This whole situation caught me on vacation in Istanbul, but I got a message from Peace Corps two days ago telling me they were sending me home. You all know as much as me if you're reading BBC. But it IS as bad as the reports are saying.

Anyway, I will do better to write something of substance later, but for the time being, know all our volunteers are safe and accounted for, having been in the states at the time or evacuated to Armenia.

Thank you for reading... will update with whatever deems worthy an update. More will be here, just too tired to write now.

Once again, pictures attached. Reading on Facebook? Click Through. The captions are bound to look odd without the attached photos there.

It's been a while since I've had a substantive post, and for once I've got a good reason: I've been pretty busy. It's been really nice to be out of school for a good month now—given me time to work on other things on my own time.

First-ever Ninotsminda Region Linux Workshop

I've had a few secondary projects never really take off, and I'll be the first to admit that winter made me a barnacle out here (you've got no idea what getting sick every three weeks and not feeling your hands indoors will do to your work ethic – my only real secondary project became “mope in my room and listen to Ira Glass podcasts under a sleeping bag”). But in June one project finally took off and it was a surprising hit, for both me and the participants.

A little background: in the past year or so, the Georgian Ministry of Education and Science initiated a great program known as “Deer Leap,” with the goal of 'computerizing' Georgia's schools, from capital to village. I stole its objectives from a related website (second or third link on Google):

Deer Leap Project objectives:

to help local governments in developing IT infrastructure of schools, including support for establishment of Internet connections in schools;to provide Georgian teachers with elementary computer skills, and guide them to use the opportunities provided by modern information technologies in teaching their subjects;to support curriculum development with the assistance of an interactive learning environment promoting learning skills; to encourage the creation of original software on Georgian language, culture, history, and nature in accordance with the National Curriculum;to support schools in establishment of Internet connections.In short, they're basically wiring the entire country, top to bottom, with new computers and internet to bring the schools into the twenty-first century. My school has yet to be wired to the net (they say this year, but the internet issue has been something of a վաղը, վաղը (mañana, mañana). Still, the computers are there and are waiting to be really best utilized. Understandably, this is one area where serving in Georgia as a teacher is an incredibly exciting time to be doing so.

I always joke that my story of the “old days” to my grandkids, as I sit in a rocking chair and whittle on a piece of wood while tounging my poorly-adhering dentures, will be “kids, let me tell you about the time they wired my middle school to the internet – these men came in with their fancy Apple computers and their network cable – no none of that fancy fiber optic hologram stuff you kids are all talking about, and what have you – we had Netscape Navigator, webcrawler, geocities and the likes that you saw on your trip to the museum – and if you wanted to download a dancing monkey “please wait” mouse pointer, you had to wait two hours – AND YOU LIKED IT!. Not as cool as the war stories and “uphill barefoot in snow both ways meet Susie at the malt shop before the sock hop” stories our grandparents tell, but I'm clinging to it. Now I get to relive this little moment in another country's educational history, and it's pretty cool. I get to even play a small part.

The one hitch in this otherwise simple tale of boring computer stuff is that the ministry (understandably) didn't want to fork over the additional $ million or so it would take to buy XP licenses for all these new rigs. They went another route: Ubuntu Linux. For those of you not familiar, Linux is a free operating system based on open source: the recipe for the entire thing is completely and freely available. What this means in the shortest explanation possible is that it is free to use and free to adapt. I'm a personal huge fan of this approach, but it's even better for developing countries, as money otherwise spent on the licenses can go to something else also important for the schools' improvements (we lack books, for example).

Even more importantly, a major project with Ubuntu is localization: the open-ness of the code makes translating the entire interface into the most rarely-used of languages basically just a question of finding people who speak the language and know how to code – no reverse engineering needed or breaking patents. It's all there. There's currently a team in Tbilisi translating the whole OS into Georgian, something you'll never see from Microsoft. While the Georgian isn't 100% done yet, virtually every app, large to small, is already available in Russian at least, so this works great in no-English environments.

Finally, viruses (trojans, better put) run amok here on people's pendrives (everyone's got one, they're almost jewlery around people's necks) and anti virus apps are rare to be found on people's computers, let alone virtually non-existent internet to update the AV databases. So it's usually a complete mess on any computer, which understandably hinders productivity. Linux OSs benefit from a rarity of viruses written to attack them, and a system much more resistant to them, out of the box. My laptop is running Ubuntu and I don't even have an AV installed, this after having to reformat at least three times due to some awful trojan that got past my AV on Windows before I just said “F it, I'll be running Lin for the next two years”. Actually, I'm enjoying the switch.

The only problem with this is that NOBODY here knows how to run these computers running Ubuntu, and they unfortunately come with a much steeper learning curve than Windows. This became painfully clear when my host mother, the regional director of the Educational Resource Center, requested some invoices from the regional schools, simple excel spreadsheets – and we received back piles of headaches: empty floppies and CD-Rs; the template returned as sent, no information saved to it; in one case we got a .jpg file back, a screenshot of the filled in spreadsheet, as the computer operator couldn't figure out how to “save as” or how to print. In one school in a nearby village, their Deer Leap computers collected dust in the box, because the operator couldn't figure out how to log in.

Ryder doin' his thing.

Please note the bags under his eyes :)

So, training was needed. Enter the geek.

I never really actively used Linux until I came here, but I did waste lots of time in college and high school screwing around on it. That seeming waste of time then paid off here marvelously. When I got to Georgia and heard about all this crazy open source software stuff, I decided to get myself up to speed, as eventually I could do something with this in my site. It all culminated last month, with a weekend training workshop, the first of several we'll do, to get the schools ready to use these computers in the classroom and the admin office for the upcoming school year. The goal this first time around was the administrative side and basic operation.

My host father, in addition to being a dentist, runs his own NGO, in Russian “Здравое Общество Джавахети”, unfortunately officially translated to English as “The Sane Population of Javakheti” (really should have been 'sound'... he went to register it a frustrating month before I arrived and could have proofread the translation. Oh well). The org is focused in public health and education, a pretty broad sector nicely tied up with the slogan, “Soundness of the body is found through health; soundness of the mind – through knowledge.” So, he financed the trainings through the NGO as an official Sane Population project to improve the outcomes of the ministry providing these school computers, as well as serving as my language wingman (though I taught it in Russian and was confident in my ability to basically pull it off, there were inevitably going to be those times when I'd end up saying “to log in to the washing machine, just enter your tomato on the password crate” -- so he was there for polyglot damage control.

Computer operators hard at work

We invited in from the village schools each of the computer “operators” -- we'd probably just call them “the computer guys” to this first training. Interestingly, out here, since 90% of the staff of any Georgian school is female, the vast majority of our “computer guys” were actually, indeed, “computer ladies.” So for me, this hit me that these trainings will be also providing vital real job skills for young women in the regions, killing two of my birds here with one stone.

I will say right now it was an enormously stressful 5 day period, prepping and actually running this workshop, as without fast internet, you're always going to come across that one missing driver file or program the computers will need, or the Russian menus aren't on this one, or this one won't burn CDs - I was up at the Resource Center until sunup 2 days getting everything set up, and of course I still ran into a few embarrassing bugs or general showstopping problems, broadcast right on the projector screen for all to see.

One of the frustrating moments:

Ryder wigs out and types in Georgian GOD

LINUX IS HAAAARD

An interesting upshot of being up that late under exceedingly annoying circumstances with my host dad, is that it was yet another bonding moment for us. He saw how much of myself I was putting into making this work well, and I think he really appreciated the effort. We shared a few slightly off our rocker laughs, like the morning at 6 am, just driving back home to get a few hours of sleep, we had been out of cigarettes for a good 6 hours and slowly stalked the streets in his '80's Lada looking for a smoker with a pack to bum off of “... nope, he quit in '95... nope not a smoker... nope... wait, what, Ryder jan, that's a babushka...”

But was it a success? Absolutely. Fifteen operators arrived on the first day airing their complaints over this “unusable” operating system, complaining that the “government didn't bother to buy anything of quality” and left realizing that though it's a little tricky, it is capable of doing EVERYTHING they need to do in an office and school environment, and can do it without violating copyright laws, and without contracting viruses, and can now confident in their knowing how to take care of business on these machines. This was a classic Peace Corps project – used minimal resources, utilized assets already found in the community, and was really just about knowledge transfer.

The next step, I hope, is getting in the teachers – a training of trainers kind of thing, focused on not how to use Linux, but how to teach it in the classroom; how to transfer what knowledge local students have of Windows over to Linux.

