vladimir putin sucks

New Blog

2009-10-22T06:04:00.002+04:00

Hello there. If you are still following this blog, I would like to humbly request that you check out my new blog, at www.danielatherton.com, whereupon you will find everything you ever found on this blog and MORE, specifically because I will try not to forget about the new blog for months and months at a time. Thanks!

Exile On Not Main Street, Part II. Or: The road less traveled. Also vodka.

2008-09-18T16:36:00.005+04:00

Hello, friends. Romania is still Romania, and language class is still language class (For a limited time only, all the suck of PST, crammed into a more portable three weeks! Available for the low low price of oh just kill yourself now!). Thankfully, even our teacher didn't want to teach this afternoon, so we just sat outside drinking coffee and talking about recent Romanian history, which seems to involve a lot of Germans and kings who don't want to be kings and then Stalin. So, since it was topical, I showed her my Stalin Museum pictures. It was nice to be able to contribute to the discourse. Also, I showed the photo of me as Bearinacage from last Halloween, the photo of my winter beard, and the photo from my host brother's wedding where I gave a prepared toast and then downed a huge kh'anzi in front of 300 people. Man, I miss Georgia. I mean, I want to be here, and I'm adjusting, but I don't really know how to balance what seems to be a healthy impulse to fondly remember my time there, and the need to fully adjust my focus to HERE. I'm sort of afraid I'm going to find myself at work two weeks from now, with someone asking me a random work question, only instead of answering it I will find myself bawling and sputtering, "I....remember.....the.....time.....when.....Kelly Uphoff......said......Colonial Williamsburg....." and then I will run out the door and just run and run into the wilderness and nobody will ever see me again. It's a possibility that's on the table, I think.

Anyway, here is part two of my Exile Story. I'm going to visit my new city this weekend, so perhaps I shall have some interesting insights and/or photographs for you to gaze at in wonder, come next week.

---------------------------

I went home and packed a small bag. Under our safety and security rules, when moving volunteers is a possibility, a volunteer is only allowed to pack a small carry-on-size bag to bring with him. That’s basically enough room for a laptop and two or three sets of clothes. I didn’t really consider at the time how much this rule would end up affecting my life. I was also not really considering the possibility that I would never be back to that room, that house, or that city. I went through the motions I was supposed to go through, just in case – I arranged my possessions in groups of importance, in case Peace Corps had to retrieve them and send them to America for me, and when the call came on Saturday morning for me to go to Tbilisi immediately, I said goodbyes to my family. It was an extremely confusing evening and morning of conversations:

Me: “I may have to leave for Tbilisi tomorrow.”
My host family: “Why?”
Me: “Because of the bombings. Peace Corps wants all the volunteers together. We may have to leave the country.”
My host family: “But Rustavi is safe.”
Me: “How do you know?”
My host family: “They won’t bomb Rustavi.”
Me: “They just bombed an airport 20 minutes from here and an army base five kilometers from here.”
My host family: “But not here. You should not leave.”
Me: “I have to. And I might not be able to come back.”
My host family: “But you are leaving for America in two days.”
Me: “Yes, trust me, I am aware of this.”
My host family: “Stop being silly. Put your things back in your room.”

I took a marshutka to Tbilisi. The marshutka to the Peace Corps office, it turns out, was my last marshutka ride in Georgia. I didn’t know it at the time, or perhaps I’d have taken some pictures. Things in Tbilisi seemed pretty normal, which was actually weird, although I don’t know what I was expecting. I met some friends of mine – volunteers who also lived in the east, or who were in the city for other reasons – at the Peace Corps office in the early afternoon. We sat in the volunteer lounge, and since I no longer work for Peace Corps Georgia, I can tell you without fear of reprimand that we started pounding some liquor I had in my cubby. This led to an amusing exchange with our new Country Director, who had just arrived in Georgia two weeks prior. He ordered pizza for us and for the staff, since we weren’t permitted to leave the office, and mused, “I wish we didn’t have that alcohol policy. Now would be a good time for a beer.” I nodded my head in agreement, and took another sip from my coffee mug. Which was full of vodka.

At any rate, we discussed the situation with the CD, while I wondered whether I smelled like the amount of liquor I’d consumed.[15] He told us that all the other volunteers and trainees were gathering in central Georgia, and moving to a safe location in Bakuriani, a ski town in the mountains to the south (here are some mediocre pictures of Bakuriani, circa July 2007). We asked to be taken there as well – at this point, we had no idea what was in store for us, and we didn’t want to wait for what could be a long time, in Tbilisi, without being able to see many of our friends. This seems like an ironic desire now, since we ended up spending nearly a month in closer quarters than change in a coinpurse.[16] The country director agreed, and after waiting for a couple hours we clambered into a Peace Corps SUV to take off into the wilderness, armed only with our emergency bags and, um, another bottle of vodka.[17]

By this point, the main east-west road through Georgia – and, along with it, the usual route to Bakuriani – was closed, due to the bombings and troop movements.[18] This meant we had to take the Other Way. Basically, the Other Way was not so much a “road” as it was “dirt that led in the direction of mountains.” What began as a seemingly exciting road trip into the void (this probably had something to do with the alcohol) turned cramped and boring almost as quickly as, well, an indefinite stay in a hotel in Armenia. Darkness descended upon our vehicle, and with it a heavy fog, and we kept crawling along, stopping every five minutes to ask villagers if we were going the right way. They journey took six or seven hours. Almost all the vehicles we saw were headed in the opposite direction. At one point we were stopped by a military checkpoint, though I don’t know what they were hoping to achieve by setting one up on the Road That Wasn’t A Road. The dirt and the caravans heading the opposite direction and the fog and the checkpoint and everything else made the trip morph quickly from an Adventure to an Oh Fuck What Is Happening To Us. And yet, we played the “Guess What Will End Up Happening” game in the car, and I made a persuasive argument that we’d eventually head back to our sites. I think that most of us who ended up in Armenia believed, at least to some small degree, that we’d end up going back to Georgia – even after we’d been in Armenia for several days. It took a week in Armenia, and a contentious group meeting in which many people cried, for that belief to fade, one bomb and one minute at a time.

NEXT TIME: Dan Forgets How To Leave A Voicemail. Or: The 37 lari bill keeping him from ever returning to Georgia.

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[15] He did, at one point, call me a “smartass” after I made a joke about concealing a ballistic missile in my volunteer cubby. I think he meant it admiringly, though. Or, at least, not condescendingly. Perhaps I should ask someone else for a work reference, after I finish my service. “What, that smartass? He’s okay, I guess. Kind of a smartass. Did I mention he’s a smartass? I did? Good. Because he is one.”
[16] GET IT? Quarters ARE change!!!1!!1!!1 This is the worst pun since Tom Schreiber’s immortal “You spin me right round baby right round, like Rick Record baby, right round round round.”
[17] The fact that I don’t think we opened this bottle while driving to Bakuriani is a testament that we really NEEDED that extra year in Georgia, after which we would not only have tipped a few back along the way, but offered the driver himself several shots. Man, I miss Georgia.
[18] Now would be a good time to remind you, loyal readers, that the next time you’re doing some urban planning for an entire country, you should probably have more than one main transport artery. If, for aesthetic purposes, you really feel like you NEED to limit yourself to just one highway, please make sure that no part of it is less than 30 km from a violent, Russia-backed breakaway region. See, nation-building isn't really that complicated. I don't know why it's not working in Iraq. Zing! This would be topical political humor if anyone still cared enough about Iraq to look away from Photoshopped pictures of Sarah Palin for two seconds.

Exile On Not Main Street, Part I. Or: How to use the phrase "gold-shitting" in an amusing joke.

2008-09-16T17:34:00.003+04:00

Short prelude: today, I attended a press conference to announce the opening of an American Center at a local library, put together by the two volunteers in this city and our language teacher. We went to the local library at the appointed time only to wait around for 20 minutes for no reason. Once it started, it consisted of a man -- in this case, the director of the library, I think -- gesticulating and shouting about Johann Gutenberg, the power and magic of the printed page, Pax Romana, Russian imperialism, and T.S. Eliot. I later told the volunteers here that this experience was EXACTLY what a Georgian toast would be like, if there happened to be a toast about T.S. Eliot. It was comforting. Sometimes, things are NOT different. Anyway.

...

So I was talking with my parents, at some point during our 27 day exile.[1][2] I was describing some event or other, and either my father or my mother said, “You should write a book about this.” He/she was joking, I think, but I thought about it for a second, and then determined that this would no doubt be the most boring book in the history of letters placed in sequence.[3] Here is how I imagine proposing such a book to a book publisher:

“So, I have this idea for a book. It starts off with a bang – explosions! Bombs
dropping everywhere! Americans fleeing from the menacing advance of the Russian
army! It’s so Cold War, right? Yeah. So our hero takes the first couple of
chapters to escape to safety. Then the whole middle of the book is our hero
sitting in a hotel, doing nothing, thinking about his life and eating a lot of
carbohydrates. I figure that, for an artistic twist, chapters 6 through 37 can
just be full of blank pages. Like hundreds of blank pages, and the reader has to
flip each of them one by one. The reader will want to kill himself by the end of
it, which will make him identify with our hero. Then the book abruptly ends, and
there’s a ticket to Romania you can cut out of the book jacket in the back. It’s
like ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ meets ‘Emma.’ Meets ‘Dracula.’[4] What do you think?”

The publisher’s dilemma would then be whether to (a) stab me, so I wouldn’t be able to inflict my book pitch on the human race ever again, or (b) stab his/her secretary for letting an obviously homeless person into his/her office. So I decided against writing a book about the Exile. But that doesn’t mean I can’t blog about it![5] Accepting the present means acknowledging the past, and likely you are extremely interested in what happened to us [6], and oh who am I kidding just humor me. This may break a new record for post length, so I will break it into manageable bits. Please tell me if it is not interesting. I shall mostly ignore you, but also try to “spice up” the text with “jokes” and “thoughts” and “codes for free money.” So, here we go.

All of us who were in Armenia have been bitching about it as if it was the end of the world from Day One – or acting like it was so important that it deserves, to pull a random example out of a random hat, a fifteen-part blog post. I feel a bit selfish for acting like this thing that happened to us was the Worst Thing To Ever Happen To Anyone Ever You Should Feel Sorry For Us. People thrown into an uncomfortable and unexpected situation tend to overdramatize it to feel better about themselves, and of course we did that. But clearly others got a slightly rawer deal, no matter how hard it is to see past ourselves. The Georgians who were displaced, for instance. Also, the soldiers who died. Also, Aeroflot travel agents in Tbilisi, who will never receive any business again ever.[7] Not to mention the fact that evacuation of Peace Corps posts happens with distressing regularity all over the world.[8] We’re patently unspecial, no matter how we’d prefer to think otherwise.

At the same time, going through an experience like this is something that MOST Americans never go through, so part of me wants to make sure I write it down before I forget it, no matter how uninteresting it turns out to be. I of course wish it had never happened, and that I was still in Georgia doing the work I went there to do, but some part of me is glad to have seen the ass end of an asskicking. I came to Peace Corps to expand my views about the world, and this has certainly done that. I’m glad that I can now understand the personal side to geopolitics and international warfare, and I’m glad that I can now understand the personal side to mass humanitarian crises. Americans never put a face to the things that happen overseas – often we don’t put a face to the things that happen on our own shores. But a city that I’ve lived in was bombed, and people I know and love now live in a place that is potentially devastated – by hopefully short-term humanitarian issues and decidedly long-term newfound economic issues. I don’t claim to be the only one who’s ever seen such things. But I’m the only one I know.[9] So I’m going to talk about it.

As I may or may not have mentioned in my brief summaries [10], I was at work when it happened. This was Friday, August 8th [11], and I was at work in Rustavi like every other day. I started hearing from friends that something bad was happening – I believe the news was that there had been skirmishes in the now-famous breakaway region of South Ossetia [12], with both Ossetia/Russia and Georgia blaming the other side, and that Russia had started bombing Georgian territory.[13] I started texting all my friends, many of whom were with all the new trainees in central Georgia, near the bombings, to see if they had any info, and I also started repeatedly checking a good Georgian-produced news website. I wasn’t sure exactly what would happen – for some reason, tensions over the breakaway regions flare up every summer [14], and for a while it seemed like perhaps this was just an extended flare-up, and that both sides would back away from disaster. But as the news kept getting worse, I realized that this was different, and I started thinking about going home to pack an emergency bag, in case we had to consolidate with all the other volunteers in a safe location.

At this point, it wasn’t clear what was going on. Russia was (to my recollection) merely bombing at this point, and seeming content to extend its arm over the border, cause some mischief, and then puff out its chest to gloat, “See, we could do that ANYTIME WE WANT.” Bombing feels different than a full-scale occupation. It’s more impersonal, and one can retain the illusion that things aren’t going too too badly for your side. As long as you get some shots off yourself, score some points for your team, you can feel reassured, no matter what the damage. The “war” still seemed like a skirmish until Russian troops crossed the border from South Ossetia into Georgia proper. I feel like somehow this is an important geopolitical observation, and yet I’m sure it isn’t. Let’s move on.

NEXT: PART II. Or: The road less traveled. Also vodka.

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[1] I can’t pinpoint when, because, frankly, for the most part I can’t differentiate what happened on day one from what happened on day 27. It was like being in prison, carving each passing indistinguishable day into the wall with a sharp mess hall utensil, except of course that prisoners know how long it will be until they get to leave. Ha! Anti-exile humor! Get used to it!
[2] Note to PC/G staff who may again be reading this blog: while the sarcastic streak of your now-former volunteers is without equal, we direct none of it towards you. You guys were awesome. Just so you know. Hi, Tika.
[3] Maybe second-most boring, after “Emma.” God, that book blew.
[4] This could be changed to “Bunnicula,” if it was a children’s book publisher.
[5] Though it should also mean that.
[6] If this is true, I will lose more faith in America than I lost when Fox News claimed that Sarah Palin has foreign policy experience because “she’s right there next to Russia,” and people believed it. By this standard, the comptroller of Fargo, North Dakota, could be the next secretary-general of the United Nations, because Fargo is “right there next to Canada.” Listen up, America, because I am very serious about this: if you elect Sarah Palin and Whatshisface to be Vice President and Whateverthatotherthingis of those United States, I am never coming back. You have been warned.
[7] Aeroflot is the national Russian airline. This joke is not funny.
[8] For example, some of my refugee friends were planning on transferring to Peace Corps Bolivia this week, only to find out a few days ago that there have been violent riots this week in Bolivia, and that the program there is in danger. They no longer get to go. Sorry, guys.
[9] Well, along with the 80 others of you. Shout out! [clever Armenia reference]!
[10] As always, I’m too lazy to look these things up.
[11] Our training manager claims that the sheer number of 8s involved portended disaster: it was 8/8/08, the 8th week of training for PC/G Group 8, and he had sent 8 mass text messages about the Peace Corps alcohol policy the night before. OK, not that last one. But that group could have USED 8 text messages about the alcohol policy. This is a tangent, but during their orientation some of them decided that it would be fun to FLIP EACH OTHER IN THE AIR. INSIDE. A ceiling mirror was apparently shattered, along with any pretense of that group’s collective intelligence. Ha ha! G8 jokes! We 7s are totally kidding, guys! Please don’t come over to my house, ever! I value my ceiling and my ribs.
[12] If you had bet me a trillion dollars, two months ago, that normal people in America would ever ever ever be able to accurately describe what “South Ossetia” meant, I would have seen your trillion and raised you a magic flying gold-shitting pony. Funny, how things work out.
[13] I might be slightly off about what exactly happened when and in what order, because I’m not connected to the internet as I write this, and because everything happened very fast. But if you’re interested in the specific sequence of events, it’s available on Wikipedia, of all places, and it’s impressively footnoted.
[14] As I have also mentioned before, during the summer of 2007, when I was training in Gori, a Russian jet dropped a bomb that did not explode only a few kilometers from Gori. I got exactly zero inquiries about my safety from America, when it happened. I think it barely registered on the American news. Funny, how things work out.

It's a bird! It's a plane! No, it's a wireless signal! Or: Ploi-yes we can!

2008-09-15T17:18:00.002+04:00

Hello there, friends. I have been able to chat with several of you over the last week that I have been here, but I apologize to those of you I haven't seen online when I've had a chance to use the internet. I hope you're all doing well -- especially you hardy members of the Skeletor crew. Say hello to America for me, and make sure not to trip on all the on-time modernity.

