Control

One of my favorite parts about my life in Telavi has been watching the evolution of computer availability with my host siblings. When the weather started to turn cold, and the kids were inside more often, they naturally began to fight over the computer. They'd fight when they got home from school, and would barrel through their homework to be the first done and secure their spot on the computer for that precious hour they [each] get. It's really incredible what flash games and Facebook will do to a sibling relationship.

Most of the vicious fights happened when it was just the two of them in the mornings before school. No one ever truly won - someone would get kicked too hard, punched too much, or in one extreme case, where Goga threw a pair of Ani's favorite pants out the back door and into the weird trash filled creek that flows behind our house, be fed up with Georgian boy shit. Their fighting would be so voracious and frequent that eventually my host mother, tired of hearing about these escapades from the wronged child day in and day out, put a password on the whole computer. That way, she would have to be home in order for them to be able to use the computer. In her mind, she was eliminating a huge aggravator from everyone's life.

Unfortunately, what this introduced was an almost blood frenzy of Internet induced angst from my siblings. Now they'd just harangue her even more the second they were ready to go online, not caring about where she was in the house, what she was doing, or who she was talking to. She'd try to hide her keystrokes, but since the passwords were like four characters long and the kids would raptor pack her (standing on opposite sides of her, with one being a distraction and the other watching diligently for what she was typing) they would figure each one out. But she wouldn't know they had figured it out until the next time they would get in a fight over the computer in the morning and the "loser" would complain to her. 

Then she started to hide the keyboard, under the assumption that if they couldn't type they wouldn't be able to log on. Which is pretty sound logic, honestly, but they're determined kids when they want to be. They found that pesky Special Assistance menu that's on Windows log in screens, which brings up a virtual keyboard. Using the mouse, they were able to select the letters needed for the super simple password. And again, they could have gotten away with this, if only they had shut the fuck up and cooperated and taken turns. But no. Shit fests ensued in the mornings again, and word finally got back to my host moms ears. Naturally she started to hide the mouse, also. 

It began in a drawer in the desk, but Ani and Goga quickly found this hiding spot. Then my mom moved them into a cabinet in the living room, changing what one she'd use every day and always hiding them underneath bedding and towels. That didn't help, either, and inevitably they'd find these peripherals and then use them when she wasn't home. Finally she just started to bring the mouse and keyboard with her to school. It was the solution she had been dreaming of! Divine retribution at last! Freedom from quarreling children always! I mean, it's a bit cumbersome having to carry a full size keyboard and a mouse in her purse day in and day out, but if it saves her a headache or twelve per week it's totally worth it.

So there I was a few weeks ago, sitting on the couch in the petchie room, reading my book. My host brother had just thrown a fit about not being able to use the computer, and stomped out of the room, leaving only my host mom and me. She waits a moment. We hear the bathroom door close, and then she hurriedly comes over to where I am and motions for me to stand up. I look at her curiously, but comply and stand by the door. "Watch for Goga," she whispers as she lifts up the cushions and pulls out the keyboard and mouse from the empty space underneath the collapsable couch bed. Of course I start busting up, because this women just pulled computer accessories out from a sofa with the same caution that someone might have when revealing the location of the hidden rebel base to a confidant. 

And that's the current resting location of the peripherals. Right under my butt as I type this up. My host siblings have yet to discover it, that's how unASSuming (RIMSHOT) it is. I've started to run interference on the kids, keeping them out of the room and occupied so my mom can safely extract the secret devices. The suspense of having the keyboard and mouse magically appear is starting to drive my host siblings insane. They keep asking me if I know where it is, but I always just play dumb and lie. Their incessant fighting makes me want to strangle both of them, and I am pretty sure my host mom is in the same boat as I am, considering she always sighs and yells that she will abandon them and come back to America with me if they keep fighting. So if they want to pull their hair out in wonder as to where the accessories are, let them!

Besides, I've got my own computer, and my own Internet, and I can do shit like this.

Since you need a nice view in order to just look at pictures of cats, right?

If you give a mouse a cookie...

...or, as I like to say, "If you let a Georgian use your iPhone once..."

I made the dangerous mistake a few weeks ago of letting Ani, my host sister, use my phone to take some photos. She was bored, and I figured this would be a good way of keeping her out of our host mothers hair. So into the App Store I went, and upon her request I downloaded a camera called Retrica. If you're not aware of Retrica, you're not missing anything. It is a program specially designed for people to take selfies. But she's a thirteen year old girl, and I thought, "What could possibly go wrong with this?"

And nothing's gone wrong, per se, except for the fact that I've created a selfie craving monster. Add in the two neighbor girls who, three times this week, wanted to go out and take pictures of themselves, and I've got a whole cluster of teenage Georgian girls who insist on posing "nicely" for 100 pictures at a time.

This is what my poor photo library looks like. 399 pictures. I'm halfway tempted to tell my host parents I will pitch in money to buy my host sister a phone of her own so my poor phone can get a god damn break!

I'm about as much of a cam whore as your average upper twentysomething year old. I don't particularly like taking pictures where I intentionally look decent, because it feels silly, so I'd much rather just look as silly as I feel. Unfortunately, Ani is a thirteen year old girl who is caught up in this web of "everything must look nice always" cultural mentality.  Naturally, my weird faces and goofy quirks when taking pictures confused her at the beginning. I think she's finally getting used to my "monkey faces" (I really must look like a monkey, because my grandfather, father, uncles, and now a Georgian girl all have called me "monkey face"), and "big arms" thing. She still yells at me about the "big arms" thing, however, so I don't know if I will ever be able to get her totally used to that. I make it a point to be even more ridiculous in these pictures that the teenage Georgian girls force me to take - and I do mean force. They grabbed my face and put lipstick on me the other day, informing me that they wanted to "look nice for Facebook."