After that, I'd like to open them up to the general public, and really focus on providing basic office computing skills to locals, especially young women, perhaps mimicing this great organization I'm familiar with back home that teaches such skills (typing, resume writing, etc) to single mothers trying to (re-)enter the workforce after missing out on the “computer revolution.”

In the short run, though, I dare say we just created 15 new computer geeks out in the Caucasus. They were so happy and thankful, Aghas and I received several invitations to go with them to the Black Sea in a group on vacation. Kind of a strange offer, but, hey I'm proud of myself.

Anyway, hi :)

I meant to write a nice long letter with photos about my recent and very successful Linux computing class I taught for the regional technology teachers, but ran out of face time with the comp to do it.

I might be leaving for site tomorrow, so I couldn't let the fast internet go totally unused for the blog, so I figured out how to upload video.

Here, friends, is a sample of Georgian national dance: I really can't describe it in any way other than "flatly cool". I shot this a year ago during our orientation to Georgia, in an old Soviet resort compound in Tabakhmela, outside of Tbilisi.

Those of you accessing this via Facebook will probably have to click through to get to the embedded video.

Enjoy, 'til I get back to you!

--Ryder

After reading Why Credit Cards are Getting Away With It

and The Cure for America's Chronic Recession

off Robert Reich's blog and this week's This American Life on the topic of the mortgage/credit crisis, I made an awkward effort to explain my "tsk tsks" and the general situation to The Sultan (my host grandmother). Turns out the woman is a pragmatist. NOW IS THE TIME FOR ACTION, she indicated.

My mother (that is, American mother) is in China, on an educator exchange program through her district, until the 20th. My host grandmother said, "Does your mother have access to email? Quick, write her before it's too late. Tell her to bring back with her four to five sacks of black Chinese soil, and I'll match it with four to five of our good Javakheti soil. You'll have 10 sacks, and can plant your own potatoes. Ekonomika mekonomika, retsessiya metsessiya (Armenian for economics schmeconomics, recession schmecession), the rest can starve. You'll be fine." She laughed loudly, and said "Your mother will think my 'chauffer has left the car' [gone crazy]. SEND IT!"

That's that: I think we're opening a subsistence potato operation in Tucson.

 

I just got back into Ninotsminda last night very late (the first time I've been on the road after dark, and I've gotta say... Georgia is DARK at night) last night, in a marshrutka carrying me, the driver, a commercial convenience store style refrigerator, and hauling another broken marsh in tow behind us through Javakheti's mountain range gave me lots of time to just zone out and think.

I've been out here for just about a year, and I don't even know what poignant thing to say about that, other than that I have. I'm surprised at how long it's been and how short it's felt, as well as how short it's been and how long it's felt. Mostly it just doesn't feel foreign or disconcerting here anymore, but that's part of the adventure.

The new volunteers are coming, and we're about to become the "veterans" in country. It really does seem like forever ago that I arrived here.

I'm not going to try and force an article in here that would sound forcibly self-righteous and overly philosophical. That said, I'll just upload a picture of my host grandmother I've been meaning to post for a while. This is right after she and I did some digging in the garden for more potatos. I think it's easy to say Tatik Manya "The Sultan" Zalalyan and I are the closest. I love this woman. I'd been going through some host family issues lately, and through it all, she'd been there for me without a budge. She still tells me she'll "break my fingers" if I don't make my bed, but I promise you it's endearing.

I remember a class I took a long time ago it seems (but not really) my sophomore year in college – this intro class to international business. We of course hit on the entertaining topic of internationally marketing a product – that there is a critical need to do your homework with regard to possible misunderstandings in naming or advertising your product in languages with which you might not be completely familiar.The professor brought up a few examples: In the Spanish speaking world, when Chevrolet brought its new Nova car to a Spanish-speaking country – Mexico, if I remember correctly, it hit on a nice little embarrassment – I'm taking her word for this, as I know about as much Spanish as I overheard passively while living in Tucson - "no va" means something like "doesn't go." Bic advertised a click pen, saying it won't leak in your pocket and embarrass you, unfortunately using the Spanish verb closest to "embarrass," which has less to do in Spanish with feeling sheepish as it does with being impregnated. Zipping over to Germany, some kind of multinational cosmetic company introduced a hair curler or straightener or something (what do you folks do with something like this?) called a "Mist-stick" with the unfortunate downside of such a product being linguistically associated with, well, poop.Making the same leap as I did in my final leg of the journey to where I am writing this, Germany to Georgia, I bring you Barf. This wonderful Iranian product is the local "Tide with colorsafe bleach," it cleans my clothing in the washer with the utmost of effectiveness, leaving all my absolutely gross reworn clothing (remember, I also only take a bath, if lucky, weekly) as spic-n-span as detergently possible every Sunday.But Barf, as we all bemusedly know, should not be introduced to already soiled clothing. Seems like a frying pan to the fire kind of deal.

This would have been an endearing marketing misfortune, but it seems the folks in Tehran are on to us. On a bottle of their Windex-equivalent line, I recently noticed an addition. Written in the tiniest of letters, right under the product name, an almost legalistically fine-print bailout: "Barf means snow."Needless to say, I appreciate this attention to customer concerns. On a side note, I've gotta say, it's in my head-trip column along with a long list of other things that my detergent is exported from the "Axis of Evil."

Happy summer!

Ryder

… I just had one of those "Peace Corps Moments™." And it, silly as it sounds, it made my day.

A long time ago I asked my mother to ship me a pair of boots, as the snow was clearly getting the upper hand on my poor New Balances I stupidly thought would do the trick. Well, she bought me this wonderful pair of boots that I eagerly opened at the Peace Corps office in Tbilisi, only to discover … two lefties. Something went tragically wrong in the actual boot selection process.

I'd let them sit for months in the office up north unused until my host father mentioned an idea, that he knew someone who'd lost his right foot, in an accident, the 1980s Afghanistan war (this was the USSR's Vietnam, essentially), something. Point is, he could use them. So the next time I went to Tbilisi I brought the boots back with me to Ninotsminda and gave them to this man, decked out in fatigues and crutches, now running a tiny produce market. He was incredibly, incredibly thankful—the boots were of far better quality than anything you can find in these parts, and he'll get to use them for twice as long… once one wears out, he's got another lefty waiting for him. These'll likely go for a good five years on him. He thanked me graciously, and I jokingly responded "ничего... это подарок от американского народа" ("it's a gift from the American people," like the signs on all the well-known USAID-completed things that have been done here (including a park and an open air market). We laughed, shook hands, that was that.

This was several months ago, and today I was passing by his produce shop, and he shouted out at me "Ryder you're totally not allowed to pass by me, come in and say hi!" I was greeted with a warm handshake and a heaping bag of fresh fruit. The value of such a thing cannot be underscored enough—for one, fruit is an incredibly rare part of my diet, as nothing grows here but potatos and garlic so it all has to be shipped from the really fertile parts of the country up north. And thusly, this bag was probably a good ten lari… seven dollars worth of food… several bananas, apples, oranges and even two pomegranates for good measure. Ten lari worth of fresh fruit inventory at the start of the season is a hell of a gift back. As I walked off, I peeled open the first banana I've had in probably a good seven months, and couldn't help but smile like it was going out of style.

Sounds hokey, but I think it's as important to note the good stuff like this as it is to say OH MY GOD I DON'T GET ANY SLEEP IT'S SO COLD I WANT A HAMBURGER RA, so forgive the snippet, but I'm having a great day today, because a one-legged veteran is making use of a stupid mistake a Tucson hiking gear store's manager made in my shipment. As is hung in my mom's kitchen back home, "when life gives you patches, make quilts…"

Love,Ryderito for some, Rodya for others, Radik for yet others, Rubik for the next group, and Muttonpockets to a few of the PCVs (long story).

I’m killing some time at my internet hookup here in Ninotsminda, after all ten of my kids stood me up for the inaugural RYDER DAVID COBEAN EXTRACURRICULAR ENGLISH ACTIVITY CLUB EXTRAVAGANZAFEST meeting, hopefully they’ll have a good reason for having done so, or I’ll bewitch them all with the evil eye (a phrase I have somehow managed to learn in Armenian).