I've been in a SUPERSTUPIDFAST PST for a week now -- learning language at twice the normal Peace Corps speed, and struggling to get my mind all the way here, on my new assignment and my new country, rather than leaving it in pieces in Georgia and Armenia. It's happening, a day at a time, but it hasn't yet become easy and normal to be here. I keep accidentally speaking Georgian in my Romanian classes, for instance, which is infuriatingly annoying. Also, I keep finding myself striding into the street with no regard for street lights, since DRIVERS in georgia pay so little regard to street lights that there's no use in paying attention to them as a pedestrian either. This led to a ROMANIAN PERSON (specifically, my language teacher) chiding me a couple days ago as I stepped into the street despite a "Don't Walk" sign with, "Hey! You aren't in Georgia anymore."

I find myself missing Georgia in weird ways. Romania, at least in the city (I've been told, and really assumed to be true anyway, that the villages are far different, and far more like what I'd be used to from a year in Georgia), is almost obscenely different -- more modern in nearly every way. I find myself getting on buses that leave on time, that don't stop on the street for random people, and I find myself missing marshutkas. I find myself using wireless internet at a restaurant in a mall (like right now, for instance), and I miss having to text people to get information. I find myself with new friends (there are a couple current PCRO volunteers in the city we're training in, and they're great and we hang out a lot), and miss the old friends I was supposed to have one more year with. It's a tough situation, but I signed up for it, and it's better than any other alternative that was available -- not to mention the fact that on a lot of levels I'm really excited to be here and to get to work -- so I get used to it, one day at a time.

It does help that Romania is so modern. Every day I get confronted with things that they tell you, in transition/COS conferences, you will be confronted with when you go back to AMERICA. On Saturday, we went to a supermarket as big as a Wal-Mart, and I nearly fell down. We passed aisle after aisle of variety you couldn't dream of in Georgia, just like most of my friends are doing back in the States right now, and it was difficult for my brain to even handle it. Today, we were at a volunteer's apartment, and they ORDERED PIZZA. And we're NOT IN THE CAPITAL. Not to mention the previously noted wireless internet abilities, or the fact that there are MULTIPLE MALLS in this city. All of this, plus the fact that I am told over and over again that my soon-to-be site, Brasov, is an unbelievable Euro-style city, with skiing resorts all over the place and lots of tourists, and that PCRO volunteers love to go there and are jealous of me for getting sent there (well, almost there -- I'll be working with an NGO in the city, but also with some smaller NGOs in small towns surrounding the city, and living in one of those smaller towns), and I'm dealing with a pretty healthy set of inflated expectations, which any Peace Corps volunteer knows to be a bad thing. It remains to be seen what my actual experience will be like, but the setting and the fact that I'll be living alone (nearly all PCRO volunteers get relatively nice apartments that PC pays for) means that the ceiling of how comfortable I'm likely to be during the next year is pretty high. And yet, as I've said again and again -- enough time spent as a volunteer teaches a person that high expectations inevitably lead to a letdown. So I'm going to try not to let that happen.

In the meantime, I'm just going to try to learn the language as fast as I can -- we finished an entire language manual in just over a week, so perhaps "learn the language" could be better termed "try to keep my head above water" -- and see how the move to site goes. I'll have internet every couple of days for the next two weeks, and then hopefully at my new house, so try to say hi when you can. If you're a fellow refugee, drop me a line and let me know how America is. I miss all of you guys. You Americans, I miss you guys too and I wish I'd been able to get back and see you in August. Romania seems awesome and is way more accessible than Georgia, so you have LESS excuse not to come visit me, haha, but I'll let you know if I can get back to America in the next few months. Until then, see you on these interwebs. I'll be able to post more often once I get to site.

Until next time, friends.

NOTIMEFORCLEVERNESS

2008-09-08T13:32:00.002+04:00

I am in Romania. I have literally like one minute to type a message out before heading off to training, but I wanted to let the negative three people who read these that I am here in one piece, and only mildly freaking out. Thankfully, I remember feeling these same things when I got to Georgia a year ago, so it's easier to handle the second time around.

More in-depth stuff later, but if you have money for international calls just burning a hole in your pocket, my new phone number is +40 756 395 475.

Turning A New Leaf. Or: From Vlad (Putin) to Vlad (the Impaler). Or: 28 Days in Skeletor. Or: Moving into my new apartment in Rustavi! Excited!

2008-09-03T00:32:00.003+04:00

Friends, if you are reading this note on Facebook, please click through to my actual blog -- I haven't posted on it for months (if you need catching up: I got too frustrated at my old site, moved to a new site, started a new job, prepared to move into a new apartment, got attacked by Russians, and have spent the last month in a hotel in Armenia. Also, I bought a cool new t-shirt!), preferring in the last couple of weeks to update everyone on my situation simply on Facebook, just because it seemed weird to use the blog. It already seemed like a relic. But life, eventually, moves on, and so I move back to the blog with a new title, a new graphic, and soon enough a new angry email from my new Peace Corps supervisors, who will not be amused at my political commentary.

Yes, friends, new Peace Corps supervisors. If you've been reading my Facebook-only notes recently -- and I really, really appreciate that a lot of people seem to have been doing so -- you read in my last note that I have decided against returning to Georgia, at least in the short-term. It was a wrenching decision -- imagine that you had been living there for 14 months, nearly three of them in Gori, which was hit hardest by the Russians, and then see this, this, and this -- but, in the end, I couldn't confidently assume that I would end up doing any good by going back, nor was I sure what I'd even do once I got there. Many of my friends are going back, and I hope they can help. I wish I was there with them. But the decision just wasn't sitting right, so I had to turn my attention elsewhere. Without job prospects in America, I looked at transferring to another Peace Corps country; there weren't many good options for volunteers who have already served a year, but I seem to have been lucky enough to find the perfect option for me. I'll be leaving for Bucharest sometime around the end of this week, and will be serving out the rest of my Peace Corps service in Romania.

I don't know much about Romania yet. The things that one can learn from the internet never end up being quite how things are once you actually get someplace, so I'm trying to hold off any judgment until I'm in Romania seeing it for myself, but everything I've heard about the country and the Peace Corps program there is good. It seems like what we were all hoping Georgia WOULD be in a few years -- a newly admitted member of the EU, with rapidly improving economic and infrastructure systems. It will even be adopting the Euro in 2012, after which I can't imagine Peace Corps remaining in the country (volunteers would become too depressed after realizing that we get paid the equivalent of 2.37 EUR per month). There are exciting things happening there, and hopefully I can be a part of some of them. I'll be living near (in? not sure yet) the Romanian city of Brașov (pronounced Brashov), working (I think) with an organization that disseminates information about social services. So I've spent the last few days researching the country (from their Peace Corps Welcome Book: "American and local fast food restaurants are available in many parts of the country." Yes!) and attempting to start learning Romanian, which seems to be sort of like Latin with a Slavic accent. I don't know what will come of my decision -- as I've said in this and other spaces before, I've been in Peace Corps long enough to know that it's usually a bad sign to be excited about something -- but I'm at least cautiously optimistic, and I'm ready to get started.

One would think that I'd be a bit reticent to jump right into Romania, with so much emotional energy still invested in Georgia, and I would have been last week or the week before. But today is Day 22 in Skeletor (our intentionally, but not particularly amusingly, mangled pronunciation of the Armenian town our hotel is located in), and we're ready to just Get The Hell Out of here. I am not sure I will ever be comfortable in a hotel again. The next time I go on vacation, I would not be surprised to find myself checking into a hotel, breaking out into a profuse sweat, and then checking out immediately just to make sure that I can. Each of the past 21 days has been nearly identical to the last – we eat the same foods at the same times and do the same things with the same people and eventually we descend into the same fits of madness. Some volunteers have escaped, and those of us who remain can see the end, but it is not yet here. Volunteers who were taking cash-in-lieu (of a Peace Corps-issued plane ticket home to America) began to leave on Friday, and departures continued until yesterday. Most of our friends have left -- everyone who remains here is waiting on a transfer. It's a profoundly unsettling feeling, saying goodbye to friends you didn't expect to say goodbye to for another year, and not even getting the chance to do it all at once. After fleeing Georgia unexpectedly, then receiving the news that we would not be going back, then enduring two weeks of uncertainty about our futures, then leaving each other one by one, we've finally come to the point of complete numbness. You could snap a kitten in half right in front of me at this point, and I wouldn't have the energy to feel anything about it. Perhaps at some point I'll get enough of it back to write something poignant about this experience, but right now I just want to get the f#$% out of here, and start the next phase of my journey in Romania. Check back in this space, and perhaps soon I'll have something better to say.

I'll save the most important thing for last: I've been telling some of you over the last couple of weeks that volunteers have been setting up mechanisms for donating to the rebuilding process in Georgia. As I mentioned above, Georgia was on course to join the rapidly reforming and improving economies of eastern Europe, to join NATO, and to stabilize as a western democracy. The Russian attack (NB: I've heard that public opinion in the west has begun to turn against Georgia and its role in its own demise. I'll be clear in saying that Mikhail Saakashvili, the Georgian president, was drawn into a trap and made a rash decision with devastating consequences. The fault for that decision lies with him. But the Russian response was not only clearly the result of months of planning, but was the equivalent of shooting a ballistic missile at a paraplegic. It was an indefensible overreaction, and destroyed the lives of hundreds of thousands of civilians who had nothing to do with the politics. Just to be clear.) set Georgia's progress back many years, ruining five years of growth and foreign investment, and shattering the lives of hundreds of thousands of now-displaced people, not to mention the hundreds of people who were casualties of the bombings and other military action. It is heartbreaking to see the goal that we were all working towards set so far backward so quickly, and the only thing that many of us can do is urge those we know to help the rehabilitation process begin. Thousands of refugees remain in IDP camps, unable to return to destroyed homes, and the necessary aid is just beginning to get to them. We've heard stories of people sleeping on the floor in schools, people without access to food in tent cities, and other inevitable consequences of such a large number of people being displaced so suddenly.

Several mechanisms are in the works for former volunteers in Georgia, their friends, their families, and their communities to donate to the beginning of the relief effort. A US-based organization is being founded that will be able to provide umbrella aid to many different local Georgian NGOs to purchase supplies for IDPs and to start projects that can help get communities back on their feet, but it is not finalized yet. For now, volunteers have identified four organizations, each of which has wire transfer capability, that can be trusted to use donated funds appropriately and to get the money to the right places. We're calling our effort the Megobari Project, after the Georgian word მეგობარი (megobari), which means "friend." Please visit The Megobari Project's website, and forward the information to anyone you know. I'll continue to use this blog to pass along fundraising information, but for now please visit the website and consider how you might be able to help. It would mean a lot not just to me, but to all of us who have worked so hard to help ordinary Georgian people improve their lives and their country.

More to come soon, friends.

How not to build a blog audience. Or: Updates all up in this piece

2008-05-06T16:13:00.002+04:00

Here is how not to build a blog audience:

Step one: Start a blog. Name it something catchy and/or amusing, like, “Cavernous Tales of a Spelunking Enthusiast,” or, “Paige’s Page,” or, “Free Pornography Available Here.” Design nifty-looking graphics.
Step two: Post frequently. Fill your posts with amusing anecdotes or perhaps simply entertaining language moist furniture clown pants.
Step three: Wait until you have quite a few devoted blog visitors. Repeatedly promise them future “content.”
Step four: Stop posting for no reason. Ha! That will show them.

Anyway, that was all by way of saying that I am very sorry to have kept you waiting, friends. I have no excuse. Life has been relatively boring and amusing-anecdote-free, and I have completely lost the desire to write about it. In the winter, I spent most of my evenings sitting at my computer, writing something or other. More recently, I have taken to less-productive activities, such as watching “The Wire” and listening to music on my iPod while pretending to find the deep hidden relevance of each song to my life (this activity has led me to the conclusion that grassroots international development is most achievable when one remembers to “get low”). But I am going to try to return to my old ways, friends. For one thing, the future members of G8 who read this and other PCV blogs are beginning the fun, last-month-before-I-leave-America stage where they start hyperventilating every time they pass a Taco Bell, wondering if they’re making the right decision (You’re not! Get out while you still can! I haven’t had a decent burrito in nearly a year! Run! Ha ha ha! Just kidding! Maybe!). And despite the layers and layers of cynicism inherent in me that would require an intense session with one of Bill O’Reilly’s loofahs to scrub out (Friends, remember that I am a humor professional. Do not attempt to utilize such fresh topical humor in your own lives. You might tweak a hammy and pull up lamer than Barbaro. Zing!), I do feel that it’s only fair to be available and informative for those folks, because I want them to bring me gifts.

For another thing, I have recently discovered my grasp of English vocabulary, syntax, and grammar to be slipping at an alarming rate. This is more than a little concerning, considering the fact that I was a total grammar and spelling snob, in America, and the fact that I would still like to at least pretend that I can write at a professional level (Those of you without any exposure to my non-blogging self will have to take my word for it that I could write a mean sentence or two in my day, and that I don’t try very hard on this blog. It is, after all, the internet, which everyone knows is just a passing fad.). So I really should be practicing my composition a little more frequently, not to mention my cursive and my phonics. And blogging is an easy way to do that, which is one of the reasons I started doing it in the first place. I will have to remember that listening to The Shins on repeat does not a professional writer make, and that watching four episodes of "The Wire" in a single night will do nothing to help me move out of the proverbial (wait, literal) mother's basement where I shall surely be living come September 2009.

So, updates. Again, not much ever happens, in my little town on a mountain, so there is not much of interest. Mostly, I just wake up every morning and do the same thing I did the day before, which consists of going to work and interspersing periods of productivity with periods of banging my head against the metaphorical (sometimes literal) wall. I still owe you what I hope will be an interesting piece discussing what it can be like to live with a host family; I'll try to get that written in the next few days. I also may write a post about work; while it is true that not much is actually happening, many things are sort of happening, or about to happen, or hopefully starting soon, or somesuch, and it might make for interesting blog fodder. Basically, I have been engaged, over the last few weeks, in an intense effort to come up with a long-term plan that will allow me to stay at my current organization and my current site. The difficulty and inactivity at work have continued without seeming to improve at a rate that I'd find acceptable over the course of two years' worth of work, and so I have started doing some things that will hopefully determine whether my organization has the desire and ability for the sort of improvement that makes my time here worthwhile enough. I'd explain but it would be boring and take a lot of space, so I'll just make it a standalone post that those of you who prefer toilet anecdotes to musings on grassroots international development (and, thinking about it, I count myself among you) can skip.

But there are some minor (very very minor) tidbits from the last couple of weeks that I can share with you before the meatier stuff to come. I will do this in easy-to-write bullet format:

We have a new dog at my house. I will discuss this more in my host-family post, but a week or so ago a one-month old dog showed up in our yard. My host brother said he'd brought it from Tbilisi, but he hadn't been in Tbilisi, and thus, since I was too lazy to ask any more questions about it, the puppy's genesis remains a mystery. That said, it was pretty clearly a conciliatory gesture on his part for the huge fight we'd had a few weeks prior, and I'm glad it's around. It appears to be English Pointer-ish and is about two months old at this point. My family named it either Duda, which has no meaning that I know of, or Duta, which is the name of a Georgian television personality who prances around with puppets on a kids' show called "Duta's Fairy Tales," hosts the Georgian equivalent of "American Idol," and pretends to be John Belushi in "The Blues Brothers" in a popular cell phone commercial. It's hard to tell, and I haven't asked for clarification, because I may be the laziest person on the planet. Duda/Duta has turned into a very energetic puppy. I take complete credit for this, because it seemed pretty melancholy the first few days it was at our house, so I lavished attention upon it, with the hopes that I could train it to obey simple commands that would seem run of the mill in America but that I have never seen any dog in Georgia perform. My hope is that many future interactions will go like this:

Me: Excuse me, sir, have you met my family's English Pointer?
Other Person: Why, no, I haven't! By the way, you speak excellent Georgian!
Me: Who, me? Pshaw. Anyway, watch this! (to the dog) Sit!
Dog sits.
Other Person: (faints)

The other recent Exciting Addition to the Jincharadze household is...wait for it...a hammock! Now, for reasons that are completely unexplainable, the only place in Georgia, apparently, where it is possible to buy a good hammock is the town of Khashuri, about three hours east of Chokhatauri. I had already been making plans for the volunteer stationed in Khashuri to purchase me a hammock when my host mother stopped in Khashuri to buy one on her way back from Tbilisi, so I was delighted to see it. Hammocking wasn't really my thing in America, but there's a lot more sitting around to do here, no air conditioning, and someone's always on the couch in the kitchen. I was quite excited to start listening to deeply meaningful Shins songs on repeat in increased comfort, until it started raining a few days ago and hasn't stopped long enough to put up a hammock. Ha ha, Jesus. Ha ha. You can make it stop now.
I spent this past Saturday at a sort of "English Activity Day" put on by Julien and Martha, friends of mine in a near-ish town called Terjola. I was supposed to help them supervise some random English-language activities for students in three different language ability groups. I ended up having to do very little, in exchange for which I got a delicious pasta dinner back at their house, but the best part of the day was when I was working with a group of "intermediate" students to create a story from a magazine photo. The students selected a weird photo of a cat on a sofa, and then, by taking turns creating sentences for the story, came up with this jewel that requires and will receive no further comment from me:

"There is a cat in the sofa. It is thinking. Cat thinking about his family. It is very strange. He is alone. It is afraid. It is very lovely. He will go and kill a man. After this somebody will catch him and will take in zoo in cage. And he will kill himself. His grave will be in Terjola. Other cats will visit him, and dogs too. They are crying. One day there will come her lovely cat. This cat miss dead cat and he will kill himself too. About this story will write the Shakespeare."

