DAY TEN

After a day working with the teachers, I was invited to a supra at the home of the host family of one of the TLG volunteers.  We toured the yard, vineyard, chicken coop, rabbit house, bee hives and small garden while upstairs in the house, pots boiled, knives chopped and pestles crushed ingredients for the feast that was being prepared.  Children ran in circles screaming, taking turns with the giant stuffed bear one of the guests had brought with them while their mud pies dried in the evening sun.

Conversation was muted for the first moments of the meal, everyone too busy eating to talk.  Plates were restocked, glasses refilled with the home-made red wine and toasts were made every few minutes, to our countries, to education, to literature, to Sachkhere, to love, to family.  Even I offered a couple of toasts, getting into the swing of things.  Through the interpretation of the TLGer who lived with the family, we compared notes on our favorite authors, Pearl Buck, Isaac Asimov, Hemingway, Tolstoy.  We discussed philosophy, psychology, war, poetry and a myriad of other subjects till late in the evening when someone started playing the piano and all the Georgians around the table began to sing something softly, in harmony, a beautiful ending to my ten school days in the lovely town of Sachkhere, Georgia.

DAY NINE

The sun was out from the time I woke up, the first time all week.  The sky was brilliant blue with huge billowing clouds capping the mountains surrounding the village.  The river raged brown and full from the rain of the last few days.

Today was another half-day.  School started at 10:00, and I spent the day with teachers as they showed me what paperwork means to a Georgian teacher.  Plans were also in the works for an excursion later in the afternoon to Chiatura, a town very near Sachkhere.  First though, after school, I hiked to the top of the mountain behind School #2 to see the castle visible from the windows of the school.  The castle is called Modinakhe or “Come and See.”  Legend has it that long, long ago, a young man wanted to marry a noble maiden.  Her parents said until he had a castle to call his own, he could not have her hand in marriage.  He built his castle in the most prominent place on the mountain and then told the family to come and see the home he had built for his beloved.

The walk was steep, along a road sometimes in good repair, sometimes crumbling.  A couple of vehicles passed me on the way up, and once I had to maneuver among several cows.  A cable car station lay in ruins at the top of the mountain, now no longer in service since the earthquake in ’91 that toppled the three remaining towers of the castle and much of the town.  The views were stunning, the entire town laid out at my feet.  From the peak of the ruined castle walls, I experienced vertigo, the piney slope falling steeply down to the town.

Twenty minutes away by car, Chiatura was once a thriving mining town, full of Greeks, Ukrainians, Russians and others from around the Soviet empire.  There are graceful pre-Soviet buildings along the tree-lined avenue bordering the river and cable cars sailing high above from cliffside to cliffside.

Now however, though the mining continues, it is on a much smaller scale, unemployment is rife and the buildings are in decay, but one can see the charm that once made it a proud town.  On the return trip, we stopped at a monastery built directly into a cliff.  We walked up the steep stone stairs to the foot of the sheer wall where halfway up was a gated door set directly into the rockface.  Narrow metal stairs climbed to the doorway that was now unfortunately locked.  We had arrived too late.  The nuns had closed the door.

DAY EIGHT

Today was a short day, classes breaking around noon.  There was an ice-cream company that was promoting their product and had announced that they would be giving away free ice-cream to all the students in the school.  I was in the midst of a game involving conjugating verbs when the screams of a multitude of children burst into the room from the open windows of our second floor classroom.  Of course we all ran to the windows.  I was afraid someone had been run over.  Hundreds of young children were lining the road outside the school having been released from classes to wait for the ice-cream truck.  Thunder rumbled high up over the mountains behind the swimming pool complex across the road.  From that point class was over.

The math teacher from the day before, Nino, and another English teacher, Irina, who I have taught with a few times, took me for coffee to the café in the pool complex.  We talked about the process of teacher certification while sipping Turkish coffee and eating the cheesy pizza called khatchapuri.  Nino invited us all on an excursion to the home of one of the most famous Georgian poets, Akaki Tsereteli, in the village near here.  She took us in her car, and we visited not only the preserved home-stead of the poet but the 10^th century church that Eka and her family attend on Sundays that stands hidden among maple and mulberry trees on the hill above.

