My school in Georgia

This was my school. It was a small village school in Akhelsopeli just a 10 minute marshutka ride outside of Zugdidi where I was living. It is a very small village. I don't know the population but you can judge the size considering that we only had about 100 students in the whole school from grades 1-12, and some of those students even come from the city to study out here for various reasons. This made teaching nice, with class sizes between 5-12 students.

The school is in the process of being remodeled, but it's clear it's still a while away from being considered one of the "renovated" schools where some other volunteers work.  here are two hallways in the school. One recently painted, the other one desperately in need of a paint job. Windows have been replaced in the whole building and there is a computer lab (where internet is intermittent at best and painfully slow) which works when the school has power... though, sometimes there is no power. One renovation I would like to see is getting new blackboards. We could only use one kind of chalk on our boards, most chalk would just scrape across the board without making a mark, and blackboards in other classrooms are in much worse condition.

I thought the fact that our school had a bell, an actual, manually rung bell was kinda cool. But, obviously hand ringing the bell can cause a lot of problems as one might imagine. Sometimes the bell might get rung by naughty students at the wrong time, or sometimes someone would ring it early and I wasn't able to finish the lesson... or someone would ring it late and I had too much time to kill waiting for the bell to ring. At some point while I was there, an electric bell was installed. Unfortunately, you still had to manually ring it, so I didn't really get the point. But worse than that was the fact that it was so quiet you often couldn't hear it ring... and of course when the power was out they'd still have to go and ring the manual bell anyway. I think the whole electric bell system was a bit of a waste of money... that could have gone to a new blackboard instead for one classroom.

Here is my classroom with my 6th grade students. I was lucky that we had our own "English Classroom" because most TLG teachers in other schools had to move from class to class and couldn't decorate their classrooms.

In the photo below you can (kind of) see some of the decorations I made for the classroom. The first thing I did was make question words with Georgian translations because they struggle a lot with question words since they never hear them from the Georgian teachers and never use them since answering questions never involve using them. My last week at the school I made the ones above. I don't know if you can read them, but they are common classroom phrases like "May I go to the bathroom?", "I don't have my homework." and "How do you say ________ in English?". These phrases were a terrible enigma to my students who especially struggled with the "How do you spell ______?" phrase. As I tested them on this, they would respond with sounds rather than letters, "How do you spell 'hat'" they would respond "Huh-ah-tuh" instead of "H-A-T". I tried very hard to enforce the use of letter names rather than sounds for these sort of activities, but many still never learned them.

Below is our wood stove. This, ironically, was not set up until a week or two before I left Georgia and since it warmed up in December after a bitterly cold and rainy November, we only ever lit it twice. If it's not freezing, it's better left unlit since the wood often fills the classroom with smoke and it is a huge distraction for the students who are always trying to maintain the fire with more wood and paper.

 

  

This is English World 3, a British English McMillan textbook. The quality of this series is quite good, unfortunately the older, supposedly more advanced students get cheated because they don't have the experience to get into the higher levels. This book is the third in the series, and is used by our 6th grade students. It assumes they know things like past tense and a whole lot of vocabulary. We spent 3 months on the review chapter and we were only able to get to chapter 1 by my last week of teaching there. I seriously hope that they don't try to finish this book off in the spring, some students in the class don't even know the alphabet or are just learning to read basic words, and this is what they're going to be expected to do in a few weeks. 

These are all the girls from the 9th and 10th grade. One of them studied English really hard and could actually have a conversation. The rest... well, they were well intentioned and very sweet girls, but I think they just liked hanging around my classroom because I was a new and exciting alternative to anything else they could have been doing not because they were actually interested in the language.

Sometimes they would have soccer tournaments. On these days it was hard to get the kids to come to class and study, they were much more interested in watching the game or playing than coming up to class. The gym teacher never seemed to care if students were really supposed to be somewhere else when they were playing. 

This was a fall concert put on by the 1-3rd grades. Aren't they cute?

I hope this gives prospective TLG teachers some idea on what the conditions are like in schools in Georgia. Of course most schools are much bigger than mine. Some are renovated, many still are not. Everyone's experience is different, but this was my experience.

