SOME THINGS I'LL MISS, SOME THINGS I WON'T
AND SOME THINGS I'LL NEVER FORGET                    
FIVE MONTHS IN GEORGIA

Good fences make good neighbours, and good neighbours we have indeed, but even still the same too many fences make me feel slightly oppressed. 

Most every Georgian property is surrounded by a fence with a large gate, and as such most of the day-to-day socializing takes place in the street, unless of course, you're brewing cha cha, that tends to draw people inside the barrier. There are a few communal benches along our street and guaranteed no matter what time of day or night I happen to be out there, there are people chatting, or simply sitting in silence watching their little part of the world go by. 

I have seen fences made from piles of thorny branches.  I have seen fences made from rows of old school lockers, and from every other bit of scrap metal imaginable.  I have seen a fence whose main bit was a car door.  Yes, I have seen a great many fences, and although I respect them and appreciate their necessity, I believe I will feel a great sence of freedom whence I am no longer confined by them.

As far as I have been able to gather, these fences are, in part, a relic of the country's recent lawless and corrupt history, where many people were desperate and the police force was a mere ploy. This made break and enterings and robberies all too common, and yet, although this is thankfully no longer the case, we are still in a part of the world where every bit of unfenced green is fair game for any cow, chicken, pig, goat or sheep that's been let out for the day, and so the fence lives on.

School yards, grave yards, parks, ditches, the centre bits of  busy traffic circles, these all serve as grazing grounds, and so it is necessary, unless you don't mind livestock snacking on your yard (which in most cases is planted from edge to edge with flowers, fruit trees, vegetables, and herbs, so no, you don't want live stock snacking on your yard) to take this precaution. If you do happen to have a patch of grass amongst your cultivation however, they make excellent lawn mowers.  In fact their the only lawn mowers I've yet to see i Georgia. No need to hire a public care taker, just set a cow on it and it will be nicely trimmed in no time.



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I will dearly miss having fresh coriander in almost everything I eat.  But then, I will not miss having far too much oil in a lot of things I sometimes don't really have the choice not to eat, so I guess it evens out.

I will not miss eating meat. I once accidentally picked a pig's ear off a plate at a suphra ...enough said.

I cannot wait to live off fruits and vegetables...I am already anxiously awaiting the eating of my first avacado in over half a year!

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I will miss drafty wooden windows (in the warmer months), and waking up to the chorus of a thousand birds every morning. It is a glorious way to greet the day.

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I will not miss the tension that yelling causes.  Yelling is a common form of communication around here, happy, angry, sad, indifferent, it doesn't really matter, and it's hard to tell.  Georgians just yell a lot, and it's especially unerving when you have no idea what's being yelled about, because you can only understand maybe 5 percent of what's being said.

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I cannot wait to live in a house where the T.V. is not on 14 hours a day.  I will not miss that...at all.

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I'm not sure whether or not I'll really miss them, but Georgia's great many soviet era parks are definitely noteworthy. In all my previous years combined I had never seen as many chairoplanes (both functional and long since written off) as I have seen since coming to this country. Every other town has got a mini children's theme park of sorts, and they are, if nothing else, interesting to wander through, and to imagine what they were like in their prime, with their mini roller coasters, bumper cars, and giant jungle gym/obstacle course structures, ferris wheels, carousels, and yes, chairoplanes.

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Think me crazy if you will, but I love naturally carbonated, naturally salty water.  Borjomis tsqkhali I will miss you dearly.


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I will not miss being a woman in a decidedly patriarchal society.




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I can't wait to wear shorts again without feeling risque...especially now that it's in the mid 30s daily.

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I will not miss my long night time journeys to the bathroom.