DAY SEVEN

I spent the morning observing a 9^th grade math class.  Since I am planning to try to certify myself in the fall, I carried along the 9^th grade math book I am studying from right now.  The teacher, a young lady whose mother teaches Russian here in the same school, was having the students draw circles and tangent lines on the board discussing with the class the relationships between the angles formed by the different interactions between line and circle.

While she was speaking with the class, she came back and leafed through my book, eventually calling out problems from my book for the students to write and solve on the board.  They solved each equation in short order, impressing me greatly.  One of the students who spoke some English explained that this was math they had in 8^th grade.  They were surprised to hear that the book was for 9^th grade in the US.  The math they were doing was what we study in 10^th grade.

The electricity was knocked out early in the day, so the workshop on integrating technology in the classroom that I had planned to deliver today wouldn’t work.  Also, a huge storm blew in a half hour before I was going to start, so only four teachers from other schools ended up making it, having come on a crowded marshuka or mini-bus.  I changed the topic to teaching writing, and we all sat around my small laptop glowing in the dark room as thunder rumbled outside the tall windows and I expounded on methods for integrating curriculum into writing activities for English.

Once done, I told the teachers that any good workshop worth its mettle in the US had snacks and refreshments, and since we didn’t have any there, I invited them all to the restaurant across the street.  Under inadequate umbrellas, we waded through the gathering puddles to the restaurant and feasted on Georgian cuisine and home-made red wine in the dark, laughing and sharing the vicissitudes of being a teacher.

DAY SIX

Today was spent observing classes and chatting with the assistant director and other teachers in the teachers’ office area.   I also went on another excursion, this time to Sataphilia, a large forested protected area that contains caves, a covered area protecting dinosaur footprints and hiking trails.  There were thousands of students doing the same as we… taking an excursion.  We moved en masse from sight to sight.  Fortunately we made it back to the entrance before the rain hit though thunder and dark clouds had been threatening a downpour all day.

DAY FIVE

In the morning we had a round table with teachers from varying disciplines discussing the issue of classroom management.  It was enlightening.  I heard some of the challenges here in a village school where the children are together from first grade up and know each other like family which creates unique problems.  Afterwards, with the English teachers we discussed ELL levels and protocol for placing students.

Besides the round tables, Eka accompanied me as I observed a third grade math class.  This room was decorated with children’s work, plants and posters.  The teacher was fantastic, involving the students in the lesson and changing activities with frequency.  After having learned numbers one to twenty yesterday on the bus, I was able to follow some of the questions the teacher was tossing out to the class.

In the evening, I went to the cinema.  I have been wanting to see “The Five Days of August” with Andy Garcia, a movie about the 5-day war with Russia in 2008.  I ended up going alone.  Everyone had told me it was in English with Georgian subtitles, so I was not concerned.  I purchased my ticket and hung out in the lobby practicing Georgian numbers and letters on my IPOD while waiting for 8:00.  Well, 8pm came and went, and by the time the people from the previous session walked out of the cinema, I had almost learned the entire alphabet.

One line into the movie and I knew it was not going to be subtitled but dubbed.  Although I only caught the very few times true Georgian was subtitled in English, posting crucial things like, “Mr. President, your ride is here,” I was able to get the gist of the movie.  It is a stunning poster for Georgia, but also difficult to reconcile that a war had happened here just three short years ago.  Having come to know the people and seen part of the country, I was quite impacted.  Everyone who walked out of the cinema was wiping away tears.

DAY FOUR - FIELD TRIP TO VARDZIA

I slept like a rock last night once I had stumbled shivering into my new home-away-from-home at 1:30am.  An excursion of 8th graders, their parents, their younger siblings and a group of teachers (including me) pulled away from the curb in front of the school at 6:00am yesterday morning.  I was sitting up front with Eka.

