Job Shadowing in Gori

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A view of Gori's fort (Gorisitkhe) from a churchyard

Several weekends ago I was in Gori for job shadowing, my first time spending more than one night away from site (it was two this time!). I followed around a volunteer that has been here for a year, observing her teaching, working with counterparts, and generally living. Peace Corps gave us a 70 question questionnaire to help guide us in this experience, and I answered... most of it...

Some variety of decaying Soviet-era monument, my favorite.

Stalin's childhood home

Gori is an interesting city - famous for being Stalin's hometown and for being occupied by Russia in 2008. Before Stalin was Stalin, he was Dzhughashvili, and is still the world's most famous Georgian, and he is unexpectedly popular with some Georgians, and loathed by others. Gori is a city that wears its history openly - the Stalin museum has a pretty grand road leading up to it and there are murals and bullet holes to remind one of the 2008 invasion. 

Behind the very new municipal hall in the center of the city there is this unofficial monument to the 2008 war.

Pockmarked, I believe from the war though I'm not sure.

The official 2008 war monument, eerie and ancient, especially in the rain.

A mural featuring real bullet holes from 2008.

It has been fun to see what city life is like - I thought I really wanted to live in a village, but now I think I'm open to pretty much anywhere (that doesn't require me to learn another language in addition to Georgian). The volunteer I'm staying with lives in a tiny apartment across the street from the school she works at, with a host family of one elderly woman. The apartment is very cute, though their water situation is kind of weird - you turn it on with a switch and then it flows from every tap, not just the one you need. It seems a little wasteful but it seems to work for them. I expected city life to have more amenities than village life, but it turns out that in the village there's more space for stuff like a washing machine and a hot water heater, both of which my family has in Kvishkheti but the apartment in Gori did not. There are still grape vines everywhere - sometimes just one lonely one leading up to a balcony, sometimes enough to make it look like we're back in the village and not in an urban environment.

The current volunteer's adorable apartment building

I also had the chance to go with the current volunteer to her pre-service training site in Kvakhvreli, a small town about an hour from Gori that is directly across from an ancient ~*cave city.*~ The volunteer was there to get her old host sisters to sign up for some Peace Corps run summer camps, and I enjoyed seeing life in another village but I was really there for Uplisitkhe. I did not find the informational plaques there extremely useful, since they mostly just had pictures of the caves I was looking at on them, but it was still pretty cool looking and you can read about it here. Unfortunately it is excursion season in Georgia, when children, parents, and teachers from schools all around Georgia go to other places in Georgia and picnic and culture, so the place was crawling with people and we had to fight our way into the church. However, we walked up past the big main attraction caves to the top and there somehow it was just and two German tourists and we could enjoy a peaceful chat overlooking the Mtkvari river and a lot of mountains and forget that there were hundreds upon hundreds of school children roaming just out of site. I'm excited to go on excursions with my school next spring though!

It was also interesting to see a current volunteer at work, and I learned a lot about working with counterparts and how the day to day life of a volunteer might be different in a city and just site by site. For example, the volunteer has a lot of options for other groups to work with in Gori - there are a few organizations that focus on internally-displaced peoples' (IDP) issues, and British and American Corners, as well as a cultural center. She also works at a fairly large school (around 700 students), and it made me want to work at a smaller school, because I feel like it will be easier for me to build relationships with my students and fellow teachers and to work on secondary projects.

Even big cities here feel small, not much urban sprawl and I appreciate that.

After job shadowing I had an extra day in Gori that was ostensibly for travel but Gori is about a 40 minute drive from Khashuri so I just wandered around. In my two days I think I managed to see most of Gori's sites - there's a castle, a 2008 war monument, some recently renovated churches, some thrift stores, a lot of fun Soviet apartment buildings and monuments, and the State Stalin Museum. The Stalin Museum was weird. There were a lot of carpets with pictures of Stalin on them which was unexpected but kind of makes sense if you think about Central Asia enough.

An example Stalin carpet feat. some other guy too

A copy of Stalin's death mask

Annnd a pretty random but of FDR, I think

Gori fortress has been used for centuries and was most recently used in 2008. I don't understand why it's so easy to go into the center though... 

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.