi that restricts access to social media and video content.

My school, decorated for camp.

Plus I’ve been trying to study a little Arabic everyday so I don’t forget it all and studying for various exams and also trying to learn English since apparently I teach that now.

I also went to a surprise funeral with all of my coworkers. I thought I was going on an excursion, but no. There was still hiking involved.

In addition to all of that important work stuff, I’ve also been able to see a little bit more of Georgia, though I need to work faster if I want to see it all before I leave.

A view of deep Shuakhevi, the neighboring region, from the funeral.

The first place I visited was Vaio, my friend Cherish’s site. I had to stay because my last marshutka is at around 8:30pm and I had been invited to a birthday dinner. Her house is at the end of an hour-long hike that you only usually get a ride for half of, but it is a beautiful village and her host family is extremely sweet, so it’s worth the trek.

The aforementioned birthday feast, pizza in the foreground :D

The view from Cherish's house~

Cherish, her host mom, and a host aunt visiting from Russia.

The next place I visited was Zvare, my friend Jenna's old site. We just went for the day, to hike, swim, and visit her host family, but it was lovely.

Jenna's ex-host-dogs

More lush Adjaran forest views

Post-swim snacks with Daniel, Jenna, and Jenna's host brother.

My first real trip was to Borjomi, for the DWG meeting. Borjomi is known for being home to the favorite mineral water brand of the Soviet Union, also called Borjomi. While I don’t dislike it, it’s not my brand of choice (more on that later). Two of us stayed in a very nice guesthouse overlooking the city that we happened upon after our reserved one seemed to be unoccupied by any staff members. Guesthouse #2 had a pleasantly all-female environment, with Olivia and I, two backpackers, and two women who lived there. While I feel very comfortable at my host family’s home, it’s nice to be able to make your morning coffee without a bra on. The morning after our meeting we went to some hot spring pools in the Borjomi park that I had read about. They turned out to be rather far down a path through the woods, though that hadn’t stopped the masses from getting there. We had met up with one of the volunteers in Borjomi, Annie, and ended up sitting in the icy river more than swimming in the small and crowded pools. I am ever on the lookout for more hot spring opportunities.

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I have had two meetings in Tbilisi so far, and more to come. It’s tragic because Tbilisi is between 6.5 and 9 hours from my site and between 40 and 60 lari, but glorious because Tbilisi is a wonderful city that I would never otherwise go to because it’s too far. Tbilisi is fun because I can dress up and there are always other volunteers around including ones I haven’t met and there are different types of food and beautiful buildings and tourists that I can speak Arabic with and several cablecars. I also use these opportunities to go to the PC office, where I get most of my mail and books from the library and very useful things from the free bin (All of my envelopes! A real towel! A very large scarf!). Despite all of this, I am dreading the next time I have to go back.

Tbilisi's bathhouse street, aka my 2nd favorite place in Georgia.

Also hummusbar has the best food I've had in Tbilisi and it's vegan ?! (Full disclosure these pics were taken during PST, but still in the summer)

On the way back from one trip to Tbilisi I stopped in Kvishkheti, turning a 9 hour marshutka ride into a 3 and 6 hour one. It was nice and weird to see my PST host family and the village, and I hope to go back again soon because I really want to maintain the relationships that I built there.

Remember these guys? <3 <3

While most of the trips I took this summer were work related or I was tagging along on a trip that someone else planned, there was one wonderful one that was all me. While researching my new site during PST I happened to read in passing about a mountain festival called Shuamtoba in Khulo, a nearby region. All I could find online were some pictures of it and evidence that it had occurred in previous years and may have once been the site of some illegal electioneering. The dearth of information obviously entranced me, and I had to go. I asked my friend Natali at the Keda tourism office about it and she called her Khulo counterpart and confirmed that it would occur during the first week of August, and it would be in a village called Beshumi and not in the town of Khulo. Despite my efforts, this was the most information I could find, until another volunteer happened to go their with her host family and sent me the phone number of a guy I could call to reserve a cabin. I did not reserve a cabin but I did recruit two of my fellow Kedalebi, Daniel and Cherish, to go up with me, a marshutka ride away of an unknown distance.

Marshutka views on the way to Khulo.