Pros and Cons of being a TLG (Teach and Learn Georgia) Teacher

 I hope I’ve made some of my readers think about coming to Georgia to participate in the Teach and Learn with Georgia volunteer program. I want to highlight some of the good and bad points of the program and of living here for those who are considering coming.

Pros:

Program open to all nationalities: Most English teaching positions only consider native speakers, but Georgia wants as many teachers as possible and will accept any fluent speaker of English. This is a great opportunity for people to experience another culture and perhaps improve or practice their English at the same time. Most participants are from English speaking countries, but in our orientation group there was also someone from the Chech Republic and from Poland.

Airfare included: Unlike many volunteer positions, this one includes lots of benefits, one of which is round trip airfare. Not only do they offer round trip airfare, but if you sign on for two semesters, you’ll even get a round trip airfare to your home, or to anywhere of equal or lesser value for the winter or summer vacation. The only unfortunate point is that you can’t choose your flight schedule or route (though you can make requests, but they don’t have to honor them). You must fly from Tbiilsi and they make the bookings, you can’t book your own and get reimbursed which is what I usually do when I go to Korea and back so that I can choose the airline and schedule that I like.

Health insurance included: Health insurance is included in the program at no cost. Seeing the doctor is covered 100% and prescriptions are covered 50%. Although, I hear most doctors are pretty bad, but I had good luck personally here.

“Stipend” provided: Volunteers get a “living stipend” of 500 Lari  (about $300 USD) per month after taxes. I use quotation marks though because this is 200 Lari per month higher than the local teachers. It is quite easy to live off this small amount. If you don’t travel much or make long distance phone calls on your cell phone, you could even save a little money. Because I travel every weekend, I’ve found myself with close to a 0 balance in my bank account at the end of the month, though.

Low cost of living: This goes along with the above point, but living and traveling in Georgia is very inexpensive. A six hour marshutka (minibus) ride from my city to the capital city is 15 lari ($10 USD), or I can pay the same amount for the 8 hour night train and get a bed with sheets, blanket and pillow in a 2 person room. If you’re on a budget, you can take the 4^th class in the night train for just 5.50 Lari ($3 USD) you can get a bed with no blankets or pillow in another section of the train. A loaf of bread is 0.60 tetri (0.20 USD), a kilo of clementines is 1 lari ($0.65 USD), a cup of tea in a local café is 1 Lari ($0.65 USD),  a ride on the metro in Tbilisi is a fixed rate of 0.50 tetri ($0.30 USD), and a night at a hostel is usually between 15-25 lari ($10-$18 USD). This makes Georgia a very affordable place to visit or live, even on a very low salary. 

24-hour support: If you ever have a problem, whether it be a translation issue, school issue, health issue or personal issue, you can call the TLG hotline, regional representatives or the health insurance company who all speak fluent English and can help you with your problem.

Neutral:

Living with a host family: Although technically you have the option of getting your own apartment, on a salary of only 500 Lari per month, it would be nearly impossible to pay for your own apartment and survive on this. I’ve heard of some teachers that renew their contracts and find a roommate, but the vast majority of teachers live with a local Georgian family. I hate to say that this is a pro or a con, because it’s complicated and depends a lot on the family and the teacher.

Good points of living with a host family include a) Low rent of 100 Lari per month ($65 USD) which includes meals, utilities, etc, b) The opportunity to learn Georgian traditions, language, culture, etc, and c) A chance to integrate into Georgian society.

Bad points include a) conflicts due to cultural differences b) the need to adapt to local customs and expectations, the good and the bad c) the inability to control your surroundings d) difficulties controlling your diet e) Never understanding what’s going on around you f) Accepting your host family’s situation… no family is perfect, everyone has their problems.

Cons:

Roughing it: While every home is different of course, many people here are roughing it, so to speak. No, no one is living in a shack on the side of the road like what many people may think about when you say the word “third world”, but your house may not have the modern convienences that we are used to in our home countries. Central heating is quite rare, most homes are heated by wood stoves or electric space heaters. Many homes may not have a stove or oven, just a gas burner to cook on. Many homes don’t have washing machenes, they may hand wash everything or they may have a manual “washing machine” that dates back to soviet times into which you must heat water and manually pour it in and manually drain it out. Hot water may come from a hot water heater, or hot water may come from a fire built under a tank in the bathroom. If it’s the latter, you may feel bad about asking your host father to chop you wood every time you want a shower. Most teachers here find they don’t get to shower too often. Several times a week if they are lucky, once every 2 weeks if they are unlucky. Maybe you might not have any refrigerator and all your food is stored on the table overnight. My classroom had no heater until after our first snowstorm and teaching in the cold is unpleasant for teacher and student. Maybe your electricity goes out for a few hours once or twice a month. Maybe your electricity goes out for 2 days. Transportation is not always reliable, sometimes the bus you expected to come just never shows up. Or it’s too full and won’t let you on. Or it’s too full, but it lets you on anyway. Living here is certainly an adventure. But, that’s why I came, so maybe you won’t consider it a con.

No control over placement: One of my biggest concerns coming here was the fact that I didn’t know where I would be placed. We were told 12 hours before we were shipped out to our families where we would be placed. It would be nice if you could choose to live in a village or city, choose whether you wanted to be closer to the mountains or to the sea. I guess in the end it doesn’t matter, but it would have made packing a lot easier if I had known where I would be placed. If I had known that I was going to be in a wet, rainy part of the country I would have brought some kind of rain boots and an extra umbrella. My biggest regret here is the fact that I brought no boots with me.

If anyone is interested in this program, feel free to e-mail me with your questions and concerns.smileyjkl (at) hotmail (dot) com.

To apply for this program, please go here: http://www.tlg.gov.ge/

To read other blogs, please see here:

http://teachandlearnwithgeorgia.wordpress.com/

http://peripateticpedagogue.wordpress.com/

http://www.the-other-georgia.com/ 

http://mes-tlg.blogspot.com/

A Day in the Life of a TLG Teacher

I am a “volunteer” teacher in the country of Georgia located in the Caucuses between Russia, Turkey and Armenia. I use quotation marks around the word volunteer because we are actually paid higher than the local English teachers, our salary (living stipend, whatever you wish to call it) a whopping $300 USD per month. Local teachers make about $150 USD monthly. I am part of a government sponsored program called Teach and Learn Georgia (TLG) which places fluent English speakers of many nationalities into public school classrooms around the country to assist the Georgian teachers and provide both students and teachers the opportunity to practice their English.

I am writing this post because many of the teachers I met during our week long orientation had no idea what kind of country Georgia was nor had any idea what living in Georgia would be like. Some teachers expected to be living in a tropical country, many teachers expected to be living under western European standards, many teachers didn’t know that it was quite possible, no likely, that they may end up living in a village where they might not have things like running water, hot water, heating, air conditioning etc etc. 

Everyone here has different experiences. Some people live in modern houses in cities, others live in rural areas where they don’t even have an indoor toilet, just a squat toilet in an outhouse in the backyard. If you’re not willing to live like this for a while, than you shouldn’t consider this program. But for those who are open minded and willing to experience something completely different, than TLG is a great program to join. This is just the story of one day in my life.

I wake up to the alarm clock on my TLG supplied Nokia cell phone at 7 am. It’s still pitch black like night outside, there’s no daylight savings time here. I crawl out of bed and search around in the dark for the plug for my space heater and plug it in the only outlet in my room. I’m not allowed to leave the heater on at night, maybe for electricity costs, maybe for safety, probably for both. I crawl back into bed and hit the snooze button for the next 30-45 minutes until I can drag myself out of bed. I pull out my clothes for the day; jeans, sweater, long underwear to wear under everything plus two pairs of socks. I put it all in front of the space heater to warm up, everything feels like ice to the touch. After about a minute in front of the heater everything is warm and toasty and I can get dressed.

I go downstairs to the kitchen to start getting ready for school. I strike a match and light the gas burner on our gas canister that serves as a stove and put some tomato and bean sauce on to warm up. I plug in the hot water maker to boil water and while everything is heating I go get ready. The kitchen is cold because no one has lit the wood stove yet this morning. The bathroom is even colder with its tiled floor and cement walls. A shower is unthinkable in this cold, sitting on the toilet is like sitting on ice. Our sink is outside and I go out to brush my teeth and put my contacts. I never realized that toothpaste would get so tough to push out from the tube in the cold. At least the water is hot this morning so I can wash my hands and face in warm water.

