Raging Narcissism. Or: I Look SOOOO Good

Just to point it out, I have changed the image at the top of this blog not because I have a raging need to see a Photoshopped image of myself (although I do), but because Peace Corps told me to; it is against Peace Corps policy to have the PC logo on any non-official document or used in any non-official way, and my previous blog banner had the logo on it. So I had to change it and this was the first thing I came up with. The end.

In current-news-related news, things are pretty much same old same old: we're overworked and stressed, and the forthcoming final language test is striking fear into us. Also striking fear into me in particular is the move to our permanent sites next Friday; mine could end up being awesome, as I've said, or it could end up being terrible, and I don't yet know which it will be. It will definitely be more lonely a lot of the time, especially depending on how much I am allowed to travel in my first few months at post (we're not allowed to take vacation time for our first three months at site, but none of us is yet quite sure whether this applies to, for instance, spending a weekend at a friend's post, since we're technically "on the job" all the time here. We think.). We'll see how it goes, and I'll be sure to keep everyone updated. Also, since I just thought of this and it's easier than switching browser windows to type it separately: Edan, when are you leaving, again? I am going to be very interested to see how different the experience is depending on what country you're in; I have no idea whether PST is relatively normalized across posts or whether what we're doing is totally different than what Morocco volunteers do. Let me know.

Oh, and since it was asked, the girlfriend is American and her name is Ellen.

Yes, I Still Exist. Or: Sort Of.

I realize that it's been an absurdly long time since I've posted. I am sorry about that. Also, I continue to realize that I say that at the beginning of every post. Hopefully once I get to site, where I'll have (knock on wood) daily internet access, I'll be able to post more at the rate that I intended to before I got here. But the flip side to having a lot more time to post is that the posts probably won't be as interesting. There are so many things going on here right now that I literally have no time to journal and post; I wish I could tell you all about them, but I just never have the time.

A couple weeks ago we found out our permanent sites, our permanent host families, and the organizations we'll be working with for the next two years (starting on August 25th, which I think is a Saturday, so I suppose starting August 27th). We learned our assignments on a Friday in Gori, spent two days at a filthily nice hotel in the mountains of northeastern Georgia where we met our supervisors, had training sessions during the day, and had mountains of fun at night (surprisingly, this fun included not only beer but also several aggressive games of table tennis), then left for two days at our permanent sites. My permanent site is a town in western Georgia called Chokhadauri; my NGO is only a year old, but the people seem very ambitious and ready to do even more things than they've done so far. It's going to be a very difficult situation -- not in a big city, not at an established NGO, and with no sitemates and little to distract me in the town -- and it's not what I would have said I wanted before I found out where I was going. But I'm really excited about the people I'll be working with, and there's definitely the potential to do a lot of really good things over the next couple of years. So we'll see how it goes.

At site, I didn't do a lot of work, since I was only there for two days, but my co-workers took me around the town and up into the mountains for a birthday supra (this was two days before my birthday) -- that's where my current Facebook photo was taken. There are more excellent photos from that day that I'll hopefully be able to post soon. When I got back to Gori that Wednesday (my actual birthday), I had drinks with a bunch of Trainees and we talked about our visits and what we were excited or concerned about. Then, this past Sunday, my girlfriend threw me ANOTHER supra in her village with a bunch of friends. So I definitely got more than I expected out of the first completely irrelevant birthday of my life.

Other than those bits of fun, though, it's been pretty difficult the last few weeks. We've had so much thrown at us by our training staff -- speeding through language modules without having any time to retain or understand all of the material, having to juggle multiple NGO training projects at once, even getting told that we were supposed to hold a one-hour training session on grant writing for university staff who didn't speak English, and that we were going to hold it in three days. This week we're going to the capital twice, to visit donor organizations and meet with some of their representatives in order to establish some working contacts, and to find the Peace Corps office there, which we haven't yet been to. That should be a lot of fun (it's obscene how much we're looking forward to eating at the McDonalds there...we have nowhere else to turn in a country that does not eat hamburgers) but leaves two fewer days to study or work on our projects.

All of this goes to say that I'll probably be just as difficult to track down for the rest of this month as I have been for the last couple of weeks, although if you'd like to track me down please don't let that stop you from trying. I'll be on Facebook as much as I can, but I probably won't be blogging much. Perhaps if I have free minutes here or there I can tell stories like That Time The Door of My Supervisor's Car Flew Open While We Were Driving In It, or That Time Everyone Started Freaking Out That Peace Corps Was Going To Kick Them Out For Drinking Too Much Because We Got A Warning Via Text Message, or That Time I Got So Sick That The Next Morning I Passed Out and Hit My Head on the Toilet (a very recent story that is really terrific, so I'll try to post it). Aside from that, I will talk to you guys from site, where life will again be completely new and hard to deal with. That will, I think, be the hardest transition of those we go through here, but it will also be (hopefully) the last one, since I will (hopefully) be there for the next two years. We'll see how everything goes. As always, let me know how everyone is doing and where you're all moving to and such. And if any more of you get pregnant. Or get married. Or get herpes. Communication is what life is all about, friends.

Fin.

The Importance of Being Earnest About Whether You're Any Good at Basketball (Answer - no.)

Time is really beginning to accelerate. I think that, when faced with such a fact, it’s important to take the time to stop and smell the flowers. Or to stop and take a photo of a guy using a riverbank in the center of a resort town as his own personal squat toilet. I find smelling flowers to be silly, so I really didn’t have any option. I HAD to take the picture.