Last week, a friend came up to Chokhatauri during the day to drop something off for me (ok, ok, it was DVDs of "The Wire"). Incidentally, she was the first not-me American to visit Cho in many months. We went to one of the two sort-of restaurant-things in town (the other one was closed). Nobody was inside, but the boys who always stand around on the steps outside this restaurant assured us it was open. So we hunted a woman who worked there down, ordered food, and ate it. It tasted pretty good, and was cheap. When I went back to my office, everyone asked where I'd gone. "To that cafe next door," I said. This prompted raucous laughter. "Nobody ever goes to cafes here," one coworker said, which I already knew, since I've never seen anyone AT this cafe. "People go eat in Ozurgeti if they have money." I protested that my mtzvadi (pork kabob) and two beers cost me six lari, which is not a lot of money. "You must have been eating dog mtzvadi," she replied. She did not elaborate whether this meant mtzvadi FOR dogs, or mtzvadi OF dogs. Neither seems a likely scenario. Much more likely are these two conclusions: one, my coworkers are kind of crazy, and two, putting money into a restaurant in Chokhatauri will likely be a bad investment for some time to come.
Yesterday, I spent like 40 minutes figuring out how to install certain drivers on my computer that would allow me to type in Unicode Georgian (basically, to type in Georgian outside of using certain fonts in MS Word). So, now I can do this: გააჩერეთ, რა. This simultaneously delighted me and made me profoundly embarrassed to be making even 100 American dollars a month. Sometimes I really should find some work to do.

And, on that note, I will now find some work to do. From tomorrow until the weekend I will be in Tbilisi, doing work while trying to dodge the incoming Russian missiles being fired from the MiGs that by now blanket the sky like smog. Ha ha! That's just a fun joke for those of you who have heard tell about the recent ratcheting of developments between Georgia and Russia concerning the it's-ours-nu-uh-it's-sovereign-but-basically-ours territory of Abkhazia. I got in a minor amount of trouble the last time I wrote about politics on this blog, so I will leave a summary of these events to my friend Jen, who wrote an extremely amusing one on her own blog. I will try to blog some more while I am there. Do not abandon your fair blogger, friends. I am back for good.

Maybe.

Also, you know what? It was a joke, but I am now seriously considering changing the name of this blog to "Cavernous Tales of a Spelunking Enthusiast."

Puppy punnery, part two. Or: People who throw darts too hard, Memphis, the Finnish, and other things/people that do not please me.

2008-04-15T14:13:00.000+04:00

Hello again. If you (a) did not get a chance to read the last post before I removed it, and just as importantly (b) give any sort of rat's ass (I am not assuming this to be true), it is possible you are curious as to (a) why there is an edited post that makes some sort of reference to a dog, and just as importantly (b) what god-given reason could exist that caused me to cryptically remove it. I shall reveal all...right now! Or, at least, after several paragraphs of bloviating.

The post referred to something that happened two Thursdays ago; in short, I came home to discover that my host brother had found newborn puppies under our house. He'd only been able to reach one of them; the other two were too far under the house. The one he'd been able to extract was sitting in a box in our driveway. He and I had a discussion about whether the mother, who was likely a street dog (of which there are many, in Georgia), would come back for them. We agreed (at least, I thought we did) that it was unlikely, and I decided I wanted to try to save the one puppy we'd been able to reach. I took it out of the box, and walked around holding and feeding it for the rest of that evening. The source of the ensuing hilarity (Hollywood term!) was thus: my host brother vehemently disagreed with this course of action. He felt that the puppy had "bacteria" all over it, and that it would make me very sick, and that I should put it back in its box immediately and take a thorough shower. He also thought it might scratch me and give me rabies. I tried to explain that the dirt on its fur was basically harmless, as long as I washed my hands, and that it wasn't possible for the puppy to have rabies yet, since it hadn't eaten anything. I told him that I would call a doctor if it would make him happy. He agreed to this, but remained very angry with me for not doing what he'd asked.

The next day, I took the puppy to work with me, where, after initial discomfort, my coworkers began to take quite a liking to it. I even bought it a blanket and some baby formula. That afternoon, for a work meeting, my host brother showed up at the office, staring daggers at me. According to him, the mother had come back (the truth of this claim was never verified), and I should have left the dog at home, and now it was my fault that it was going to die. Well. I took sharp exception to this, and when I got home from work, we had the Argument In A Non-Native Language to end all Arguments in a Non-Native Language. We basically yelled at each other for a half hour -- him saying that I ask his family for "many things" (which is not true), and that he has never asked anything of me (not true), and that he could never trust me or cooperate with me since I had not done the one thing he'd ever asked me to do (accept that invisible lethal bacteria and rabies covered the fur of a newborn puppy and posed a danger to my very life), while I attempted to explain in a language I am nowhere near mastering that this was an isolated incident, that I respected his home and his family, and that I had simply been doing something I felt to be necessary to save the life of a puppy. At this point, however, I knew I didn't have a choice but to acquiesce to his wishes if I wanted to stay in his home, so I didn't intervene when he grabbed the puppy and flung it back under the house, claiming that he'd known all along that the mother would come back and now the other two would be safe while this one would die because I'd touched it. Amusingly, part of my host brother's argument that I did not respect his family was the fact that I haven't been teaching him English, and thus it is impossible for us to communicate -- an argument that he made to me in Georgian, that I understood in Georgian, and to which I responded...in Georgian. To my host family, anything less than fluency on my part means that I know no Georgian and should really be teaching them English. This is brought up every time I don't know a word that is spoken and every time I need to use the dictionary. Anyway.

I was almost literally shaking with anger after this argument; I was furious that he felt this way about me, and that he discounted all of my attempts to fit into his family and to leave as small a footprint as possible simply because I didn't want to do MORE work when I got home from the job I'm HERE to do. I wrote an enormous post about the incident, which both recounted it and discussed the inherent difficulty of, and my highly mixed feelings about, living with a host family in this country. I think it's an interesting topic, especially for those of you who read this blog because you are soon to leave America for a similar situation of your own, whether it be in Georgia or another post, so I'm going to devote an entire post to it, hopefully tomorrow. But, the reason that I took the post down requires me to describe what happened the next Monday, so instead of delving into Better Know a Georgia: Host Families in this post, I'll spend the rest of it recapping a mildly interesting last couple of blog-free weeks.

Two days after Dogapalooza, I headed to Kutaisi to meet some friends for an excursion to a nearby place called Sataplia ("place where the honey is"). I wasn't sure what, exactly, we were going to FIND there; I'd been told that there was "a cave and some dinosaur footprints" there. Hm. Dinosaur footprints. You'd think that dinosaur footprints would be an important archaeological artifact, and that knowledge of such an artifact would be widespread in a country that has such pride in its history. And, perhaps, Georgians DO all know about it. But I hadn't ever heard of it, and neither had the volunteer who proposed the excursion, who said he'd read about it in his tenth-form English textbook. After picking up some supplies for our trip (beer and granola), we hired a couple taxis to take us to Sataplia, from which we planned to hike the few km back to Kutaisi when we were done. The taxis took us just outside of town, where there was a REALLY bad road (even for Georgia) branching into the countryside, at which intersection there was a large, dilapidated sign with "Sataplia" and a drawing of a brontosaurus on it (to be fair, this drawing was probably created under the strict supervision of a credentialed paleontologist, or at least someone who owned a paint set). We followed this road for a few kilometres, our jaws rattling with each enormous pothole and my mind wondering just how much abuse my computer, contained within a backpack on the backseat, could take, until we came upon a forested area that was really quite nice. There was a gate, and a house-like building, and a trail leading down a hill. So. This was Sataplia. The guided tour trams must have been in the shop for repairs. Also, I didn't see any honey, nor anything that could have lent the name "Place where honey is" to this particular place. But it was a very nice forested area, nonetheless.

A man came out of the house and walked towards us. We explained that we were there to see the footprints and the cave, and he offered to take us. Wary of being asked to PAY him, which we did not want to do, we begged out of his offer, and strutted self-importantly down the trail (after, in order to placate the man, we allowed him to show us a large dinosaur diorama inside the house). At the bottom of the trail, we found the entrance to the cave. The cave stretched majestically from the mouth of a large rock down into blackness, and we would have been able to see it and marvel, except for the trifling fact that the entrance was covered with a large iron door and locked. The curator (or whatever he is), being an apparently patient and good-humored man, had followed us down the hill, and offered again to let us in. This time, graciously, and after much conferral, we allowed him to assist us, and he unlocked the door. We entered the cave, ready to gaze upon its wonder and majesty. At which point we noticed that there was no light in the cave. An eagle-eyed member of our party spotted a light fixture in the ceiling of the cave, meaning there WAS or at some point had been electricity, just, you know, not at the moment. So we inched our way down what seemed like a narrow and dangerous path (but which was actually a nicely paved walkway with guardrails), armed only with a flashlight and our cellphones, and we experienced the cave through these narrow bands of light and via the pictures we were taking with our cameras (SNAP - "Oh, look how nice that part of the cave is! I'm glad I randomly pointed my camera at that particular section of what looks to my eyes like inescapable blackness!"). It did, at least from the photos we took, seem like a very nice cave, and the guide bragged that it contains the "largest heart-shaped stalagmite in the world." So it's got that going for it. Which is nice.

After exiting the cave, we took a break to drink beer and eat granola, because that is what Man does in The Nature, before we set off for the Exciting Dinosaur Footprints. It turns out that the beer-drinking part of the expedition was a little more exciting than the part where we saw eons-old preserved footprints. The footprints ended up being indentations in a giant slope of what could have either been eons-old sedimentary rock, or poured Soviet concrete. The only thing keeping the hordes away from these Important Archaeological Discoveries was a fence with a broken gate, so we took the opportunity to go take immature pictures of ourselves on the footprints, knowing full-well that you could never lie on an exhibit at, say, the Chicago Field Museum, while pretending to take your shirt off. We did this while engaging in a spirited discussion about whether these were real dinosaur footprints or a failed Soviet attempt at creating a tourist attraction ("People won't come just for a cave...Hey, I have an idea!"). Then we walked back to Kutaisi, ate, and headed to the nearby village where one of the volunteers with us lives to spend the night.

The next day, I traveled to Tbilisi, since I had a couple of ECO Project meetings on Monday. These meetings were relatively uninteresting (except for the fact that one of them occurred in a compound that, after seven months in a village, might as well have been Buckingham Palace -- we even got laminated Guest passes -- and the other one occurred in a brightly colored office with tastefully arranged workspaces that nearly made one of my companions faint while he sputtered something about how amazing the office was and would anyone be interested in his resume), but we will -- finally -- get back to the topic of the beginning of this post with what happened afterwards. I went back to the Peace Corps office for a meeting with my Program Manager, to discuss the difficulty I was having getting traction with my assignment and ideas for bridging the communication and activity gap in order to get substantive work started. Near the end of the meeting, I got a text message from a coworker. It said that she'd read my post about the puppy on Facebook (where I cross-post these posts for particularly lazy people), and that we should talk about "your problems" when I got back to Cho. This shocked me -- not only had I not realized that she knew how to check Facebook for such things, but I would never have thought her capable of reading one of these posts. Frequent readers of this blog will know that this post, for example, is not an aberration -- I always write like I'm trying to win some sort of prize for most extravagantly convoluted sentence structure and most inelegantly complicated verbiage. I was, in a sense, proud that her English ability had improved so much. I was also mortified that she'd read, and at least partially understood, a post that I'd written in the heat of anger. I texted her back, explaining that I didn't have any problems, that I'd been angry, and that we didn't have anything we needed to talk about. Realizing how bad an idea it had been to post it in the first place, I pulled the post. So. Now you know. By the way, I know that it must seem kind of stupid to talk about this incident again, given that she read about it LAST time, but this post is much more level-headed, and thus more deserving of a permanent space in the internet ether.

Just to round out the events-since-I-last-posted topic: The weekend after this happened, I went back to Tbilisi to watch basketball; UCLA was in the Final Four for the third straight year. I attended the last two Final Fours, only to see UCLA lose in both, and while I was very happy that they were back this year, I was a little depressed that they might win the national title the ONE year (ok, one of the TWO years) that I was out of the country. I went with some friends to an expatriate bar in Tbilisi that Friday night, to ask the owner if she'd stay open until 2am Sunday, when the UCLA game was going to be televised, and let us watch it on the bar's American Forces Network feed. I don't particularly like going to this bar, but the owner is really friendly to us, and we thought she might be willing to stay open. Turns out, she wasn't, but to her immense credit she did offer to tape the game, and to show it to us on Sunday morning if we came for breakfast. We agreed to this arrangement (I begged her to stay open and offered to pay her "as many lari as you want," but nobody else had a vested interest in the game, so I was the only one who wasn't immediately satisfied by her solution), played some darts, and left once some creepy Georgian men horned in on our game, started to hit on the girls, and created several holes in the wall with their full-body dart throwing motion (I don't know how to say "throwing" in Georgian, so I started yelling at them, "You're playing TOO HARD! You're playing TOO HARD!"). This seems irrelevant, but will soon become quite relevant indeed.

Saturday night's festivities whittled the number of people who ACTUALLY ended up wanting to wake up Sunday morning for breakfast and basketball to two, including me. I showed up at the bar to wait for the other person, only to discover that the owner had been unable to find the proper channel the night before to tape the game. I sat down in front of the large-screen TV, dejectedly, and noticed that it was showing a repeat of Sportscenter. I didn't think I'd be able to see the game after all, so I didn't turn away, and I saw that UCLA had lost. Even more dejectedly, I continued to wait for my friend as Sportscenter ended, and the ESPN feed began showing...wait for it...wait for it: a repeat of the UCLA game I had wanted to watch in the first place, except now I knew that UCLA would lose. When my friend got to the bar, he wanted to watch the game without knowing the ending, so I didn't tell him, and we watched it over some delicious but overpriced breakfasts. He figured out after I repeatedly reacted with "meh" to well-played UCLA possessions that I knew UCLA would lose.

This would be a bad enough Sunday morning as is -- the third consecutive year of watching my alma mater lose THISCLOSE to a national championship. But no. While we were watching, the owner of the bar came up to me and told me that my friends and I had walked out on our tab on Friday night. Assuming her to be completely correct, I apologized profusely and expressed my profound embarrassment at the error, explaining that we had been fleeing creepy men and must have forgotten, and I paid the 26 lari tab (the friend I was with that morning hadn't been there, so the repayment was all on me). I called a friend who had been there that night, to relay this information, and she told me that we had 100% without a doubt paid the tab before leaving. Now, I am assuming that the owner of this particular expatriate bar is not a thieving liar, and that she does not have swindling employees. The only conclusion we could come to was that the creepy Georgian men must have stolen the money after we bailed. So, to summarize that Sunday morning for me: (1) finding out that UCLA lost their Final Four game and then having to watch the entire game without saying anything (2) having to pay 26 lari because someone stole our tab two nights before. But wait! It gets better.