We paused in the town of Khulo for a bit after losing Cherish, which provided me with the opportunity to ride one of Georgia’s most scenic and underrated cablecars, and to order a meal that consisted of 7 hotdogs and a cucumber tomato salad. After we found Cherish we stopped to get her a beer after a difficult journey, and there encountered a man who decided that we would be riding in his marshutka to Beshumi. We decided not to argue and were rewarded with a small supra in a lovely field, and all the chacha we didn’t want to drink.

Happy **~~~**

Ugh just look at that cablecar

Daniel, a guy with a marshutka, and some of the most painful chacha I've ever experienced~

Eventually we reached Beshumi and wandered around until we ran into Daniel’s host family, who fed us a delicious meal and helped us find a cabin for the night. Cherish fell down the stairs of the host family’s cabin and sprained her ankle, though we didn’t know it at the time and didn’t let it stop us from our wandering. We had planned to camp if we couldn’t find lodging, but it kept raining. There was definitely not lodging though, since we had decided to come to a popular resort village during it’s most popular weekend. People come up from Adjara and Akhalsitkhe with their children because the dry air is apparently good for their health. The woman who rented us a cabin on the first night didn’t charge us because she felt bad about not having space for the second night, and they had had good experiences with prior PCVs. On the second night Brittany’s host family came back and was kind enough to let us stay in their cabin. I may have learned a lesson about the virtues of advance planning from this, but I’m not sure.

Beshumi has a lot of cabins and not much else

Jenna showed up with her host fam and I made her hike with me

Right before the rain

By the time we got to the actual festival we were already tired and it was hot and sunny above the treeline. We watched a series of very old men (I think one was 94!) dance traditional Georgian dances, and then a lot of other people dance them, and then we saw the head minister of Adjara come and say something. There were balloon sellers and fruit sellers and a lot of people with umbrellas to hide from the sun. There were also mysterious food stands with beautiful displays of local specialties that I could not quite figure out the source or purpose of, but after lingering by one long enough someone offered me a plate and I had some delicious sniori (cheese layered thing) and baklava. The highlight of the day was the horse races, which were the exact opposite of horse races that I have attended in America. They seemed to consist of all the local boys who had horses running in a big circle in a rocky and uneven field, with spectators permitted anywhere they felt safe enough to stand. The majority of the horses didn’t even finish the race, including, tragically, the one that I had bet my 5 lari on.

Mystery food and handicraft stand

The oldest dancer (94!) and a bride who just got married at the festival, awwww

A festival attendee and her pet chicken

The highlight of my festival experience~

I’ve also been to Batumi a few times because I have to go through it anytime I want to go somewhere other than Adjara, and it’s easy to come down and say hello to people rolling through. I go for the beach and the food, and occasionally for the bazaar or the cultural experiences. My best Batumi moment so far was walking to Carrefour and buying ingredients for spaghetti though. And also drinking 20 tetri cups of KVASS. I also went on a tour of the Batumi water company's intake and processing centers by tagging along on a water-company sponsored English camp excursion. It was strange and delightful.

Fun fact: on a water company tour, behind every door is... more water

The apartment facade of my dreams.

My final vacation of the summer was one night in Ureki, otherwise known as the beach with actual sand. Rachel and Dora and I went and buried ourselves in the magnetic sand and late afternoon light. The sand is supposed to have some variety of healing property. There were so many people, but no ATM. I bought pickled herring but it was very slimy and strange. Ureki was peak Georgian tourist town, and I loved it.

The beach with the sand

Also the most beautiful bus stop in the most perfect light

SNAKE UPDATE: My Peace Corps live snake sighting number has been raised to 10.

High quality evidence of one snake, by the family cow shed.

The PST Behemoth

Reminiscing about early summer in Kvishkheti~

Hello! Sorry I forgot about my August post, I'll try to make it up for you by posting a little more often in September. This particular post is for my most dedicated readers (<3 u mom) and for potential Georgia trainees who want to know what pre-service training (PST) is all about... in depth.

PST was not alll about Sunday day-off hikes, but they were a lovely time.