Anyhoo. Much has happened since I last updated. Many times I have said to myself, “This is a perfect cultural hilarity. It must go on my blog.” Almost as many times, I have forgotten the cultural hilarity before I actually sit down to transcribe it. I bet Oscar Wilde never had this problem. He probably had it easy, though. He didn’t have to devote brain cells to making sure he always knew where the closest decent toilet was, or to making mental plans of escape from every public transportation vehicle he found himself in because they all seem to either be powered by large and likely flammable canisters of natural gas or to store their extra petrol – also, incidentally, quite flammable – in piles of 2 liter bottles in the trunk. Georgians don’t seem to be particularly scared of fiery death explosions. Their gas lines run above ground, in small pipelines that can’t possibly stay out of every vehicle’s way all of the time. I saw a young man swinging on one of these pipelines yesterday. Also, you have not seen utility and efficiency until you’ve seen the sheer number of wires that people jam into electrical junction boxes. It’s like [culturally inappropriate joke that would hamper my mission as a representative of the United States of America]. Ha ha!

We’ve been working hard, as usual, and playing hard as well. Those of you to whom I have related the story of two Saturdays ago know what I mean when I say this. To those of you who have not heard this story, I am sorry – you will not read of it on this blog. It involves salacious material that shan’t be seen by websurfing teenagers in Sri Lanka or by Peace Corps officials in Washington. By way of a hint, I will say that some of this salacious content concerns vodka, a machine closet, a squat toilet, a Georgian who meant well but who got his semantics mixed up and ended up saying “[expletive] your friend!” enthusiastically and repeatedly, and the worst slash most tremendous slash most potentially blackmailatory photo of me ever taken. Don’t drink vodka, friends. It does not like you. It is a seductive temptress whose true aims are cruel and nefarious.

I feel very badly when things like last Saturday happen; they just feed into my constant anxiety complex about the fact that part of my job is to present a certain image of Americans – hardworking, helpful, freshly-scrubbed folks who enjoy a good cultural exchange as much as the next guy. I don’t like doing things that contradict this supposed image, and yet we all find ourselves doing them all the time. I mostly stay in my room, for instance, when I’m home because I’m always some combination of too tired, too busy, and/or too unable to communicate a particular thought for me to want to hang out with my host family. I feel bad about this. I feel bad when I walk down the street listening to my iPod, because I think it makes me look like a shuttered American who prefers drowning in a mental Gin Blossoms oasis to actually looking at Georgian people on the street, even though I know that making gregarious eye contact with people when I walk would be a culturally weird thing to do anyway. And I definitely feel bad when my trainee friends and I get drunk, which – and I don’t think this would come as a shock to anyone reading this blog in some sort of official capacity – happens. I want to be spending my time laughing and nattering with Georgians in their native tongue, telling them of America and listening to their stories such that I might understand their country better. But it’s so hard to do that when your language skills are so lacking. My language skills are getting better, but it would still be impossible to have any sort of actual conversation about things that don’t concern where I’m currently going, whether I’d currently like to eat, what sorts of things I like and don’t like, or how I’m feeling at the moment. I did break out a list of questions in Georgian that my language teacher gave me this week – I handed the list to a host sister who speaks a little English and asked her to read me the questions at normal conversational speed so I could try to answer them – and I answered almost all of the questions (mostly of the, “what is your address,” “do you like dogs or cats,” and, “what do you do every day” variety) in front of several people who were hanging out in front of my house. I got quite a few bonus points for that. Itsis kartuls kargad, they laughed (“He knows Georgian well”). But, nonetheless, communication remains difficult, so when trainees are tired we usually prefer to hang out with one another, and that usually means drinking. And I feel bad about it.

This is not to say that I have not been interacting with the locals at all. In fact, some of us have become downright entertaining for masses and masses of local children. This happened when we started playing basketball at a decent court near some apartment complexes in town. Originally, we were just fooling around on our own, trying to engage in an activity that combined the fun of pretending that we have any actual coordination or athletic talent with the aerobic rigors that become necessary when you eat your body weight in carbohydrates every day. The second time we played, however, some precocious Georgian youths – I’d guess most of them to be in their late teens – challenged us to a game. There were several problems with this. 1) None of us had played basketball in quite a while, and we weren’t any good to begin with. 2) These Georgian teens obviously spent some time on the court. 3) They were liberally substituting amongst ten or so available players. 4) Georgians do not apparently play pickup basketball like Americans do. Americans bump each other during pickup games, but you try not to foul each other, because nobody wants to be the guy committing or calling fouls in a pickup game. Here in Georgia, at least on this particular court with these particular players, you are going to get grabbed when you’re on offense and charged into when you’re on defense. Also they like to yell a lot. 1+2+3+4 = Americans getting spanked by Georgian teenagers at an ostensibly American game, which is embarrassing, because it’s not like we’d beat them at soccer or something. This became tremendous fun to the seemingly thousands of children who materialized out of nowhere to watch us play and cheer against us; this may have been, in fact, the literal definition of the concept “unwanted attention” that has been preached to us by Peace Corps staff, inasmuch as it seemed at the time like we were causing some sort of riot. However, it ended up being a riot-free, if humbling, experience, and I am happy to say that we played them again a couple of days ago and just worked them. We have found our basketball touch, and the rest of the world had best watch out, because we’re coming for you imperial-style.