Oh, and have I mentioned that Georgians love Facebook? Cause they do. Most teenagers I've met don't do anything on the internet EXCEPT for Facebook. My host siblings both spend hours just clicking through photos of their friends, or of random pages, or chatting with people they know. And not that this is any different than most other teenagers, because I'm sure I did the same thing, but I also remember going onto forums and participating in eRPGs (Yeah, that's right. I joined a crew of an email role playing game of a fictional Star Trek ship. Cause that's a normal thing for an eleven year old to do...?), and making websites dedicated to god knows what, and forget the day that Space.com happened, because that might've just been the most marvelous day ever in my little prepubescent life. And I guess that's yet another perk of speaking English - a lot of vary diverse content is available to us online. Content that may not even be translatable into Georgian. But my host siblings don't do ANYTHING. They know Facebook, and Youtube, and some strange Russian version of Facebook, and that's it. No emails, in fact I'm pretty sure that most kids don't know how to even compose and send an email. All Facebook. All the time.

Anyway. Sure, little Georgian teenagers. Let's make sure we "look nice for Facebook." I'm glad that you've got the priorities down!

Inevitably, once we take a minimum of 20 photos, and a maximum that so far has yet to exceed 130 (Yup.), they will want the pictures IMMEDIATELY TO PUT ONLINE. With my sister, it's easy - I just send them to her via messages on, you guessed it, Facebook. Six at a time cause that's all you can do. But that's doable. I don't mind doing that. It becomes another matter altogether when dealing with more than one Georgian girl.

We spent an hour one night this week trying to get pictures from my phone to Rusa, my neighbor, because her Internet at home was out and she did not want to wait. She brought a jump drive over, and I told her that if it was formatted a certain way that my computer would not be able to work with it. She laughed, and then was confused when, shocker, my Mac could not read her Windows formatted USB stick. I tried explaining it again, and she asked me, "But, what version of Windows do you have?" No version of Windows. It is another type of computer. Mine and Windows do not get along. They are not friends. "...Is it Windows 8? I have Windows 7. That is why." No. No it's not. Mine is not Windows. At all! She then suggested that I take my phone to her house to plug into her computer. I told her no, that it would not work (Which I mean, it probably would have, but I wasn't about to a) go outside AGAIN, b) plug my poor iPhone into some Windows machine and c) have to deal with an interface on the computer that was probably in Russian or Georgian and has god knows how many weird ass viruses on it just so an impatient 14 year old can get some glamor shots where her face is completely over exposed!), and she suggested plugging her phone into my computer. So an Android media managing app download later, and still we could not get photos onto her computer. We ended up having to take out her micro SD card, stick it in my card adapter, and just give her the pictures that way. And I guess maybe I should have thought of that first, but why would I give any more thought to getting this chick her pictures when SHE WOULD JUST BE ABLE TO DOWNLOAD ALL OF THEM OFF OF FACEBOOK WHEN SHE GOT INTERNET AGAIN.

It was a really frustrating evening. Unsure if you've picked up on that one.

The whole "we must look nice constantly" thing is really starting to wear on me. It's an unrealistic expectation, and makes people just get incredibly petty and shitty with each other, all the while keeping women, especially here, in the outdated roles in which they find themselves. Which is why I insist on my default face for pictures with young Georgian girls to be silly. I want them to see that it's ok to laugh at yourself, and that you don't have to always good.

I think it's working a little bit. My host sister has gotten significantly goofier while I've been here, although whether it's her just getting more comfortable with me or I am actually making her weird is hard to say. I do know that before I came around most of her pictures on Facebook were your typical vacant eyed model inspired faces and poses that many girls here (and let's be real, anywhere with internet access) are so fond of. And now she has a few where she's got her eyes crossed, and her tongue is out, or she's making a sass face. I'd like to think a small part of that is me, but until she herself starts to do the "big arms" thing I don't think I'll be able to take any kind of credit.

Cold

Sometimes I make the very silly mistake of thinking that I look awesome.

This usually happens in the mornings, and it's usually following about a twenty minute long string of obscenities going through my head about how much I don't want to get out of bed, because outside of bed is the air known as "cold." It happens after I've stumbled to my dresser, pulled a skirt on over the long underwear I slept in, thrown a sweater over the top half of my long underwear ensemble, and then hiked up my super toasty wool socks over the long underwear bottoms - you know, so snow can't get all up in my business. Once I throw on my goober boots, I feel like one of those chic Norwegian women who always are all playful and cute in the snow. The ones who have the perfect hair and they're just loving every second of their polar afternoon because hey, they're in this super cute long underwear and pairing it with clothes and don't they look so comfortable and fashionable? They're the ones who don every winter style magazine cover, and who can make even the winteriest of the boots look good.

So as I've got this mental image of me being a super cute Swedish snow bunny in my mind (which I'm not remotely of Nordic descent, but we'll just skip right over that detail), I will, without fail, just happen to glance in the mirror on my way out the door. It's always far too late to do anything about my clothing, as I inevitably do not leave for school until the VERY last second, but I'm still always slightly horrified by the person staring back at me.

With my hood up, my look would not be considered "Norwegian Arctic Fashionista," and would instead fall into the category of "Homeless Eskimo Yooper Chic."

This is always kind of embarrassing, given how well put together everyone looks here. Women still wear very cute little boots with absolutely zero traction, and most have traded in their stilettos for the much more "practical" wedge heel. They wear sheer black tights underneath their adorable dresses, and have very black classy jackets. Their faces as they pass me in the street say, "Dear mother of tits, it is cold as all get up outside!"

And then there's me. Being all Yooper about shit. Stomping down the street with bright blue wool socks peeping over the top of my fuchsia lined stompy boots (seriously, these Columbia boots are fucking awesome), wearing my long underwear on the outside for everyone to see. My jacket is super poofy. My scarf extraordinarily fluffy. And guess what? I'm pretty warm!

The previously mentioned embarrassment of how I look always dissipates the second I see any other human being on the road, which usually means it's gone about two minutes after I step foot outside of the door. I see people sliding around on the snow because they might as well have smooth plastic trays strapped to their feet. There are folks walking in tandem clutching each other as they go so they can share body heat. The smugness I feel as I stroll on by, not slipping because my big ol' stompy boots have a crazy little thing called traction, only helps to make me warmer. It's an internal heat that starts to spread and it feels about as warm as the sunlight does on those cold winter days. I could try to dress all fashionable, but fashionable isn't warm. Fashionable will just make me cranky and cold and quite frankly that sounds just awful.