I’ve been really busy with a bunch of projects, some going well, some… well, bumpy starts, or just a very rocky path toward getting them done. My mother recently reminded me of a quote I had written on my monitor back home, “I love deadlines, especially the sound they make as they whoosh by.” In the next few weeks I’m trying to get a pen pal book of letters, photos, and articles about Ninotsminda, Javakheti and Georgia off to my mom’s students in Tucson, start an English club so it gels by the end of school (I want to keep my kids and myself busy in the summer break, so none of us forget our English), I’m trying to get a book donation finished with my mom’s school, mine, and the necessary OK stamps in Washington, and I’ve got this Linux class I’m trying to plan out that I’m going to teach to school officials in the region, in all of two weeks. Add planning lessons, something I’m trying to do better at lately, and finding girls to successfully apply to this leadership camp in Bakuriani this summer, and well I’m not sleeping too much these days. PS Thanks so much to Michelle and Shara for your advice and help on my attempt at this English classroom… Despite my efforts, there’s just not enough energy in the community to support this at the time, so I’m baby stepping it (trying for the meantime to just commandeer a room for next year, and we’ll go from there with little things I can find locally to spruce it up).

I’m loving the incoming spring… it’s like winter has been waging a war since October with the warmth, and slowly but surely spring is gaining ground here. Every few days a cold snap will come through, but the freeze has lost his soldiers and is on the retreat… I haven’t seen snowfall since mid April. The warmth has meant that water is again flowing, and I couldn’t be happier. With the lack of handwashing I’d been getting sick about once every three weeks here, and it was getting me pretty depressed. Green vegetables are making a slow comeback into my diet, so even on that front things are getting pretty rad.

Most importantly, I’ve been able to sit outside with a cup of coffee in the morning now. I broke down in February and bought an electric grinder and a French press, and I’ve found the one store to buy milk at in Nino, so I’ve been having the best cups of Dunkin Donuts coffee since my 4am DD/IHOP outings a year ago with Goldy, Amjad and Lila. The taste is wonderful, though I wish I could find those three on the shelf at the Tbilisi supermarket.

A year has almost completed and honestly, I’m pretty shocked at how time flies. A year ago I was panicing over final details, trying to close up shop in Tucson, and now I find myself almost on the trailing end of my service, and trust me we all feel like we blinked to this point here. I’m going to do my best to not worry too much about the “what’s next,” as I’ve been proven time and time again lately that this life business has a way of unfolding pretty much on its own, and I’ll figure out the details as they come. Still, I’m going to start studying for the GREs soon, just in case… eek.

I really can’t wait for the summer here though. I want to take time to crack down into my Russian, Georgian and Armenian, enjoy waking up a bit later, and just having free time to work when I need to on what I need to without daily lesson planning. Not to mention R&R. Some of us are going to embark on the grand all-Georgia tour to be known as Villapalooza 08, so look forward to some snippets from visiting other volunteers’ outhouses :-) That, and my greyhound style “adventure” to see the coolest Spanish speaker on the planet since Tito Puentes, but with a hell of a cuter smile.

I don’t know what else I’ve got right now! I should probably just upload some pics from winter and spring; life goes on marvelously, frustratingly, but altogether well. Note: Apparently shouting RA GINDA DZAGHLO (WHAT DO YOU WANT DOG) at street dogs in Tbilisi turns them soft and placid. I witnessed a man birja squatting (I’ll have to upload a graphic to explain this phenomenon) with sunflower seeds avert a shepherd attack with those three words. I must not have the touch, I carry a zapper thing for a mean little gremlin on my street not bigger than a schnauzer…

Later bavshvebo

Ryder

Բարև, folks

Been a while, huh?

I want to let y’all know that I’m alive out here, though I definitely hit that point where writing constantly became … unsustainable? Nah, I’m just a lazy jerk. I’m still going strong out here, though the winter has taken its physical and psychological toll on me (and everyone). My carb-only diet would make Atkins shudder.

As I write this we’re getting ANOTHER blizzard coming our way. Sideways cornflake size snowflakes falling… sideways, visibility about 10m. I thought I had survived my first Georgian winter, and despite all the warnings and reminders from locals, really wanted to believe spring had finally taken root about two weeks ago. I had been out of my site, Ninotsminda, in the capital of Tbilisi for like 11 days—the longest I’d been away from Ninotsminda. More on the Tbilisi work week of heaven and hell later, but while I was gone, spring made an early teaser showing, apparently, while I was gone. Tbilisi is always relatively warm—the name comes from the Georgian word for warm, tbili, after all—and I got my first moment in 2008 of wearing sandals outside and having to yank off my jacket (done with the hugest smile on my face, mind you), but upon my return to Ninotsminda, the storks common to Armenia and this part of Georgia had returned to their huge nests on the non-functioning streetlamps near my house. The mountains were showing more brown than white—they’ve been covered from base to summit since November—and the dirt road, permafrozen and snow-covered since about the same time, was a disgusting, but sanguine river of snowmelt muck. I really, really thought that was it. I wanted to believe! Two days later, whiteout.

As I moaned in my laryngitis-ridden remnant of a voice (I’ve been getting sick here like I’m getting paid for it), my coworkers at the school all laughed and told me we’ve got a few more months of this ambiguous “what the hell season is this” junk. Snow has occasionally been known to fall here in June on a bad year. There’s a reason the locals call Javakhq, this region of the country, Sibir’ Gruzii—“the Siberia of Georgia.”

This all has other consequences: water has been a problem in Nino this year. The town laid new pipes in October, and the digging left the ground porous enough to let the cold down to freeze the pipes, leaving Ghojabek, my part of town, cut off from the mains, and the backup reservoir has been long since drained. So our water has been coming by daily runs to fill up barrels from a nearby-ish communal spigot, hauled back by sled. We’ve basically been without running water since the start of February, which has limited bathing (once every two weeks, by bucket), shaving (why bother), handwashing (thank God for Target brand hand sanitizer), or use of the flush toilet (I squat in a shack with a hole outside. Nothing says “toughest job you’ll ever love” like dropping your pants outside in 10-below Celsius weather).

Still, every other day we get a warm spell, and hit the plusses into the evening, which is a wonderful feeling. I’ve started being able to teach without a jacket at school, which is heaven for my Tucson-inbred tendency to strip off as much clothing as possible at the faintest ghost of warmth. I’ve stripped down (indoors, mind you) to a polo shirt and jeans on the occasional relatively warm day, and get scandalous looks from colleagues convinced that I wish to die of hypothermia, still bundled in Eskimo coats. Though I’m not looking forward to several months of trudging through the muck as the snow finally melts for good, I’m really looking forward to stowing my now gross and worn to death jacket, and even eventually wearing shorts.

Like I said, I was up in Tbilisi forever a few weeks ago, and while it cost an arm and a leg on my volunteer allowance, it was full of so much productivity; I returned feeling a sense of accomplishment I’d been waiting for since starting this gig in June. Finally involved in work beyond just teaching, I’ve gotten myself involved in a number of projects for my community I’m going to be really proud of when they get off the ground. The main reason I ended up there was for an in-service training with my partner teacher (“counterpart,” in Peace Corps jargon) focused around improving our team teaching methodology, better familiarizing the counterparts with the Peace Corps mission and the Ministry of Education’s larger goal of methodology reform, and, to generally inspire them to work with us on those reforms. We’re all working through a lot of Soviet past in the Georgian education system—top-down authoritarianism, language-learning-as-translation, insufficient supplies of, all the same, old textbooks, not to mention the challenges of working in relatively neglected periphery areas (some of us are in villages of less than 400 people, thank God I’m not, though we have our own challenges in an ethnic minority region).

I have been really lucky to have one of the best counterparts Georgia has to offer among those I’ve seen. It may sound strange, but many of the other Georgian teachers required simultaneous interpretation into Georgian at this conference, as English skills among teachers vary in the regions, but my partner, an Armenian not at all proficient in Georgian, held her own with remarkable strength in English the whole time. I’m really blessed on this end; my Russian and her English have given us a remarkable working relationship on the simple level that very little gets lost between the two of us in communication. That helped us build a kind of camaraderie by now that has meant that we’re open about frustrations and successes on a level that I think is rare here. I think getting out of the everyday patterns of work gave us a new freedom to talk about what she really thinks we need to do at the school, and in tangible terms, resulted in two new project plans Armine and I hope to accomplish, both initiated by her—the REAL goal of all this. We hope to replace our aging and hard to find textbooks with some supplementary materials, something I think critical to the lessons, and far more bold—develop a modern, western style, students-come-to-us language classroom, with A/V equipment, student centered group seating, a mini library, and most importantly, our own space to blanket with visual aids and language materials, a little slice of an English speaking country in the middle of a small town on the borders of Armenia and Turkey. It will take a lot of work to find funding for, but it’s very doable. The main thing is to get it done with significant local contribution, at least at the in-kind level. But it will reap immeasurable benefits on students’ ability to learn here, and serve as an example of how to create an environment conducive to language learning here. My sustainable development spider sense is tingling...