Our classes have really begun to pick up steam – both language and technical training have started to give us a lot more work, and the pressure seems to be building. This is because we are getting our permanent placements this upcoming Friday – the town or city where we will be living and the organization for whom we’ll be working for our actual two years of service – and actually traveling to those sites this weekend to meet the host families we’ll be moving in with in several weeks and our counterparts at our organizations. It’s going to be a pretty nerve-wracking week; everyone is starting to get alternately excited and anxious to find out not only where we’ll each be for two years, but almost as importantly how far we’ll be from each other. Georgia is a pretty small country, but the transportation system is relatively rudimentary and it can take much longer than it would seem to get somewhere. You’re also not supposed to leave your post for recreational purposes very often, although I’m not sure how the policies about this actually translate into practice. So it’s likely that we’ll all be placed in a location that will make it difficult to see some, if not many or most, of our friends here. This upcoming weekend is going to shape much of the rest of our experience in this country, and Peace Corps has been so sensitive to the anxiety of being separated from our friends that they’ve…separated some trainees from their friends already by mixing our language clusters up according to how well we’ve been doing in language class so far. I’ve mentioned before how some people are doing well while others are having a lot of trouble; Peace Corps decided to randomly move everyone around and out of their month-long routines in order to match people of similar abilities. I don’t know enough about educational theory to know whether such a move will end up causing resentment or whether it will motivate everyone to learn better. But it’s really one of those moves that’s either going to work out swimmingly or fail disastrously. So we’ve got that going for us, which is nice.
At least we were able to get a weekend of great fun in before this upcoming week of stress. This weekend we were allowed to travel on a “cultural excursion” – basically going in groups of five to any place in Georgia we wanted to go, provided that it was close enough to get there and back between Saturday morning and Sunday at 7pm. My group decided to travel to a town called Bakuriani, which in the winter is a ski resort but in the summer is just a nice little town with gorgeous places for us to hike. Of course, it rained all weekend, so we didn’t go hiking so much as drink a lot of beer at our guest house.

I will have more details about the craziness of the current week, and the jollities of this past weekend, when I can -- as well as photos -- but I need to wrap this post up. Hope all is well over there. I have even less internet access currently than I've had to this point, so it's difficult for me to check how everyone is doing, so please drop me a line via email, Facebook, or blog comment with updates and such. I'll try to post one more time before I leave this weekend for the conference where we'll meet our counterparts for the next two years, but if it ends up not being possible, you'll DEFINITELY want to read the next installment in the Life of Dan, because things are about to get pretty interesting. Bitches ain't shit.

Same Old, Same Old. Or: Seriously, Many Hilarious Hijinks Occur Here, They Just Probably Wouldn't Be Funny to Someone Who Has Cable Television

I really need to be writing journal entries more often. The problem, as I’m sure I’ve said many times in this space already, is that we’re just tired all the time. When I am home, I’m usually either fighting to keep from being given too much food or laying on my bed, staring into space and ruing myself for not studying enough. It sounds worse than it is, really; it’s true that the G7s are constantly bitching about life to each other and to the current volunteers we hang out with in the evenings (there are several G6s posted in Gori that we’ve gotten to know pretty well since we’ve been here, and they’re surprisingly and thankfully agreeable with being complained to), but our grievances aren’t so much of the “we don’t like it here” variety as they are of the “we don’t like such and such part of our classes and it’s difficult to be studying all the time” variety. For the most part, in a general sense, we’re really comfortable here already. And, looking back on the process, it’s surprising that it took so little time. But, of course, it hasn’t FELT like so little time.

This is all, really, just a long way of apologizing for not having posted a long entry in over a week. Not much has changed since my last post; this past week has mostly served to get everyone into a steady routine, and time is beginning to speed up. I’ve settled into a daily rhythm, and that more than anything helps a person to acclimate to his surroundings. I wake up most mornings rva saatze (at eight o’clock) to find Irma, maspindzel dedachemi (my host mother), already awake and cooking my breakfast (This morning, though, her clock had apparently stopped for an hour during the night – she was just starting her routine when I came into the kitchen, about to leave for school, and was very confused as to what exactly the hell I was doing awake at 7:30…explaining “no, it’s 8:30, your clock is broken” is very difficult when two people don’t quite speak the same language). I’m not a morning person, and, while I don’t take morning showers here, I have to spend extra time getting dressed because I have to dress professionally while doing Peace Corps activities, so I usually roll into the kitchen about ten minutes before I need to leave. This is a problem, because one of Irma’s main life desires is that I eat more than I am intending to eat at any particular moment. I am always the only person eating breakfast at 8:30, but there is usually about as much food on the table as my entire family would eat for dinner on a given night in America. It is Irma’s goal that I eat all of it. It is my goal to leave for school before causing myself major gastrointestinal damage. It is a game, and Irma usually wins. I have learned the basic phrases for “I don’t want any more food,” and she knows my broken Georgian slash gestures for “I need to leave for school now.” But Irma is a brilliant tactician. “Tchame, tchame. Puri kargia. Erti kidev.” (Eat more, eat more. The bread is good. One more.) If this does not work, she has perfected a glance that can only be described as conveying, “You are causing me extreme emotional pain and anguish. I am very sad for you that you would even consider leaving before having another three pounds of egg salad.” This usually guilts me into saying, “Fine, I’ll have just a little bit more.” Then, she grabs the serving dish before I can decide for myself how much more to consume, and she spoons enough food to maim a bison onto my plate. I, feeling a nagging sense of rudeness at simply saying “no” and refusing to eat more, defeatedly scoop as much food as I can into my mouth, and stagger out the door trying to avoid falling into a hyperglycemic coma. Irma will then shove cookies into my satchel as she unlocks the front door for me.