I had a giant box full of framed photographs that I'd gotten made that weekend for my documentary club; they were photos that the children in the club had taken, and I was bringing them back to Cho in nice frames to put up on the walls of my organization. This box was very heavy, and I had to get it back to Cho somehow, but I was not headed straight back to site on Sunday afternoon, as is usually the case (reason why forthcoming). So my plan was to send the box by itself on a marshutka, and have someone pick it up when it got to Cho -- this is something people do often (really, other than the fact that there's never enough space to be comfortable in a marshutka, it's a nice system of transportation). I took a cab, with this giant box, to one of the two big marshutka stations in Tbilisi, only to be told that there weren't any marshutkas going to Cho that afternoon from that station (ok, maybe it'd be a better system of transportation if there were regular timetables), so I had to pay the cabdriver more money to take me halfway back across town to the other one. When I got there, there was only one marshutka displaying a "Chokhatauri" sign. I asked the driver when he was leaving. As it turns out, the answer was complicated: he was supposed to leave at 4, but he didn't have enough passengers yet, and if he didn't get "enough" by 4, he was going to just go home, and not make the trip. "But I really have to send this box," I said. "It's for children. It's very important." We discussed the issue back and forth for a few minutes, and he told me that I just had to wait there until 4pm to see if enough people showed up. This wasn't an option -- the reason I wasn't going straight back to site was that I had been invited to my former LCF's birthday supra, in Gori (my training site, near where she lives), and I had to leave Tbilisi to get there on time. I pled with the driver, but he wasn't budging, and I couldn't haul this immensely heavy box to Gori, then to a train, then back to site. So, out of options, I asked the driver how much I'd have to pay him to ensure that he'd actually drive to Cho. He said 100 lari, which was absolutely out of the question, so I asked for 40, and we settled on 50 -- which is a staggering amount of money for a volunteer to pay when he hasn't anticipated such an expense. I made him write a receipt on a crumpled piece of paper, since the photos were for a project that I had a budget for, and I was hoping to be able to put this 50 lari somewhere in there (note to the people who paid for my project, who in fact read this blog: I am sorry. It was for the children. I had no choice). So, with a quizzical look, he wrote "Box sending: 50 lari" in Georgian, and the date. I assured him that this was exactly what I needed, and ran to catch a marshutka to Gori, my pocket feeling vastly lighter than I'd anticipated it would feel when I woke up that morning (Specifically, 76 lari lighter, which is something like 50 dollars, which is an enormous amount of money...wait, hang on, the dollar just fell again. More like six dollars). Oh well. At least the supra was a lot of fun. My birthday gift was a photo from last year's Halloween party, in a nice frame:

[OK, my connection isn't working well enough to load it, but I will do so the next chance I get]

This past weekend was boring, and contained no exciting events to report. Thus, you are now up to date. I am sure this pleases you immeasurably. Perhaps, by tomorrow, you will no longer be up to date, because today is Georgian "Love Day," and I have been invited to a celebratory "discotheque" and/or "concert" tonight (nobody seems exactly sure which it will be). I'm sort of curious, so I agreed to go, which may turn out to have been a perfectly fine decision, or may turn out to have been a Horrible Mistake. Details to come! Raise your hand if you're excited!

Wait, I don't see any hands. Fine. See if I spend 37 pages detailing a couple of modestly exciting weekends for you AGAIN.

By the way, I hadn't wanted to piss off my host brother by looking for the puppies under the house at all, to see if the mother perhaps had come back after all, or if they had died. But a couple of days ago, I was in the first floor of the house -- where I rarely go -- and my host sister said, "Do you smell that?" I didn't, but that didn't mean there wasn't a smell, so I asked her what it was. "The puppies," she said. So.

The dog days of spring. Or: Places where puppy punnery is totally inapuppriate.

2008-03-27T14:54:00.008+04:00

[in the process of being edited for some really fun reasons that cannot be explained]

A request. Or: Hey! Hey you!

2008-03-20T16:28:00.002+04:00

Apparently, the graphic at the top of my blog and a couple others has not been working because of some weird problem with the host site I use for it. I thought, when occasionally visited this blog myself, that it wasn't loading because of my internet connection. Hey, people -- let me know if sh#$ stops working. I wouldn't want you to think that my blog is SUPPOSED to have a giant gray box at the top. What do I look like to you? A guy who wouldn't care about something as stupid and superficial as the blog banner he has probably spent a cumulative total of at least six thousand hours tinkering with?

In my defense, I have a lot of free time at home to do stupid things like tinker with blog graphics. Don't judge me. Go watch some television, or eat some Arby's. I'm not speaking to you anymore.

March Madness. Or: Mail time.

2008-03-20T16:24:00.000+04:00

Happy NCAA Tournament Opening Day! I hope you're all taking the day off of school or work to properly appreciate the best four-day holiday our great nation has to offer. I, of course, will be missing (at best) nearly all of it, seeing as how I'm over here on a mountain, despite the fact that my alma mater, UCLA, is loaded and the pick of many experts to win it all. I hope that they do, even though it would be pretty funny for them to lose in the Final Four two years in a row, both times with me in attendance at great effort and expense, only to win Banner 12 when I am over here on this mountain. Pretty funny indeed.

This week has brought challenges anew to my little corner of the world. My organization seems to have been struck with a case of Creativity Paralysis; there is an upcoming grant competition I told them about, and I have been encouraging them to come up with a "program" of possible projects so we can have some meetings with donor organizations, but they cannot seem to think of a single new project idea. They ask me if *I* have any ideas, and I tell them that it's all well and good if I ply them with project ideas for two years, but then what happens when I leave? They consider this conundrum, then ignore it and ask me again for a project idea. I am also encouraging them (encouraging is the wrong word; it is more like demanding in an increasingly forceful manner) to conduct needs assessment in the community -- to go out into the community, somehow, to discuss problems, issues, and ideas with the community, so the community feels like more of an active participant in the work of the organization. They flatly deny this to be possible. From their perspective, asking anyone in the community what he/she needs or what he/she would want from our organization would elicit a one-word response: "Money." "A job." "New gas pipes" (that last one is threewordsshutup). They think that it would not be at all possible to engage community members further than this. And, if they're unwilling to do this, and unable or unwilling to come up with their own ideas (which are less likely to work anyway if they're not conceived and conducted with the help and enthusiasm of the community), then we're in a bit of a pickle. You are fascinated by this, I am sure, so I shall of course update you endlessly on the ins and outs of the Exciting Saga of Whether Dan Can Do Any Work Whatsoever Here.

Speaking of doing work, I am in receipt of an email from a soon-to-be G8, who will be in the verysameown Business and Social Entrepreneurship program that I am in! Her name is Theresa Marie, and she asked me enough questions to fill a book. Instead of filling a book (I think we were told at Orientation that, if we WERE to write a book during/about Peace Corps service, that it would be the property of the United States Government. Since we're volunteers, or something. I may have this wrong. But, just to be safe, I'm not writing ANYTHING while I'm here, government! No, sir! Not writing anything! This is just like screenwriters during the Writers' Strike. What? Me? Writing? No way! Ha ha! Hey, look over there!), I replied to her email, and I thought it would be pertinent to the other G8s who have found and will find this blog to repost my answers. Don't be shy, G8s! Ask away! But, seriously, if more than, like, two of you email me, eff that. I'm not MADE of time.

Hi Daniel,
I stumbled on your blog while looking for current information about Peace Corps Georgia. I am taking you at your word and emailing you with questions.

Hi Theresa Marie. Your group will actually be getting an "Alternative Handbook" (I mentioned it on my blog) that will answer any question you have much more thoroughly, from the perspective of lots of volunteers, than I could. I don't know when you'll be getting it; the staff here should be sending it to you soon. But I can answer your questions in brief, and then if you have further questions that perhaps the AH doesn't answer adequately, I and the other volunteers can do our best to answer them. But, let me warn you from the outset -- the experience is going to be different than what you think it will be no matter WHAT you think it will be, and no matter how much preparation you do. Just prepare the best you can and learn what you can about the country, and then be ready to go with the flow once you get here. No two volunteers' experiences are exactly the same, and none of us could have predicted last year at this time what we'd be like after almost a year here. It's just the kind of experience that can only be experienced, rather than explained. But don't let that fact scare you.

I recently accepted my invitation to do business development and social entrepreneurship (or whatever the title is) and basically wanted to know what the job is in real application.

There's no one answer to this, and I'm probably the person you LEAST want to ask. All of our organizations are different, and my organization is the smallest, newest, and the one in the smallest town. My experience and my job is vastly different than, say, the BSE volunteer who works at a business consulting organization in Batumi. The things we have in common are basically that our jobs, at the broadest level, are to get our organizations to work more efficiently, effectively, and to transfer knowledge, concepts, and best practices about things like long-term planning, project design, and fundraising. How well doing so goes for you depends on your patience, drive, and the luck of your site draw.

I also have questions about what to pack – beyond what is specified in the “welcome book”. Aka what did you bring and where really glad you brought, what do you wish you would have brought?

I'm going to save this question for the Alternative Handbook, since it will be more extensive than I could be simply from my own recollection, and since it will have a female-specific packing list, written by a female volunteer. I will say that I'm most glad that I brought my laptop and an external hard drive -- if you're the sort of person who uses a computer with any frequency (and you may not be), you will really want to bring a laptop, and I'd suggest bringing at LEAST one large external hard drive. We use them to store the illegally pirated movie files that we swap. We would feel bad about this, but there is no other way to see American movies here, unless you enjoy old movies dubbed into Russian, or bring a lot of legally-purchased DVDs, which is not an efficient use of packing space. I wish I'd bought more music before I left, and ripped more legally-purchased DVDs to my own external hard drive. You'll have a lot of downtime here.

Anything you wish you had known before going? Any general advice?

Georgian. How to cook. Georgian. How to unfreeze pipes with my bare hands. Seriously, the answer to that question could fill a book, and would probably be totally useless until you actually get here. Sorry. This is probably not what you're looking for, but, honestly, the thing I wish I'd known is that my preconceived ideas about living here were going to be wrong. Just be ready for anything.

How often are you able to communicate with people from home? Have you been able to go home and how often/complicated what that?

If you're a BSE volunteer, you're probably going to have internet at least almost every day. It will probably be slow, it may stop working frequently, and it will be subject to whether or not you have electricity at a particular moment, but you'll (probably) have it. So communicating with people online will probably be easy. And you can Skype, if you have Skype. If not, it's expensive to get phone calls (and way too expensive to make them yourself...practice your texting dexterity), but there are things you can use to make it cheaper. I'm just not 100% sure what they are. My parents deal with it, and they're the only ones who I talk to on the phone. I haven't gone home yet -- most people don't until at least their one year mark -- but a lot of
people do during the summer of their first year. I'm planning to go back in August. It can be complicated and very expensive, but a little less so if you plan way way way way way ahead.

Also, do you know any other volunteers who would not mind answering questions (especially women doing business development so I get their feel for things)?

I will ask the women who are in BSE if they mind me giving out their email addresses, and I'll let you know.

Looking forward to meeting you and everyone else in June. Thank you so much!!!

For sure. Not a problem. Good luck in your preparations, stay away from expectations, and spend your last few months eating a lot of different kinds of food, preferably ethnic cuisine, because once you get here you will eat the same thing every night for two years. Oh, and pack multiple pairs of really good long underwear, top and bottom. You won't take it off ever during the winter, and you'll want to be able to rotate one into the wash occasionally.

Theresa Wilson
Miami University

When I decided to write this post, I had a couple of other things I thought of that I wanted to have said in my email. Now I forget what they were. Maybe I should drink less wine.

Better Know A Georgia, Part Stupid Internet List. Or: You know you've been coming to this blog too long when...

2008-03-12T18:03:00.005+04:00

Usually I really hate these "You know you're ______ when" lists, but I found this randomly on Facebook, posted by some expat or other (hence the Tbilisi-specificness of it, since expats mostly live in the capital), and thought it was amusing. I also thought it would be pertinent as a Better Know A Georgia entry, because while, obviously, Georgians and volunteers would understand the jokes immediately (although, really, "jokes" is giving even an amusing version of this sort of list too much credit), most of you will not, and as such I get an opportunity to explain things, while subtly mocking the merely-amusing-ness of the "jokes"! Hooray! Let's begin:

YOU KNOW YOU'VE BEEN IN GEORGIA TOO LONG WHEN:
You can distinguish between Kazbegi and Argo in a blind taste test.
Kazbegi and Argo are Georgian beers. They taste the same. Hence, the joke is that you have been here too long if you can taste the microscopic difference between them. See? This is fun.
You recoil in horror if somebody punctures a khinkali.
Khinkali is sort of like Chinese dumplings, served piping hot. You are supposed to pick them up by the "knob" of the dumpling with your fingers, and put them into your mouth whole. But I'm more of a puncturer.
You find nothing romantic in candle lighting.
See, because if you have candles lit, that means there is no electricity.
You never go anywhere without a small flashlight.
This is true. I carry my crank flashlight with me everywhere. Usually, I go home from work after dark, and the streetlights on my street UNTIL RECENTLY were never turned on. So, the first night, I ended up inching my way along in pitch blackness, triangulating my position by my distance from the tops of the trees on either side of the street, which were barely visible against the starlight, and also trying to figure out whether I was in immediate danger from any of the 50 barking dogs I could hear but not see. Since that night, I've carried my flashlight everywhere. But, a couple weeks ago, they started turning the streetlights on. Here's a personal addition to the list: you know you've been in Georgia too long when you find yourself sincerely grateful that streetlights are turned on.
You consider amoebic dysentery to be a weight loss strategy.
I know a volunteer who has lost 30 pounds due to different stomach ailments.
You actually believe that Borjomi water has curative properties.
Also curative: spending time in Bakhmaro, a mountain town in Guria, which apparently has a "healing mixture" of mountain and sea air.
You think you can get a cheaper fare if the taxi driver doesn't notice your accent.
You do need to project a certain air of native-ness with taxi drivers, or they'll overcharge the hell out of you, since most Georgian taxis are "freelance" and not metered. Thus, you need to either agree on a fare before you get into the cab, or try to pay him what you feel is appropriate at the end of the journey without asking his opinion, and hope that he doesn't lock the car doors and drive you to Russia. A good technique for cheaper fares: when negotiating with the driver, say, "I know that's too much," and slam the door. He will, almost without fail, drive five feet, stop, open the passenger door, and ask for less money.
You don't mind eating dinner or showering in complete darkness.
I haven't showered in complete darkness, but I have showered by candlelight. You never shower more quickly than when it's (1) below zero, (2) you're naked in a room with no heat source but the hot water, (3) your glasses are several feet away and the room is covered in water, and (4) you have no idea whether too much steam extinguishes a candle. I spent the entire maybe two minute shower envisioning having to stand naked and shivering in the dark until the sun came up.
You get annoyed if the waiter doesn't change your plate every 5 minutes, or doesn't take empty bottles off the table within 30 seconds.
They like clean plates here. At supras, your place includes a plate on top of a plate, so that partway through, a hostess can take the top plate, leaving you with a clean one. I never want to make the hostess do more work, so usually I tell them I'm ok with continuing to eat off the top plate, even though it has a couple chicken bones on it. This confuses everyone.
You can't drink a glass of wine without a toast even when dining alone.
It, literally, was kind of weird to sip wine with my family when I was in London. Georgians do not sip alcoholic beverages. Ever. You wait for a toast, and then down the entire thing. Occasionally, if there is a mini-supra at my office, and I'm trying to do work, I will accept a glass of wine, but sip it at my desk instead of downing it at the table with everyone else. They don't like it when I do this.
You are not taken aback when a complete stranger at a supra kisses you and professes that you are his best friend.
I have lost track of the number of times this has happened.
You appoint someone tamada even when dining with foreigners.
Volunteers do this when we're eating Georgian food and celebrating an occasion. It seems weird not to.
A few shots of chacha don't even give you a buzz.
Tchatcha is the Georgian word for homemade vodka. As I mentioned in my supra post, it nearly always tastes like pure jet fuel. I think even Georgian men accept this, so it's not culturally insensitive to say it.
You're at an expensive restaurant and don't even notice the guy at the next table yelling into his cell phone.
Georgians answer their cell phones whenever, wherever, and conduct phone conversations by yelling. To be fair, Americans do this too. I read a story recently that the official announcement-making-woman for the London Underground got fired after joking on the PA system, "To our American friends, yes, you probably are talking too loud."
You have grown used to the picture quality of pirated DVDs.
Pirated movie files, more accurately.
You find sit-down toilets uncomfortable.
Not uncomfortable yet, just weird, if it's been a while. I'm also becoming quite proud of my Turkish toilet form. I'd show you, but, you know, you're...over there. Where you are.
You think you speak Georgian fluently.
If I ever once think this, I need to not only leave Georgia, but seek medical care, because something bad will have apparently happened to my brain. I do, however, sometimes think that my Georgian is better than it is. For instance, I get annoyed when I am in Tbilisi and I say something to someone -- a waitress, say -- and they answer me in perfect English. I think, "what, you think your English is better than my Georgian?" Of course, it is. But it pisses me off that they THINK it.
You can't put a proper sentence together in your native language.
I can't put a proper sentence together in ANY languages now. Some people speak several languages fluently. I speak zero.
You automatically bring your own toilet paper when you go to the bathroom.
You get burned enough times, it becomes a reflex. You don't really want to hear more about this.
It is no longer surprising that the only decision made at a meeting is the time and venue for the next meeting.
I wish our meetings were this productive. If I tried to obtain this information at a meeting, I would be met with the question, "Why do we need to have another meeting?" Now, I do not mean to rag on my coworkers. They are motivated and (often) hardworking (at least as often, for instance, as I am). But, today, I was trying to tell them that they didn't have to wait for an suggestions from a woman in Tbilisi to start asking townspeople what they wanted from our organization. I said, "Don't wait two days for her response. Just go out and do it." They asked me, "Why?" I said, "So you're not sitting around for two days not doing anything." The response: "What's wrong with that?"
You no longer wonder how someone who earns $400.00 per month can drive a Mercedes.
Answer: because it's the frame of a Mercedes on the body of a 1976 Soviet Lada.
You honk your horn at people because they are in your way as you drive down the sidewalk.
I would probably be doing this if we were allowed to drive. I have, for instance, been IN a vehicle that drove onto the sidewalk to avoid two stopped cars that had just hit each other.
Other foreigners seem foreign to you.
It took maybe two weeks in this country before we started looking at the tourists who occasionally visit Gori, where we were, with an expression of superiority.
You consider McDonald's a treat.
True.
You ask how much people are making and expect to hear an answer.
I don't, myself, do this. Because anything more than "zero" beats my salary. Also, when you live in a small town in an economically struggling region, you don't ask what people do, because they might not do anything, and that would make you feel awkward. At least, it would make ME feel awkward, because I am an American. The recipient of the question probably wouldn't feel awkward at all, but would instead start telling me about the job he had back in Soviet days.
You ask fellow foreigners the all-important question "How long have you been here?" in order to be able to properly categorize them.
In the case of the new G8s, I will KNOW how long they've been here. I'm looking forward to perfecting the inflection of my dismissive, "Pff. Wait until February."
Smoking is one of the dinner courses.
We were just recently discussing this. Nobody could think of a volunteer who had ever smoked in America -- no matter how long ago they'd quit -- who did not resume smoking here. If there are G8s reading this: if you have ever been a smoker, you will be a smoker again when you get here. It is inevitable. Prepare yourself mentally.
Georgians stop you on the street to ask for directions.
I don't know if other volunteers ever get asked for directions, but I'm told I could pass for Georgian, so perhaps that is why it happens to me with relative frequency. Just like when waitresses speak to me in English, it really pisses me off if the directions-asker decides my Georgian isn't that good and moves on. "WAIT," I think. "DAMMIT I COULD HAVE HELPED YOU IF YOU'D WAITED TEN SECONDS FOR ME TO COMPOSE THE SENTENCE IN MY MIND."
You get homesick for Georgian food when away from Georgia.
This will probably be true.
The word "salad" first brings to mind mayonnaise.
Mayonnaise on anything doesn't even really bother me anymore. Salad. Pizza. Hot dogs. Whatever.
You don't notice your gastrointestinal problems anymore.
It's not that you don't NOTICE them. You just start planning around them naturally.
You give a 10% tip only if the waiter has been really exceptional.
As far as my understanding goes, tipping here is 100% optional unless it's added into your bill automatically. If it isn't already in the bill, we only tip if doing so makes a more even number. I am going to come back to America, totally forget about this at a restaurant, walk out on a $100 bill, and get beaten to death by seven enraged waiters.
You change into slippers and wash your hands as soon as you walk into your apartment.
I change into my "home sweatshirt" and sometimes my slippers, but I wear my slippers out to the toilet, which you're not supposed to do. But, I mean, come on. I'm not gonna go upstairs to put my shoes BACK ON. The changing thing is more critical in the summer, when it's disgustingly hot out, and you don't want to get one more second's worth of sweat on your work clothes. So you put on a t shirt and shorts, and you wear that same t shirt and shorts whenever you're home. It's a nice little system. Note: only Americans do this. Georgian people never, ever, ever wear shorts.
You know more than 20 Tamunas, 30 Ninos and 60 Giorgis.
These are very common Georgian names. There aren't that many Georgian names, it seems. During training, my host mother told me, "it's big Giorgi's birthday today." I thought she meant fat Giorgi, down the street, as opposed to skinny Giorgi, my host brother, or little Giorgi, my host cousin. Turns out she meant my host brother, and I was late to his birthday supra. I felt really bad. But, as you can tell, it wasn't my fault.
Your sister writes to you about the best prime rib she's ever had and you can't remember what it looks or tastes like.
What is prime rib?
You catch yourself whistling indoors and feel guilty.
I whistle sometimes. Nobody looks at me funny or says anything, but I always wonder if secretly they think I'm doing something repugnant. If you have insight to shed on this, please let me know.
You never smile in public when you're alone.
You don't smile at men, anyway. You can still smile and nod at women, if they're not too old, or kids. Men will just stare at you blankly if you don't know them but do the American smile-nod thing. Which is weird, because "in public" is the operative phrase here. Ref: the earlier mention of complete strangers kissing you at supras and declaring you to be their best friend.
You are no longer surprised when your taxi driver tells you that in Soviet times he worked as a rocket scientist.
This doesn't happen to me very often, but last week I was in a cab in Tbilisi and the driver spent the entire time telling me Georgia was going down the tubes and that he missed the Soviets because he used to have a job in a refrigerator factory and the kids these days are terrible and what's with their baggy pants and their music etc etc etc. It puts you in an awkward position, having to defend a person's own country while he insults it. "No, Georgia is improving! The economy is doing very well! I know a lot of motivated kids!"
You consider holding a supra to celebrate the purchase of a new TV set.
I'd consider holding a supra if our current TV set suddenly got a new channel.
You specify "no gas" when asking for mineral water.
I don't understand the sparkling water thing. At all. Why is it preferable? Getting those bubbles down your throat is like work. Why do I want to work when I'm drinking a glass of water?
You think a bus with 200 people on it is "empty".
And then you are shown just how empty it is when the driver of the bus/marshutka stops to let fifty more people on.
You walk down the street holding hands with your buddy.
I mean, I don't do this, but Georgians do.
You start believing that you can blend into a large crowd of Georgians.
Until I pull my bright blue iPod out of my expensive American backpack.
You answer "ho" even when speaking English to non-Georgian friends.
"Ho" means "yeah." I can see how this might cause potential problems down the road.
You swear at a taxi driver for stopping at a red light even when there's nobody coming.
I think I did this, at least in the back of my mind, in America.
You notice that your wallet has been stolen and your first thought is that, come to think of it, the guy behind you on the bus sort of looked Armenian.
Georgia and Armenia do not like each other. I've been told that the Georgian word for "hell" is actually the name of a village in Armenia. This would be really funny if it was true, but I do not know whether it is. Very funny, that is, with the requisite caveat that xenophobia is totally lame etc etc etc.
You take foreign guests around Gori and feel compelled to point out that Stalin really liked small children.
I'm looking forward to taking guests to the Stalin Museum. Which, if you are new-ish to this blog, is located on Stalin Street in Gori, at one end of Stalin Park, at the opposite end of which is a large statue of Stalin in front of City Hall, which is one of maybe seven Stalin statues in Gori.
You order food at most restaurants without looking at the menu.
I mean, they all serve the same thing.
You answer your phone "Allo?" even when outside of Georgia (or 'gisment').
"Gisment" means, I think, "I'm listening to you." "Allo" is, I think, just a theft from English that means nothing in Georgian, which is interesting. Although I could be totally wrong about that. If you know the person who is calling, another acceptable salutation is, "Batono!" which means, "Sir!" I favor this last one. I might bring "Batono!" back to America.
You tell others your phone number in two-digit sequences: i.e. ninety-nine, seventeen, forty-three.
Georgian phone numbers have a three digit code and then six numbers. They give those numbers to you this way. It is really, really hard to process phone numbers this way, especially in a foreign language, when you're used to the American way. I mean, you'd confuse someone in America if you recited a phone number in anything other than the proper "DA-DA-DA (pause) DA dum (pause) DA dum" inflection, let alone in number combinations.
You try to bargain over the price of tomatoes while in a grocery store back home.
I still suck at bargaining. I was at a bazaar over the weekend, at a stand selling undershirts. The woman offered them to me for four lari each. I didn't think to bargain, and decided to go look around for other stands because I thought the sizes she had might be too big. But she thought I was trying to do the taxicab pretend-to-leave thing, so she said, "OK OK OK, three fifty." I'm at the bargain-by-accident stage.
You feel self-indulgent and pampered checking into a flight during the daytime.
Wouldn't know. Haven't done it in nine months. And I felt pampered and indulgent checking into a flight at all, when I went to London. "You mean I get a seat entirely to myself?"
You end English sentences with "ra".
"Ra" means "what," and is a common slang-y sentence ending. I try to talk slang-ily sometimes, often to derision from my coworkers. But I stick with it, what.
You turn off your car engine at stoplights to save fuel.
They do this here. Does anyone know if this actually saves fuel?
You have ten different responses to the question, "Do you like Georgia?"
If you are speaking to a Georgian person, there is only one acceptable response: "Yes."
The lady in your local corner shop stops asking when you are going to get married.
This will never happen. Just yesterday, I was walking to work and a woman I don't recall meeting (although I'm sure I have) said hi to me on the street. She asked if I missed home. I said, cheerfully, "Hey, my home is here!" She said, "Great! So, when are you going to find a Georgian wife?" Tricked again.

Well, that took way too much time and probably broke a record for worst content/useful information ratio. Just what you've come to expect! You know you've been coming to this blog too long when [fill in funny end joke].

Rest in peace, buddy.

2008-03-11T12:44:00.006+04:00

In dog heaven, you'll never get in trouble for pooping on the kitchen floor.

I know spring is coming because my back is acting up. Or: A spine-tingling time at the theatre

2008-03-07T18:48:00.002+04:00

Friends, would eight or fifteen groups of singing and dancing girls, boys, and old people lie to you? I don't think so. This must mean that spring is upon us, because I have just returned to my office from attending a variety show at the local cinema slash theatre, which was put on to celebrate the onset of spring, as well as Mothers' Day, which was this past Monday (I don't really know how Mothers' Days work; is it like a country by country thing, or is it pretty unified and either America or Georgia is bucking the trend, or...what?). So the town jammed itself into the cinema, with people sitting on the armrests between chairs and packed like sardines into the aisles, to see various singing and dancing acts, separated by the giving of gifts to distinguished mothers of the community, picked apparently at random. Maybe there was a mother raffle.

Now, the last time I attended anything at the cinema, I ended up sitting through a three and a half hour play of which I understood maybe five words. Also, during the play, a man started yelling and lifted a woman up onto a chair (I suppose I should clarify that this happened on stage, not in the audience, which would probably have made just as much sense). So I was hoping this variety show would not take that long. And, it didn't -- it took about an hour and 45 minutes. But it started half an hour late, and we had to get there early to be Seat People and not Sardine People. So I was sitting in there for about two and a half hours. Improvement! Perhaps I can introduce the cultural idea of an intermission. When we got there, they were handing out flowers at the door, as a crush of dozens of people all tried to shove their way through a single door at the same time. I didn't get a flower, but I did get a chance to look around. The stage was decorated with some sort of curtain and the words "Chven gazapkhulze gepatizhebit," which means, as far as I can tell, "We with invitation in the spring _______." I cannot identify a verb, or any indication of WHAT, exactly, we do with invitation in the spring. Perhaps it is meant to be a subtle philosophical postulation that nature, cruel mistress that she is, invites us to do NOTHING, EVER, and that we must TAKE what we want from her, especially when she has just subjected us to four months of torturous weather. ECO Project or no ECO Project -- when I am put upon by nature as much as I have been put upon this winter, I'm going to cut something the f#$% down.

I had no idea what the show was to consist of. It turns out that it consisted of a lot of singing and dancing. As you may have gleaned from other posts of mine, Gurians LOVE to sing and dance. It is endearing and entertaining. Slightly less so after two hours of it, but endearing nonetheless. Old women and old men sang traditional songs. Youngsters danced traditional dances. The ladies who run the local music school sang a couple nice songs (I am probably obligated to point out, in case anyone with a Cho Connection reads this, that the wife of my supervisor was the very best of the trio). An opera singer even brought the house down with some soprano aria or other. All in all, the performances were pretty impressive. And, in between the performances, there were curious presentations of presents to local mothers. A man would stand up, say something that sounded nice that I didn't particularly understand (when Georgians aren't speaking to me specifically, it's much harder to understand them...this is probably too obvious a point to even mention), and then everyone would clap vigorously, and then a coworker of mine would lean over and say something like, "that woman was in the war," which it turns out means World War II. So I suppose that's pretty impressive. There was also a present for a woman who my coworker claims is 102 years old. This woman, after being helped to the stage, took the microphone and said something that sounded to ME like, "I have 47 children!" which was met with a raucous roar from the crowd. She must have meant children AND grandchildren AND great-grandchildren. But the number still seems high, since Georgian families tend to be pretty small. Maybe she was utilizing metaphor.

So, anyway, the other thing that happened this week was that I (drumroll...) utilized the healthcare provided by the American government for the first time! Those of you who hate your health insurance provider, close your eyes and imagine this scenario (if you actually close your eyes, your computer will sense it and begin reading aloud to you): you have what seems to be a severely strained back. You are on (what you hope is) powerful Russian medication. You call your doctor, and she calls you into her office for a followup appointment (your doctor's office is five hours away, which I suppose isn't too farfetched if you have an HMO). At her office, your doctor tells you that she is going to order a "precautionary" MRI, even though you probably have nothing seriously wrong with your back. She also orders an X-ray. You get the MRI, you get the X-ray, and your doctor gives you her diagnosis, which is that there is nothing seriously wrong with your back. This costs you........absolutely nothing! Which is good, because you make about 150 dollars a month. Those of you who have fainted because an MRI in America costs 11 trillion dollars might want to call my doctor. She's awesome. You will have to spend two years here working on a mountain. But it might be worth it.

MRIs and opera singers, friends. The ancient signs of spring. Tonight I am going to attempt to sleep without my long underwear on for the first time in four months. Hopefully Jesus doesn't punish my rashness with fifty-seven feet of snow.

Better Know A Georgia, Part Whatever Plus One: The Supra. Or: Seriously, you want to come to this country.

2008-03-01T19:05:00.001+04:00

I am not one who usually lacks for words, and yet I keep trying to start this piece on the Georgian supra, so that you, the fresh-faced new volunteer, will be properly informed when you finally get here, and I keep drawing blanks. Once you have been here for a while, the word “supra” and the word “Georgia” just fit together so naturally that it is hard to imagine one without the other, and just as hard to describe the both of them in a way that fully captures what the supra is to Georgia, and to Georgian people. While Georgia is rapidly modernizing, it is and always will be primarily a land of traditions. There are traditions here for every time and for every occasion. But paramount of these, not only in the perceptions of volunteers but in the perceptions of the Georgian people themselves, is the tradition of the supra.

The supra combines the most cherished and most legendary characteristics of the Georgian people: they love hospitality, they love to party, and they really love wine. So a tradition in which a person will open his or her home to others for what could nearly be termed an orgy of food and wine – perhaps to celebrate an occasion, and perhaps for no reason at all – could not be more suited to their sensibilities. It is said that the supra is intended to evoke the Last Supper; indeed, Georgians treat each supra like a Last meal, and this is what makes a supra so enjoyable, but also so problematic, on some occasions, for volunteers. Excess is the name of the game at a supra, and if excess is not something you are comfortable with – especially when it comes to alcohol – you will have to stand your ground amidst people who, at least at first, will be confused that you are rebuking their hospitality. But if you know what you’re getting into, and you stay smart about your limits and your surroundings, then it is entirely possible that you will take nothing but excellent memories away from the supras you share with friends, family, and coworkers here. At the very least, it is likely that supras will dominate your anecdotes for friends and family back home. “You drank what out of what?” will probably be a frequent question. “Something out of a big ceramic horn,” you will say. “I don’t remember what or why. It was six hours into the supra.”

I am sure you have read or heard something about supras by now, and know the very basics. Supras can involve as few as two and as many as hundreds of people; everyone comes together to eat and drink (usually wine, occasionally liquor of some variety, but never beer, which is only for informal occasions) and give elaborate toasts for everything from peace to friendship to relatives. The supra is run by a man (always a man, unless it’s a female-only supra – this is, after all, a country governed by tradition) called the “tamada,” who decides when, and to what, each toast will be. Since a guest is always given special treatment at a supra, and you will always be a guest in this country, you may sometimes be offered the position of tamada, despite your initial lack of language ability and knowledge of supra customs. You are absolutely free to beg out of this. However: know that it is tradition, when the tamada is being chosen, for the person who is asked to be tamada to refuse several times before relenting. So, if you are asked and do not feel comfortable leading the supra, you will have to refuse more forcefully than perhaps you might think.