I used to be really good with the cold. I used to love winters. I used to go snowboarding with no jacket, doing runs in only a t-shirt and my snowpants, because I just didn't feel the cold. I was from upper Michigan, dammit. Lake Superior itself flowed in my veins, and that six month dead period we call winter couldn't touch me or bring me down.  And then somewhere along the way I became a wuss. Cold started to affect me. There would be a breeze on a 70 degree day and I would shiver like some simpering Floridian retiree. If it wasn't 75 degrees and sunny, I contemplated wearing a hoodie because it might get chilly, and wouldn't that be unpleasant? Living in California, where the coldest it would get is in the 40s (HA. Scare me later!), certainly didn't help, nor did my short stint in Texas. I complained if it wasn't warm enough in a house to wear only a t-shirt, and I wanted to be able to walk around barefoot regardless of the time of year and location.

My parents would keep the house at a frigid 58 degrees in the winter, letting it drop down to 55 at night. Sometimes we'd get crazy, and "crank" the heat to a balmy 62, but for the most part my folks were of the opinion that if you're cold put another "god damn shirt on." I used to think this was outrageous. I used to think it had to be some sort of child abuse. I mean, who are these fucking eskimo people that raised me? Who thinks that 58 degrees is an acceptable inside ambient temperature? Where is that considered alright?

Oh, young Jo. You were so foolish. You had no idea how good those days were.

Now that I'm living in a house that has exactly one source of heat, and it is localized in a room which is not my bedroom, I redact every single whine I've ever whined about being cold in Michigan.

Mom. Dad. This is my formal apology for being a wuss about the temperature in winter. I now know what true fucking cold feels like. Please give me 58 degrees. 58 degrees sounds fucking tropical in comparison right now.

I wasn't even this cold during the polar vortex of doom that the Midwest experienced this last December. It's 21 degrees and sunny outside right now, and I'm pretty sure it's about 29 degrees in my room. My computers battery actually stopped holding a charge WHILE IT WAS PLUGGED IN during the night because it was so cold. I think I've fixed this by dressing Helix (my computers name. Of course I had to give it a name, because god forbid I don't anthropomorphize everything in my life) in flannel shirts, as his battery was still going strong this morning.  My Nook, which is supposed to be able to last for weeks on a single charge, has yet to survive a night without dying. I've been sleeping in long underwear, wrapped up underneath my toasty sleeping bag and two big blankets, yet still my feet and hands are cold.

Ironically, the only time I'm truly warm is when I'm all "Homeless Eskimo Yooper Chic"'d up, and that's of course only when I'm outside.

As you can see through the frosted-on-the-inside glass, it's a blue and sunny day outside! If only it weren't cold as balls in my room!

It's crazy just how much the cold has permeated everything. I've been sitting in front of a burning petchie for a few hours now, even as I type this, and my fingers are little icicles. Copious amounts of tea aren't helping, and no matter how many clothes I pile onto my body still the chill advances.

If this is a prelude to getting sick, it can just stop right now. I refuse to succumb to the crippling illness that almost every other one of my fellow volunteers has contracted. That probably means it's time to go buy lemons to eat and get enough Vitamin C to say fuck off to whatever pathogens feel like attacking my immune system.

Seriously. Pretty sure if I can make it through this winter of no heat, then I can do anything.

The woods behind the house have excellent lighting when the sun is setting.

Unsure what type of pines they are (White, maybe?) but they remind me of Michigan.

Warm, soft light is always really misleading to just how fucking cold it actually is. Your iPhone's quickly depleting battery will remind you,  however, as will the lack of feeling of your face.

And then there are views like this. When the sky is super blue and the trees are all fluffy and big and covered in my favorite type of snow and the mountains are purple. I can sit and complain about how cold I am until I'm blue (and not even from hypothermia, RIMSHOT), but at the end of the day views like this make my stupid little cold heart happy and warm.

Skolashi: Part 2

Yesterday marked the start of the second week of school for this new semester, and as such it's probably a good time to finish my thoughts from a post a long time ago, in a blog archive far far away...

As mentioned previously, I'm not an education major, or a trained teacher. These are all just observations as someone who made it out of the American public school system relatively unscathed, so you might want to take all of this with a grain of salt.

Anyway, geronimo!

Every single issue I've encountered thus far in my school can be summed into one nice and tidy word - culture.

What I mean by this is that it's not only a language barrier, lack of comprehensive books, or a strict adherence to a pretty meaningless timetable that render most English classes in my school as unproductive, because all of these play a huge part in the issue. Yet the cherry on top is the biggest problem I've run into, and unfortunately it's the one that I'm really incapable of changing. It's entrenched itself into the very existence of all my kids, their parents, and indeed the very infrastructure of this little country.

I'm about to blow all of your minds right now. Are you ready for this? Ok, here it goes...

Georgia's culture is super different from English culture.

Whoa. I'm going to let that one sink in for a minute.

You back now? Ok. Allons-y!

So, our dear MacMillan books are published in Britain, meaning that my kids are all speaking British English. They're learning words like "maths" and "lorries" and are being yelled at if they don't use "has got" in sentences. There are questionable uses of "so" as a conjunctive, and I absolutely hate hate hate that they say "rubbers" instead of "erasers." The dialogues don't really teach useful conversational vocabulary, and the CD's with accompanying audio speak so fast and are so heavily accented that there are times that it takes me, a native speaker, a minute to figure out what the fuck it is that they're saying.

But I can deal with these things. They're workable. What isn't workable is the apparent battle of east vs. west that is taking place in the more abstract sense. These books are written by British English speakers, probably white, and are mass produced only in English so that they can attempt to be universal in the teaching English world, which, spoilers, isn't really westernized...