My walk to school takes about fifteen minutes, through the neighborhood where I live, past the magazia (shop) where men go in the mornings to look for a day’s work, past the Stalin Museum, Stalin’s first home, and Stalin Park, to the nonprofit office where we have four hours of language class a day. Four hours of language class is, to put it mildly, a lot. I am doing pretty well in language class, compared to some others in my small class, and even I am having a lot of difficulty sometimes. I can’t even imagine how hard it is for the people who aren’t picking it up as quickly as some of us are. I usually spend the half-hour break we get at 11am (that would be 2am in the Central Time Zone and midnight in California) online; if any of you need to converse with me in a hurried AIM chat before my language teacher makes me turn my computer off, that’s the time, Monday through Saturday. After language class, we go to a group member’s house, where his/her/their host mom has prepared us lunch. Lunch is usually delicious, and also usually at least 75% refined carbohydrates. This becomes an issue about half an hour into our afternoon technical NGO training, when we all lapse into our second food coma of the day.

After NGO training, we usually go to a bar to hang out, study, drink beer, and talk (the trainees who live in the villages around Gori hate us for this, since they’re not allowed to leave their villages during the week). I really enjoy doing this every day, but it concerns me. I don’t envy the people who are training in villages, because I’m having fun now, but I know that they’re being better prepared for our eventual site assignments in eight weeks. The 15 of us who are living in the city hang out with each other and with several of the volunteers who are stationed in Gori and a year into their service; once we leave for our posts, there won’t be more than one or two people stationed near us, and I expect that the evenings will become pretty lonely for a while. I’m not expecting to enjoy my first couple of weeks at post. But, for now, we’re enjoying ourselves, and being able to rewind during the evenings seems pretty crucial to our sanity at this point (“Bevri vstsavlob. Bevri vkitkhulob. Bevri sashinau davaleba maqvs,” as I might say in broken Georgian to Irma. “I learn very much. I read very much. I have a lot of homework.”). I play backgammon with a guy in my cluster, and we all whine about having to go home. It’s not that we dislike being with our host families (although I am beginning to sense that, for everyone in my host family besides Irma, interest in the American is fading to minor bemusement at the American); one is just always reticent to leave a cocoon of people who are talking about shared experience in a shared language for a group of people who will not understand your concerns about their seatless toilet and to whom you will be unable to explain said concerns. At home, I eat another gargantuan meal (as an added bonus, after I staggered out of the kitchen last night, Irma came into my room with a heaping bowl of fruit, explaining that I needed to eat it because her daughter had picked it that day in her hometown village, with the implication that it would thus be rude of me not to eat it), and I send text-messages while trying to focus on studying until I fall asleep.

On Saturday afternoons and Sundays, we wander around the city, see the sights we haven’t seen, go to the internet café, spend more time at the bars, and visit our friends in the villages. This past Sunday, I visited people in the village of Bebnisi, about 20 minutes outside Gori. We took a bus early Sunday morning to get there; it was pouring and the bus was overcrowded in that special developing-world-way, so I found myself standing in the aisle, forced to lean over a seated woman while trying not to drip water all over her. We had no idea when we were supposed to get off; thankfully, we were on the bus long enough to send a text message to a trainee who lives in the village asking him to meet us at the bus stop so we would know when to disembark. Still, for a while, I was pretty sure we’d end up in Moscow. That would be a fun call to our supervisor. “Tengo? We’re in Moscow. We didn’t know when to get off the bus. We thought maybe the village was pretty far. Is it okay if we get back slightly after curfew?”

In the village, our first stop was at the house of a girl I’ve become close with. Her family’s cow and dog had given birth on the same day the week before, so there was a new calf and two new puppies in the yard. The dog attacked me (affectionately), because, yes, Irma had forced cookies into my pocket before I left that morning. The calf spent the morning charging from one end of the yard to the other and back again in a gangly newborn gait, the hilarity of which is completely and unfortunately indescribable without the aid of video footage. It was raining on and off, and I was standing in a yard in a small village in Georgia, watching a newborn calf charge around the yard like it was auditioning for the rodeo. My list of “things I never expected to be doing” is getting pretty long.

After that, we walked to another friend’s house, where his host dad regaled us with impressions in his broken English and songs on his broken guitar. This man is my new favorite person in this country, and again I cannot describe why without the aid of video footage. We drank coffee and beer (so it wasn’t even noon; what are you trying to say?) and chewed sunflower seeds. Then the girl and I took a bus back to Gori, where we joined many other friends at the apartment of a current Gori-stationed volunteer named Cutino, who we’ve been seeing most evenings. It was a fun evening, but it was back to four hours of language the next morning, made amusing only by the simple text message of a trainee who had gotten too drunk at a Georgian feast on Sunday (“Hurtin for certain” was the entirety of the message). So revolves the cycle.