I go back in and cut up some bread to go with my bean and tomato sauce for breakfast. I pour my hot water in my cup and make tea. I hold the cup in my hands to make me feel a little warmer.

I leave the house and go to wait at the bus stop for 9:30 when my co-teacher’s husband will come to pick me up to go to school. The marshutka (the van used for public transportation) only runs to the village once every two hours and since we don’t teach until second period today we get a ride rather than getting to school for first period and sitting around doing nothing (lesson planning is not really something teachers in my school spend much time doing). As usual, they are late and I stand around in the cold for 20 minutes waiting for them to come. We show up to school 5 minutes after second period has begun and my co-teacher scolds our students for playing in the hallway rather than sitting in the classroom waiting for us.

We start class, my co-teacher asks the students what page we’re on, and since she doesn’t have her own copy of the text book, she takes one of the student’s copies. Two out of the seven children in this class have no text book, well, make that three now that the teacher has taken another book from them. We put them in pairs so that they share books.

These children are in the 6^th grade and, though only one of the seven students can actually read, our principal decided that they should study from the English World 3 textbook, a book that focuses hard on reading, assuming that students know past tense and a heap of vocabulary. These kids can’t answer simple questions like “how is the weather?” or “how old are you?”, heck, some of them can’t answer “how are you?” properly. Now three months into school we’re still in the “review” chapter in the beginning of the book trying desperately to enforce the basics. Trying to teach them past tense when they don’t understand present tense. I’m getting frustrated and feeling hopeless with these students. We’ve been having such good progress with the younger grades, but these kids are too far behind.

When I first came, I thought that working in a village would be better, easier to teach since there are small classes. Only 100 students are in the whole school, grades 1-12. But, I’m realizing more and more each day how big of a disadvantage these students are at. Many of them do no homework. Maybe their parents don’t care, or maybe their parents are unable to help, especially with English. As an ex-soviet country, the majority of people over thirty have only studied Russian as a second language, not English, and may not even know the English alphabet to help their children. Children who don’t get a good grasp their first year of the basics fall behind quickly as the material gets increasingly difficult every year. There’s no such thing as leveled classes or repeating grades in this school. Often children in the cities have better educated parents or can afford private tutors or English academies for their children, but not the children in the villages whose parents may not have stable incomes to pay for such luxuries. Many students go to school without books, even, because families may not have money to buy them.

The class ends when someone rings the bell. Yes, we have an actual bell and someone must actually ring it. We have a ten minute break where we warm up around the wood stove. 45 minutes of teaching in a classroom with no heat and my hands have started to go a bit numb. We got a tiny space heater for our classroom last week, finally, but today there is no electricity, so we don’t even have that. Even when we have it, it doesn’t really do much unless you happen to be standing right next to it. Our only plug is near the door and most of the hot air goes out our broken door anyway.

The bell rings and we go down to the first grade classroom. They have a wood stove here and I’m actually able to take off my jacket while I teach. These kids are the sweetest, most well behaved students. They are slowly catching on to everything. A lot of them have learned the alphabet and now we’re starting phonics with them. I think this class will able to go far with English if they keep doing what they’re doing now.

I leave this class feeling a little better about life and now it’s time for a break. We head to the “cafeteria”. It’s not really a cafeteria, it’s a room with a table and a few chairs where the teachers take their breaks. There are no meals offered at school. Students theoretically eat lunch when they go home from school at the end of the day (which varies depending on the grade, but is somewhere between 1:30-3:30). There is a small “café”, though where students can buy snacks. Nothing nutritious, mostly cakes, cookies, and a Georgian favorite, sunflower seeds. Teachers usually drink tea or coffee, water is stored in plastic jugs which are filled and brought to school every day. There is no running water in the school.

Now we go to teach the 11^th graders. We look all around, but they are no where to be found. Finally we spot one of them. “Come to class!” “No, teacher, we have chemistry now!”. Apparently someone had changed the schedule without informing us. We sit around the teacher’s room wood stove and wait until the next period. My co-teacher disappears for a while. When the bell rings, I find the 11^th grade students, well, three of them at least, but my co-teacher is nowhere in sight. I call her and she tells me to start class without her, she’ll be back in 5 minutes. When I ask the three students who have showed up where the rest of the students are, they inform me that the rest have already gone home.