I talked about the first half of PST earlier, but I left out a few details that I will mention here. First, PST is always centered around a city not far from Tbilisi. This year it was outside of Khashuri, but I believe the last few years before this one it was outside of Gori (a city famous for being Stalin's hometown that you can read about here). The trainees are divided into clusters of 5 or 6, and the clusters are distributed in the city or surrounding villages, with at most two clusters in any town or village. My cluster  and another were in Kvishkheti (read more here), a resort town about 20 minutes from Khashuri.  During the first month or so of PST we spent the mornings in the Kvishkheti school studying Georgian, ate lunch at a host family's house in Kvishkheti, and then went to Khashuri by Peace Corps (PC) marshutka for English Education project (EE) technical training. I am an English Education volunteer, so this post is about the training I went through specifically, the Individual and Organizational Development (IOD) volunteers go through a very similar process but with different content. The technical sessions took place at a public school in Khashuri and covered topics including classroom management, how to teach grammar, teaching multi-level classes, monitoring and evaluation, PC data collection tools, and numerous other boring but very useful topics. About once a week we had a "Hub Day" where the IOD and EE trainees all came together and we were trained on PC-wide topics, including medical, safety and security, policies and procedures, PC committees and secondary projects, and more. We also were the recipients of a classic PC Georgia combo: the vaccine-coffee break.

Our school in the summer, so much greener than when we arrived.

During the next part of PST we had practicum, which consisted of teaching practice lessons at the school we had been studying at. During these three or four weeks we taught in the mornings, took an hour for lunch, and then came back to the school for our language classes. Eight or nine hours a day in the same building made the days seem very long. I enjoyed having two clusters in Kvishkheti because it was nice to have ten people to spend 12 hours a day with 6 days a week instead of just five, but when it came to coordinating lesson planning and timing with the three counterparts we were working with, having that many people was a logistical nightmare. We were supposed to teach as often as possible with the counterpart teachers, but because there were so many of us we often paired up and never taught more than once a day. The pairing was a bad thing because we were also paired with the counterpart and then there were three people teaching one 45-minute lesson, which was far too many people. There are worse things than a trial-by-fire lesson planning PST experience though, because it has been so nice working one-on-one with my counterpart now, having that to compare it to.

For many people in our group, myself included, this was our first real English teaching experience. I was an apprentice English teacher at an English-as-a-Second-Language summer school for recently arrived refugees and immigrants in Oakland during the summer before coming here, but that was more of a teacher's assistant role than a teaching one, and I had taught classes to refugees at an internship, but nothing like actually teaching a classroom full of students. the students were generally pretty excited to have us there (except for 8th grade but I think there's a universal lack of excitement in 8th grade) and were sweet but talkative. I didn't think the teaching was that bad, but one of my observors told me that I should work on my confidence and maybe try practicing in front of a mirror :/. It was a good opportunity to see how Goergian classes are taught, what the English textbooks are like, and to experiment with techniques and activities before we got to the school we would be at permanently. I think the main goal of PST is to have us make all of our bad or weird or awkward first impressions and learn from them before we get to permanent site, and I think it works.

It was also all of our first time working with a Georgian partner, and some people in our group struggled with that element more than the teaching part. I found that saying hello to all of the teachers every day and being fairly assertive (standing up when it was the time we agreed I would teach, reaching out to the teachers regularly and repeatedly) solved most of my problems. It's hard to work with people without building relationships with them and all ten of us mostly inexperienced teacher-trainees were kind of thrown at these three teachers for a whirlwind three weeks of lesson planning and lessons three or four days a week, so I can understand why they weren't always excited to work with us. We had nothing to do but lesson plan and study Georgian, but the teachers we worked with had children and grandchildren and entire farms to attend to after school as well. Eventually they warmed up to us, and one of my favorite moments with a counterpart was one day when a group of us was taking an after-school walk we saw one of the teachers tending her grapes and she came over to chat. We received a brief lecture on the history of the town and heard about her son that she doesn't think works hard enough in his office job, and I realized that I didn't know anything about these women outside of what was directly related to teaching and that I wanted to do much, much better with my permanent site counterpart.

Our summer camp, chaotic but a good learning experience.