The cycle is comforting; it’s good to know that I already have a routine, as I said earlier. But it can also be frustrating. It can be frustrating when it seems that we’ve been here for so little time and yet are already often just going through the motions, trying to get to the next day, the next language lesson, the next attempt at communication with a Georgian. It can be frustrating not learning as quickly as I wish I was learning. It can be frustrating not having the cultural tools to step away from the table before guiltily eating my body weight in food (It’s also frustrating that, somehow, even though I stagger from the table after every meal, I’m always starving two hours later. And I think I’m losing a little weight. What in god’s name is going on in my intestines?). But, in the end, I think it’s mostly a good thing that we are becoming more understanding of our eventual roles here every day. Our NGO training can sometimes be painfully long (especially after such a large lunch), but I come away from it every day with a slightly broader realization of what, exactly, I’m supposed to do when I’m eventually dumped into a nonprofit organization here. I think we’ve all internalized our missions here. None of us are blanching at the length of time we’ll be here, or the things we’ll be doing during those two years. Our task has become normal to us. And that is, of course, frightening and comforting at the same time. I doubt that dichotomy will go away for quite a long time, even once I return to the States. Life is like that, brothers and sisters. I have the moral authority to make a sweeping statement like that, because I am in the Peace Corps.

And with that, I leave you to go study Georgian. Did you know that, in Georgian, they count in a base 20 system? The number 50 is ormotsdaati -– two twenties and ten. The number 76 is samotsdatekvsmeti – three twenties and sixteen. Of course you didn’t know that. You’re in freaking America. I just wanted you to be impressed with how hard this is, dammit.

I Swear I Still Like You. Some of You. Or: OK, That Was A Lie

Hey no new journal post but I wanted to mention that I've only been getting online during my half-hour break in the mornings (since there's wireless internet at the place where we have language class), and I can't do much in half an hour. So if I reply to someone's Facebook message or IM someone or e-mail someone but not everyone, I am very very very very sorry. Usually I'm mid-message when I start getting glared at by my teacher and I have to shut my computer off. I might start going to the internet cafe after our afternoon classes, but we're usually really tired by that point and everyone always wants to go to a bar (I will need to post about yesterday, when we started getting plied with vodka and beer and cherries by strange but gregarious Georgian men at a bar...my only supra-esque experience since I've been here)(a supra is a Georgian feast with copious alcohol and dozens of toasts, if I haven't mentioned that yet). But I want to be in better contact with most of you; I sent some texts but I don't think all of them went through.

My break is over so I have to wrap even this tiny post up. Keep on keepin' on, over there.

Even Americans Are Now Fascinated By Bearinacage

I don't have a new journal entry, but I wanted to respond to Tahnee's comment about Bearinacage in my last post. I will definitely try to find out more, but I don't have the language skillz to figure out whether my host mom is asking if I want something from the store vs. asking if I want to come with her TO the store, so I highly doubt I could ever say anything like, "Excuse me, could you please discuss bearinacage? Specifically, why Bearinacage is, in fact, inacage and not, perhaps, inazoo? You know that Bearinacage poopsinthecage, right? And that Bearinacage is really Bearinanunsanitarycage? Or Bearinadepressingcage?"


UPDATE: I have asked a current Peace Corps volunteer who works where I have language class about Bearinacage. Apparently there are bears in the wild somewhere around the city, and the people often capture them and keep them in such cages. There is also, apparently, a zoo in Tbilisi that is just as bad to its animals. I doubt the concept of "animal rights" has much traction here. Kids feed Bearinacage sunflower seeds and cigarette butts. I believe one child got his hand bitten off by Bearinacage once.

To sum up: Bearinacage is an endless, and endlessly depressing, enigma. Fin.

Peace Corps Post #4: Bonding With the Host Brother. Or: Seriously, It Would Be Nice if Someone Offered Me Alcohol At Some Point

Kitri da pamadori. I totally remember “cucumber and tomato.” I also remember several of the other words I was given. Great Success! Except, of course, many many many many many many many new words were given to me today. And I don’t remember very many of them. So it goes.

Today was the first day that I felt like I was actually communicating with my host family. I’m not stringing together stream-of-thought sentences quite yet, but I’m thinking them mere seconds after I actually need to use them, so I can reassure myself that soon I will be able to have an actual conversation in Georgian. I think I’m on the verge of getting everything to click. But I may end up being “on the verge” for weeks or months. Who knows. In any case, I’m pleased with how today went.

After language class this morning (we have four hours of language class even on Saturdays), a few of the small trainee clusters (we have our classes in groups of six called clusters) who are living in Gori met up at the Stalin Museum at the center of town. As I have mentioned previously, Gori is very proud that Stalin was born there. There are Stalin statues all over the city. My language class is held in a building on Stalini Kocha (Stalin Street). The street is next to Stalini Parki, at one end of which lies the Stalin Museum and the preserved house where Stalin spent his first few years. It’s a neat educational experience for the whole family, and if you think I’m going to make any jokes about it whatsoever on a blog that might end up being monitored by a Peace Corps staffer in Washington, you are out of your mind.