You might be saying to yourself, "Jobags, this is all pretty obvious. You're not telling us anything we don't already know." I get that. You're a smart and educated person, and I'm not trying to belittle you.  I'm just trying to make sure you're with me when I tell you that before these books, my kids have never seen a multiple choice question, and that they've never seen a fill in the blank style activity with vocabulary words, and that word banks are something that haven't been in their scholastic lives ever until now. Things that you and I take for granted because we are part of a society in which we learn how to correctly use a dictionary to find the letter we want are exactly the things that make these books less than ideal for here, because none of those things are really taught or encouraged.

In America people that don't score well on multiple choice tests are considered "stupid."1 This is because from a very young age we learn how to navigate multiple choice questions. Every single class in elementary school has some kind of multiple choice element, and kids get practice with it constantly. We're taught the most effective ways of scoring points on larger exams, and that the results of these exams will not only dictate what kind of university we can hope to get into someday, but how much external funding for our future education we might be able to receive. On the whole, we're brought up to practically do multiple choice in our sleep. The same goes for a plethora of other activities to test our knowledge about a subject. Every textbook for every class in public schools will ensure that kids are able to properly apply their new found knowledge in a bunch of different ways. American schools are grade centric; every thing we do gets a score on it, and we have progress reports, parent teacher conferences to discuss how we're doing in class, and report cards on a regular basis. We lose points for missing class, for being disruptive to our peers, for not knowing material. There are a million little factors that constitute the letter grade we receive, and we're highly aware of all of them.

But that's not the case here. Attendance in school isn't really heavily enforced - I've got one girl in second grade who maybe came to class a third of the time before break, and I have yet to see her this semester. I asked my coteacher if she was ok, and Natia gave me a look like I was insane and said, "Yes, she is fine. Lizi is just a very lazy girl and does not like school, so she does not come." I wish I had that option growing up, because I definitely would have just stayed home and read and watched documentaries on the Discovery Channel. My teachers have gradebooks, but they don't write down numbers for each kid every day, instead only sometimes giving 9s or 10s for the students that participated a lot in any given class period. Forget homework scores, because I'm pretty sure if my teacher likes the student and they messed up a bit they will still get a higher number in their notebook than a less cute kid who might've gotten a few more questions correct. So homework scores are arbitrary and ultimately meaningless because the scores for these exercises don't get transferred to the official gradebook anyway, which beckons the question, "What's the point?"

Parent-teacher interaction is limited to teachers writing down disappointed feelings in students notebooks for them to show their family. Occasionally a parent will drop their kid off at class in the morning and they'll stay and chat with us for a minute, but it usually is to tell me I am a beautiful and good girl instead of any kind of interest in how their child is doing in class. I haven't seen a physical report card, or anything resembling an actual grade, and the only type of test I've seen my kids take, outside of the ones Lamara gives my older kids, was an optional standardized test which you a) have to pay for, and b) have to go to Tbilisi to take, which drastically cuts the number of children who are even eligible to take it down by an astronomical amount.

And speaking of tests, my kids are terrible test takers. Lamara will use examples pulled straight out of their workbooks, which means that the tests are, verbatim, exercises they've done, in formats that they've seen and familiarized themselves with for a few years now. With only a handful of exceptions who actually complete the tests, most of my kids hand in their paper having only finished a question or two. In a 45 minute period. I was really perplexed by this, so I started paying attention a bit more during their next test and found that this seeming lack of effort wasn't that at all - when one of my kids gets stuck, they just stare and stare at the question, hoping to think of the answer. If they can't, then they just never move on, resulting in only one or two questions having any kind of a response. It was a bizarre feeling, having to explain to my classes that if they don't know an answer right away to go onto the next one and come back later, since that seemed like just such common sense to my standardized test centric American brain.

But it's not common sense for here.

There are so many little things that I've done since I was young that just are not a part of educational life for my lovely, tiny Georgian kids. Simple things, like copying down full words or sentences, and paying attention to copying them down correctly, is probably one of the hardest things I can ask them to do, other than spell words on their own. It's really, really weird, and I've never seen anything like it.

Also hard for them are independent creative thoughts. And I'm not even asking them to write the next great American novel. All I want are simple sentences using the vocabulary or grammar that we JUST went over, and they look at me like I might as well be asking them to write the next great American novel. My kids are amazing and wonderful at memorizing things and spitting responses back to you so long as you follow the same script they memorized. The answer to the question, "How are you?" is always, "Fine thanks, and you?" Even if they're not fine. One of my first graders lost their father over Christmas break, and that was still the answer he gave me. And not to be culturally insensitive about this, cause I realize that it's a private matter and all, but YOU'RE NOT FINE!! Say, "Not good," or, "Bad." Hell, I will even take a, "So-so!" Anything, as long as it's not the bullshit, "Fine thanks, and you," that I am just so fed up with hearing. All of my kids do it. That's how they always respond to that question, and it drives me nuts. No variation. No deviation. Always, "Fine thanks, and you."

Once I realized that my kids just memorize specific sentences and phrases, I decided to check out a Georgian textbook for one of their other classes. I just happened to look at the one for their history class, and a lot of things clicked. Like how at the end of chapters there are no review questions. There's nothing that asks for any sort of recall on the material you just read, no questions that make you come up with your own thoughts that have to be substantiated by the prior material. I borrowed my host sisters biology book, and it was the same sort of deal - absolutely no questions at the end of chapters. The same is true in every book I've looked at, with the notable exception of math texts. Aside from not getting to speak a lot of English each week (we're still at about 20 minutes a week of class time where they get to actually speak), they also are only encountering these types of prompts in one of their books, so they're not getting any kind of decent practice and familiarity with these question formats, on top of the fact that the books are only in English with no kind of Georgian direction or anything. Can you blame them for being so confused? Because I sure can't. Especially when the way in which they learn every other bit of information given to them by school (i.e. memorizing) just doesn't cut it anymore for this ONE class in which they have zero idea what the hell is going on ever cause it's in a different language and it assumes a different basal understanding than what the kids themselves have!

And it's not even like the memorizing standard is unique only to my school. Numerous other volunteers have noticed it, and I've even seen it inside my own family, whose kids go to another school in town. Watching my host sister and brother do their [non-English] homework is very strange because they just read over something a bunch of times, and then start saying the text aloud, and then when they can recite it all to their mother from memory they're done.

