(Slightly Over) One Year!

A typical Adjaran May day, storm rolling in (as seen from my bedroom door)

People often say things like "Peace Corps changed me!" and I used to secretly look down on those people, since teaching English for two years in Georgia didn't seem like such a big deal to me - many Georgians will do it for a lot longer than I will. However, despite my best efforts, Peace Corps has indeed changed me in significant ways:
- I not only willingly eat plain pasta (for breakfast!), I actively look forward to it. I am planning on making my host mother teach me how to cook plain pasta in such a delicious way, so that I can continue to eat this in America.
- I clean my shoes on a daily basis. Apparently I've been a slob for my entire life up until this year, who knew!?
- I am now absolutely confident that I do not wish to be a high school teacher for the rest of my life, and I also respect my teachers considerably more than I used to. Thanks guys~

12th grade's last day/ბოლო ზარი was Friday, but they stopped bringing books & coming to class in January -_-

Life-changing experiences aside, the last year has been weird and fast and beautiful and busy. I'd never written a grant before, and now I feel like I am constantly writing grants and then dealing with the aftermath (actually receiving them). I have an intern (!!!!), and I am trying very hard to treat her well and have this be an educational and helpful experience, since I'm fundamentally opposed to unpaid internships to begin with. I have taught many classes and my younger grades at least seem to enjoy them. My counterpart and I have started an English club that meets weekly, I've made them make zines and hopefully soon we will have the technology to watch movies & do other ~*fun*~ ~*English*~ ~*activities.*~ My English spelling skills have deteriorated drastically. I live with a very sweet host family. I have made friends, Georgian, and American (and more!). I have forgotten a lot of Arabic, but learned a lot of Georgian, and replaced all of the Russian grammar I learned in college (not much) with random food words. I have learned how to play several initially incomprehensible Georgian card games, and have played much more table tennis than I ever had previously. I know what the past perfect is now. I know an unexpected amount about Georgian political parties. I have eaten delicious food products in many different forms. I have learned how to make a new dumpling form. I have been to so many beautiful places - Chiatura twice, the Kutaisi amusement park in the aftermath of rain, Narikala at 7am, and a lot of baths. I go hiking alone, and I have seen a (dead) jackal, a (dead) weasel (stout? mink? ferret?), a (dead) mole, and 2 (dead) hedgehogs - unfortunately, I live next to a highway. I have 33 plants.

My adorable club students making books with my counterpart Nineli.

An awkward pic of me & the mayor as I add to my extensive certificate collection.

I waited to write my 1 year reflection because the family dog died right about then and the post that I was writing in my head was something like "My Peace Corps Experience Has Been A Stream of Deaths," which isn't exactly untrue but leaves out a lot of other things. I then wrote more but decided against the blog-as-diary and against sharing other people's personal tragedies to explain my experience here so far, but here's some Mickey:

A sweet & weird baby dog.

<3

Hopefully I'll start writing often enough that everything doesn't pile up into unwieldy unstructured posts like this again, but keep your hopes low... Aside from writing more, goals for the next year include:
- more lesson planning/professional development work with both of my counterparts
- daily Georgian study & daily yoga
- write a newspaper article about Keda
- apply for and get into grad school
- visit my coworkers & Georgian friends more
- visit every (accessible) region of Georgia that I haven't made it to yet (Samegrelo & Zemo Svaneti, Racha-Lechkhumi & Kvemo Svaneti, Mtskheta-Mtianeti, & Kvemo Kartli)
- figure out how to predict when my host family will eat meals so that I can join them
- spend less time in cities & more time at home but
- spend less time in my room on my computer.

On that note, until next time!

Celebrating Adjaran poet laureate Fridon Khalvashi on May 17, his son Zaza's birthday.

I climbed a tree for these~

Happy Ramadan from a village near mine!

Mid-PST ANNOUNCEMENT

Zach #1, me, Jon, and Vadood under the chestnut tree where a man named Giorgi feasted after winning some battle in 1609
Photo: Racheli

Hello!

I am still alive. I am too busy (and too not-internet having) to blog regularly, but Georgia has been pretty good so far. I am in a littleish (somewhere between 1,800 and 4,000 people) village called Kvishkheti which is outside of a small city called Khashuri. I live with a host family of 7 people, 3.5 cows, many chickens, a pig, a dog, and a lot of barn swallows.

My host siblings Anano and Datchi eating leftovers from a holiday meal. There are a lot of holidays, I'm ok with it.

My host mom Nana and I, a selfie was obligatory as soon as I entered the house

My beautiful house for three months.

In the mornings I either learn Georgian for 4 hours or I teach English for 45 minutes and watch another volunteer and a Georgian counterpart teach for the remainder of the morning. At ~12:30 or 1 we (my 4 cluster mates and I) leave the Dmitri Kipiani Public School for lunch at one of our houses, which may be either across the street or like a mile and two bridges away.

Lunch is the biggest meal of the day, and apparently pre-service training (PST) lunches are about as good as it gets - a typical one might include soup (often borsht), cutleti (basically very garlicky hamburger patties), bread, khatchapuri (cheese -filled bread), lobiani (bean-filled bread), cheese, cucumbers, tomatoes, a salad (usually cabbage), a plate of whole green onions or parsley or tarragon, plum or tomato sauce, salt, some variety or potato dish, cake or candy, coffee, and juice. We are not permitted to drink wine at lunch. After lunch, if we taught in the morning we have Georgian lessons, and if we didn't teach we go to Khashuri for technical sessions.

Example lunch, Allison's house

Kvishkheti's school when we first arrived and the grapes weren't growing yet.