I also had meetings up in Tbilisi for a project I’m completely stoked about here. I’m officially the first man on the “leadership” of Camp GLOW: Girls Leading Our World. GLOW is a Peace Corps initiative; a girls’ summer camp led and organized by Georgians with PCVs’ assistance and advice to encourage girls to take a more active and prominent role as part of Georgia’s next generation of businesspeople, politicians, local leaders, and so on. Especially from the regions, where traditional gender roles really have limited their access to prominent positions in all fields in the country, girls will—along with Georgia, really benefit from greater participation in society.

The camp offers a number of programs, from women in the media, debate, public speaking, confidence building, guest speakers, and the usual fun camp trappings, all led by female role models. It’s an incredible and incredibly popular program in the five or so years it’s been going on, but hasn’t made it into the ethnic minority areas at all—which is where I kind of came in. I somewhat snapped over the winter after getting laughed at for washing dishes—women’s work—and decided to put my frustration into action. A few conversations with friends on the GLOW board, and before we knew it I ended up joining them in planning a short pilot camp in Ninotsminda we’re hoping to run this summer. This is going to take significant work—basically rewriting the curriculum to be appropriate for a non-Georgian speaking community, finding new funding, promoting it from zero in a town that’s never heard of it, building it from the ground up, basically. (I could go on tooting my horn, AREN’T I SO GREAT AND PROFESSIONAL??? HOW’M I DOIN’? HOW’M I DOIN’?) I guess I’ve been wearing it on my face and this letter that I’m so excited about it. My good friends and GLOW folks Katie and Jess kind of form the triumvirate on what we’ve dubbed “MiGlow” (minority GLOW), and I even get the little feather in my cap of “Minority Affairs Chair.” I’m getting a little self-conscious about how much hot air I’m blowing , but I’ve been dying for big-kid work. I’ve spent the past 6 months essentially teaching and hearing “Mister Kobin, do you like a pants? I like a cheese.”

In personal news, while in Tbilisi, I got the chance of crashing at an expat family’s house—a hell of a plush experience. The first time I’d seen a microwave in 9 months, I ate the most delicious bowl of grape nuts ever, and using Tide brand (not Barf brand, yes, Barf) detergent, I washed a whole hiker’s pack of dirty laundry, and wore delightfully dryer-shrunken-to-original-size jeans for the first time since June. Life was glorious.

I’m not sure if you all got wind back then, but I took a great trip with two of my close friends here, Kelly and the same Jess of GLOW renown, to Armenia’s capital, Yerevan back in January. While it was cold as saruits (ice), it was amazing. Yerevan is up in my list of favorite cities ever, stateside or abroad. While it lacks some of the living history feel of Tbilisi, it makes up for in an almost European (but not quite, which adds to it all) cosmopolitan feeling. I guess put short, Armenia’s diaspora has really helped it out. A foreigner doesn’t quite feel so much like a freak to be gawked at there, and there are offerings from other corners of the world in cuisine, music, and art, that don’t seem to be understood through distorted goggles (example: Pizza, Georgian style, is an inedible contraption in many restaurants that involves mayonnaise). Well, while in Yerevan I managed to not spend much more than $150 over four days as a tourist, yet I saw amazing live Jazz, ate the best pasta I’ve had in many, many years, regardless of geography, along with seeing a Sunday service at Etchmiadzin, the “Vatican” of the Gregorian Christian Church, touring the Armenian genocide monument, a modern art museum, a gorgeous piece of public architecture called The Cascade (a giant staircase up a long incline lined with fountains), eating remarkable Persian food, (real Persian food… Armenia borders Iran) and toured fascinating stone architecture all throughout the city. Along with this, I had my own nice benefit of seeing the center of culture of the ethnic group I locally serve in Georgia, and hearing and speaking the high-falootin’ city dialect of the language I’m learning, and the one I’ve learned as I’ve begun to forget Georgian at site.

Being surrounded by so much Armenian with the diversity of conversations of a city was awesome, it did for my spoken Armenian what weeks of tutoring might have over just a few days. Speaking in restaurants, transportation, stores, etc, etc. There’s only so many different conversations you can have in a very small town, so it’s hard to stretch the dialogue. So using Armenian in a capital really helped. But really the place is awesome. I’m definitely going to go back. Next up this summer, hopefully, is a bus trip to Istanbul (like a day and a half of driving by bus from Georgia’s black sea port, Batumi… masochistic in the extreme).

CURRENT DISTRACTION FOR SANITY:

Reading: Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi and a December ’07 issue of Rolling Stone (thanks to my Country Director for that contribution)

I've lately found out that the –jan suffix-thing of endearment ("Mama jan," "Ryder jan," "hey babycakes jan") used in Armenian has its roots in Persian and likely the various Indo- languages of the Indo-European family, including Pashto, as is repeatedly depicted as well in The Kite Runner, a novel that takes place in Afghanistan, one I'm reading right now. The fact that I'm learning a language that has stuff in common, however few, with Pashto is freaking awesome possum.

Georgian TV just ran a spot for some sports show coming up this weekend, using the Star Wars theme. I don't think that would fly much in the states. I feel like that'd be like your local news opening with the theme to Indiana Jones.

I just got called up for jury duty. Classic! I'm sure they'll let me out of it, but if not, you all might be seeing me a lot sooner, and I want to go out for a drink at a place with microbrews on tap, and I'll be spending lots of time at Target just… having a religious experience. And reveling in the concept of flip flops in January.

I just wrapped up my first semester of teaching at Public #2, and more or less, depending on what exactly I'm measuring "success" to be, I'd call it a success. It coincided perfectly with my site visit by Peace Corps staff, and turned out to be a good week of professional introspection.

My Program Manager, Eka, the PC Country Director, and the NGO sector Program Manager came to Ninotsminda to touch base and see how I'm getting along with my counterpart and school in general, a routine part of service, and I think they were quite impressed. So was I, unexpectedly. I'd been out of the loop with my own school for about two weeks, due to a volunteer conference I had to attend near the capital, and a nasty bout with bronchitis that kept me up at the office in Tbilisi on medical for a few extra days, so I'd been a bit unprepared for the whole spiel by the time that it came around. That said, hats off to my counterpart and supervisor, who took the surprise of a staff visit well and were wonderful about it being a surprise (not an intended one; I just seemed to miss every opportunity to give them a heads up about it.

I was a bit worried that they'd come in and observe one of my older classes, where I'm still struggling with a terribly uphill battle of classroom management with the teenage boys. Not that it's bad for them to see my rough edges; Peace Corps Georgia has been at this long enough to know that well, teenagers are pretty much unmanageable around the world unless you happen to have a "horse whisperer" ability to get into their heads. I don't. Still, I had hoped to tell them of my worst challenges, but show them my greater successes. I lucked out. They came when I was to teach my fifth graders.

Let me tell you, I love my fifth graders. They're sweet, innocent, disproportionately bright, and just plain fun. I teach the class more than half in Russian since it's their first year of English, and while I can for sure hold my own in that language, I have plenty of silly mistakes, and they giggle forgivingly through each one. Every day when I walk in I get a dissonant blast of wholehearted "HELLO MISTER COBEAN! GOOD MORNING! HOW ARE YOU!" and it picks me up and pins a smile right to my face. I love these kids. Well, this morning I tell them "we have guests!" and they all excitedly stand up and smile for the Georgian and American that walk into the room with me. As I'd been out for almost two weeks, I didn't plan a lesson with my partner teacher, but she had totally come through for the both of us. Now, I've found that when the class is cooperative, I can totally improvise in such a situation and deliver a good lesson and make good use of myself (it's happened a few times before where we haven't been totally on the same page walking into the classroom, and I know how to turn that lemon into a decent glass of lemonade already). Still this time she was set for us. We gave a lesson on "I like/I love" along with fruits and vegetables and describing them with colors, and as usual was blown away at how good my youngins are. They were at their best despite two surprise visitors in the back of their room and soaked up the lesson. Two delightful highlights came when one child inadvertently professed his attraction to pears ("I love you, pear!") in response to my question "what fruit do you like?" and another informing me adamantly that apples are tasty when gray.