...Uh...buh...? What?

That doesn't do anything! Memorization, straight up, is not the correct way to test your understanding of a subject! My kids can sit there and say the alphabet all day long and say it correctly, but independent recall of stand alone letters? Nope. They're lost. And it's great that they're memorizing whole phrases, but when we need them to make up a new sentence they're just hopelessly lost because they don't understand how verbs and adjectives and nouns all work, and what you change or anything like that, because the books just aren't built for it. So I'm sitting there in class, playing remedial grammar, in Georgian (you know, that language I DON'T speak!), so that my kids can see what all is happening in the English sentences. And even then, once I get them sort of on the same page as me, my host teachers get frustrated with them that they can't commit to memory the nine new words we gave them. I've tried to get them to use flash cards, but teaching my teachers how to do drills with them has proved pretty fruitless. I keep trying every so often, but Lamara insists that having Georgian on the cards is detrimental and that they should be able to just remember what the words mean immediately. The woman has been teaching for 47 years, and I'm her third English coteacher. I highly doubt I will be able to change anything with her.

This might seem like a highly critical entry at this moment, and it's really not meant to be. I'm just trying to paint you the picture of the kind of shit I'm dealing with at school so that when I ask this next question you might be able to help me out with finding an answer.

Given the numerous differences between Georgia and the English speaking world, why do we assume that imposing a western educational system on an eastern societal infrastructure will work?

I get that MacMillian's decision to sell their books only in English is a very smart move from a business perspective. And you know, these books would actually be fairly decent if the teachers were trained to use them. But they're not. My coteachers don't understand all of the activities even. They don't ever deviate from what's in the book. They're very focused on maintaining a certain amount of material to go through for each grade, and if kids are left behind then it's just too bad. And since kids aren't really motivated to do well in class unless their parents are really urging them, the ones that fall behind tend to stay behind.

Realistically, last semester made me understand two things.

1) The money for the program I am a part of, the program that brought me to this awesome place that I love, and is paying for me to be a part of not only these kids lives but also my host family's, would be so much better spent right now on Georgian teacher development. I understand the desire to have English speakers in schools for pronunciation reasons, but bring them back in a few years. Right now, focus on having the actual local teachers able to deal with these books in the correct manner. Give them ways of dealing with behavioral issues, question formats, and external activities that all can be applied to an eastern world instead of just trying to hammer the proverbial square into the circle over and over again. Also, if you are going to use a curriculum which is highly dependent on audio disks, make sure that you can supply all of your schools with electricity so that they can actually utilize these resources. In other words, as my friend so succinctly put it, "If you are going to demand western expectations, provide western infrastructure."

2) The story of the schools, and how things are run here, is in no way unique to Georgia. In fact, I'm pretty sure there are a lot of parallels to inner city underfunded public schools in America. Education (ready for a blanket statement to end all blanket statements?), in most of the world, is really a privilege of those who can afford it. The average Georgian is unable to afford it, so many families don't really put that much emphasis on it, especially when teachers just write off kids as being "lazy" or "slow" if they don't understand something right away. It's a really vicious cycle, and it's going to take more than anything I can ever hope to do to change it.

But at the end of the day, it's not really up to me to fix everything in the Georgian educational system. All I can do is try to work with my coteachers, who sometimes very handily regress in their English speaking abilities, and stay as positive as I possibly can with the kids. I just got all of them little notebooks, and I told them I want between one and three sentences that they come up with every single day. The sentences can be about anything they want - the weather, what they want, where they went, how they feel, a cat that gets superpowers and goes to fight crime. I don't really care what it is, so long as it's in English, and that they are slowly able to realize how much they actually know versus how much they think they know. The news of these journals has been met with both excitement and confusion, because I'm pretty sure no teacher in the history of their lives has ever asked them to just write silly little phrases five days a week, but there you go. I'm a weird American, who encourages weird American things, so if it will help them learn this stupid ass language which you and I are fluent in, then that's all that I care about.



1. And no, I don't agree with it. Personally, I'm rubbish with multiple choice tests because I get super stressed out about them and tend to just fucking forget EVERYTHING I EVER KNEW ABOUT ANYTHING except for obscure Star Trek history, or something else that's totally useless for my completing the exam with any kind of hope for a decent score. But on a whole, our "smartness" is usually boiled down to a stupid number that just means we chose a bunch of circles correctly.

Honk If You Collect Baby Doll Heads

Or honk if you are passing someone.

Or honk if there's someone coming towards you.

Or honk if there is a person walking on the road.

Or honk if you're in a wedding caravan.

Basically, honk if you're a Georgian driver doing anything.

One of the first things I noticed about drivers here, other than they're fucking insane, is that everyone honks. Tbilisi is an endless stream of honking, and quite frankly, it was an alarming soundtrack for the city when I arrived initially. It only added fuel to the fire of my opinion that "every single Georgian is a shit driver and hence all of the honking - because they are all doing something stupid constantly." Which isn't fair, I admit it, but coming from a place where most people only honk if others are doing something stupid, I naturally assumed the same about here.

Except it just isn't the case.

I've tried for months to suss out just what it is that people honk about to little, or no, avail, because quite frankly everyone honks about everything.

Folks about to pass you will give you a small warning honk, in case their gut-wrenching tailgating wasn't enough of an indication that they are about to go around you.

Marshrutkas and taxis will honk at people on the side of the road if they're not paying attention, because they could possibly be paying customers and that's not an opportunity to be passed up!

There are instances of people honking when they get cut off, or if someone tries to change lanes with another car in the way, or any of the other reasons for which I'm used to people honking, but they seem few and far between on the Georgian thoroughfares.

Now, I understand all of those. They make sense to me.

The ones that are more abstract are the cases in which cars coming from opposing directions will give a small honk at each other, like an acknowledgment that they're there. Is this the Georgian equivalent of nodding and giving a small wave from the steering wheel that everyone just DOES when encountering another vehicle on a backwoods road in Michigan, only since it's Georgian it has to be louder? It also has no rhyme or reason to it, meaning a driver won't necessarily honk at every single oncoming car. But I have yet to figure out why some deserve a honk and others don't. I've thought that maybe it's because the drivers know one another, but they usually honk from a distance, and since everyone here drives some kind of black Mercedes or BMW or VW, the chances of them being able to identify friends from far away doesn't make sense. So what justifies the discrimination?