The tamada will decide when to raise glasses, and in some places or situations may decide what the subject of the toast is, but the order of toasts in a supra is actually relatively fixed (some volunteers claim that it is rigidly fixed, but, in my experience, this order is a little more variable than tradition would technically dictate). Once you learn what the usual order is among those you tend to supra with, this fact will make keeping up during the supra much easier, since you will only need to hear and successfully decipher one or two words in someone’s toast to know generally what is being said – which is good, because when drinking is involved, usually difficult-to-understand Georgian men become impossible-to-understand, slurring, shouting Georgian men. The first toast is always, “Mshvidobas” – to peace. But the tamada will not simply say, “Mshvidobas gaumarjos” (“Cheers to peace”). He will spend between 30 seconds and five minutes talking. I wish I could tell you what he will talk about, but you’d have to have amazing language ability to follow the many digressions and explications in a typical Georgian toast. Victory is understanding the one- or two- word subject of the toast (it is also, incidentally, the literal translation of “gamarjoba,” and the root of “gaumarjos,” which translates colloquially to “cheers” but technically means, “may he be victorious”). The tamada will talk for five minutes, sometimes with theatrical arm gesturing and shouting, and then often you will ask what the toast was about, and receive a two-second answer (“He was toasting to your brother.”). Subsequent toasts will include: a toast to the occasion of the supra, if there is one; a toast to the guests, if there are any (which there always will be, if you are in attendance); a toast to Georgia and Georgian people; a toast to parents; a toast to siblings; a toast to children; a toast to ancestors; and a final toast to the tamada himself. There also may be toasts to God, to spouses, to love, or to other things; the more formal the supra, the more toasts there are likely to be. There is also a strong likelihood, due to your attendance, that there will be toasts to America, and to its friendship with Georgia. Once the tamada has made the first toast, everyone around the room gives their version of the same toast. It is considered rude to skip a toast; make sure that, if everyone is toasting and also keeping an eye on you, that you raise your glass in turn to say something. Especially at first, you will not be expected to say much more than, “gaumarjos,” but toasts are a good place to practice your Georgian. Everyone is drinking, so they won’t care if you mess up, and they will be riotously pleased with your effort.

When you finish talking is where it gets hairy. It is tradition that your wine glass, after each toast, must be consumed bolomde – to the end. I’ll let you count the number of possible toasts I mentioned in the previous paragraph, and I’ll also say that it’s probably not a real supra unless there are at least seven to ten. Now I’ll let you imagine yourself after ten glasses of wine. There are ways – sneaky and not – out of drinking bolomde, but the fact remains that you will end up drinking a lot of alcohol at a supra if you either do not set ground rules for yourself, or drink enough that you forget them. Wine consumption, on even the personal level, is not even usually measured in glasses – it is measured in liters. As in: “He didn’t drink that much last night. Only a liter and a half.” Thus, rules number one through, well, eleven, of Safe Supra-ing: always know, before beginning a supra, how much wine or liquor you are willing to drink. If you do not want to drink at all, say so at the very beginning, and don’t budge. You will be begged. Begged. “Just one.” “Why not?” “It’s ok, my family made this wine. It is very delicious.” If you relent, and drink one, “just one” will turn into “just eight.” I was at a small supra a few weeks ago where four straight toasts were promised to be “the last one.” And this was with vodka, not wine (an important note: homemade Georgian wine, while it varies in strength, is usually relatively weak, despite its fun vinegar taste. Homemade Georgian vodka also varies in strength: from fire-down-below to pure jet fuel. Be advised, and be careful). If you’re not drinking, don’t drink. People will eventually take you seriously. If you don’t want to drink very much, start drinking less than bolomde from the very first toast; you will, again, be exhorted to finish your glass, but if you refuse for long enough, you will be left alone. A good excuse is, “I’m an American, I can’t drink as much as you Georgians can.” They will take this as an immense compliment.

This is a good point to mention the gender difference at supras. As a male volunteer, I have not had much opportunity to witness how American females are treated at supras, but from what I have heard from other volunteers, it is relatively easier to beg out of drinking heavily. Also, there are apparently all-female supras, where there are no men who must be tended to, which are evidently loads of fun. I wouldn’t know. But I do know that, if you are a man, you will either drink a lot, or say, “No” a lot. Georgian men drink, and they drink a lot. They will want you to drink a lot with them. They will want you to drink a lot the morning after you drank a lot, because this is the best way to cure hangovers. They will want you to drink a lot when the electricity goes out, because this is the best way to pass the time when you don’t have electricity. They will want you to drink a lot at 11 o’clock in the morning in the office of the school principal, because this is the best activity to engage in while in the presence of children. It is a fact of life in this land, and it is one you will get very used to very quickly.

Your endurance will be tested at supras in ways even beyond your tolerance for alcohol. Full-blown supras usually have vast arrays of food; every traditional Georgian dish will be present, and there will be a lot of it. On the table, plates will be stacked on top of plates that are already stacked on top of plates. You may never have seen as much food in one place as you are likely to see at big supras (weddings, for instance). Partly because your Georgian hosts will be wanting you to drink an unfathomable amount, they will want you to also eat an unfathomable amount. You will hear a lot of, “Tchame, tchame” (“eat, eat,” if you haven’t yet encountered this most ubiquitous of phrases in other parts of this handbook). Pacing yourself is an important part of the supra experience. Do not succumb to the temptation to eat all of the delicious-looking things that you see immediately, even if you do not get these foods at normal meals. You will immediately feel tired and finished, and you will have many hours yet to go. Georgian supras can be prodigious in length. A normal supra will probably last a few hours, a supra for a special occasion can last much longer. I have heard stories about volunteers who have left supras, gone to sleep, and woken up the next day to discover the supra still in progress. Besides knowing your limits in terms of alcohol, and how to stick to them, knowing your exit strategy is the most important thing you should think about during supras. There are lots of strategies. Try to sit near an exit, and to not get blocked in by other guests. Sit with people who will be sympathetic if you wish to leave – friends and coworkers, perhaps – rather than with over-enthusiastic hosts. Text a friend, and tell him or her to call you; then, when the phone rings, pretend that your mother is calling, which is an acceptable excuse to get out of anything. You can even just wait for everyone to get so drunk that they won’t notice or care if you slip out the door. This sounds like a joke to you right now. It will not six months from now, when it’s 1:30am, nobody is showing any signs of stopping, and you have to wake up to teach class or go to work in the morning.

It occurs to me that I have probably either excited you immeasurably or terrified you beyond words. But, whether you’re texting your friends to tell them, “dude, peace corps is gonna be awesome, wait til you hear how much they drink there” or having terrible visions of a bottle of Merlot chasing you down a dark tunnel screaming, “tchame, tchame” (of course, I am kidding – homemade wine, which is what you will always be drinking, is to Merlot what a go-kart is to a Mercedes), realize that the volunteer experience is highly variable. Some volunteers rarely have supras. Some supra multiple times per week. It depends on your host family, where you live, and your willingness to take part. As long as you stay in control, you will be totally fine. Gaumarjos!

Turning a new leaf. Or: That is, if the leaves start coming back.

2008-03-01T18:30:00.003+04:00

So I spent the last week in Tbilisi. It was a very difficult week, punctuated by several different sources of stress during the day and then, as young people are wont to engage in, various means of releasing that stress in the evenings. Let me just say, as an illustrative example, that any beverage entitled, "The Kiss of Death," is not something about which you should contemplate, "I wonder what that will do to me tonight and tomorrow morning."

Much of what made the week difficult was that I was spending three days working with two members of my organization, on really important things like time management and long-term planning and project design. These are crucial themes for them, and I felt a really heavy sense of responsibility to be doing the best I possibly could in helping my coworkers to understand them, and to somehow correct the situation if they didn't. The first half of the training was centered around the creation of a "practice project," which for us was actually not a practice project but a real project that we will be attempting to get funding for very soon. It's an integration project where we take children from a nearby boarding school for orphans and handicapped children to a camp, where they would plan a school-year long set of further integrat...ive activities for other children. So, basically, it felt like if I f#$%ed something up, I would be causing the ruin of orphans and handicapped children. Oh, and I have not yet mentioned: I was doing the entire training in Georgian. This is something the other volunteers at this training did not have to do. Their counterparts speak at least pretty decent English (except for the one who can talk to her counterpart in Russian, which is just unfair). Mine do not, so I had to struggle through discussions of things like, "we have to make our objectives and action plans more concrete," and, "what other resources will we need to have in the budget?" in Georgian, with minimal help. I'm glad that it, seemingly, worked out, and that both me and my "counterparts" were able to communicate our ideas most of the time, but it was one of the most mentally exhausting things I can recall ever doing. People kept complimenting me on my Georgian during the trainings; obviously, it's nice to be complimented, but it would be nicer to have the sort of successes that are only possible when you can communicate your ideas in English to someone who will understand them.

Thankfully, it was a very successful week. I'd been struggling to find directions to move my organization in, recently, and this week solved those problems. We have a lot of work to do now. But it will be up to me to help my coworkers do that work. And the week did little to pull me out of the (at this point comically) extended funk I've been in. I'm sure you're all (perhaps using an open-ended, plural term to categorize my audience is overly optimistic) getting a little tired of how I have been utilizing this space recently -- basically as a limitless forum for my own complaints and whining. And I'm hopeful that I'll come back to my winter posts at some happier time (say, June) and be dismayed at how snively I have been sounding these last two months. After all, today is the first day of March, the first day of the first month in which nature begins to rouse itself from months of slumber and stupor. Spring is around the corner, friends, and perhaps with it a solution to the things I have been unable to solve purely through personal willpower. I may snap out of my troubles the first day I wake up to the sight of something other than my sleeping bag. I may begin to skip again when doing so will not result in landing in a puddle of slush, dirt, and the motor oil from a 1974 Lada sedan. I may resume posting flowery treatises on the idyllic things I see every day here once I am finally able to stop ignoring them, lost in my own head.

This would be a preferable scenario to, say, realizing that not even spring could make what I'm dealing with easier. Which is just as plausible. You can't shit a shitter. Not that I'm calling myself a shitter. I have forgotten my point entirely, here.

What I am saying is, my apologies for the woe-is-me vibes. But, at the same time, I promised a more lengthy, amusing entry on the Week That Was, and I don't really feel like writing it. So, instead, I am going to post directly after this post the other Better Know a Georgia segment that consists of an entry I wrote for the G8 Alternative Handbook: The Supra. I have already laid out for you some information about supras, in my post about my host brother's wedding, but you can never get too much supra, in Georgia. I, for instance, had a supra two nights ago, and will have another one tomorrow! Hooray! Of course, if you are reading this post in the normal way -- on the actual blog page, instead of through some fancy feedreader or whatnot -- you know what the next post is, because you have already read it! Because it is above this one! On the page! But I wrote this first! ... You have stopped caring. I know. You can't, after all, shit a shitter.

Well I was born in a small town. Or: And I live in a really, really freaking small town.

2008-02-29T14:05:00.007+04:00

Hello there, friends. It has been a week since I've mosied by. And what a week it was! I have been in the capital, Tbilisi, since last Friday, engaging in meetings, trainings, and other such shenanigans. I will be preparing a lengthy entry on these events, because they were...eventful. But, for now, to sate you, I will simply share one thing that just happened to me:

I had to go to the pharmacy, just now, because on my way back from the capital yesterday, I picked up an enormous bag I had (which was full of, by then, clean laundry, since I spent a night engaging in washing machine use at an expat's house...more details to come on how scarily excited I was about this), and apparently I did it wrong, and I wrecked my back. So, today I called the doctor, and she told me to go to the pharmacy, where I was to call her, so she could give the pharmacist instructions on my care (believe it or not, my stunning Georgian is not yet stunning enough to say, "I need 100mg tablets of your strongest painkillers, because I have strained my back muscles"). When I was at the pharmacy, hoping that the doctor was telling the pharmacist, "He needs Russian vicodin. Lots of it. Stat," the wheelchair-bound proprietor of the establishment looked at me. I do not know this man. It took me a few seconds to realize that I sometimes pass him in the street. We have never spoken, and if he's ever looked at me in a more than glancing manner, I haven't noticed it. He asked me a question. One would think that this question would be a normal, "Who are you?", or even, "Do you like Chokhatauri?", which is a question I get from people who know who I am but don't know me. Here, instead, was his question:

"Why did you shave your beard?"

I shaved my beard last week, in Tbilisi. I am, apparently, so famous that even the pharmacy manager knows my facial hair status at all times. Next time, I'll go in there for some more Vicodin, and he'll say, "I liked the sweater you were wearing yesterday better."

Small towns, friends. Small towns.

More tomorrow (the usual disclaimer about how this might be an absolute lie).

Better Know A Georgia, Part Whatever - The Alphabet. Or: Fun weekend films for the whole family.

2008-02-21T10:47:00.010+04:00

Hello there. Normally, while apologizing for not actually posting this entry two days ago, as I promised, I would use the clever rhetorical device of giving you "zero" guesses to determine the cause of the delay. However, it occurs to me that you would all likely guess the reason to be that I am lazy and uninterested in your edification. This is not, actually, the correct reason. The correct reason is that I have been without internet for two days as a bunch of partially frozen water particles, none identical to any other, decided to make their way down from the sky at a torrid and sustained pace. But today it is clear (so far), so, without further ado:

Wait! There is an ado! An important BREAKING urgent advertisement-style PIECE OF ADO. Tomorrow, the most important piece of film in the history of cinema is being released, and you are not to come back to this blog until you have taken five or fifteen friends to go see it.

Yes, friends, Be Kind Rewind, the delightful comedy starring Jack Black, Mos Def, and about two seconds of footage worth of giant black and white photographs that I took of old cars unlesstheycutthatpartoutsinceilastsawascreeningalmostayearago, is coming out tomorrow, and I expect you all to go see it, because I have an ENORMOUS profit percentage in my contract as "Additional Production Assistant." So. There's that. And now for our feature presentation (that's a Hollywood term):

The Georgian Alphabet Entry for the G8 Future Volunteer Alternative Handbook
So, this is something I wrote for an informational CD, composed by current volunteers, that gets sent to the NEW batch of volunteers who are still in America (Flee, future volunteers! Flee while you still can! Ha ha! Just kidding! Maybe!). I thought it might be fun to post it here for a few reasons. Foremost, the Georgian language/alphabet is an ancient, historic language/alphabet, but one that almost nobody has ever seen or heard of, because of the relative closedness of the Georgian society, the small number of people who know it (estimated by Wikipedia to be only about 4-5 million, making it approximately the 120th most common language in the world -- with the caveat that it's almost impossible to have accurate numbers for such a ranking), and the fact that this country doesn't have a diaspora that does a lot of college-campus-marching, like Armenia has (there also, sadly, is no Georgian equivalent to System of a Down). So I thought it would be interesting for those of you who read this blog to see a description and an explanation of its alphabet, since, if you read this blog, it's possible that you may come into contact with this alphabet at some point. Perhaps you have received a Georgian-language postcard from me, or perhaps you are planning on VISITING HINT HINT HINT HINT. Or, perhaps you're just interested. Or, perhaps you're an actual Georgian, who has stumbled upon this blog after searching for "pictures of shakira concert," in which case this entry will perhaps have ENGLISH language educational opportunities for you (example: in a chart below, I use the word, "burrrrrrito." This is the proper spelling of this word. All other spellings are wrong.). So, without any further ado (I swear):

The Georgian Alphabet Entry for the G8 Future Volunteer Alternative Handbook

Congratulations on accepting your invitation to serve in Peace Corps Georgia! I am sure that, while you were making your decision, you thought of many benefits to serving in the Peace Corps. “Learning a new language” was probably among the benefits you thought of. It was certainly one of mine. “I will be able to use this new language that I learn, later in life, to great benefit and acclaim from my peers!” you are probably thinking to yourself. You will be tickled and delighted, then, to discover that Georgian is approximately the 120th most widely used language in the world! There are perhaps five people in the entire world, outside the borders of Georgia, who can speak this complex, ancient, and fascinating language! But do not fret, volunteer-to-be; there will be rewards for your seemingly meaningless toil. For instance, I just wrote a bunch of postcards in Georgian to my friends back in America, because I know that they will be very impressed to see something in the mail that they cannot read. “What the hell is this?” they will say, when they receive my postcard. “Did he accidentally sneeze ink? Are these words?” Friends, the Georgian alphabet can be as confusing to look at as a parrot wearing mittens. If you have ventured to find it already, perhaps on the internet, you have already discovered this. If you have not, please consult this chart, before reading on:

Now, now. Put the sharp implements down, and take a deep breath. We will get through this together. You can now probably see why the Armenians say that the Georgian alphabet looks like someone threw a plate of spaghetti against the wall. Some volunteers prefer to say that it looks like “Elvish.” But it’s not as difficult as it looks at first. It just takes practice. It’s much easier, for instance, than remembering the hundreds of different versions of each verb. Stop! Please put the implements down. Thank you. Anyway, you will get to verbs in due time, but it is the opinion of most volunteers here that, language-wise, the most important way you can prepare for your departure is to learn the alphabet. If you learn the alphabet before you get on the plane, you will start your first language lessons at least being able to understand what is being written down by your language instructor, and you’ll have that much more of a head start on learning the actual words. Past the very basics (“gamarjoba,” “nakhvamdis,” “madloba,” etc.), it is very difficult to learn anything about this language when you are not here, being taught by an exceedingly competent teacher (trust us – the language teachers are amazing; you’re in good hands). Buy a language book if you want to, and study as much as you like, but any head start you get with actual words is likely to be minimal. However, I recommend in the strongest possible terms (and most volunteers agree) that you learn the alphabet before you get here. It’s doable, and it will make it easier for everyone to get started.