Anyway, after the museum we went to the tourist hotel nearby (although I don’t really know how many actual tourists come to Gori) to look for a bar. It was only otkhi saatia (4 o’clock), but we’re not allowed to be out after 7pm unless we’re with our host families. It’s a weird juxtaposition – drinking beer in a bar in the middle of the afternoon, and then leaving pretty early so your mom won’t get mad at you – but we adapted to it. The two patrons of the small bar seemed pretty surprised to see 12 Americans tiptoe in, looking for beer, but we quickly found that, yes, we could order beer, and that it was 1 lari (about 72 cents). We also discovered that there was a pretty decent beer garden-type setup outside the back of the bar, so we hung out there and told stories about our living situations and such. It was the first really relaxing moment for most of us since we’d gotten to Gori. We made plans to hike to an old castle on a hilltop near the city tomorrow.

I got home from the bar and found my host brother and host sister-in-law sitting in the kitchen eating sunflower seeds. I joined them, because I have been a bit too overwhelmed and tired (not to mention unable to communicate at all) until this point to engage in much social interaction. So we sat there for a while, saying bits of sentences to each other. I then successfully achieved three things that have been terrifying me since I got here: I gave my host mother the money her family is to receive each two weeks from the Peace Corps without turning it into a big scene (I was afraid it would be really awkward to hand her money), I gave her some of my dirty clothes to be laundered while making it clear that I’d rather be doing it myself (I really wouldn’t rather do it myself, but I wanted to make an effort to look like I did, because I knew either way that she would use physical force on me if she felt it necessary in order to keep me from doing my own chores), and, most triumphantly, I bathed.

Now, this may not seem like a big deal to you Amerikeli, with your showers and your hot water and your reliable plumbing and your soap and your macaroni salad. But my bathroom consists of a tub, a faucet that doesn’t have a setting above “trickle,” and several buckets. I had no idea what deda would decide to do if I asked to bathe. Surprisingly and thankfully, it went fine; I asked, she filled a large bucket with room-temperature water that she stores in bottles out on the porch, and then she added to it with hot water from the hotplate to make a pleasingly temperate mixture. And it ended up not being as difficult or humbling as I thought it would be to stand in a bathtub and pour water from a bucket on myself with a tiny pitcher. It was still one of those “your new life is completely ridiculous” moments, though.

After my bucket bath, my host brother took me on a walk through the city with a friend of his. I felt really self-conscious about it, because I was wearing my “house clothes” – shorts, flip flops, and a t-shirt – which consist of things that we’re told Georgians don’t wear, tending as they do towards more formal clothing. This message has been drilled into us enough that I felt basically naked as I walked along outside in shorts and sandals (I had gestured that I was going to change before we went out but was rebuffed), and I was sure everyone was staring at me because of it. We walked along the streets, chewing sunflower seeds, and talking a little – mostly pointing at things and saying the words for them. It was quite pleasant. We were bonding without having to say much. We saw many of the important buildings in the city, as well as a park that has a lot of carnival rides and small food vendors, not to mention – swear to god – a baby bear in a cage. Don’t ask my why Gori has bearinacage. I don’t have the language skills to ask about bearinacage. Bearinacage just exists, mannnn. My host brother even bought me an ice cream as the inspirational orchestra in my mind played a heartwarming strings piece. Then we walked back to the house as my host brother and his friend fought wordlessly for the coveted position of walking next to me (this American-in-a-foreign-land-making-a-concerted-effort-to-learn-their-obscure-language gig can have some ego-inflating side effects), and I hung out with a group of people, trying to absorb what they were saying, until I got tired and came up to my room, followed swiftly by deda carrying an enormous plate of cookies that I don’t want but which are sitting on my nightstand anyway.

So ends another day in Gori. I wish I had the time and the energy to craft these entries into pieces of literature, or at least to pepper them with more jokes, but it’s hard enough staying awake just to write everything down in the first place. You should, if everything goes according to plan, finally be able to read these on Monday. I will still not have been in the Peace Corps for even two weeks. I think I’m going to be 47 years old when this is over. I should write a new theory of relativity.

Peace Corps Post #3: Getting Used to Gori. Or: I Can Understand Your Gestures! Great Success!

Today was better than yesterday. That’s the first thing that should be said about it. It didn’t start out better – I woke up, frankly, in abject terror of my inability to communicate and my fading sense of the helpfulness of my presence in this country – but it has ended pretty well. And, I suppose, that is as much as I can possibly hope for – that each day is better and easier than the last, and that I eventually find myself comfortable in this country. I remain terrified of asking to wash my clothes and to bathe, because the water in my host house, as far as I can tell, is currently no more than a slight trickle, and I have no idea what my host mother’s idea of me washing myself might consist of (I’m sure not bathing sounds disgusting to you Ameriklebi, but we have been told by current Peace Corps volunteers that they bathe every few days in the summer and as little as once a week in the winter). But I am abjectly terrified of fewer things than last night. So progress is being made. We’re even communicating sliiiightly easier, though the proper analogy might be taking ten steps up Mt. Everest.

My host mother’s house is not quite a house, in the American sense of the word, so much as a flat or an apartment. People seem to hang out on the first floor, but it’s sort of like an unfinished basement, and doesn’t have many house trappings. The second floor is where the normal rooms of the house are. There’s a modest kitchen, a modest dining room, a living room, a bathroom, and a couple of bedrooms. But, according to Peace Corps host family policy, each volunteer has to be given by his host family a room with a door that closes and locks (this is a foreign desire to Georgians, but they are apparently briefed on Americans’ fondness for space and privacy, not to mention the fact that most of us are carrying expensive electronics that we’d prefer not get stolen by someone in the neighborhood). There is no door for my room – only a curtain. The lockable door is between the dining room and the living room, which is attached to my room. This means that, to close “my” door, I am keeping my entire host family out of not only ONE room but TWO rooms, out of five total upstairs rooms. I feel very bad about this, but they seem to be accepting it perfectly well. My deda (“mother” in Georgian, but I think I’ll use it to mean “host mother,” since it’s shorter) has started to close the door when I gesture that I’m tired or that I need to study. I still feel really bad about it, but at least they don’t really seem to use the living room much. It doesn’t have a TV in it or anything. Pffffff. TV. You Ameriklebi.