My other favorite conundrum is just the single honks drivers send out randomly while on a road alone. It's not around a curve, or a sharp turn, or anything else that would cause some kind of reduced visibility. No. Those all would merit an alert honk. But it's normally in a place where there are no cars anywhere, and no real impending crash zones, so why they feel the need to blast that horn of theirs is beyond me. They might just know something I don't. Maybe it was where there was a car crash years ago because of a herd of cows, so now everyone just honks to discourage any bovine crossings, and it's just become common knowledge that in this part of the road you honk.

This sounds ridiculous, I understand that, but that's kind of how information gets passed along here. For example, one of the most hilarious and/or irritating things about driving in this little country is that when your car is getting fueled up everyone will vacate it and stand a good twenty feet away. When asked why, I'm told it is dangerous to be in the car, and inevitably the Georgians I'm speaking with will make an explosion sound and hand gesture. So basically, the take away of this, is that one time many years ago, someone was smoking while fueling up their car and this, of course, lead to a big ol' ball of fiery gasoline powered inferno. Instead of suggesting that people NOT smoke while fueling up their automobiles - because let's be real, that will just never happen here! - it's much easier to blame it on superstition and that everyone will be much safer if they just stand off to the side since you never know when it'll blow! ....Even though you totally can predict when it will all ignite, but whatever. Georgia.

Anyway, back to honking.

After spending a few weeks in Telavi, and noting many instances of insane honking, I realized why Tbilisi is actually just one large never ending orchestra of car horns.

Weddings.

When you get married, between the church, and other churches you have to visit, and the location of the supra, everyone will get into their cars that are decorated with huge ostentatious ribbons and go careening down the roads, honking merrily all the way. Sometimes people will hang out of windows and shout and wave, and they are totally not discouraged by the ridiculous velocities at which the car is traveling. Nor are any observers remotely concerned about their safety, nor are they even phased by the amount of noise emanating from eighteen cars with whooping Georgians halfway out the windows getting drowned out by the noise of the car horns. They really are something to see. And hear. And there are so many weddings that you quickly become immune to all of the honking that is constantly going on. It's not so noticeable in Tbilisi, since all of the aforementioned reasons for honking on top of weddings are also in play, but in a smaller town like Telavi it's very easy to identify a wedding caravan.

I've honestly stopped noticing them. Or I had, until I went back to the seemingly docile in comparison streets of America for a month and then returned to the ruckus of weddings and taxis and general vehicular dumbassery that is universally worth a good honk. It was slightly jarring again, and I had to readjust myself to Georgian city norm levels of noise.

I'm sure that all the reasons above have legitimate reasons for Georgians. I'm sure a few of them are as obscure as us Americans flashing our headlights at oncoming cars to warn them of a policeman lurking ahead. Yet since I wasn't born into this place, and hold no drivers license of my own (although dear GOD I want one!), and don't even possess the linguistic prowess to ask drivers why they honk at a specific time, let alone understand their answer, I'm left to make my own guesses. And my guess is this - honk if you're a Georgian driver doing anything.

So when you come to Georgia some day, which I know you totally will because I've sold you on this place in the various charming blog posts I've written and you've read, don't be alarmed by the constant stream of car horns. Nothing serious is happening - it's just a way for Georgians to interact. There's absolutely nothing quiet about this group of people, and I love them for it. They're a loud bunch, always yelling or banging things around, or trying to make as much noise as humanly possible with whatever they have at their disposal. The sooner you can come to terms with that, the sooner you will start to feel more comfortable amidst the ensuing chaos of everyday life.

P.s. As to the title of this post, that's an actual bumper sticker available on the Internet. I haven't seen it here or anything, I just Google'd "honk if you..." so I could find something witty to call this write up, and I stumbled upon this gem. You're welcome!

Every Day I'm Chame-ing

Yesterday at school I had an interesting interaction with my teachers. It went something like this:
(Yeah, I'm sorry that I'm THAT person who writes stuff in a language system that you can't read, but I just really like the look of Georgian, and I'm not trying to be douchey about it, so apologies!)

One of the Teachers: ჯოანა, გინდათ ხაჭაპური?
Me: არა! გმადლობთ!
A Different Teacher: არა? მართლა?
Me: ხო! მადლობა!

Translated, this interaction went something like this:

One of the Teachers: Johanna, you want khachapuri?
Me: Oh, no! Thank you!
A Different Teacher: No? Really?
Me: Yeah! Thank you!


Five minutes later, they came back with khachapuri, and handed one to me with a declarative "ჭამე"(eat). We all laughed, and my English coteacher jokingly said, "We knew you wanted."

I'm not really going to complain, because khachapuri is, hands down, my most favorite thing in this country. I could, and usually try to, eat it at least once a day. Not the crazy boat and butter one from my previous post, but the more simple cheese filled bread that's common in my part of the country. I think my fellow teachers knew I was bullshitting them, and they absolutely called my bluff.

Well played, Georgian mothers! Well played, indeed!

Georgians sound incredibly bossy. This is largely due to how their language is set up. Being heavily context based, the things you say have vastly different meanings depending on how you say them, or where they're being used in a sentence. My host mom is pretty polite, by English standards, and will add a "თუ" to things, which is "if." So when I get home and she asks if I want food, instead of phrasing it like my teachers (გინდათ სარგომელი, აქა) she will say "თუ გინდათ სარგომელი, აქა" ("If you want food, it is here").

This applies to pretty much any kind of offering. Georgians seem to use the imperative a lot, but they don't mean to be the bossy that form implies. If they offer you a seat, it's not "have a seat," it's "sit!" If they ask you if you want wine, it won't be "do you want wine?" It will be "drink!" I caught onto this pretty quickly, and think it's hilarious that the second I'm around any kind of maternal figure she'll immediately start shoving food in my face and saying "ჭამე! ჭამე." Coming out of a very large and in charge Greek family that was constantly making me eat a lot, this seems totally normal, and if I take just a little bit of food they're happy and get off my back.