So – how to learn it? The internet can be a good resource for you, but when I did my research before leaving America, I never had any idea how reliable the information was on the few websites I found. Some of it was contradictory. So, since the alphabet is such an important first step, I have compiled the Absolutely Unassailably Correct Pre-Departure Future Volunteer Alphabet Guide for you, so that you can feel reasonably confident that you are learning what we learned. I do not require your thanks; merely that someone bring me a Taco Bell Burrito in some sort of thermos when you get here from America. Thank you.

Now, then. As you can see from the first chart, the Georgian alphabet is made up of 33 letters. Some of the sounds contained in these 33 letters basically do not exist in English, and some of them sound exactly the same as other sounds, to our ears, but are in fact different. Differentiating sounds, and being able to identify the proper letter when you hear sounds that are not in English, will end up being a much more difficult task for you than just memorizing which squiggles correspond to the sounds you CAN hear. It is still hard for volunteers who have been here a long time. I will do my best to explain these sounds for you, but it will take arriving in-country for you to really grapple with them. Let’s start with an alphabet chart, and then parse it further from there:

One thing that does make learning the alphabet easier is the fact that the sounds never change with context, like they do in English. There aren’t several different sounds represented by the letter for “a” – there’s just one, so all you have to do is learn the sound for each letter, and it will always sound like that. This frees your brain to try to recognize the letters that sound, to English speakers, exactly the same. But we’ll get to those in a minute. First, the easy ones. These 16 letters have English equivalents; except, as I mentioned, each letter has only one sound that never changes. This chart tells you which English sound is used for the equivalent letter in Georgian:

Of these, all are very commonly used except for the last two; “j” is used infrequently, except in the word “gamarjoba,” and “h” almost never, except in the word, “ho.” This is fortunate, because they can be difficult to write.

Next, there are five letters that do not have an EXACT equivalent in English, but are either pretty close, or combine a two-letter sound that we DO have in English. These are also easy letters:

Of these letters, the letter “zh” is not used particularly often, but the others are very common.

Finally, we come to the twelve letters that will be the most difficult for you to learn. These twelve letters consist of six sounds in English, each with two variations that will be very, very difficult for you to hear at first. It will get easier for you to sometimes hear the difference between these sounds as you spend more time here, but you will continue to make mistakes, and if you have annoying coworkers, they will laugh and try to get you to make sounds that you cannot (for instance, they LOVE to try to get volunteers to say “bakh’akh’i,” which means frog, and twice uses what is generally considered to be the most difficult sound for Americans to say). When this happens, my best advice is to say the word, “faith,” which combines three sounds that don’t exist in Georgian, and are thus just as hard for them as “bakh’akh’i” will be for you. Ha ha! Cultural exchange is fun.

The easiest way to think about these sounds is in pairs of letters, one with a “soft” sound, and one with a “hard” sound. The soft sound is closer to the way the letter sounds in English; for these sounds, you should be letting air escape your mouth. For the hard sounds (marked here and in many language guides with a ‘), make the same sound as before, but stick your tongue back in the roof of your mouth, and force the sound through it, without letting air come out. A good way to test whether you are saying the sound properly is to put your hand in front of your mouth; if you feel breath, you’re saying the soft sound, and if you don’t, you’re saying the hard sound. Let’s give it a try:

Of these letters, the general consensus is that the most difficult is “kh’,” or the letter that looks like a “y” (I have to describe it, instead of typing it, because you probably don’t have Georgian font drivers installed on your computer yet – find a driver online, if you can). It’s hard enough to say the soft version of this sound, especially when you haven’t had a glass of water in a while, but the hard version can be very, very difficult. The best piece of advice I heard for pronouncing it is to tilt your head back as far as it can go, and look at the ceiling. Then say the soft, “khhhh” version of the sound. That should produce the proper, harder sound.

It will be hard to know if you’re getting the sound right until you’re here, in your language classes; your language teachers will do an excellent job of trying to teach you the sounds, but you still won’t be able to tell them apart in conversation-speed speech for a while. But don’t really worry about it. Georgians will understand you, even when you say the sounds wrong, and to my knowledge there aren’t any extremely embarrassing words that sound exactly like a more innocuous word, only with one sound pair switched. It ends up being mostly a spelling issue; you will NOT be a good speller in Georgia. Just trust me on that one.

So, now that the alphabet is laid out for you, how can you practice it so you know it backwards and forwards once you get here? What I did was to write the letters over and over and over, just like kindergarten all over again. This allows you to start putting sounds with squiggles, and gets you more comfortable with writing the letters more quickly (although don’t try TOO hard with j, t’, ch’, or ts’ – there are handwritten versions that are easier than the typewritten ones). There is also an excellent website that has a small alphabet game, where you are shown either a Georgian or an English letter, and have to select the proper equivalent in the other language. A combination of these techniques, along with any other materials that you find on the internet (although be careful with these, because as I said before, I found a lot of contradictory information online; the sources usually have the alphabet right, but often have differing explanations of the sounds) or that Peace Corps might send you, in whatever way you think works best, will work out fine for you.

So, that’s it! I am sure you will arrive here with the alphabet in the palm of your hand. Eventually, though, you will have to wash that off, and actually learn it. And it isn’t so hard, with practice. Trust me. The time you spend pre-departure on the alphabet is time you don’t have to spend on it here, when you will need every word you learn immediately, in order to be able to communicate at the most basic level with your host family and with people in the community. The Georgian language is a fickle mistress, and you must do your homework if you wish to tame her. Good luck.

F#$%^ing February. Or: Comments on comments, with some added alliteration for your amplified amusement.

2008-02-18T13:01:00.005+04:00

First, comments on a couple comments. I am attempting positive-commenting-reinforcement, since there are STILL LOTS OF PEOPLE WHO COME TO THIS BLOG AND DO NOT COMMENT. This blog is a LEARNING tool for you, dear readers. A learning tool so that you can know More About the Peace Corps and More About the World and More About Important Things. It should be a conversation! Nobody enjoys me talking endlessly to myself (Except me. I enjoy this immensely). So, I shall respond to the most recent comments. Ruth commented on the post that questioned the Meaning of Everything:

Hey you got your wish to start a band by going to Georgia! Congrats. Will you do a Georgian version of the sandwich song? Was it "Make Me a Sandwich"?
You'll probably start to feel better when the weather improves. Being cold really ruins attitudes.
Realizing you don't know everything is a sign of maturity. I don't think anyone expects you to have figured out too much at this point in your peace corp career. At the end of 2 years though, watch out! (kidding). I think we're all just impressed that you went and you're trying your best in a difficult situation. Maybe someday you'll be able to sum up neatly what you've learned, but even if you can't I don't think that means you have changed or learned anything.

To clear up any confusion, "Make Me a Sandwich" was not the name of a song, but instead the name of my band, which is on hiatus until we can all learn how to play instruments and write songs and do heroin ambidextrously. Rest assured, MMAS fans: my new band, Mzis Chasvlis Sikhvarulit Momgherlebi, is more of a side project, and our album Bakhakhivit Mgherian will not affect the recording schedule of MMAS' debut album Pastrami on Rye, which is still on target for its "never" release date.

As to Ruth's other points: being cold does seem to be affecting me more than I thought it would. We heard, from G6 volunteers, that February was the worst month, in terms of morale and motivation. One volunteer (the one and only Tom Schreiber) told me that, at one point last February, the hot water went out while he was showering, and, if there had been anyone else in the bathroom, there might have been a homicide. This despite the fact that last year was, apparently, an unusually warm winter. Not only has this winter not been unusually warm, it has been the coldest winter, at least in Chokhatauri, that anyone can remember. A coworker of mine just complained to me that, usually, there is one big snow per winter. This year, I have lost count of the big snows. There have been at least five, probably closer to ten. I knew, from the aforementioned G6 warnings, that the winter would be difficult. I didn't anticipate it being this difficult. Either the other things that are making this month difficult are making it really, really difficult, or the winter is affecting me more than I thought it would. I'm not totally sure which it is. I'd prefer to attribute it to the winter, though I know that the winter is not entirely to blame. I suppose what I am saying is: perhaps home, office, and automotive climate control are more of a factor in the economic success of the western world than one would think. It's hard to be productive when you're cold and/or really hot, and most of the world is one of these things most of the time. But, whatever the case may be, Ruth: I appreciate the encouraging words. The difficult thing, for me, is my tendency to conflate success with effort. If something doesn't work, I feel like somehow I have failed in my effort, and I wonder whether I'm trying hard enough. Maybe I am, and I just have to accept that what happens, happens. Or, maybe I'm really not. Who knows? It is February, after all. I think I am going to rechristen it, "f#$%$%ing February," because I enjoy both bad language and alliteration.

The second comment comes from "Linda," which is the nom de plume of my mother, regarding the post about the criticism of Peace Corps in a New York Times op-ed:

The Peace Corps is a very large organization working in a very large number of dissimilar countries throughout the world. A world that is changing very quickly. That PCV's need to be better qualified for some of the posts that they are sent to is a point well taken and I believe accurate. However, there are also many areas where PCV's are not only useful but a great benefit to their host country, city, town. It's a matter of fit and some rethinking of some of the more technical posts that PCV's are sent to.

I can't really speak to some of the more "technical" posts that PCVs are sent to in many countries; in a lot of countries, PCVs work in forestry, agriculture, medical, and other quite specific and technical fields. I hope that the volunteers sent to work in these areas have the experience to make a difference in their host sites, but I have no idea whether or not this is actually the case. Georgia is not a Peace Corps post with highly technical programs; volunteers here either teach English, or work as consultants at business or social organizations. Some volunteers here are highly qualified for their work; some of us are either directly or recently out of college, and got all of the specific knowledge for our work from two months of training. I don't know a great deal about how other volunteers feel about this, but the conversations I have had about it lead me to think that they feel much like I do: when things are going well, it seems like what we thought before coming here is true -- that merely coming from a good educational background in America allows us to transfer knowledge and ways of thinking that the people here really need, but have had little access to. When things are not going well, we think something else: what am I doing here? Why me? How can I help this town and this organization? And I suppose such thinking is inevitable. It is, again, f#$%#ing February. My program manager said something to me recently, in an email. She said, "You may not be seeing the results of this yet but you have changed [the members of your organization, local youth, and the town in general]... and trust me it is a change for the better." Slow change can sometimes seem like no change, or not enough change, and that can make a person think, "perhaps someone else could be doing this better." And perhaps someone else could. Hopefully, at least, I'm doing enough. Maybe ask me in March.

Speaking of "someone else" -- not of someone else instead of me, but rather of someone else in addition to me -- I would like to acknowledge a crazy reality: there are going to be new volunteers here pretty soon. We have been here for eight months, now, and in a little less than four more, there will be a whole new batch of idealistic trainees who have no idea what F#$#$%ing February 2009 (this sounds like the theme of a bar crawl) has in store for them. It's hard to believe we've been here for this long. Regardless, these volunteers will soon be finding our blogs and reading what we wrote for an informational CD that Peace Corps will be sending them, and they will start to ask us questions about stuff. This is frightening and exciting at the same time. I am sure that it is obvious to those of you who know me and those who do not alike: I enjoy being seen as a person who Knows Something. But the responsibility is daunting. What if they read this blog and think that all volunteers do is complain about the weather and talk about toilets? Could I live with myself, knowing that 60 idealistic still-in-America pre-trainees have such a correct notion of what is in store for them? Maybe I should start writing about how I've taught everyone in my town to recite Shakespeare in English and how we built a community center with no materials except sweat, companionship, and increased intercultural understanding.

Oh well. If any newly-invited American is happening across this blog, feel free to email me with any questions you may have. I will try to be as idealistic as possible in my response. And, for your edification as well as that of anyone else who might be interested, I think I may post my contributions to the alternative handbook (that informational CD) on this blog, because they were on the fascinating topics of the Georgian alphabet and supras. Also because I have already written them, and it would be a shame not to pad my post count with things that have already been written for another reason (I may also post something or other from the January edition of The Tamada, the volunteer-written satirical attempt-at-a-publication, because I know people love reading collections of inside jokes that they may not find at all amusing). I am happy to be a resource for you almost-almost-volunteers in any way that will be helpful. But, a warning: I might, if I were you, either wait until the weather warms the #$%^ up, or take any response with five or thirty grains of salt.

It is, after all, f#$%#$ing February.

Tomorrow: my Alternative Handbook 2008 article about the Georgian alphabet. Finally, after all this time (I am too lazy to look up exactly how much time): a new installment of Better Know a Georgia! Dream happy dreams until then, friends.

Tom Schreiber. Or: Welcome, searchers!

2008-02-17T18:29:00.000+04:00

Friends, I don't pretend to understand the internets. It may be a connected series of tubes. It may be run by gnomes, or the French. All I know is that the internets are wonderful. All eleven of them. I sometimes mention in this space that my favorite thing about this blog is getting to see what random people, all over the world, were searching for when they stumble upon my blog. I discovered a while back, to my surprise and bemusement, that Google, in its infinite wisdom, puts my blog on its search results pages for all sorts of queries to which my blog provides absolutely no answers. Most mornings, when I get into work, I check an internet tool that allows me to see, among other things, all the search queries that led to "hits" the previous day. Here, for example, are some of the best ones from the last few weeks:

"Reginald wood stove"
"It is time to look sooooooo good."
"shirt off" "my host"
"can you take a photo of us"
"cramps in hands at night"
"find a map of where the war on terror is at"

And, I swear to God:

"a greek Mythological sculptor reputedly able to make sculptures that could walk and talk"

I checked Google about this last one; it turns out that this blog is on the FIFTH PAGE of results for this search query. If the person who searched for this has returned to this blog and is reading this, please let us all know why you (a) searched for this in the first place, (b) scrolled through five pages of results before finding something to click on, and most importantly (c) what in God's name compelled you to click on THIS result. If you answer, I will award you fifty credits. But try not to hurt yourself when collecting them.

Google not only presents odd search results; it also ranks them via a mysterious formula. The only person who knows this ancient and powerful formula is not even a person. It is a dragon who lives in a cave on a mountain. His name is Albee the Racist Dragon. We volunteers have recently come to discover that this search result formula is also a formula for fun; a volunteer named Tom Schreiber (that's Tom Schreiber, if you didn't hear the first time) realized that, when searching for his own name (his name being Tom Schreiber), Google returned another volunteer's blog post ABOUT him (him = Tom Schreiber, in case I'd lost you already) above his own blog (that is, Tom Schreiber's blog). We became curious about what would happen if other volunteers started posting about Tom Schreiber; sure enough, a couple other volunteers' posts have ALSO jumped Tom Schreiber's own blog on the Google results page if you search for his name (type in "Tom Schreiber").

Now, you may be wondering if I am going to be joining these volunteers in this experiment. I am not. I refuse to write a post about Tom Schreiber. I am certain that this blog, behemoth of the online community that it is, would not only supercede Tom's blog on Google, but would literally make Tom's blog cower in fear and run to an uninhabited, poorly-lit corner of the Internet, to the unfindable realm currently occupied by the "Nudie Photos of George W. Bush" blog, the "Black People Support Hillary!" fanpage, and the Armenia National Tourism Board's official website. I do not wish to embarrass Tom's blog in this manner, because Tom is a very nice man, a friend of mine, and a seventh degree black belt in a martial art that he invented himself because he thinks that karate is "for sissies." So do not think that this post (the one titled, "Tom Schreiber") is an attempt to engage in this activity. It is merely my discussion of the activity, and my musings thereon. I do not wish to "beat" Tom Schreiber. That is all.

Tom Schreiber Tom Schreiber Tom Schreiber Tom Schreiber Tom Schreiber.

A letter to Jesus. Or: Acts of the a-frosted.

2008-02-15T12:19:00.003+04:00

Dear Jesus,

Hi. It's Dan. I don't ask you for a lot of things. I try to keep to myself. You're probably pretty busy. That said, I have one teenysmallrequest for you. Here it is.

Make it stop snowing. Right now. It is snowing very hard. This displeases me. This makes me think you don't like me very much.

Sopleasemakeitstopmmmmmkthanksbye.

Indubitably yours,
Dan

PS I still have your toothbrush.

Something to chew on. Or: Besides pigeon meat.

2008-02-11T12:12:00.000+04:00

So, first things first: I know there are Georgian readers of This Blog. Occasionally, I pick up a straggler from the internets, someone in Tbilisi or Rustavi who has been searching for "lyrics to misha magaria" or "where is shakira concert" or some other query for which this blog provides no help. I also know that at least a couple of the Georgian staff members at the Peace Corps office stop by from time to time. Ostensibly, they do this to make sure I am not saying anything that would reflect poorly on the Peace Corps (they will particularly enjoy part two of this post), but the real reason is, of course, that they cannot resist my mirthful musings.