After four hours of spectacular scenery through mountains and valleys we stopped on the side of the road by a raging river and the moms set about emptying the contents of the luggage area under the bus where they had loaded all their home-cooked food.  It was spread out on a couple of blankets, all the kids running around in circles anxious to start digging in.  Of course my tiny plastic plate was loaded up with a kind of quesadilla (called khatchapuri), kebab (fried or roasted - not sure - sausage), chicken (probably killed the day before), some kind of flowers marinated in vinegar (looked like bean sprouts), and finally cake... all of it incredibly delicious.  If you've ever seen "Legend" with David Bowie, you'll remember how in the forest there were always flower petals or puffs of tiny cotton-like things floating through the air like snow... well... replace that with a rain of snow-like pollen & you get the picture.  I ate between sneezes.  By the end of the day, I had used an entire roll of toilet paper, my tissue de jour.

Back on the bus & very culinarily satisfied, we continued the journey through a sizeable town named Borjomi, left the East-West Highway and started heading south towards the border with Armenia.  The highlights were a nun-monastery where we visited an ancient 12th century Orthodox chapel, lots of sneezing involved there, and the final destination, Vardzia, cave dwellings dating from the 10th century.  The setting was a rock face with caves carved into it facing rolling lush green mountains... a mix of Switzerland and Cappadocia.  I really can't compare the scenery of this country to anything I've ever seen before.  It's pretty spectacular.  It combines things I've seen in many places, and creates something completely beautiful and different... fields of red poppies, yellow, blue and purple flowers scattered in thick profusion amidst lush grass on sloping hills that sweep up to a blue sky with giant billowy clouds... everywhere I look reminds me of 18th century Romantic English art... soft, accessible and rustic with the occasional ancient stone tower at the peak of a hill or a crumbling wall along a cliff.

A lot of time was spent at the caves & I got a bit of a sunburn, taking pictures, climbing up and down steep narrow stairs, ducking through tunnels.  By the time we left, I had made lots of friends of the kids, finished off half a roll of my precious and diminishing toilet roll and bought an orange Fanta.

On the way to the next stop, I decided I could learn the numbers to bide my time on the bus.  Eka and I were having good conversation, but during the lulls, I might as well make use of my time.  So I learned one to ten and had some little kids behind me drill me on "one plus one," "three plus five," etc. till I was pretty confident with the first ten impossible sounding numbers... just to give you an idea, the most difficult one is nine, "tsukhrha."  It requires moving the neck around in a semi-circular fashion, making gutteral sounds and finishing with a flourish of the hands to get it just right.  The kids caught on that I really had a tough time with that one and asked me every possible combination of addition/subtraction problem to get me to say it.  I noticed at one point that moms and teachers were leaning towards the aisle to get a good look... lots of laughs.

An hour or so after that, we stopped to see a museum.  Eka kept me more or less updated on the progress of our excursion... where we were, where we were going, etc.  But instead of a museum, we started walking up this long hill.  It was around 2pm and getting pretty hot.  Up till then I had been a bit chilly since I had only worn a T-shirt.  I didn't realize we were going to be in the mountains, in caves and in thick-walled, ancient churches and monasteries.  After the museum, there was a bit of discussion about whether to head straight for the park to play and eat or see an 8th century monastery that was very nearby.  The monastery crowd won out, and it was great, very old and set in the middle of a forest on a high mountain.  The views on the way up to it were fantastic.  I filled up my empty water bottle with the supposed curative water from the fountain that came straight out of the mountain.  Inside the church, the teachers and kids were kissing everything.  The person would kiss... say... the post of the entrance to the church, then touch their forehead to it then cross themselves.  The icons in the center of the room had a short line of kids crossing themselves, kissing the glass covering the sacred picture, touching their forehead to it, then genuflecting three times.  It was really something to watch.

About an hour later, we stopped on the side of the road for our next picnic.  In short order everything was laid out in the middle of another big field on the side of the road, the wind blowing snowy pollen sideways, the ubiquitous sound of the river in the background.  I was starving.  Anything left over from the morning was laid out again, but there were several new appearances... small strips of eggplant stuffed with walnut sauce, shredded lettuce with vinegar dressing, cucumbers and tomatoes, little fried sticks stuffed with beef, sautéed mushrooms, and more cake.  One mom came around filling small plastic cups with something that I thought was coffee.  I had refused a drink earlier in the day thinking it was prune juice or something and almost missed out on coffee, so I didn't say no this time.  It ended up being some very potent but deliciously sweet home-made walnut liquor the color of coffee.  That warmed me up.