Talking to a lot of other people in this program, it sounds like they're having real issues with this facet of Georgian culture. I usually forget that not everybody had an in-your-face-and-lives type of family like mine, and therefor this might all seem very unusual. It's also strange to me that many other volunteers mistake the tone with which these things are said for being an actual command. I've yet to encounter a Georgian who offers you something with anything less than genuine hope that you're comfortable, be it a seat, a meal, a drink, or even a book.

Also, I'm finding more and more that even by Georgian standards I'm absurdly polite. I say "thank you" and "please" and even "hello" all the time, which is just not done here. If you know someone, you say hello. If you're at a store, you just ask for what you want, and don't need to throw a "please" onto your request. Certainly it's ludicrous to use "thank you" when someone hands you something you asked for, and then again when they give you back change from the transaction, and especially crazy when you leave! I'm slowly dropping some of these out of their daily use, but it's hard since this is something that's been engrained since I was little. Nothing is ever said, and I'm never openly laughed at for overusing these phrases, but there are little snickers and grins that tell me I'm being a way too happy spaz about buying some tea.

Blank Stares Abound

If you've been reading for a while, you know that I'm of the opinion that Georgian is hard to learn. Once you master the Elvish looking alphabet and its various sounds, which is really the easiest part to becoming proficient, you get to the bizarre structure of it [I say bizarre as it pertains to us English speakers]. Verbs have seemingly arbitrary stems which, depending on tense and person, you add different letters to. There are no articles and no prepositions because you tack these onto words in the form of infixes and suffixes, and in certain cases you even drop a few letters to make the word sound better. And if that's not enough, you're usually dealing with some throaty sounds that are absent completely in English conversation, as well as navigating dizzying consonant clusters that make you want to give up your first born for a freaking vowel to be thrown in.

It's a tricky language for even the most language savvy person, and Georgians know it. So foreigners are met with great enthusiasm and appreciation for even attempting to communicate in Georgian. But many times, if you try to say something you will be met with a blank stare. When you repeat yourself a few more times, you start to get more and more disheartened as confusion clouds the poor Georgian's face. Eventually, you will either start charading in hopes they'll understand, or just write out the word. You will inevitably get your point across, however, and they will say the word you wanted back to you and guess what - it will sound exactly the same as what you have been saying for the last five minutes.

Or at least to you it will.

I've been experiencing a lot of frustration in regards to communication over the last few weeks. Even with my coteachers, who supposedly speak English, I have to phrase things very simply so they will understand. I'm a [fairly] decent and eloquent writer when I want to be, and can construct pretty complex sentences in English. We'll count that as a side effect of speaking it for the last 26 years. So being plunged into a place where hardly anyone knows my language, let alone speaks above a certain elementary proficiency, has been a bit taxing. Which is fine! It's what I expected! It's just been strange to be on the minority side for once.

And that's exactly what I am - a minority. Being a Caucasian English speaking female has never before put me in this category, but in this part of the world that's totally what I am.

The upside to not being able to exercise my native language so much is that I'm picking up Georgian really quickly. I'm able to read at a fairly decent pace, and even in class I'm able to understand more and more what my coteachers are saying to the students. It's a good feeling, finally being able to frame and pick out small parts of what is happening around me. Of course, this good feeling goes away almost the second I try saying something in Georgian and everyone looks at me like I was prattling on in Chinese.

My friend and I were having a chat last night about our inability to communicate with people around us when she said something that has made everything else finally fall into place - Georgians aren't used to hearing non-Georgians speak Georgian.

Duh.

I mean, it's so simple.

As English speakers I think we really take for granted just how global our language is. It is dominant on two continents and one very large island, and that's only native speakers. We won't take into account the various other parts of the world where it's taught from an early age so that children are fluent by the time they're ten years old. We're used to hearing familiar words sound different due to the accents and influences of other languages. Australians and Brits are different from me, but I still know what they're saying [most of the time]. I've grown up hearing the various regional dialects present in America, so just because someone has a drawl doesn't mean I can't have a conversation with them. Accents have been a part of my life for as long as I can remember.

I'm aware that I sound borderline ridiculous when I pronounce Georgian words, and I've accepted that for a while I will have a pretty bad American accent with it no matter how hard I try. Given the people I regularly speak English with here have similarly thick Georgian accents with English, I figure they've likewise accepted my crazily affected speech. And accept, yes. But that is not the same as understand.

Georgia has only recently had a steady influx of foreigners. Up until a few years ago, most people that spoke Georgian were actual Georgians, with the random Russian or Turk thrown in for good measure. This is not a large country, and aside from a couple secluded communities in the Greater Caucasus mountains who speak a different form of Georgian (think of the difference between French and Quebequois and you have the difference between Georgian and Mingrelian), there isn't really much regional variety in how people sound. External entertainment, like music and movies, is either dubbed in Russian or Georgian, with a few songs making it here in English. But you're still dealing with a group of people who, for the most part, never had to deal with obvious accents in their own language. And when you've never encountered different pronunciations of familiar words, odds are you will have a hard time figuring out what is being said.

It's strange to be an outsider. I refuse to say that I understand completely what Spanish speaking immigrants are currently going through in America, because that's just an outrageous claim, but I do sympathize a lot more with them. It's hard to be somewhere and not possess the ability to communicate your most basic needs. I'm very lucky here, as I've an incredibly supportive host family who patiently tries to help me navigate through their crazy phonics, as well as teachers who give me any resources I could possibly want for learning Georgian. I'm also lucky enough to know how to read, which is a pretty big game changer. So I'm off to a way better start than most immigrants in America, and I'm still incredibly frustrated by it. In fact, I've almost every single advantage I could possibly want when learning a foreign language, and by the end of most encounters I'm exhausted and feel like going to sleep for twelve hours to give my brain a rest.