After we were done with practicum we had a summer camp to plan, another occasion where having ten people at the same school was kind of a mess. At this point both of our clusters realized that we hadn't done anything to build a relationship with the school's director, and now we needed to use the school after the school year had ended and didn't know how to contact her or feel comfortable doing so. Instead, we took the easy PST way out and our very kind (too kind) Language & Cross-Cultural Facilitators (LCFs aka Georgian language teachers) did the contacting and requesting for us. This was another situation that I was determined not to repeat at site, and one that I wouldn't be able to because my lovely LCF, Lela, would be off living her life and not constantly available to answer questions and translate and explain and do everything that she did for us in PST. We were given about three days to plan our camp, and then another day to incorporate feedback into our written plan before we started. We made posters and told children to come, and they did! Word travels fast in villages, and there isn't that much to do if you're at home during the summer. On the first day we learned about the importance of having back-up plans, as we flew through most of our games and activities in half the time we had allotted. Our management and leadership style was somewhat akin to some Anarchist collectives that I have known, but with the added stress of having 30 children running around you as you try to make decisions. The summer camp ultimately went pretty well despite some rough spots, and I learned a lot from it that I applied to my also mandatory summer camp at site. Working with ten minds does leave one with a wealth of ideas. During this period we were back to language in the morning, camp and technical in the afternoons, and occasional Hub Days.

Our site placement map, lovingly made out of masking tape by PC staff.

Me and my Peace Corps assigned "megobari" (friend), and now sitemate, Jenna.

After the summer camp we had our site placements, where we all stood around a masking tape map of Georgia and opened enveloped with our permanent site placements and then stood on the map. It was nice to visualize who we would be near, though alas most of my clustermates and close friends were far from me. It turns out that I am the G17 furthest from Tbilisi (and everywhere else except for Batumi). After that we went to Borjomi, a resort town known for bottling the Soviet Union's favorite mineral water (also called Borjomi), for the Supervisor's Conference, where we met our new directors and went to some sessions on working with people from other cultures and did get-to-know-you activities. It was at a beautiful hotel with a pool and sauna and I was torn between wanting to start my relationship with my director, Inga, off right and wanting to go to the pool. I think I managed to strike the right balance because Inga and I are on good terms and I got to go to the nice pool before budget cuts mean that our conferences have to be at less fancy establishments.

My director Inga and I after the conference, in a slightly over-full PC marshutka, headed to Khashuri so we could catch another marshutka onward.

The day after the conference we went with our directors to our sites for site visits. This was a three day visit where we met our host families and counterparts and got to see where we would be living and working for the next two years. The most important thing that I discovered was that I did not in fact live in the village that my school was in. Instead, I live about a kilometer down the road in a place at the intersection of villages with at least four possible names. To this day I am not 100% sure where I live, and I get the impression that my host siblings aren't sure either. The site visit was odd because I then went back to Kvishkheti and had two weeks left of PST where we covered final issues related to transitioning to permanent sites and working with teachers and final Georgian lessons, but the whole time I and almost everyone else was ready to just go and start what would be our lives for the nexxt two years. I adore my PST village and host family, but knowing that I would be living somewhere else and after two and a half months of training and months of application and interview and medical and legal clearance I was very ready to go. And then eventually we did, after a long journey to a long ceremony in a rainy Tbilisi my host mom, director, and I set off once again for site. We left Tbilisi at around 3 or 4 pm and got to my house at 1 am. I was asleep when we arrived and didn't say bye to my director, but she has forgiven me.

Saying goodbye to our LCFs with khatchapuri and tiramisu they made for us (we made them breakfast earlier)

A last toast to the Kvishkheti krew.

First glimpses of Batumi, the seaside city that I go through any time I want to leave Adjara (or go to anytime I want a wider variety of food or the beach).

My director and I stopped for about 20 minutes to stretch our legs and take pictures, after 4 hours of driving, with another hour and a half to go.

The Black Sea!

Batumi has a new and strange and lovely skyline.

I wonder what it will be like in the winter...

My new home! My room is on the far left of the second floor.

The approach to my new school.

The flag of the Adjaran Autonomous Republic painted on my school.

The road to my house, paved in 2017.

The view from my bedroom window.

The historical bridge that's the only thing that shows up when you Google my area.

My counterpart Nineli, an administrator Mzisa, and I on my first visit to the school.

A dead beetle. I hope to see more of these (but alive)!

This hammock was a joy to encounter.

This little porch jutting off from my family's yard and overlooking the river is one of my favorite spots.

My host family mostly grows food but there are some flowers too :)