Next stop Borjomi.  It was almost 10pm.  The kids were so excited that they were going to this park... seems like it has a reputation of having lots of attractions for kids, long boardwalks for the adults, a fountain of curative fizzy sulphur water, a river (of course) and beautiful tall fir trees.

Well, the lights were all off.  One of the kids, Nica, who had befriended me, said (via Eka's translation), "When the president visits here, I'm sure they turn on all the lights and everything is perfect.  Now we have an Englishman and look at the park... in the dark!"  It was pretty chilly, but the night was clear and beautiful.  On the way back to the bus, along the dark walk, the kids stopped at small glowing stands selling cotton candy that was made right there on the spot, coming away with giant billowy globes of spun sugar.

The final leg of the journey was tough... I was so sleepy, my head rocking back and forth against the short back of the seat on the curvy mountain roads waking occasionally to push the two plastic plates loaded with squares of cake topped in strawberries that a mom had given me from vibrating off the little shelf between me and the driver... two hours later, trying not to think about the cold walk back to my home in the dark, I got off the bus & headed down the empty streets to my place.

DAY THREE

I taught classes today to 7^th, 8^th and 9^th graders.  In the 9^th grade, I continued the lesson on the EU, dividing the board between problems and solutions and having the students come up with ideas that could be separated into the two columns.  There are several teachers’ offices, only two of which I have become familiar with.  One is the assistant director’s office where there is always lots of activity, teachers coming and going.  The other is where Eka spends most of her free time, so I have inevitably spent more time there as well.  When they are not connecting to Eka’s wireless USB device or doing paperwork, someone is coming in with plates of food to tide us over or making coffee.  I like this room the best.

On a more mundane note, the hot water in the place I am staying is now working, so there is no need to heat water for an improvised shower anymore.  Also I have learned that there is really no set time for meals.  One eats when one is hungry.  Realizing that, I have quickly learned how to pronounce the things I like, so I can go out and buy something if I am hungry and no one has appeared with a plate of food.  I am also making progress on the math text that I am studying.  I plan to attempt the math certification test when I return home in the fall.

DAY TWO

Today I spent the day interacting with students in the various classes I observed, meeting teachers and having dinner with a couple of the TLG teachers before calling it a day.  The constant sneezing I thought I had escaped in my own state of Georgia has followed me.  I cannot stop sneezing, the pollen floating in the air like snow.  It is wearing me out.

A couple of things stood out to me in the classes I participated in.  Firstly, the children are extremely involved in the lessons, for the most part that is.  There are always the one or two that sit in the back and try to avoid doing anything.  Students were called on to participate, to respond, to write on the board.  One of the classes has two slow students, one who can hardly speak, sitting in the back of the room.  I’ve been told that there are no resources dedicated to working with these kinds of students.  Often their parents will attend school with them, the more severe, and help out when necessary.

This school goes from first to twelfth grade and has a population of about 600.  The classes are comparable to home, between 30 and 35 in a class, even at the elementary level.  Kindergarten is held in separate facilities.  Sachkhere has a Russian oligarch benefactor who, having made this area his home, has poured money into the region, providing everyone with electricity, running water, a stove, a refrigerator, a huge pool complex here in the main city, and is in the process of refurbishing and in some cases rebuilding every school in the region.  Sachkhere scores among the top of all the schools in Georgia outside of Tbilisi, the capital.

In the third grade English class I saw today, the children were fairly jumping out of their seats to answer, yelling for the teacher, raising their hands… it was wonderful to watch.

The ninth grade was doing a lesson on the advantages of joining the EU.  Eka gave them seven minutes to read a passage from a two page reading, and then they each stood and recited from memory the paragraph they had read… incredible.  I have never seen such prodigious memory.  Even I could not have recited word-for-word a paragraph I had just read.  The levels of English ranged from fairly fluent to difficulty with a single sentence, but they were all engaged, working with partners and attempting to get their work done.