In thankful contrast to my current mental state, I woke up this morning terrified of pretty much everything. I am sure that I should have completely accepted the fact that I was not going to be able to understand much of anything for a while, even though we’re studying the language so much, but when it actually happens it makes you feel so helpless. I was frustrated at my inability to transfer ANYTHING from my language classes into a coherent sentence. So this morning I woke up dreading an entire day of the same. Deda walked me to my 9am language class through the streets of the town – I felt like a six year old on the first day of first grade – and we didn’t try to talk much. Language class was difficult (we have four hours of it a day, six days a week from now on), but I think today I pinpointed exactly what is difficult for me. I’ve been breezing through the matching-written-words sorts of exercises, and getting envious stares from my classmates, but it was almost more frustrating because it didn’t help at my host house, and I didn’t know why. But I realized today that, while I can easily understand everything when it’s written, it’s much harder for me when it’s spoken or when I have to speak spontaneously. I have no experience with spoken foreign language – I took Latin in high school. Hopefully I will adapt more quickly now that I’ve pinpointed what I need to work on.

Our language class is at the NGO office of a current volunteer named Mark, which is cool because it allows us to ask him questions and see what his life is like, and also because there is free internet access there. I got about three minutes of wireless access on my laptop during a break, and thankfully it wasn’t too late in the states and Chris was on AIM. It was awesome, and not a little bit weird, to actually get to converse with someone from home who isn’t my mom. It was the first time since I’d left. I wanted to ask him what I’ve missed since I’ve been gone, but I realized that most likely nothing interesting has happened. I’ve been gone less time than I might have been gone had I just gone on a vacation. It just seems like it’s been years. But I was really happy either way that I was able to talk to someone. After class, we headed to an internet café in town; there was available internet at the office, but probably not for everyone at once, and we also wanted an excuse to walk through the city. We found the internet café and spent two hours there. It was distinctly weird to be using the internet again. It felt foreign. It felt American. It felt like something I’d left behind. I realized that I was thinking about it that way, and it scared me a bit. When we went to a reception at the US Ambassador’s house in the capital during orientation, we met some volunteers who are nearly done with their two years of service (they’re “nearing COS” in Peace Corps-speak, with COS standing for “Close of Service”), and it was awfully frightening how far they’d left America behind. One of the girls I spoke to forgot how to say a Georgian word in English while we were speaking. “Sorry, I forget English sometimes,” she said. “WHAT?????” I said. But only in my mind. That’s what I was reminded of when I was in the internet café, realizing that I have lost a bit of my desire to spend hours surfing the web, and I’ve been gone mere days. I was bored in just over an hour, after checking my e-mail, Facebook, CNN.com, Salon.com, and ESPN.com, and posting something short on my blog. When I was working in LA, I’d spend basically the entire DAY on the internet. What’s happening to me?

After my friends and I wandered around Stalin Park for a while (Stalin was born in Gori and the citizens are very proud of it – there’s a Stalin Street, a Stalin Park, a huge Stalin statue, and a Stalin Museum built around his boyhood home), I successfully purchased a large bottle of water at a maghazia (shop) after whipping out “tsk’ali” (“water,” although I should have practiced my sentences and said, “sad aris tsk’ali,” “where is water,” or, “me minda tsk’ali,” “I want water”), “didi” (“big,” after I was initially shown a smaller bottle than I wanted), and “ra ghirs?” (“how much?”). I felt pretty proud of myself. Then I felt less proud of myself when I forgot what my house looked like and stumbled upon it by sheer luck. I’ve spent the evening studying, trying to learn words as deda points them out (and trying to convey that I’m not retarded when I invariably forget them instantly), and avoiding being fed with much more success than last night.

As I briefly alluded to at the end of the last entry, this is more difficult than it may seem. One way Georgians show their hospitality is by feeding their guests. Probably the most common thing said by a deda or a bebia (grandmother) to a guest is, “tchame, tchame,” which means, “eat more, eat more.” They say this over and over while they shove bucketfuls of food at you. The food is great, but there’s so much of it. Last night deda asked if I wanted any chai (tea) before bed, and I said sure. I’d eaten maybe an hour before this. She beckoned me out to the table a few minutes later, where I saw enough food for an entire new meal. And only one place setting. She then spent the fifteen minutes or so it took for my dzalian tskheli chai (very hot tea) to cool off by buttering a piece of bread for me, putting karTopili (potatoes) on my plate, and demanding that I eat it. I stammered that I didn’t want any more (“meti ar minda, meti ar minda”), but it took several attempts for this to work. She does, however, seem to be requiring less persuasion that I’m full with each passing meal, although she apparently told a semi-speaker of English who was over this evening that she is “very sad for him because he eats so little.” At this point, when I don’t want to eat any more, I just start saying, “daghlili var,” which means, “I’m tired,” because it causes deda to become much more concerned with getting me to bed than she is about getting me to eat. Such is life here on Ninoshvili Street in Gori.