Anyway, following the lesson I had a series of meetings with the PC staff and my counterpart to discuss progress to date, and I realized that I may have been overcritical of my progress so far here. I think I set, without knowing it, really high standards for myself in the first semester, and got disappointed and guilty when I said to myself that homework turn-in is still low, test results are pretty bad, and my students aren't behaving themselves.

Then I realized I'd been basically just focusing on the challenges in my upper grades. My 5th and 6th grades are absolutely amazing. Success comes slowly, but more importantly, I know that more than half the kids in both those grades look forward to English with Mr Cobean, and smile with every right answer they get. Whether that's me, the lessons, or just the enthusiasm of youth I don't know but I'm pretty sure I'm helping at least contribute a positive feeling to a difficult language to pick up in a tiny mountain town in the South Caucasus.

I was going to bring up the glass half empty/half full metaphor, but something more appropriate came to mind. I walk home in snowmelt mud-puddly dirt roads about half the time of each week, and rarely come home with two dry socks. For some reason it's always my right sock that gets wet. Nonetheless, I still have one dry sock.

Keeping your head on straight in a teaching job like this is all about recognizing the one dry sock. I've got tons of dry socks at site: my school is very professional, well kept up, my faculty genuinely respects me as a peer, and those students that haven't caught the bug of malevolent puberty give me good effort, and will probably eventually start showing fruits of their toils. In general, I've got lots to be thankful for at my school. My counterpart and I occasionally have misunderstandings, most connected with language miscommunication, but we have a great and open working relationship.

I think I'm going to teach the younger grades more next semester, all the same; they just make me really happy even on the challenging days.

Plus, I get a kick out of realizing to myself every once in a while that my college degree landed me a gig where I can legitimately blame getting stuck behind a herd of cows for being late every once in a while.

Ninotsminda is mega cold these days, and I'm battening down the hatches for the winter months which obviously have already started (oh a good two months ago). But I've stockpiled music (you'll note the recent celebratory comment on facebook about finding some Talking Heads on the internet… not kidding), am teaching myself guitar, and am intensely immersed in learning Armenian these days, all winter lockdown pastimes, in case I get snowed in. So far, so good. Right now I'm dosing myself with one of my few mp3s of NPR's This American life, and if you guys want a good care package idea, a burned DVD full of podcasts from this show would probably make me weep with joy. Weep.

Weather and political situation permitting, I'm hoping to make a trip sometime soon enough to Erevan, and am really looking forward to it. I hope to get up a post about how Georgia-not-Georgia compares to Armenia-not-Georgia.

I'm sorry it's been so long since I've chimed in, but I'll be honest, life is pretty simple and repetitive, and it's hard to make a blog post over the injustice of the Donor Kebab place in Tbilisi going from 3 lari to 3.50 or the merits of rabbit shashlyk at the Ossetian restaurant. I mean, that was seriously a good 20 minutes of recent conversation, right there. I love it here, it's just

Still, I recently found a bar in the capital where a live Georgian band played the Dire Straits. I don't know if I've ever been happier.

… Until I stepped out to my house's entry and looked out the big window at the stars. Just caught two meteors running through Taurus and Orion—I wonder if there's a shower I'm not aware of this time of year. I love the sky at night. Being from Tucson, I thought I was lucky to have such a bright night sky there. Now I'm living in a town of 6,000 people; the nearest "big" city of 30,000 is two hours away and behind a mountain so I've got the best view of what's above ever. It's hard to make out the constellations there are so many stars. Oh! Awesome! Lila just by chance told me it's actually the best shower of '07, and it's coming on the 13th. I'll be ready for it.

 

Okay, I don't often hear myself speaking any language other than English. I don't hear much Russian because I haven't been around an american friend who's studied the language for a good year and a half. That means that the only Russian I hear is good Russian.

I'm watching some cop drama with my host brother and this episode features an ill-treated American. Yes there are plenty of things to be said about how ... "great" the acting is or the ridiculous Cold War motif, but mostly I'm all self conscious about how I must sound when I speak now. This guy sounds like a doof. I don't want to sound like a doof. This is the international, patriotic or something version of hearing your own voice in a tape recorder and saying "Why do I *sound* fat? Can someone *sound* fat? I sound husky."

On another TV note, I watch a lot of RuTV, Moscow's answer to MTV, as we've got a 12 year old teenager in the house. Some of the family hits include "The Greater the Love, the Lower the Kiss," interpreted as some kind of tantric Victoria's Secret ad in a Gothic cathedral, or the one with the girl riding a gigantic flying washing machine in the desert as a computer animated house with chicken legs parades around in the background. Where's the wholesome Christina Aguilera drrrty video when you need it?

There's this show that I watch on the Russian gov't channel, forgot the name, but it's essentially the grand epic sportsman battle of the millennium, at least as far as it's billed. Except it's mostly a show designed to demonstrate Russia's team of former olympians and various performing artists' athletic prowess against a broad sampling of international competitors. That means the USA, China, and ... Kazakhstan. Yep.

The events, treated with all the seriousness of the Boston Marathon plus a baptism or Freemasons initiation rite, include dressing up like a sumo wrestler and throwing beach balls into a hula hoop while an angry bull tries to gore you, dressing up like a mouse and running through a spinning obstacle course, and dressing up like a hillbilly and running on a conveyer belt, catching bread in a basket from a fishing pole. After such an epic competition, I will never watch the olympics again.

When the Americans started losing I started rooting for the Kazakhs, as there were a few cute women and a nice guy on the team and I had to find at least one reason to keep watching despite the number of sumo wrestlers I watched get gored by a stressed out bull in a godforsaken arena somewhere in France. (Yes, the show is recorded in Paris. The neutral ground venue adds a certain World Cup/No Man's Land je ne sais quoi touch to the whole affair). My host family told me I wasn't being patriotic enough. I'm sorry. When we can get our act together and learn to catch a freaking loaf of bread from a fishing pole while wearing a straw hat and black tooth wax, I'll be the first to take off my hat and sing You're a Grand Ol' Flag. Plus, rooting for the home team felt like somehow sanctioning the whole experience, elevating it from "guilty pleasure" to "hallowed feat of brain and brawn"

...And then I remembered that we televise bowling.

Sakartvelo: Stories of Peace Corps Life in Georgia was started in the summer of 2007 as a collaborative project of Peace Corps Volunteers in Georgia. Our goal is to promote the "Third Goal" of Peace Corps by educating the world about life in Georgia as well as raise awareness about our projects and accomplishments. We hope our podcast will entertain you, educate you, and maybe convince you to pay us a visit. Enjoy! Sakartvelos goumarjos!

http://www.sakartvelopodcast.org/

If there’s one thing to convince an agnostic about the fire-and-brimstone vision of god, it’s golf ball-sized hail.

I often tag along on my host mother Marina’s work runs to nearby villages to meet with school officials. It’s a nice way to see familiar but different scenery. Really, they’re the same; Armenian villages in the south of Georgia can only be put together so many ways. You have your potholed dirt road, run-down buildings, haystacks, large-brick walls and tin roofs, all clustered together in the middle of nowhere. But then there’s the other side; in each one you don’t feel at all taken aback, overwhelmed; each feels made of the same stuff, so each feels homey. Then there are the little differences. Patara Khorenia has a lake, men washing their Лада cars at the bank on a Saturday afternoon. The nearby (and even closer to Turkey than Ninotsminda is) Orlovka is populated by “Old Believers,” a small sect of Christianity averse to the direction the East and Russian Orthodox churches evolved toward. Still, it’s fascinating that no matter how far out you go, still, there’s that “Enjoy Coca-Cola” sign hanging over the local market.

The other day on the way back from a quick visit to another school in Orlovka, black clouds appeared on the horizon. The kind that actually make you nervous, no matter how many Tucson monsoon seasons you’ve done. Tucson might put on quite the lightning show, but Ninotsminda has it beat on the “oh Jesus, find cover” factor. By the time we returned to Nino, a downpour had begun, but not a drop of rain was falling from these black clouds. Hail. All hail. Golf Balls. Pouring golf balls like the water comes down in Tucson in July. Aghas drove the rest of the length home tree to tree, hoping that a big one wouldn’t dent the roof or shatter the windshield. I love that the entire time, all I was thinking is this will be how I open late September’s blog post. Thanks God; you’ve just furthered the unhealthy self-absorption.