The three floors of classrooms are airy and spacious, desks built for two with a bench incorporated.  There are huge windows that look out on a courtyard and mountains.  The concrete walls, empty of adornment for the most part, echo, particularly in the hallways where it is hard to even hear one’s own thoughts with the cacophony of shouts during class change.  Walking through the dark high passageways, the children move to the walls to say hello in English.  It seems there is an unwritten rule that anytime a student sees a foreigner, they must say “hello.”  I see them working up their courage as they approach me in the street or in the market.  Sometimes I help them along by saying it first.  Occasionally, they make it as far as “How are you?”  When asked how they are, they almost invariably say, “so-so.”  I asked a teacher why everyone said so-so instead of fine.  She said that perhaps out of a superstitious idea that if they say they are fine, they are asking for something bad to happen….

DAY ONE

I'm sleeping better... getting up at 6:00 & running with one of the kids I met on my first day... a senior from the school that just graduated, Eka's nephew & one of the small group of teenagers that met me on my arrival...

By 6:45am, dressed in shorts, T-shirt and running shoes, I was jogging down a road by the river with Giorgi… a bit of exercise to stretch the legs and ready the mind for the day ahead.  Giorgi met me again at 8am and accompanied me to the market to pick up some necessary items before heading to school.  I arrived at school promptly at 9:00am, and met a Canadian teacher who is here on a program called TLG, Teach and Learn with Georgia.  Eka was elsewhere, so Judy showed me around a bit, and I ended up going into class with her and a Georgian English teacher.  After class, we met again in the teacher’s lounge and I met my host teacher at long last.  She was very gracious and introduced me to several other teachers.  She invited me to go to a workshop that was being held in a neighboring village.  The city of Sachkhere has three schools, but there are many in the villages scattered throughout the Immereti region.  At the conference I met several other Georgian English and TLG teachers and was invited to a supra, a huge meal with lots of traditional toasts and course after course of small plates loaded with Georgian cuisine… a fantastic way to begin my first school day.  The workshop was led by Jenny, a fellow TEA program colleague who had extended her stay a couple of weeks and was using one of her days to come down and lead this conference in a school with the English teacher she had met in Nebraska.

Back at school, classes were wrapping up, so I spent the evening walking around with Judy who gave me the guided tour of town in English, the Georgian/English version having been delivered on Sunday when I arrived.  Still seriously jet-lagged, I was in bed by 9pm.

ARRIVAL IN SACHKHERE

I've made it to the town of Sachkhere... well I made it here Sunday evening.  Initially I was going to stay in an apartment, then with a family, but in the end I'm in a kind of boarding house.  It took me a couple of days to figure out what the situation was, but I think I've got it.  There are two really old wonderful ladies who share a two story house that looks like a Stalinist ruin from the outside but is all fountains & rose gardens inside the giant metal gate.

Fortunately for me, there is another young tenant who speaks a little English.  Through her I was able to borrow an iron yesterday morning to get my shirt in shape before my first day at school.  Meri, the landlady, not only got the iron, she ironed the shirt... thank goodness, since I have no idea how to do it.

Later I asked how I could wash my clothes & my interpreter said with hands.  I didn't know if that meant I had to wash them myself or could pay someone else's hands to do it.  Today I learned that Meri will do it... thankfully....

THE JOURNEY – FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF GEORGIA

They say it's the journey, not the destination... but after 26 hours of air and layover time, I was more interested in the destination... Tbilisi airport at 3:30am.  I was so tired, I almost didn't notice the constant near-misses the 90-mile-an-hour taxi had on the way to the hotel.  I say almost.  I had chosen the front seat in order to have a better view, but thankfully my exhaustion dulled my anxiety.
I napped for a few hours in the hotel and then began to get to know Tbilisi a bit.  In two short days, I have withdrawn money from an ATM, purchased a cell phone and eaten in several fantastic restaurants... oh, and walked all over the centers, new and old, besides visiting the huge market and buying a few clothes to fit in better.  This is an incredibly beautiful city, panoramic views of mountains, a river running through the valley, ancient and solitary churches perched like sentinels on hilltops.  It reminds me of Spain before the EU poured money into it to get it up-to-speed with the rest of Europe... slightly decaying, charming, a bit provincial but obviously in the process of getting spiffed up.  I will not be surprised if this country becomes a tourist magnet in the coming years.
Tomorrow I head for my assigned city, Sachkhere.