Hopefully tomorrow I will remember the phrase for “cucumber and tomato” (kitri da pamadori), so when I am quizzed on it with people watching I won’t be made to feel like a retard.

Peace Corps Post #2: Orientation in Tabakhmela and Meeting Our Host Families. Or: Please, Please, Please, Please Don't Give Me Any More Food

First things first – I got the name of the village wrong in my last entry. It was called Tabakhmela, not Tamakhela. I say was instead of is (although its name remains Tabakhmela unless they’ve decided to change it within the last five hours) because I am writing the entry you are reading from a new location – from a town called Gori (one of the larger towns/cities in Georgia, but I believe it still has only 50 or 60,000 residents), in the bedroom of my new temporary host family’s house. I know I should have been writing down what happened during the week of Orientation as it was going on, but this whole week, when I’ve had free time, I’ve only wanted to sleep or socialize with my Trainee group. I really want to sleep now, too, but I know that I shouldn’t, so I am going to try to record some thoughts, even though to adequately describe today would be absolutely impossible (if you are perceptive you are sensing a pattern – thoughts on this later). I could sing, and I have sung, the same song about the entire week and a half of my Peace Corps experience, but I’m going to say it again and it holds just as true today as any other time I’ve said it up until now – this has, without a doubt, been the weirdest day of my life. The most difficult, too, in many ways, though the difficulty has been mental rather than physical or emotional.

We spent nearly a week in Tabakhmela getting to know each other and spending all our time in Peace Corps overview classes. Our hotel compound was in a small village and we were only allowed to leave twice the entire time – once to walk a short distance to a small shop to buy soap and shampoo, and once to take a bus into Tbilisi to attend a dinner reception at the US Ambassador’s house and meet current volunteers. We were going stir crazy pretty quickly. Many of us dealt with it by telling gossip about each other the entire time. We were having a lot of fun with each other, yes, but if you put 46 mostly young people in a hotel for a week without letting them leave, things are going to happen and everyone is going to find out about them. I was doing more gossiping than a twelve year old schoolgirl. I suppose I can only hope that, for karma reasons, just as much gossip was being spread about me. I can tell more stories about Tabakhmela later, hopefully, when I have the time. My apologies, also, for the abrupt ending of my last post; I left it unfinished intending to return to it, and it never happened.

Anyway, Tabakhmela seemed crucially important while it was happening, but, looking back on it, the difference between adjusting to and living in Tabakhmela and adjusting to my new situation seems like the difference between swatting at a crumpled piece of paper with a stick and playing for the New York Yankees. Everyone in Tabakhmela except the cooks – from, obviously, the other members of the group, to the instructors, to the Peace Corps staff – spoke English. My Georgian was being practiced in the laboratory of the classroom. I could control the things I needed to control. But that changed this afternoon. We drove out to Gori and met our host families, and from that moment until now I have been more frustrated than I’ve ever been in my life. It’s not necessarily a bad frustration – that is, it’s understandable and not the result of anyone doing anything wrong – but it’s a frustration. I am able to communicate with my host family in only the most rudimentary of ways. I understand, in a good sentence, one in ten words my host mother says to me. Most of my evening tonight was spent simply staring at her, trying to look understanding, when really I had absolutely no idea what she was saying. Needless to say, my classroom ability to conjugate the Georgian word “to be” has not been as helpful as I’d hoped it would be. I’ve never been in this situation before, and I’ve never been in any situation that I could possibly compare to this situation. I have no playbook. I’m just hoping it works out.

My host family consists of a host mom, Irma, who is a retired music teacher (if I latched properly onto a word I understood – ekvsi – she’s been retired for six years) and whose husband is deceased (um, I think). She has a son, Giorgi, who is in perhaps his late 20s and who is very nice. I was under the impression that he lived here, and he was here most of the evening, but I don’t know where he went off to. There is a 2 year old, also called Irma, and some other vaguely familial persons whose names I only sort of remember and whose connection to everyone else I have completely forgotten already, if I understood it in the first place. A major hurdle for the next couple of days is deciding whether to pretend I know who everyone is or to ask again and risk looking like an idiot who can’t remember anything.

I have to go to bed. I’ve fought it as long as I can. This time, I really hope to continue the tale as soon as I am able. I hope you are looking forward to reading about The Time Dan Thought His Host Mother Was Just Serving Him Tea Before Bed And It Turned Out To Be An Entire Meal Right After He’d Already Eaten One. Because I am looking forward to writing about it.

Wow -- Gori Edition

Greetings from Gori, a city of ~60,000 (or so I've been told) in North Central Georgia. We got here yesterday after six days of orientation in a small Georgian village called Tabakhmela, outside the capital city of Tbilisi. I am sitting in an internet cafe and I don't have the means right now to copy the writing I've done about my experience so far -- which is on my laptop -- so I'll keep this pretty brief. I just want to let whoever is reading this (still probably just Ruth, but perhaps others of you if you've gotten word that I am finally going to have semi-frequent internet access)(semi-frequent by Georgian standards, that is) know that I am fine but still a bit overwhelmed by this entire experience. I'm going to try to write as much as I can about everything, but I could write a book at this point and still only scratch the surface. This week has felt like six years. Anyway, journal entries to come, so stay tuned, but until then I miss all of you and I wish you could somehow experience the craziness that is this yourself.