We start class. Again, we have no teacher’s book, but with only three students (miraculously all of which have books) I am able to look over their shoulder as they read their lesson. These are good students who try hard, but their English book is way too difficult for them. They read the whole lesson without understanding much and are unable to answer any of the questions in the book. I go over all the “new” vocabulary from the lesson, but there are too many other words from the text that they don’t understand that they are still unable to answer the questions in the book. I assign the work we couldn’t do in class for homework, but I know they won’t do it. My co-teacher, by the way, never showed up for class. And she’s the good co-teacher.

After school I run an English club for the older students. This week we are playing the board game Life, which I borrowed for the week from the American Corner in town. The kids love it, but they don’t use much English to play the game. One student who speaks English well translates everything for the rest of them.

After class I go to catch the marshutka back into the city. Usually I rush out to catch it at 3:30, but it never shows up until 4:00. Today I get out of our English club at 3:40 but when I get to the marshutka stop, the students inform me that it has already left. Fortunately, I am informed that if I stop a passing taxi from here heading back to town it is only 50 tetri (0.30 USD) so some other teachers and I hop in a cab and head back to town.

Back in town I head over to my favorite internet café. While it’s possible to get a USB modem for a laptop here, the device is expensive and I didn’t feel like spending three day’s pay on a device I can only use for 2 months. The internet café charges just 1 lari per hour (0.75 USD) so it’s cheaper for me to go there several times a week rather than getting internet for my laptop.

After making my skype calls to the Boyfriend and checking e-mail and facebook I head back home, trying to be home before dark. While it’s not really dangerous to walk around after dark, people tend not to do it unless they have to, and so I try to do the same. It’s kind of lonely walking home after dark, even at just 7:00.

I get home and my host mother points to the pot of tomato and bean sauce and asks me “sachmeli?” Food? This is how we communicate since my Georgian isn’t so great still. I scoop up some sauce on my plate and eat it with bread. For dessert we have homemade fruit preserves. This is a treat, my host mother doesn’t pull these out often.

After that I pull out my book and sit in front of the wood stove trying to keep warm. It’s hard to read with the cacophony of noise around me. Phones constantly ringing, the two children arguing with their mother about their homework, lots of really loud conversations because my family loves to talk and talk and talk. I’m used to all this now and I can usually read my book over the din. This past week, though, my host mother’s brother and his wife and their 3 week old baby have moved into our house (for reasons that have never been explained to me, they just appeared one day and never left) and this has added to the din. The baby is generally very, very good and hardly makes a fuss, but when she does start to cry, the mother has the most obnoxious song to calm the baby down that goes something like “Nyaaaaa, nya nya nyaaaaa, nyanyanyanyanyaaaaaaa, nyaaaaaaaa”. After my ears can’t take the abuse any longer I retreat to my room where I huddle in front of the heater with my book until it’s time to sleep.

I go back downstairs and my host parents have figured out that I ran away from the cacophony and laugh that I have returned again now that things have calmed down. I go out again to the sink outside to brush my teeth and take out my contacts, thinking to myself that I should have put on a jacket before stepping outside. Finally I’m ready for bed to recharge for a new day. I slip into my ice cold sheets and wait to warm up and fall asleep.

 * update* the weather has been much better lately, around 10˚C every day. November was an unusually cold month. December is more seasonable. I expect that January and February should bring back November's cold weather again.

The rest of the TLG orientation

Due to the lack of internet at my home, I will be writing posts and posting them later. This post was written on 10/8/2011.

For the last two full days of orientation we mixed up the rhythm a bit, but it was still quite a full schedule. Georgian classes in the morning and information sessions and methodology in the afternoons. My Georgian language is progressing a little, but unfortunately, my listening comprehension, even in class is pretty bad. I think I've got 3/4 of the alphabet down, at least so that I can recognize them, but it will be a while before I'm able to write them on my own. Not to mention distinguish between similar letters.

One thing I really wish we had done on this orientation is have a group excursion and actually see Georgia. I've only been more than 100 meters away from the hotel 3 times in the past 7 days and each time only about 4 hours each. Fortunately, last night, one of the other volunteers asked our teacher where a good place to go to see some Georgian culture was and got the name of a restaurant. All we knew was that there was Georgian food and wine there, but about 30 of us jumped into a bunch of taxis lined up in front of the hotel and zoomed over there. 