I’ve been teaching now for a week and a half, and it’s exhausting but good work. I’m pretty sure I’ll be working with the eleventh, tenth, seventh, and fifth graders, haven’t yet decided on whether I’ll also pick up the ninth or sixth graders as well. There’s more challenge and more work with the older kids, as I have to cut through the thicket of puberty to get anything in their heads; the flip side though is that there are those few really brilliant ones I’d really like to have a chance to work with before they’re off to university, if they go. If they’re not planning on it, I’d like to get them to the point of reconsidering that, or even applying to an exchange program that’d likely change their lives if they went. I won’t lie, there’s a bit of a saccharin “Dangerous Minds” plot in my dreams here. In all seriousness, though, that time abroad would be a career accelerator that I’m not sure many have thought much about. And it’s not like there aren’t hundreds of ways to study something in America on someone else’s bill. I’d really like to help the strongest ones find a way.

The fifth graders are a blast for mostly the opposite reason; they’re total blank slates with English. I taught them their first English phrases in Cyrillic and the Armenian alphabet, and teach in the class in Russian. They’re still young, so like children all across the world, they’re really loud, but they’re not yet too cool to learn.

We’ve been teaching without a schedule for the past two weeks, as it’s hard to figure out how to allocate the resources the right way in the beginning here. Due to this, I haven’t really been able to plan any lessons; rather I kind of do a tag-team improv thing with my counterpart teachers. It works more often than it doesn’t but it’s really really tiring. The daily process involves me “observing” until something gets really boring from the book and I scramble to come up with a communicative activity to save the day. Hopefully we’ll come up with a structured way of doing this once the schedule is finalized, so I can give my stomach lining and head a bit of a rest.

I’ve had some trouble with discipline lately, and find myself taking to all the tricks teachers have used in my upbringing with mixed results to handle the problems. I’ve had to break up teenage boys, I’ve guilt tripped, I’ve threatened with summoning the principal, but so far my favorite has been just shutting up and standing there. Silence is deafening, and it saves my own voice.

Still, each class has its gem student, and I love teaching to see what they’re capable of. I’m trying to get the eleventh graders comfortable with writing; I want them to start writing what will essentially become journal entries. It’s been an uphill battle to get them to do the homework, but I think eventually I’ll find the right difficulty-challenge level where they won’t mind taking care of it once a week. I have an ulterior motive, prompted by reading a book written by a Peace Corps volunteer in China, who learned tons about his site, Fuling, from the writing assignments of his university students. I hope to keep giving them assignments that kind of open my eyes to how they think and live here. It’s sneaky, but this is the whole mutual learning thing I’m after out here in the boondocks.

As far as family life goes, all’s more or less really well. Host dad and I bicker and laugh as much as always, and I really appreciate all the reality I get to taste. It’s strange to say, but I like hearing my host family get into quarrels, mom yelling at kid over homework, host sister with teenage eyerolls, etc. they’re so wonderfully real. There are people in the village that have begun referring to me as Aghas’s son; not totally sure what I think of that. It’s sweet, but I hope it doesn’t eventually interfere with my independence. Still, I love them all and feel really blessed to live exactly here for two years.

I think I got maneuvered into making burritos for the host family this weekend, the small and agreeable price to pay for bragging about the glory of Mexican cuisine. Hoping I don’t set the kitchen on fire. The nice thing about living in an Armenian village is that we actually have a plentiful tortilla equivalent. Armenian լավաշ (lavash) seems like it’ll make a really nice substitute. Hopefully I can line up an appetite with my time as honorary chef; my desire to eat is so erratic I can barely figure it out. Sometimes I’ll skip an entire meal and find myself starving, putting a Fanta and a Snickers in me between lessons to keep from crashing. Other times I down my weight in bread and cheese (death by հաց և պանիր). I’m sure that’s one of the many things that will eventually stabilize. I miss khachapuri; is that bad?

So starts a new chapter of my life. That carries a number of meanings; beginnings and ends. I no longer live in Khidistavi; I am no longer in Georgia, even though I am in Georgia. I now know full, real, final heartbreak, unfortunately in a way I never knew I would. Still, more importantly, I made it; the roughest part of Peace Corps (or so I am told), the mental boot camp that is pre-service training, is finally over. Though I've yet to begin anything I'd really call work, the past week has been sufficiently rough enough that the rest of this will be a comparative cake walk.

I'll leave most of what happened out of what is essentially a government website viewable to all, including her. Details will remain at a minimum out of respect to the person I at one point deeply loved before this. Chelsea and I are so very, very far beyond over. For the second time she broke my heart, though realistically, though I really should have seen it coming, the signs were all there. Hooray to hindsight. I completely fell apart for a good week and a half; almost to the point of going (or being eventually sent) home. Finally, though, I'm just done. Done.

I'm sorry to all that I alienated, hurt, exhausted, or drove completely nuts all this year over her crap.

That said, new chapter.

I swore in among some of the best friends I've ever had last Friday, the 24th. The ceremony was held at a large, Soviet-ly beautiful theatre in Tbilisi, our oath (the same oath the President recites—moving up in the world, I am) presided over by the American embassy's Charge d'Affaires. Speeches were given, along with the usual song and dance (literally); it was a nice event, marking a fairly important point in my life. I just gave the government two years of my existence. This isn't the army; we can go home any time we want. Still, leaving after this point, having committed to long term development work and real personal relationships in places Americans don't often trek, being THE face of the United States, early departure is basically tantamount to a dishonorable discharge and a guilty conscience court martial.

For all the crap that's gone on in my personal life lately, I'm really, really proud that I made it up to that stage in Tbilisi. I'm in.

Aside from Peace Corps and US Mission staff, our audience was filled with the various training host families, new permanent site host families, and host organization (business, NGO, school) directors. It felt a bit like a second graduation, my host mother Irma and host brother Lasha from Khidistavi in the crowd, as well as my new host father Aghaz and school director Artush, having made the trip all the way from Ninotsminda to see me swear in.

The meeting between host family members during the reception was quite a moment. Remember that I'm serving in an area of Georgia that really doesn't speak Georgian; for my Arizonan friends, I'm working in Georgia's South Tucson. My host father here in Ninotsminda, though very eager to improve (we're talking about starting a Georgian speakers' club here already), doesn't speak very well, his main languages are Russian and Armenian. Irma, my host mother from Khidistavi, speaks comparable Russian; not very well, and Georgian is her first language. So one side says in far-too-fast Georgian how great a person I am, the other says he agrees in far-too-fast Russian, while leaving everyone in the dust (especially me) while sharing a word with my director in doesn't-matter-the-speed-I-can't-freaking-understand-Armenian Armenian.

I'll backtrack for a moment while I'm on my linguistic woe-is-me to say I really did well during training with the Georgian; I'm pretty happy about that. Though I definitely lost steam toward the end, me ukve saertod normalurad vlaparakob qartulad, da me es ena dzalian mik'vars—dzalian saintereso, dazhe lamazia. ukve upro msiamovnebs laparaki qartulad, vidre rusulad. Somkhuri—ekhla es skhva kitkhva, magram praktika aq iqneba. I'm already speaking pretty well in Georgian, and truthfully I actually have more fun using it now than I do my Russian. I managed to hit Intermediate-mid in Georgian, which, considering I only had two months of it, is a promising portent for what may come with Armenian. As of yet I haven't had my eureka moment with it. Still looks like a bunch of typos when I see it written, and it still sounds like a bunch of threatening gibberish to my ears. But, so did Georgian two months ago, and Russian sure as hell did when I was a freshman in college. So I'm sure I'll get over it.

I took a few days to cool down and pick up my psychological pieces in Tbilisi after the Hiroshima-style breakup, so I didn't go down with my host father and director to Ninotsminda. Peace Corps staff was wonderful—they put me up in a hotel near the office and drove Artush and Aghaz all the way back home. I spent the time getting to know the G6 (last year's arrivals) volunteers staying for the weekend, so in its own way that was a lemons-to-lemonade kind of thing.

I've been in Ninotsminda already for six days and am experiencing a bit of the culture shock that comes from having been Georgianized quite efficiently, while the bun is still in the oven as far as Armenianization goes. But I've noticed my frustration waning a bit, and realize that if I just land a tutor for the Armenian, it will come before I know it, all the while as I lean on the Russian to prove I'm not linguistically retarded. A few months and all will be fine. Still, right now, I get pretty cranky pretty quickly, as I try to figure out what the hell is going on each time I hear "Inche! Skuzkuzenk gnatselem hamar voj karogh uzum em haryur vraastanum e! Vostegh! Enkerenere!" (most of these are actual words, some are random sounds I keep hearing and feel like I should know, but don't). Thank god almighty I speak Russkiy.