Part one of this post, thus, is a question: what is up with the bird meat? Obviously, I would not be able to get an answer to this question from those I work with, since they hardly speak English (they are clustered around my desk right now, going through an English textbook, saying English phrases like, "I live at school," and, "kidney beans," and looking at me for approval). But today I was exhorted to consume what appears to be pigeon meat for the second time in a week, and I just don't really get it. Like I said before, it tastes fine, but it is tiny and thus very difficult to consume. Why bother? I'd imagine that it is difficult to shoot pigeons. My mental picture of doing so involves a Georgian man, standing on his porch with the shotgun one uses to fire shells at random into the air on New Year's Eve, luring pigeons into the yard with cornmeal before emptying a beltful of .22s in their general direction. I'm not 100% sure why everyone seems so excited when there's bird meat to be had. You have much larger birds in the yard! And you don't have to shoot them! Someone please edify me.

While you're ruminating about that, I have a far less frivolous topic for this post. I was talking to my mother a little while ago, about various things, and I mentioned an op-ed that had been written in the New York Times a short time before, and that had been circulated amongst volunteers. Basically, in the op-ed, a former Peace Corps country director in Morocco expresses his displeasure with the way Peace Corps works, who it sends where, and how effective volunteers can be in the situations in which they're placed. Our country director here sent us, after the email was circulated, another link, to a published set of letters to the editor, responding to this op-ed, including one from the current Director of the Entire Peace Corps, Ron Tschetter. I told my mother I'd email her this article, but I decided that I am interested in whether anyone reading this has thoughts about it. Of course, nobody posts comments on this blog despite there being quite a number of readers (I have conniving ways of finding out who you are), but I will put this out there anyway, because it touches on themes that I think about every day. This blog, for better or worse, is an "out there" document of the Peace Corps, so I'm going to refrain, I think, from discussing the article in detail, what I think about it, and why. I will say that I think many of the author's points are very, very wrong, but some of them are undeniably right. Life is complicated and hard to figure out, friends. That's the sort of penetrative, insightful, and original commentary you come back to this blog again and again for.

The creation of a family band. Or: Von Trapped in existential hell

2008-02-08T11:01:00.000+04:00

I’ve been trying for a few days now to come up with something mindblowing, a stunningly prescient conclusion or learned lesson, after looking back on the one year of my life that I’ve known anything about this country. I am not having a lot of success. Really, there should be something I could say, right now. The Peace Corps brochures are full of glossy pictures of volunteers, all gazing maturely at the camera, their smiles an expression of confidence and wisdom and clarity. “Look at us,” they say. “We joined the Peace Corps, and we totally figured everything out about the world.” The kind of people who come back to America, work for a Boys & Girls Club, and spend their weekends volunteering in soup kitchens, lecturing people about harmful stereotypes. The kind of people who start every story with, “You know, I once learned something powerful about mankind, when I spent two years among the indigenous tribes of mountainous Peru.”

Am I that person? I don’t think so. Not yet, at least. While it is true that I am no longer capable of starting or contributing to any conversation without saying, “In Peace Corps…,” this is less a manifestation of grand lessons learned than, well, the fact that conversations with people in America wouldn’t be any fun if I couldn’t engage in wicked games of one-upsmanship. You thought it was a little cold the other night? I live on a mountain and must carefully weigh the decision to change my pants or take a shower against the possibility of immediate frostbite. You were annoyed that some guy was tailgating you on the freeway? I travel in seat-belt-less death chariots that contain nine seats but 20 people, and the only thing keeping my mind off the image of T-boning a cow at 70 kilometres per hour is that I must keep constant vigil for pickpockets. I win! All the time!

Of course, life is not as hard as I make it seem – at least, not for those reasons. It’s just fun to say that it is. But these are the things I talk about, because what else is there? I have no life lessons to impart upon you, friends. The last year has been, it almost goes without saying, the most eventful year of my young life. I have moved to a new country, learned a new language, lived with two new families, and tried to accomplish things in a culture and a profession that I had no prior experience with. Have I learned anything about the world? Not much. In fact, I think that the most constructive thing that has happened, vis a vis the world and me, is a decrease in knowledge. I have learned just how much about the world I don’t know, and maybe just how much is not knowable. Perhaps it’s a product of living in such an insular culture; Georgia doesn’t have too big a presence on the world stage, and the people here don’t seem to mind too much. They’ve lived basically among themselves for millennia. But coming to a place of which you knew so little, beforehand, really just makes you realize, “Jesus. There are like 190 other countries, scores more distinct cultures within those countries, and just a buttload of stuff about those people that you not only don’t know anything about, but have never even thought to consider the existence of in the first place.” If there are so many people in a country I’d barely heard of a year ago, how many other people are there? It's kind of a weird thing to think about, but we never really stop to consider just how large a number six billion is. There are just a buttload of people who have never heard of you, and of whom you have never heard. Is that a life lesson? Maybe. Would they put it in a Peace Corps brochure? Probably not.

I suppose I’ve probably learned a lot of things about myself, but such progress is hard to measure, even for someone who resides so far inside his own head that he should put a futon in there. I’ve certainly experienced more difficulty than I ever have before. I’ve certainly done things that I never would have done before, acted in ways I never would have before, and I feel more mature than I did a year ago (these are the sorts of things people who live in their own heads say). But I suppose I thought that I would spend my time here achieving a sort of zen about life; instead, I have discovered that sheer perseverance is as much of a victory as one can sometimes hope for. On Saturday, another person from my group will Early Terminate, in Peace Corps parlance, and head back to America; after surviving almost miraculously intact through training (which is rare), losing a few volunteers right before swear-in (more typical), and remaining intact for the entire first four months of our service (unheard of), our group will have lost two volunteers in the last month and a half. Both are close friends of mine. Both decided they didn’t want to be here anymore. Perhaps the act of staying, in and of itself, is an act of personal growth. I did not expect this, when I got here. I knew, from books that I’d read, that former volunteers always describe the experience as a series of peaks and valleys; one book cautioned, “You will feel some of your highest highs, but also some of your lowest lows.” This has proven true. But I don’t think I expected this experience to be such a constant mental trial; I thought that the difficulty would be in adjusting to a new way of life. That, frankly, has been a breeze. I squat in an outdoor latrine, I eat foreign-looking and foreign-tasting foods, and I can read a crazy squiggle language (note to HCN Peace Corps staff: an ancient and beautiful squiggle language! Seriously. It’s nifty looking, and I am always pleased with myself when I write in it).

But, friends, I don’t mind telling you – the new year has been kind of a bitch so far. No longer can I fall back on the idea that, “oh, it’s just the first few months, it’s supposed to be hard.” It’s no longer the first few months, but it’s still hard. I sometimes feel very isolated, despite daily internet access (perhaps, even, partly because of it, but that’s a rumination for another time). I’m always tired, despite many days when I have almost no work to do (again, perhaps, because of this fact). I often feel overwhelmed by the task before me; I am a young, inexperienced consultant for a young, inexperienced NGO that exists in an environment that may not be able to support it at much more than a subsistence level. I don’t have the experience to teach them more than basic concepts, but these basic concepts often confuse them. I can help them find funding (maybe), but I can’t help them attain a real sense of sustainability. Unless they hire a fluent English speaker, they will revert to exactly what they were before I came as soon as I leave. I temper my expectations, but then mentally berate myself for falling into a trap of laziness. I spend days with no work to do, then use “not having work to do is okay” as a crutch for not doing any when I actually have some. Have I had successes? Yes, I think so. Have I had as many as I hoped to have? No. Am I okay with that? I’m not sure if I like either answer to that question. And none of this is even grazing an issue that has consumed my thoughts but about which I will absolutely not write on this blog (I only mention it, shrouded in mystery, to remind myself I was thinking about it when I come back, weeks or months from now, to reread this post).

So, where does that leave me, a year after receiving my invitation to do this? I don’t know. Have I learned more about the world? I’ve learned a lot about a place I knew nothing about, before, and I’ve learned how many parts of every other culture out there I am ignorant of. Have I learned more about myself? I’m sure I have, but I couldn’t really tell you what or how much. What have I learned?

Well, I have started to learn how to play the guitar. I have – I don’t wish to brag – become modestly familiar with putting my fingers on the strings, and changing their arrangement thereon at a modest pace. Great success! Now, I am learning my first Georgian song. It is called, “Tbiliso.” Apparently it’s one of the most popular. If Georgia was 50 Cent (and, oh, how its teenage boys wish this was so), “Tbiliso” would be “In Da Club.” My host sister-in-law, who as it turns out is a sadistic and maniacal music teacher, openly mocks my mistakes, and demands I start over from the beginning (“Shetsdoma! Tavidan!”), despite asking me to (1) remember the chords, (2) play and change them at the proper tempo, (3) read words she’s written in Georgian by hand, and (4) sing them. I have not yet successfully played the song and sung the song at the same time (one could argue I also have not done these things successfully when attempting them separately. Why doesn’t one just shut your damn mouth). Perhaps this skill is beyond me. Or perhaps it’s merely weeks of practice away. However, tonight produced an important development: we have decided to start a (host) family band, once I stop sucking so hard. My new band will consist of myself, my host brother, and my host sister-in-law. We will be called, “Mzis Chasvlis Sikhvarulit Momgherlebi,” which (sort of) means, “Sunset Love Singers,” because that’s the closest translation I could come up with to the phrase, “Sunset Serenade,” which is written on my guitar. Our first album will be called “Bakhakhivit Mgherian,” which means, “They Sing Like a Frog.” Once I stop sucking so hard, I will use my laptop’s sophisticated studio equipment to record our hit first single, which will be, coincidentally, “Tbiliso.” Then I will put it on the internets for you to download. I am 100% serious about all of this. Above is a tentative picture of our first album cover.

So, if you have skipped straight to the end of this post, looking for the answer to the question, “What has Dan learned in the one year since he received his Peace Corps invitation and started this blog?”, here are your answers:

1) ????
2) The song, “Tbiliso,” if by “learned” you count “must still read the words and chords from a piece of paper.”

Don’t all email me with congratulations at once. I’ll need the inbox space for the Peace Corps people, inviting me to write an introduction for their next brochure.

Addendum: boy, are the counters at the top of this blog ugly (at least, the one with the turkey). If anyone knows of better ones, or smaller ones, please let me know.

Anniversary! Or: Wheeeeeeeee.

2008-02-05T18:31:00.000+04:00

So I was thinking, to myself -- which I do modestly often: "It's been about a year since I found out I was coming to Georgia." I checked my blog archives, to see if I had ever mentioned a more exact date for the receiving of my Peace Corps formal Invitation (notice how I have indicated its formaltude by Capitalizing it). And, it turns out, that today is a much more IMPORTANT anniversary! Today is the One Year Anniversary of this blog, which as far as I'm concerned is the REAL date of importance, in terms of the beginning of this Grand Adventure. Yes, friends -- this blog, and along with it the Chronicle of Record of my years as a Peace Corps volunteer, is one year old today. Go ahead and scroll back, in the archives, to my first post. I'll wait.

How stupid was THAT post, huh? Full of lame jokes and a total lack of information. The staggering difference between that post and my current posts is an indication of just how much this experience has changed me, and just how much I have matured (poop). I have not had time to compose a lengthy entry at home, musing about the things that have changed in my life in just one year. Perhaps I will write one tonight. But, for now, I will give you a haphazard and just-now-thought-of list of things that are true now, but were NOT true on February 5th, 2007:

THE AFORESAID LIST OF THINGS

I now know what pigeon meat tastes like. At least, I'm pretty sure I do. Last night I went to a supra at my host sister-in-law's family's house. They were very excited to have, as they termed it, "bird meat stew." They encouraged me to eat some. The bones and the meat parts were very small. It wasn't so bad, really. But it wasn't good enough to warrant killing a pigeon and then trying to gnaw a cubic millimeter of meat off a tiny bone.
I could, as any regular reader of this blog knows, now talk about different kinds of toilets, and the various merits and demerits of each, for hours. I took toilets very much for granted, on February 5th, 2007. I think at one point I said that I would leave Georgia immediately if it did not have western style toilets. If there is a Jesus, He/She has a sense of humor, because I have only seen one (1) western style toilet in my town, and the toilet at my office would have been the most disgusting thing I'd ever seen, if I had seen it on February 5th, 2007. Now, of course, it is at best the fifth most disgusting thing I have ever seen.
One year ago, I would never have considered that either (a)washing myself from a bucket or (b) washing, sometimes, once a week could ever leave a person actually clean. Now, I have considered it, and: no, such a person is not at all clean. But sometimes that person doesn't care anymore.
I now know that you can, indeed, survive on a diet consisting, entirely, of: pasta, bread, potatoes, cheese, eggs, mandarins, and occasionally the meat that you can glean from a chicken that has not been shot up with steroids but has instead been living in your yard, near the latrine. You will, however, burp a lot more often. This is in stark contrast to America, where I lived entirely on sandwiches, fast food, frozen chicken patties, and cottage cheese, and did not burp particularly often.
In America, I lived (most of the time) in a place that was basically 70 degrees 24/7/365. Occasionally, it would rain. Now, I live in a place where it is obsequiously hot in the summer (ten credits to the first person to look this word up and realize that I have used it in a flagrantly incorrect manner), constantly raining in the fall, and colder than the Devil's genitals in the winter. Thus, I now know: boy, it's a lot easier to live where it's always 70 degrees. I'm getting pretty sick of having difficulty swallowing a pill in the morning, due to the shivering of my hands. Also, my sleeping bag is starting to smell bad (see bullet point #3).

Well, friends, that is all the time I have for right now, but I will try to post a follow-up tomorrow. Stay tuned! And, happy anniversary, to me! Mailing me a gift in appreciation of this anniversary will earn you eleven credits.

Oh, and speaking of gifts, I almost forgot: a gift from myself, to this blog, in appreciation of our first anniversary together! As I am sure you have noticed, there are additions to the blog above this post. These are fun flash timers. One of them shows, pictorally, the 24 months of my Peace Corps service, and where I stand in it, linearly. I have selected a turkey to mark the Where I Am part because, well, the website had some pretty stupid choices, and I have been known to have turkeys in my yard, until we ate them all. Underneath this timer is a timer showing how long it has been since I have been in America. I was thinking about this this weekend; all volunteers have things that they miss, not being in America, that they regret. A volunteer here, from the group ahead of ours, had never even heard about the unbelievable Boise State - Oklahoma football game from two Januaries ago, until we described it to him, and he was very chagrined. Another volunteer, from Cleveland, missed LeBron James' Crazy Playoff Game last June where he scored 11,456 points in six minutes playing one-on-five (you cannot possibly be surprised that male volunteers rue missing sporting events instead of, say, weddings or baby births or discoveries of important lifesaving medicines). This weekend, I missed the Super Bowl, which turned out to be the Greatest Football Game of All Time, Mostly Because the Patriots Totally Blew It Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha. Peace Corps Officials: PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE make Super Bowl Monday at 4am a volunteer holiday. I beg you. I know others have begged you. I missed the Greatest Thing That Has Ever Happened to Humanity because it was not.

Anyway, I got to thinking that, boy, I haven't been in America for a while. So I made another timer to show, numerically, just How Long it has been SINCE I have been in America. Note: in a New Breaking Development, I may be coming BACK to America in August. Note this on your iPhone iCalendars!!!!!! So this timer will probably reset before the one above it.

Okay, that is all. More tomorrow (offer not binding).

Funders, stand and be recognized. Or: I can't actually see you, so you probably don't have to literally stand.

2008-01-29T12:07:00.000+04:00

Friends, if you scroll down two posts, you will see a shameless request for money from me, relating to a project that I wrote for/with my organization to be able to purchase camera equipment so that local children can learn how to make documentaries. This project has been funded fully by.....someone. I know one of the donors (my parents.....this SOUNDS somehow like cheating, but I assure you it is not), but the rest of the funding was donated by people who have not made themselves known to me. They may have been contacted by Washington, or they may have been people I told about the project, or they may have been people who clicked on the link I provided below. If you donated to my project, please let me know that you did so. I want to make sure that I thank those who helped get the project started, and I want to make sure I know who to provide with updates on the project as it moves forward. Thanks very, very much, if you did.

And, if you did NOT donate, but were THINKING about it, I will give you half credit. If you did not donate because you clicked on the link INTENDING to donate but discovered the project to be funded already, I will give you 3/4 credit. Once you accrue 500 credits, you win a small stuffed bear.

Note: the small stuffed bear's ears have been cut off. I used them for my Halloween costume.