The restaurant was small and nice but we knew we had picked the right place once the music started. From the little I've seen, it seems that Georgians love to sing and love four part harmonies. There was a variety of acapella music and other singing. 

Then the dancers came out. There wasn't a whole lot of dancing, but we got to see a few numbers. It was not what I was expecting at all, but it was fabulous. The music and dancing here is so lively and interesting. I can't really compare it to anything I've witnessed before. 

Thursday evening, the last evening of training, we were finally given our assignments. I was told that I was placed in a city in the Samgrelo province. I’m not sure if I’m going to disclose the city name on the blog or not for privacy reasons. If I had been placed in a village, I wasn’t going to since I would probably be the only foreign teacher in the area and it would be impossible to keep my identity and my host family’s identity private. But, as I will be in a city, it may not be as big of a deal. There are two other teachers from TLG placed in my city and there are others that are already there as well. I will see how things go. I may give more information on my location as the time passes.

Friday morning we went out for our last jaunt around Tbilisi. Many main streets downtown near Freedom square were closed off to traffic and there were police everywhere. It’s because the president of France is in town this week. Street cleaners were working hard to make the city center look beautiful.

We came back to check out of our hotel and the host families and school representatives had all arrived to pick us up to bring us to our respective cities, towns and villages. They had a quick meeting and then it was time for us to meet our family and go out into the real Georgia. We were placed on either side of the room and they announced the names one by one and we clapped for each person when they found their family/ school representative. 

I was picked up by another teacher at my school who happens to be the sister in law of my host family and lives with us. I am really lucky because she speaks some English. In fact, her English is quite good, she’s just never spoken with native speakers much before and her listening skills are not yet up to par. Don’t read this as a complaint, though, I’m quite happy to have someone to translate for me because the rest of my family doesn’t speak much English at all. The host mother only can say yes and no, the host father seems to know about as much English as I do Georgian, but he communicates quite well with these 10 words.  More on that later.

From the hotel, she took me by taxi to Tibilisi Central a bus and train station in Tibilisi. We found the bus to my region and loaded it up with all my things. There were about 5 or 6 other TLG folks on my bus as well with their respective families/ school reps. After loading everything on, my host went and bought our tickets and came back to announce that the bus was scheduled to leave at 4. It wasn’t even 2 o’clock at this point. Fortunately, we were both hungry, so we went off in search of a restaurant. It took us a while, but we found a good one and she ordered lots of yummy stuff. 

We made it back to the bus just in time to hop on. Six hours or so later we were in my city and meeting my host family at the bus drop off point. In my next post, I’ll write more about my first few days with my host family.

TLG Orientation Days 2-4

Well, our orientation has gotten much less exciting since my last post. We have very little free time during the day due to the... orientation. Our first three days have gone like this:

8-9: Breakfast
9-10: Orientation
10-12: Intercultural Training
12-12:15: Coffee Break
12:15-2: Intercultural Training
2-3:30: Lunch/ Break
3:30-5:30- Georgian Class
5:30-5:45- Coffee Break
5:45-7:15- Georgian Class
7:15- Dinner and free time
12:00 - curfew

If you're wondering how my Georgian is coming along, I suppose I speak as well as anyone who's been here for four days can. We've learned quite a few phrases and I'm trying to keep track of them in a small notebook that I can carry around with me. It is helping me to speak, but not really helping me remember the phrases. I've probably got about half the alphabet down, but learning the Georgian alphabet is much more challenging than learning Hangul was. There are way more letters and it's more like Roman letters in that there is no real rhyme or reason for their shape. They all just look like squiggly lines to me.  Fortunately there are no capital letters or then I'd really be in trouble.

We're all jet lagged and in information overload.  By the time our free time comes we're not all that excited about exploring. Finally, last night, we made our way out of the hotel and into town for the first time since Saturday. We wondered around without much purpose, we had no idea where we were or what we wanted to do. But we happened to get out of the Marshutka (minibuses/vans that serve the city, no large buses like other cities) in a rather hip looking (but deserted) area which seemed to be a rather international district. We wandered into a restaurant without knowing what it was and found out it was Uzbeki food. But, it was delicious and not very expensive (though quite a bit more expensive than Georgian food) and then we moved on to a Moroccan hookah bar down the street. It seemed a bit overpriced at 30 lari ($18 USD) for the hookah, but we split it between 4 people so it wasn't too bad. We could never have afforded to eat there though, most of the dishes on the menu were the same price as the hookah! In a country where a giant meat filled dumpling costs $0.35 USD at a nice restaurant, it seems a bit exorbitant.