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I think I might kind of miss seeing everyday words that have 4 or 5 or sometimes 6 consonants in a row when transcribed into English. A few typical examples of this are

tsqkhaliv -water
tskhra - nine
mtsvani - green
tvitmprinavi - plane
vphiqrob - I think
kurdgheli - rabbit

The best and most impossible are the ones that have the qkh sound, which involves contracting your throat somehow in order to utter it properly. The only way I've ever succeeded is by having my asophogous crushed slightly. Nevertheless, it is a very intersting and beautiful language, and it's been a great expereince getting familiar with a tongue so entirely unique and foreign.    

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I will never forget the fiirst time Mirian called me his sister, not his teacher, not his friend, his sister.  I will miss the little goof probably more than anything else.  Our karate sessions, that always only eventually seemed to come to a close when I got an accidental elbow in the face, our endless games of speed and the like, our chin-up competitions, our English lessons that began to more and more quickly digress into foolishness the more comfortable we became with one another, and how he kept me company at my bedside while I was sick, making me laugh by telling me Georgian jokes translated into English. Ki batono, my time in Georgia would not have been the same without you. A great many thanks! Dzalian didi madloba!

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I will miss free range live stock.  I once witnessed, while waiting for a marshrutka in the centre of town, an old man with a hunched back and cane 'run' out into traffic to shoo his cow back onto the grassy patch in the middle of the traffic circle. 

I love that you can't drive anywhere farther than 15 minutes away, without at least once having to cede to a heard of something or other crossing the road or simply walking in the middle of it. I love how docile cows are, and how bashful pigs are, how ridiculous chickens look, especially when they run, but just generally all the time, and how there is something so calm and peaceful to behold in a heard of sheep.  

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I will never forget teaching the 'th' sound to my grade threes.  There was a picture of thirteen birds on a path, thirteen and path being among the new words we had just covered in our phonics section.  Alongside the picture was a sentence with blanks that read '               birds on a               ." While circulating the class I noticed that Dato, a very bright student, had written 'twelve birds on a path'  instead of thirteen.  I tried to explain to him that we had to use the vocabulary words we had just covered to complete the excercise, then proceeded to count out loud while pointing at each individual bird in the picture.  At seven he promptly stoppped me and, pointing to the wattle on the bird in question said, "Es ra aris chiti. Es aris mamalia!" "That's not a bird. It's a rooster!" I couldn't argue with him, so I just had a good laugh and let him have it.

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I will miss being able to guess with 50% accuracy at a perfect strangers' name. For males it's Giorgi, for females it's Nana. This can work for or against you though. It really didn't help when trying to keep my students straight. 

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I remember in the beginning, before I really got to know my students,

in my grade four class I would get surrrounded by a bunch of little grils with dark hair and huge brown eyes before the beginning of every class. They would shower me with questions and compliments, and all I could do was laugh at how alike they all looked. I couldn't keep them straight, just seven sets of big dark eyes, browner I think than any I've ever seen.

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As many flaws as there are in the Georgian school system (as there are in every school system) there is something very right about a school where students still bring flowers to school for their teachers.  Although I've yet to pull a kid's ear or give them a healthy tap on the head, the fact that that's allowed means that I am also allowed to hug my students, to give them a pat on the back or a pinch on the cheek, without having to fear a law suit, and there is something much more functional and common sensical about that, than the hyper restricted way in which we are forced to teach in our schools back home.

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My A.D.D case in grade six spontaneously broke out into ''My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean' one day last week.  It's really hard to chastize a student when you can't stop laughing. 

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I can't be sure, but something tells me I won't miss chugging wine. Pretty sure I'll be ready for a serious detox when I get home. I will however, miss the Georgian toast. In Georgia, you don't drink unless a toast is made, they can be as simple as a toast to you, to friends, to family, to love, to life, to the deceased, or to country, but often times, they take the form of eloquent speaches, not that am ever really able to underrstand much of them, but the idea behind it is enough to make you appreciate it.

Georgians drink to celebrate love and togetherness. This is why it is necessary to drink to something. We drink to the things that unite us, all that we share and all that we hold dear, and so although we may end up drunk, we also end up closer to one another than when we started. And that my friends is a beautiful thing.