If there's going to be one big psychological challenge for me it's the remoteness from my closest friends in the group. Since the closest person I had to a sitemate decided to go home, I'm left without anyone nearby—she was to be twenty minutes away in Akhalkalaki. There are a few people in Akhaltsikhe about two hours away, but my nearest good friend is a 7 hour, 17 lari marshrutka ride away up in Gori. That's going to put me on edge. Peace Corps offered me a site change after Colleen left but I really want to try and make it work here in Nino. My host family is positively wonderful and my school is a real diamond in the rough. They say you usually only get two of three things how you want them in a Peace Corps post: family, job, site. So I'm very thankful for having two of them perfect and will give it a very determined and committed shot, which probably just means I'm staying but don't want to say that yet.

The family. This is a great group of people. I swear to god Aghaz and I are going to be an interesting pair for two years; my host father and I jokingly quarrel in that "welcome to the family, go cut the grass" kind of way about 30 times a day. I do something American, thus wrong, or in my own patent OCD Ryder way, and blame it on my American upbringing, and then get a lecture about how I'm ridiculous. I then, being myself, proceed to explain to him that I've been doing this or that my little American neurotic way for 23 years and nothing he can say will convince me to change my behavior, at which point he tells me he will stop feeding me or he'll go out back and get the sickle, which usually proceeds to us fake boxing in the living room, which usually leads to a coffee break and a hell of a lot of laughter. This man is awesome. He's as pushy and argumentative as I am, and you can tell he loves to bother me about my unsettling American ways of doing everything as much as I love unsettling him with them. Hard to put it, but there's just a really fun bond I've got with the guy already. Our relationship is something akin to a constant mutual international noogie.

Marina, the host mother, turns out to not just work for the local Educational Resource Center, but is actually its director. She speaks fluent Georgian (that's a bit out of the ordinary here), and just finished up a "night school" class teaching hopeful future police officers critical conversational Georgian. She's really smart and is positively a great person, and plays along well in my constant spar with Aghaz. Every once in a while I'll just fire a smile about whatever the current topic is—my sandals, the way I eat bread, my distaste for sugar—her way and she'll give me one back. Some kind of "yeah, he thinks I'm crazy for not liking the orange ones either. Knock the brim of his cap…that always works for me."

In general, this is my kind of family: warm, intelligent, happy, and already comfortable making fun of me for all my weird particularities. Basically, I don't at all feel like a doted-on guest, which is SO refreshing. I make the coffee, and tonight I helped Aghaz chop wood out back. I'm still cringing over the teenagers' (Mania and Vladimir) taste in music—mostly russkiy pop, but we've got two years to get used to this. eventually I'll be shamelessly singing along to Via Gra and Ruki Vverkh, and they'll be moping to Elliott Smith in no time.

School doesn't start for another three weeks, but I do have a summer camp to plan (basically after-school day-care style activities). I'm likely going to teach 'em kickball, capture the flag, and play as many games as I can come up with with a bag of water balloons as possible. Dylan, I'm eating my words of polite ridicule about Ultimate Frisbee. I'd get such exotic American sports brownie points if I had a disc and the knowledge of what the hell to do with it to make it "ultimate." Oh well.

So, life is churning around, I suppose a bit more violently lately than normal. Oh well, that's how it works I guess. Having it all happen again is starting to show me that what we had, while not a mistake, was just not right for the long run. We were passing strangers that met on the doorstep to new lives, and that never ends well if you don't admit it.I can immediately throw myself into work, real, productive, bigger than her crap work. That's huge for me. So, I'm really looking forward to tomorrow, when I officially declare my summer "vacation" over.

Awesome. I freaking live in the Caucasus. I just met my first Chechen. Awesome.

I'll write again when I've got more news from the front.

Հաջողություն,

Ryder-jan (Րայդեր ջան).

PS: INTERNET UPDATE: The satellite dish on the net café in Nino broke, so I'm cut off unless I take a cab to Akhalkalaki or quickly use my host mom's computer at work. That said, the new date for internet at home sounds like late September, so get your Skype paraphernalia ready and I'll see you on facebook, as I stalk your profiles while you all sleep. Creepy.

Gamarjobat ojakhs da megobrebs!

It’s been about six weeks and I’ve been positively silent, so I’m starting another letter. I have trouble sometimes deciding what to put in these things, because my day in, day out schedule is pretty monotonous. Still, through the paint of an email writer’s brush, I’ll do my best to make it sound interesting. It’s raining right now in Khidistavi; thank god, because it’s been awfully hot the past week or so. More than 40 Celsius, which really knocks you out without air conditioning or reliable showers and having to dress “business casual” (my Rainbow sandals aren’t getting much mileage).

I’ve actually done quite a lot here since I last checked in with you all in the states. And on second thought, I’ve actually been having quite the interesting month. Peace Corps has finally loosened the reins a bit as we’ve learned enough Georgian to be given some time to do a bit of travel within the country. I’ve discovered I’m doing far better at the Qartuli than expected, had my first taste of teaching in a Georgian classroom, learned much of my permanent site and program assignment, have met with many of my site’s residents and leaders, and am counting the days to being able to work for myself in this country. There have been a few fairly undesirable things that have come my way over these weeks, but I’ll get to those later.

I am really proud to say I found out two weeks ago that I’m doing the best in the group (44 other trainees) as far as my progress in Georgian. We had to hit intermediate-low by the end of our ten week training, and I was the only to do so by our fifth week mid-assessment. I’m ecstatic. My LCF (Peace Corps-ese for language and culture teacher) said she’s had to resist the urge to run around saying “that’s MY trainee! That’s MY trainee!” Needless to say, I’m proud, and have enjoyed the star pupil status, for whatever that’s worth. For all the goofy ways I slip up here and there, and feel like I’m swimming upstream in technical training, it’s good to know I’m excelling somewhere.

Bakuriani and Borjomi

About two weeks ago, Peace Corps set us loose on our first independent travel experience. We’re on a pretty tight leash during training; there’s a 7pm curfew on Saturday and Sunday, the only two days we’re allowed to travel; no overnights. So, getting one weekend to get out to a hotel somewhere and see new scenery on our own became quite the precious experience. Relying on my Russian to get a hotel booked and their location in Gori to research marshrutka (minibus) schedules and rates, my friends and fellow trainees Kelly, Dan, Ellen and Jeremy (after far more deliberation than is worth mentioning here) decided to go explore Bakuriani, a small mountain village. While the weather ended up keeping us indoors the whole day we were there, the guest house and trip there were a load of fun. We convinced a Marshrutka driver to make an early run in that direction off schedule from Gori and arrived in Borjomi to connect with other transport a few hours later. My host father in Khidistavi told me about a passenger train that ran out of Borjomi’s station through the mountains to Bakuriani. As usual, taking a train proved to be a great choice. We really got a chance to appreciate the view on the long climb up, while talking to some interesting people (and fending off the attention of a few unsavory folk). That Russian’s a real mixed bag. I love the conversation but I could spare a few of the …colorful interactions It’s caused. All the same I’m glad to be speaking.

Bakuriani is pretty, but we mostly missed it due to heavy rain; the experience there became a pretty expensive trip for beer and khachapuri on top of a mountain. But we set out the next morning to check out cool, green, beautiful Borjomi, nestled between stretches of lush mountains. This city is home to a famous line of spring water, basically the Arrowhead of Georgia. At any rate the surroundings are very refreshing to a Tucsonan. Above is a photo; neither words, nor this picture, are likely to do it justice.

Gudauri Supervisor Conference

The weekend before last Peace Corps held a conference at an off-season ski resort in the mountain village of Gudauri, at which we would meet our supervisors. The morning of our departure to the north, the remaining 39 volunteers not in the multi-language pilot program learned of their sites, host families, and organization supervisors. Our supervisors were there, waiting for us at the resort, and upon arrival, we took part in a greeting ceremony that resembled something like a Revolutionary War battle’s setup—supervisors lined up on one end of the resort’s yard, trainees in our own travel-frazzled phalanx on the other.