 Statue at the end of the hip, international street

We still don't know where we're going to be placed in Georgia, though we've been told that the greatest need is in rural parts of the western side of the country, so many of us may wind up there. I'm not to concerned about it now. I'll be concerned once I figure out where I'm actually staying. With my luck I'd freak out and wind up in a perfectly normal place. 

Uzbek dumplings and Georgian Beer

TLG Orientation Day 1

 Our hotel and home during orientation

This is my first week in Georgia, and we have a one week orientation before we are sent to a school to teach. We got to our hotel in Tbilisi last night around 5 pm and I was able to call home and tell everyone I had arrived safely. Just 2 hours later we had our first orientation meeting. We were late, too, because we had no idea what time it was and we thought we were an hour behind the actual time.

At our first orientation meeting we learned all about transportation and safety here. We’ve been told to beware of driving in taxis alone, crossing streets, stray dogs and gypsies. Overall, though, they tell us that the crime rate is not very high here and it’s fairly safe to go around town. Today we went out for a few hours, my roommate at the hotel and I, and we certainly noticed police and security everywhere around the city. We also found that there are many underground passes to cross the streets since it seems a little suicidal to cross the streets in some places.

TLG (Teach and Learn Georgia, the program I’m with) takes in volunteers every two weeks but this group starting with me is the biggest they’ve had yet, 102 of us. It’s a little hard to get to know 102 people. We’re all here alone and want to meet friends, but it’s hard to get to know people when there’s so many of us. Fortunately, on our flight there were only 6 of us and we’ve more or less been sticking together.

First thing was our medical check. This was super easy. Despite the austere appearance of the clinic on the first floor of an old apartment building, it still had little touches of modernity/ cleanliness that I did not have for my medical checks in Korea. Like covers for the urine sample and a real toilet instead of a squat toilet… Though the vials of blood taken didn’t have covers on them. I guess they’re not exactly going to get contaminated with HIV or Hep from the air… Just would hate to be the one who drops that test tube rack by accident…

Freedom Square

Then, after we got back from the clinic, two of us went out to explore the town for a few hours. First we decided to walk, but after a while we realized that the sidewalk sort of disappeared and the street looked more and more highway like. So, all we could do was to get into a taxi. But, though we had decided we were going to Freedom Square (the only landmark we had heard of) we had no idea what this was in Georgian. Serendipitously, on a street sign just in front of us, there was a sign, written in both English and Georgian that pointed the way to the square. I tried my best to copy it as it looked on to paper before getting into a cab. We got into the cab and showed him the paper… the taxi driver scratched his head a bit and asked… “airport?”. Oh boy, looking at it again, I realized that I had miscopied the first letter since the sign had been far away. I fixed the letter and he said.. “ahh! Hfjojveoxozdjo” or something else we couldn’t understand, but we figured that was probably better than the airport, so we said yes, and all of a sudden he drove off. We almost took off before asking the price, but we remembered and I busted out the only Georgian I learned before leaving “sami?” (three). And he kind of laughed and took off. I assumed that meant OK.

We got there in one piece, driving in Georgia is a bit interesting, since things like lanes and rules and respect for other drivers don’t seem too important. We were also looking for a speed limit sign, but couldn’t find one of those either. They must have a speed limit.. right?

Singers at the festival

Once in the square, we didn’t really know what we were going to do. But after walking around for a few minutes, we found a crowd of people and went over to check out what was going on. Apparently it was some kind of music performance. We stuck around for a few songs and we were impressed with the singers and it was interesting to get a taste of Georgian music… or at least what we assume is Georgian music.

Beautiful, crumbling house

From there we walked around and saw a bakery where we proceeded to pick up a few snacks. One baklava and one cream puff later, we continued on our aimless journey and found a church, a park and eventually an outdoor flea market.

