Go Go Guria!

Throughout orientation, there was much speculation over placements, despite the fact that it was totally beyond our control. Finally, the day before we were to be dispersed all over the country, we found out our placement information!

Mitch and I have been placed in Guria, which is apparently considered to be the “back woods” region of Georgia. Some of the things people said about our region include, “oh the people are so nice, but they are like the rednecks of Georgia,” and “if a crazy person escapes an insane asylum and goes to Guria, you won’t catch him because you won’t be able to tell the difference.”

Guria is in Western Georgia, and has a subtropical thanks to its proximity to the Black Sea. Luckily this means that the climate should be fairly similar to that of North Carolina, with limited snow.

Five of the volunteers from my group (Mitch and me included) have been placed in villages not far from the town of Lanchkhuti. My village is called Etseri (grouped together with Jurukveti, apparently, because I work at Jurukveti Public School) and Mitch’s is called Ninoshvili.

The end of orientation was gloriously awkward as it involved host families and/or school representatives coming to pick us up from Tbilisi to take us back to our regions. Nothing like a multi-hour car ride with strangers who don’t speak your language!

The meet and greet went a little something like this: timid volunteers on one side of the hotel lobby, with eager Georgians on the other, facing one another as our names were read one by one and we were introduced to our hosts.

For those of us in the Lanchkhuti district of Guria, our school representatives came to pick us up in a big passenger-van (or “Marshutka” as it’s called here). We secured our luggage to the roof of this van. Melody would have been freaking out at this point. Then we piled in – five TLG volunteers, five old Georgian men (our school principals), and a young guy who is a Marshutka driver in Lanchkhuti.

We began our journey by promptly going the exact opposite direction of where we needed to be going, eventually making it back to the hotel in Tbilisi after an hour of being lost and asking directions every 2 minutes. This segment of the trip is also known as our accidental visit to Rustavi (which we’ve dubbed the Compton of Georgia, for the record).

Since we hadn’t had any lunch and clearly wouldn’t be making it to Guria until late at night, we decided to snack on Mitch’s stash of Kashi granola bars while the old man had all jumped out to argue about and ask directions. Mitch, being the painfully considerate person that he often is, suggested that we save some of the granola bars to offer to the old guys.

Ever the obedient one, when they climbed back in, I tried offering them the 2^nd half of my granola bar. The three men behind me understood the pantomime and declined without incident, but for some reason the one next to me and Michelle was less skilled in charades and felt the need to call his daughter, who also happens to be my co-teacher, to translate. It went something like this:

Me: “Oh, it was nothing really, I was just trying to offer him a piece of my granola bar.”

Her: “What? Can you repeat? Can you speak more slowly? I am having trouble hearing and understanding.”

Me: “Oh, sorry! I just was trying to share my food with him.”

Her: “Oh, you want food?”

Me: “No, no! I don’t need food, I have food. I have food, and I wanted to share with him.”

They then spoke to one another again in Georgian and when he handed the phone back to me, she told me:

Her: “He says thank you, but you will be stopping at a restaurant in a few hours and then you can have food.”

At this point, it was still unclear to me whether she understood that I wasn’t asking for food.

A bit later, we stopped at a roadside fruit stand. The men bought apples and Churchkhela (a traditional Georgian dessert/snack of nuts and dried fruits on a string, covered in boiled grape juice mixed with flour to create a protective coating. The result looks like a wax candle, so Mitch appropriately calls them ‘nut candles’) while we took pictures of the massive double rainbow that had appeared.

When we got back in the van, the men insisted we eat the apples and Churchkhela, and I couldn’t help but think that my earlier communication issue may have either inadvertently or passive aggressively goaded them into buying us food. I blame Mitch!

Probably an hour or so later, we stopped at a restaurant. The men spoke with the woman at the counter, and a massive feast was delivered to our table. We had bread, cheese, cucumbers, onions, tomatoes, skewers of delicious meat, and some grapes they had bought at the fruit stand (there doesn’t appear to be any concept of a ‘no outside food or drink’ policy thus far in Georgia).

Then came the vodka! We were given shot glasses and so that we could participate in a number of toasts (to us, to Georgia, to the dead, to love, to friendship, etc). Even though most of us wanted to be done with the vodka shots after the 2^nd one, how can you decline a toast to the dead? We ended up taking ~6.5 shots each. Thank goodness for the bottles of pear soda on the table that we were able to use as a chaser!

In the middle of these festivities, another group of TLG volunteers came in to the same restaurant. This group had about 20 people crammed on a Marshutka headed for the Adjara region (directly south of Guria). In a wonderful twist of irony, our old men forced one of the guys from this other group to participate in one of our rounds of shots, and he happened to still be hung-over from being a drunk asshole throughout the entire orientation (despite the fact that we had been asked repeatedly to not drink since the training week was considered to be paid work for us).

After this feast, the other volunteers took the opportunity to use the bathroom before piling back into the van, but I declined. I honestly didn’t feel like I needed to go, but I also suspected that these facilities were not ones that I would want to use. I just wasn’t ready to give up the cushy Western style bathroom habits I had been enjoying at the hotel in Tbilisi (the other volunteers later confirmed that I was right).

A little over an hour later, I was regretting that decision as the 6+ vodka shots had worked their way through my system. I needed to go to the bathroom, but I didn’t want to be THAT girl. Around this time, we hit a traffic jam, and the men decided to hop out of the car to stretch their legs. I saw a sign for a Gulf gas station nearby that said it had a “WC”, so I mentioned that I needed to make a bathroom stop. One of the guys called some English speaker just to tell me over the phone that they would stop at the next available place for me to use the toilet… embarrassing. Then the traffic started moving, so we had to frantically run back into the van, and one of the old guys had to pull the door back open and make a running leap back into the car because we almost left him! Everyone found this hilarious. It would have been funnier to me if I weren’t still doing the pee pee dance in my seat and worrying about what type of bathroom we would be stopping at.

The Gulf gas station was indeed the next stopping point. I brought Michelle into the bathroom with me to make me look less silly. The bathroom was super clean and Western style!!! There were, however, no doors on the stalls, so I told Michelle that her company was no longer needed. Best surprise ever for a roadside stop in the middle of nowhere in Georgia. Looks like being “that person” paid off.

A few hours later, we pulled off into a gas station between two forks in the road. Apparently this is where we were parting ways.

My host father arrived a moment later to take me back to his house where the family was waiting with a nice dinner, complete with more toasting. I was still quite full and uninterested in alcohol thanks to our earlier feast, so I was only able to eat a little bit. Luckily for me, they gave me chocolate liqueur instead of vodka, so I was able to take just small sips for the toasts.

At the end of the dinner, I was shown upstairs to my room, which is actually my own entire floor, with an external staircase. I gratefully fell asleep the moment my head hit the pillow.