Here I met my soon-to-be boss Artush, the director of Ninotsminda’s Russian school. I have to say it was a moment—there are many of these—where I felt really lucky to have the Russian to fall back on. While many of us were working through frustrating Georgian-English language barriers, here I am, speaking fairly freely with someone who by nature of his community and upbringing speaks fluent Russian as a first language. It was quite a surreal experience to sit during conference sessions in a room of Georgians and Americans, trainees paired with their respective supervisors, at the back of the room, with a PC Georgia staff member translating from Georgian to Russian everything being simultaneously translated to English from Georgian for all the trainees. It was as confusing to understand what was happening in the room as it just was to explain. The polyglot back-and-forth got to be so much that I gave up and started listening only to the Russian translations happening right next to me, occasionally doing some assistance in that for my Armenian supervisor. Having the Russian opens such a door for me; I’ve been able to have a far more “real” experience with people. Sometimes it feels like I’m cheating, but I wouldn’t miss out on the interactions I’ve had for the world. I spent the final night of the conference next to a smoky piano singing old Russian and Georgian songs and showtunes with various piano-playing organization supervisors and nearly our entire language training staff—all the twentysomethings PCG employs for PST. Hell of a staff we have here.

Ninotsminda permanent site visit

I guess one of the biggest events in the past month since I’ve last written (really hard to realize it’s already been a month) has been learning of my permanent site placement. For those of you whom I haven’t told, I’m part of a pilot program Peace Corps and the Georgian government are starting, sending PCVs into areas of Georgia relatively disconnected from the situation in the core. Georgia’s main two ethnic minority groups are from the neighboring Caucasus countries: Armenia and Azerbaijan, mostly populating Georgia’s southern Samtskhe-Javakheti (Armenian) and Qvemo Qartli (Azeri) regions. The problem, among others, for these regions is one of language: the local populations are unable (in some cases) or unwilling (in others) to integrate with mainstream Georgia, and often find themselves far more connected to Yerevan or Baku than with Tbilisi. In fact, Georgian is in many cases a distant third language for the population, behind the national language to which a group keeps, and Russian, which history explains well enough. Our role, in coordination with working with the local communities to improve the condition of English education, is to serve as a sort of conduit through which mutual engagement might start to take place.

I've been learning Armenian for about three weeks now, and though I can barely say a thing in it, it will help a bit when I first arrive at my permanent site. I did, however, get to take a visit for a few days after the supervisor conference, and I'm looking forward to working down in Ninotsminda come September.

Ninotsminda (ნინოცმინდა/Նինոցմինդա) is located far in Georgia’s south, about 15km from the Turkish border, 20 from the Armenian. It’s a different world down there. In a country the size of North Carolina, just about anything that could change about the surroundings from Gori indeed did. The climate is entirely different; I’m far out of wine (and cherry, peach, plum, apple, etc) territory down there; it’s visibly more arid but still looks like a jungle by southern Arizona standards. Much rockier, and it seems that the principal crop is grain, in various forms. Ninotsminda is located past the city of Akhalqalaqi (that’s the Georgian word for Novgorod, for you language geeks out there… akhal = new, qalaqi = city), which is literally in the mountains nearby, kind of located atop a mesa. That’ll be my nearest relatively urban experience, but with a population of 7,000, Ninotsminda, though still something of a village, is no slouch. It has street names, which by my standards makes it a small town.

The population is 98% Armenian, making the Georgian I’m taking right now of little local use. That’s a shame, as I’ve really grown to love speaking. That’ll come eventually with Armenian, but with only two weeks of it, I’ve far too little knowledge of the language to yet be excited about it, though I’m sure that will come. Generally, the population speaks in Armenian by choice, so I’ll need to learn to understand it, but most peoples’ primary language of literacy is Russian, so it will be playing a major part of the next two years of my life.

My school, public No. 2, was recently renovated, so I’m feeling pretty blessed. On an interesting note, the textbooks are not the ones used in accordance with the national curriculum; they’re actually supplied from Moscow. For any of you keeping tabs on Georgian-Russian relations that should be an interesting fact. Non-language classes are taught entirely in Russian. My pedagogue colleagues at the school include one English teacher with whom I’ll be teaching, one Georgian teacher (excitingly, an actual ethnic Georgian), and an Armenian teacher. I’ll start teaching about a week or two after the first day of classes, spending those first weeks observing to get a hold of how things are done there.

During my site visit, I had appointments to meet the sakrebulo (parliament) representative, head of the post office, and police chief, and met and stayed with my future permanent host family, the Zalalians. Just as kind as the Tlashadzes, I was surprised by the differences between Georgian and essentially Armenian home life. For one, strange as it may sound, architecture—I got very used to living on a farm in a Georgian-style house. Georgian houses are set up behind a walled-in courtyard very often, and sometimes break off various rooms into entirely separate structures. The focus seems to be on the yard. Right now, even, I’m typing outside and tend to do all my work at an outdoor table. In Ninotsminda, the designs are again focused on a single building, like an American home. As far as I can tell, the Zalalians eat meals together rather than in a come and go fashion. I was indeed growing to like that casual aspect. Luckily my host mother and father said they have zero problems with me making my own food and coffee or tea, rather than being waited on. That will be very welcome. My host father there joked, “when you finally move down here, we’ll have you out back with the sickle, cutting our grass!” Looking forward to feeling a bit more like a self sufficient human.

About the family: again, I’ll be living with a family of five; two parents, two children, and a grandmother. My host father, Aghasi, is the town’s dentist; the mother, Marina, works for the region’s Educational Resource Center (something of a governmental in-between agent that advises in administrative and legal, and budgetary matters for all these schools, public and private, not fully used to decentralization. They provide advice and assistance, but no direction. As an excellent windfall, she used to teach Georgian, and has to know it for her government job, so she speaks perfectly. We’ve already agreed to speak as exclusively as possible in Georgian. I’ve got a host brother, Vova, and sister, Mania (named after the Grandmother), about Lasha and Vaniko’s ages, respectively. Both will be my students. Vova’s got a bit of an unfortunate taste for 50 Cent and Russian pop. Mania is into gymnastics, and just returned from a camp in Erevan. The mother plays piano beautifully, and is teaching herself guitar. Overall, they seem like an incredible, interesting group of people to spend two years with. I’ll be very happy. As another completely selfish thrill, Aghas told me he’s getting internet (broadband!) sometime in September for the place, and will try to split it off into my room. I’ll actually be in touch again, and will know what’s going on in the world (what’s this about flooding in Tucson?)! Most importantly, everyone seems very grateful that I’ll be there with Peace Corps, which will make my time all the better.

It really seems like Georgia is trying to improve its relationship with the Samtskhe-Javakheti region. It is pouring lots of money into development here, and the currently awful stretch of highway between Akhalkalaki and the next major city, Akhaltsikhe, bare gravel for long stretches, is actually being paved as I type. Looks like it will be done by winter, maybe spring at the latest. This is good for the community, as it might ease access to Tbilisi and Georgia proper in comparison to Erevan (a little competition for goods and services will do nothing but improve everyone’s lot), will help Georgia for much the same reason, and will make my travel life (both business and pleasure) much easier come next spring. I hope to do lots of project work between here and Tbilisi, and would rather not spend all my time on a Marshrutka bouncing through potholes. In general, lots of progress looks like it’s just about to start; I feel very lucky to be here to live as a part of this community at this specific time in history.

That really sums it up as far as travel goes. I had the pleasure of going out to my current host father Alex’s apple orchard last week. Found out he has five hectares of apple trees nearby, and is looking forward to a good harvest in September. I love this picture of him, and had to toss it in.

Finally, the horror of horrors happened. I became the latest statistic on Peace Corps Georgia’s theft numbers. At the university in Gori where we do hub day training, some punk student swiped my mp3 player which had essentially my musical life on it. Considering my use of music as stress release #1, this has been pretty rough. I spent four and a half hours at the police station in Gori filing a report in Georgian, Russian and English, and they said they’ll do all they can to recover it for me. I don’t expect to see it again, but a man can hope. Thank god for the internet when I go to site. NPR streams, here I come.

Training continues, and I’ve had my first experience teaching students during practicum. It’s been great for the most part, very hard at times, and downright embarrassing when I write the occasional lesson plan that crashes in the first five minutes. Live and learn, teach and learn too. I’ll say this: vocabulary is a bajillion times more fun to teach than grammar, phrasal verbs are an educator’s worst nightmare, and the hormones of puberty are the devil incarnate.

Another three weeks until swear in, and I can't wait. Hopefully by the next time I write, you’ll all be seeing me on AIM and Google Talk again. Keep telling me how things are progressing with you—I look forward to the letters. I love you all and miss you tons.

დროებით/արայժմ,droebit/araizhm,

Ryder/Րայդեր/რაიდერ/Райдер

This is really just a post to test formatting of everything for when things get going.