 

Cream Puff and Baklava from local bakery

 Statue in the park

The flea market was tons of fun. For those of you who read the blog, you must know I’m a sucker for markets and old things. Everything from dishes, cameras, war metals, Persian rugs, and swords were there on sale, and the market just continued from one road down the next on both sides of the street. Then when we thought we had found the end of the market, we discovered that the park on the other side had been converted into a giant art market and we went out and checked out all the beautiful art for sale as well. I'll make a separate post with photos for this, since I took quite a few.

 

Flea Market

After that it was time to head back to the hotel for lunch. The meal times are rather interesting. Breakfast is served at our hotel from 8-11, then lunch from 3-5 then dinner from 8-10. I’m not sure yet if this is just a hotel thing or a Georgian thing but I guess we’ll find out. Every meal so far has included bread and cheese along with another dish. We’ve had pasta three times now in four meals, including for breakfast. They also offered breakfast cereals with dinner, but not with lunch. It’s hard to say if these are normal yet, or if they are trying to be accommodating for us westerners or what, but they are certainly interesting. 

Finally it was time for our evening meeting. We learned a bit more about the program and we got our cell phones, which are provided by TLG and are free to use if you're calling someone else from TLG. We're now all sporting Nokia 1280s which are basically a newer model of the super basic Nokias everyone used to walk around with in 2000. I even had to manually set the time and date.

Nokia 1280, our phone

Tomorrow, the real orientation begins, first with an info session for an hour in the morning, followed by 2 hours of a Georgian language class followed by lunch then intercultural training and finally dinner at 8:00 in the evening. Not much time for play and we've been banned from drinking for the entire orientation week (seemingly because of people who have caused problems in the past). Not that they can really enforce this rule, but we aren't quite ready to test them yet.

Arrived!

I'm in Georgia! Not much to say yet, except death to American Airlines and I love Turkish Airlines. I'm starving and can't wait for dinner at 8:00. Getting my program provided cell phone tonight too... not that I'll be calling anyone quite yet!

I'll just leave you with a photo from JFK airport....

Kimchi Ramen from a Korean food stand in the food court. It was so surreal, everyone around me was speaking Korean including 95% percent of the customers. I wasn't sure what language to use, but the woman taking orders was totally fluent in English... I hate those awkward situations where you want to show off but you feel like a fool... And the woman thought it was very funny that I ordered this dish... I have a feeling not too many westerners order this one...

Packing for Georgia

Packing to go to a new place is always so difficult.. hard to guess how the weather will be, hard to guess what will stick out like a sore thumb amongst the locals... I have been in e-mail contact with someone who lived there for a while and asked what I needed to bring. Of course, she said it all depended on where you are living, mountain vs. valley, city vs. country..... too bad you don't know where you'll be placed until you get there. Kind of like SMOE but on on a countrywide scale. it doesn't bother me too much not knowing. I'll only be there for less than 3 months... whatever it is, I think I can deal with it for 3 months... I hope. But, I would like to know what I should pack!

So, this is what I've packed so far:

Clothes:
3 sweatshirts
1 winter coat (not too thick, but with a hood and waterproof)
1 wool coat for fall
3 pairs of jeans (I'll wear one more on the plane, so I'll have 4 total)
2 pairs of dress pants (for work)
6 t-shirts/three quarter sleeved shirts (for fall)
8-9 shirts/sweaters (for winter)
1 set of long underwear (for unheated houses/classrooms in winter... lessons learned from Chile)
14 pairs of underwear
12 pairs of socks
1 pair of fuzzy socks (for cold houses)

Shoes:
One pair of dress shoes
One pair of flip flops

Toiletries:
toothpaste
toothbrush
1 stick of deodorant
nail clippers
tweezers
small bottle of lotion
1 bar of shampoo
1 small bar of soap

1 towel
4 facecloths (many people told me to bring baby wipes or wet naps to wash when I can't take a shower, but that seems very wasteful to me. I'm sure facecloths will be sufficient, and they are reusable)

And... a whole box of school supplies, mostly from my house which were left over from high school/college, plus some that the neighbors gave me that they picked up for dirt cheap when school supplies go on sale. From the sounds of it, the kids there will probably need them, if not the other teachers in my school.

Am I forgetting anything? I've still got 2 more days, I leave on Thursday!! :-)