2 posts from 2006

Oh the weather outside is frightful and the weather inside… not much better.

It’s late fall in southwestern which means that I’m not stirring my 0 sleeping bag until . Since stays on daylight savings time the sun doesn’t come over the mountains until close to nine.

 

It’s also so cold in my room that I can see my breath. No central heat here and the concrete walls of my house just seem to make it colder. The only source of heat in the house is the wood burning stove [pechi] downstairs in the family room that actually keeps it pretty toasty. So, until late March I’ll be spending a lot of time down there.

Late fall is also tangerine season, the main crash crop of most of my region. My host family’s house sits on an orchard of a hundred trees or so. Unfortunately, the tangerine prices have bottomed out since Georgian’s main trading partner started boycotting Georgian imports.

Still there are a constant stream of trucks coming through and the normally subdued town center is filled with crews loading crates of tangerines.

At least with consuming around a dozen tangerines a day I’m getting my full complement of Vitamin C.

Before leaving for the Peace Corps I had grown increasing while not necessarily anti-technology more technology-less- going without a TV, refusing to get a cell phone, not upgrading past Windows 98 and eventually not having a computer at all. I assumed that this would be good preparation on what I thought would be a two year moratorium on tech stuff. Peace Corps is all about living in mud huts and reading by candle light right? Not exactly. I had a cell phone eight weeks into service. A month and half ago I bought a flash drive (portable hard drive). I'm getting a computer for my house and any month now we should have satellite internet in my village.

Orginally, I had entertained romantic notions of hand writing all correspondence with long flowing letters. Well, most of you have seen how well that worked. Sorry. So, I've sold out and started a blog. It seems like the popular thing to do now. So, dear friends and family I hope to keep you abreast of what I'm doing currently while converting some of handwritten journals into accounts of what I've been up to for the past year and a half. So, without further adieu...

 

Where am I and what am I doing?

 

Good question. I'm in Georgia [formerly the Soviet Republic of Georgia] or about ten time zones or so away from central . If you take out your maps it’s between , , , and Armenian. More specifically, I’m in the village of Mukhaestate (population ~2000 people), four miles from the eastern coast of the and 25 miles from (the third biggest city in ).

 

Even more specifically, I live in a two story concrete house near the center of the village with my Georgian host family. I have a host father, Olegi(55), host mother Mzia(43), host grandmother Emine(83), and two host brothers Aleko(22) and Mindia(21). Plus I have loads of host aunts, uncles and cousins who live in Mukhaestate and neighboring villages. More on the family in later posts.

 

And now, what am I doing? I find myself asking that question all the time. I’m part of the Peace Corps TEFL [Teaching English as a Foreign Language] program. There are about 60 of us in country. Our primary job is teaching English classes in coordination with Georgian English teachers. Our official role is to introduce communicative teaching methodologies in the classroom. In layman’s terms we’re here to make learning fun or at least not so excruciatingly boring.

           

“Memorize this text about the history of and recite it? Change these sentences from active to passive voice? Read and translate? That’s sounds exciting but why don’t we trying using the language in a practical context, do some role playing, maybe play a game that will help the students learn what the words mean.” That’s in essence what I do.

           

There are two English teachers at my school in Mukhaestate, Ketino [Mrs. Kate] and Makvala [Mrs. Makvala]. They are both very nice middle aged ladies. We teach English in the 5^th through 11^th grades.

           

So, my primary job is teaching, introducing new western ideas in the classroom and what not. My secondary job is a little harder to define. Essentially, we do whatever needs to be done and that we’re willing to do in the community. This might be organizing after school clubs and find funds to remodel the library. Right now I’m working with some other volunteers to start a national boys leadership camp.

More roles we play… We’re “the American” in our community. Most Georgians have never seen a real, live American. I’m there model of what an American is right along with Britney Speares, Justin Timberlake and Eminem. The Peace Corps is the warm and fuzzy side of the foreign policy. We’re Corps who don’t wear camo and carry M-16s. Further, a volunteer’s job is also to bring back information about the people of these faraway lands to the people of the . So, hopefully within this blog I hope to accurately relay to you what life is like here in . I’m going to try to post weekly. We’ll see how well that works. Take care.