It would be awesome if Americans could adopt the attitude that Georgians have to outsiders. Most signs here are in Georgian, English, and Russian. All of the ATM's and street pay boxes have multiple language options, with English always being one. Every single restaurant I've gone into has an English menu - even ones in tiny villages. And even though they can't seem to understand a freaking word I say other than "hello," "thank you," and "goodbye," you can bet your ass that every Georgian I've met gets incredibly smiley when they see me trying. I've never had so much encouragement for such blatant linguistic slaughter. Juxtapose this with many people stateside, who hate the fact that we have billboards in Spanish in predominately Latino neighborhoods. Or even my personal favorite, the folks who get irate when they have to "Push 1 for English" when calling a hotline.

Leaving your home country, and entering into a minority, is tough. It's hard even when you're educated and have resources, because you will be very different for a while. It's even more difficult when you don't have the tools to learn on your own, and you're forced to pick up the language through interaction. When you're met with hostility and general annoyance, you're going to feel self conscious and not want to try speaking their language. Instead, you will find other people who speak your language, and create self sustaining spheres inside the larger community and never fully integrate. Immigrants in America don't know English for a lot of reasons, and being lazy certainly is not one of them. They don't know because our whole cultural apparatus - schools, public buildings, signs, television, even the testing system for higher education - is biased towards the English language, and is completely bilingually unfriendly. As a whole society, Americans are fairly cold when it comes to helping foreigners on our turf. We've this strange sense of entitlement, like if you're going to live in our country you better learn the language before coming here, and if you don't then clearly you're just lazy and rude, when there are actually much larger forces in play that make this a completely unrealistic expectation.

I guess what I'm trying to say is this: 
Next time you're frustrated by the cashier whose English is heavily accented, just imagine it's me trying my hardest to practice your crazy ass contradictory language in some vain attempt to fit into where I'm living. Cut people trying to learn English some slack, because for as wild as Georgian is, I'm pretty god damn happy that English is my first language.

Streets and Stereotypes

In my reading of numerous blogs, and talking to various people before coming to Georgia, several warnings stood out in my brain. The three that stuck with me the most were:

1) People are insane drivers, and take their cars up to ridiculously unsafe speeds on ridiculously unsafe roads and you will probably get hit by one if you walk in the road.

2) Georgians will feed you no matter what. They also will randomly drag you into their houses and make you eat.

3) Don’t friend them on Facebook, because the second you do, they will go through every picture of you they can and “like” all of them. 

These made me giggle, and I figured I would be spatially aware enough to realize there was a car coming and thus avoid it, and polite enough to refuse food, and that the whole “liking” pictures was one of those stupid stereotypes like “black people talk really loudly in movie theaters.” Clearly, since I knew everything about the world, I paid these no real heed.

Only, they’re fairly true (not the movie theater thing, just the general statements about Georgians). The streets here are in terrible shape. There’s no real reason that it takes almost 12 hours to get across a country that is the size of South Carolina, other than the roads are awful. The main thoroughfares in  Telavi are still riddled with potholes, and that’s to say nothing about the side streets, most of which are rubble or cobblestone. These roads have bred two very different types of drivers: ones who are arguably over cautious, and ones who think they’re F1 drivers. The F1 drivers are more numerous, and they avoid potholes and other obstacles at the very last second, often swerving several feet around it, bringing their thousand pound vehicle within mere feet, if not inches, of hitting you. Since I always walk as close to buildings as I can except in extreme circumstances (i.e. parked cars, leering elderly Georgians on a stoop, sketchy looking dogs, etc), I’ve sort of come to terms with the fact that if I get hit by a car while walking it will not be out of malice. Rather, it will be the driver legitimately losing control of their vehicle and thus obliterating me. And I'm pretty ok with that, honestly, because what use is there in worrying about this particular part of my day since I have to walk everywhere? 

As I mentioned before, my street is cobblestone, and is also on a fairly steep hill. People that go down this are generally pretty cautious, as they don't want to really mess up their suspension. The exceptions to this are the van drivers. There is a huge number of various types of vans here. Also, lots and lots of BMWs, Mercedes, and VWs. In the last few days, I've also seen a fair number of Jeeps, including one that was the same year as Nigel, which made me simultaneously happy and sad. It's stupid how heartbroken I still am over that car. But that's all besides the point. The point is that vans are really the only cars that haul ass down my street. 

I say this because last night, as I was walking down to the fountain at the bottom of our hill for water (my host mom scolds me if I drink a substantial amount of water from the tap, which makes me wonder where our water comes from, if street water is that much better...), a van came roaring down the street, and swerved to avoid a particularly jutting rock and almost nailed me. So after giving the driver a ridiculously dirty look, I started back for home, when my neighbor, T'ako saw me and came running out of her house. She lives two doors down, and threw open the gate to her yard and dragged me and my water bottle inside. After hustling me in past her grandmother, she sat me down on the couch next to her sister, and proceeded to feed me a shitload of fresh grapes, cookies, and coffee, even though I had just eaten back at the house. Her sister was watching Turkish soap operas that were dubbed in Georgian, which are super popular here. In typical social interaction fashion, there was a lot of hilarious gesticulating from all of us to figure out what the hell we were saying, although me laughing at a Georgian pad commercial was totally not understood by either of the girls, and no amount of hand waving would articulate why it was so funny. But trust me, it was wicked amusing. Anyway, T'ako herded me over to the computer once I was done with coffee, where she made me watch videos she had taped of herself dancing alone in her bedroom to really, really bad club music. She then friended me on Facebook, and we eventually struck a really good balance of talking via Google translate, and I think tonight we're scheduled to play some cards? Who knows what all I agreed to through Google translate. I guess I'll find out later!

After about an hour and a half of being force fed and laughing really hard, I returned home. Once I turned 3G back on the iPhone, my Facebook was instantly inundated with notifications of T'ako "like"ing every.single.one.of.my.pictures.from.ever. It was sort of ridiculous, but definitely made me smile.

No seriously. She went a few years back, even!

Anyway. The whole point of this very roundabout post was simply to say that stereotypes exist for a reason, and in the span of two hours last night, I experienced three very prominent ones.