Khashuri feat. Vadood, me, Zach #2, and Olivia #1. Photo: Mark #1

We take a Peace Corps marshutka there, which takes about 20 minutes and is the most peaceful part of my day (usually). The afternoon sessions are on various PC things like data collections or on English teaching, which is very helpful for those of us that don't have any real English teaching experience (me.), but they can feel very, very long. We do that five days a week, we get Sundays off, and one day a week is usually a "Hub Day," where all 55 trainees get together and listen to different Peace Corps lectures, usually the more general ones about health and culture and inclusivity and all that. Those are also long but they are at a snazzy hotel (the only hotel) with wifi, coffee breaks, and fancy bathrooms.

In the evenings I wander around Kvishkheti, hang out with my cluster and the other cluster in KV, look at birds, help my host sister and host mom with English, eat dinner alone because my fam eats at like 5, study Georgian, read books, lesson plan and make materials for classes, sometimes eat second dinner with the fam, and then I go to sleep at like 10:30 or 11, which is crazy early compared to my American schedule but I think I'm adjusting alright to the village life.

A Soviet ruin from one of my walks.

Host family dinner at my host mother's parent's house - another volunteer, Rachel, lives here.
Feat. Dato, Valerie, Mariam, Datchi, Anano, Nana, and Rachel.

We have a lot of rules about where we can go and how late we can be out, so I haven't gone too far from my village yet - I'm in Gori right now for job shadowing, but for my other free days I have staying in Kvishkheti and gone hiking, I've gone to the site of the Soviet Union's favorite mineral water spring in Borjomi, I've stayed overnight in the village next to ours, Tezeri, and I've gone back to Khashuri for the day just to eat and hang out somewhere new. I still have yet to go to Tbilisi proper, but I'm not too worried - I have two entire years after training to do that.

Day off in Khashuri

KV hiking krewe - Allison, me, Josh #1, Kaigler, Dora, Tylar, Kevin, Jon, Matthew #1 - before the unexpectedly long hike~
Photo: Racheli (ty!)

Orientation & Staging

Bertrand Goldberg's Marina City

It's the last night of orientation - I've been with the same 58 people on the outskirts of Tbilisi for the last week and it's been weird. The U.S. Embassy and a MacDonald's are in view but out of reach. None of my pictures of Georgia are loading, but I haven't really been anywhere yet, so it's ok.

We had staging in Chicago, where we had a few introductory sessions on Peace Corps (PC) policies and Georgia and got to know each other. I got there a day early and couchsurfed with a botanist and went to a willow identification and cocktails event which was a good time. Other than that, I met many other PC volunteers, one college friend, biked 7 miles, drank some very fancy tiki beverages, went to the Art Institute, and fell in love with a dead architect. 

After that we had a 26 hour journey to Tbilisi, where we had the pleasure of arriving at 3:45 am, to the sounds of the G16/15s and staff members yelling and clapping at us. We got to see our first Georgian sunrise and then began our first day of orientation 6 hours later. Since then, we have been more or less confined to a hotel and its grounds, which becomes very claustrophobic very quickly. I've wandered off a bit to see the surrounding marshes and ponds (many frogs! some turtles! one tropical-looking lizard! middle-aged fishermen enjoying afternoons alone!) and on the last day, to the bread/liquor stores at the main road. There are a lot of wild dogs that people are worried by but they seem more scared of me than I am of them. The food is good, the coffee is instant but constant, and the hotel we are staying in is odd but pleasant. Georgian is somewhat difficult but I feel prepared to learn it, and have not struggled too much in my (2) classes so far. I have yet to figure out the Georgian keyboard on my computer.

We leave tomorrow for our pre-service training (PST) villages, where we will be in individual host families, with five or six volunteers per village. I am very excited to finally go out in the world, after this week of pacing one way around the track and then the other. 

This Blog, Again?!

After a year-long absence, I am reviving the blog but this time to record my Peace Corps experience (for my mother) and my Georgian language experience (for me~). I leave next Wednesday for Peace Corps - first a few days of pre-departure orientation in Chicago, then a post-departure orientation outside of Tbilisi, and then three months of "staging" where we learn Georgian and about how to become effective teachers and to work in Georgian society. I am very excited to leave, though nervous about finishing packing and cleaning before I go.

I am going to be a primary/secondary school English teacher, so hopefully I can use my struggles with previous language learning attempts to be an effective and empathetic teacher. I gained some teaching experience last summer at the Oakland International High School as an English Language Teaching Assistant working with recently arrived refugee and immigrant students, and it was a very informative and educational experience. It made me very happy to know that I will be working with a Georgian co-teacher and will not be alone in a classroom. I also taught a cultural orientation class for refugees at the International Rescue Committee from June to April, which helped me become more comfortable with public speaking and working with (adult) non-English speakers, but the situation there was very different than it will be in the Georgian classroom. I am very thankful that we have several months of training to prepare.

So far my language study has been limited to watching the Peace Corps Georgian language podcasts , which are pretty helpful - I've been told that all I really need to do before getting there is become familiar with the alphabet and that we'll learn everything else we need to in the classes we have during staging - every morning, six days a week, for three months! The one other thing I plan to do before departing is work on Memrise to fully cement the alphabet. One small step at a time. My goal for Peace Corps is to become conversational in Georgian and hopefully learn how to write letters and other basic things like that. I've read that Peace Corps language training often focusses on pure survival communication, but I would like to try to move beyond that, which means I will have to focus and practice. Other than that, I hope to maintain most of the Arabic I've learned so far. I have a few Arabic books packed and there are several other volunteers that I know of already who are either fluent in Arabic or have taken some coursework and I would love to practice with them! My year of taking Russian and Arabic at the same time at Tulane should have helped me prepare for keeping everything straight in the brain -_-

That's all for now, and I'll write again from the other side.