Good news: I figured out how to walk between my and Mitch’s
villages
Bad news: I wasn’t trying to end up in Mitch’s village
Here’s the full story:
Since I don’t have class Mondays and Fridays, Tamo asked if
I would be willing to occasionally go to her other school when I have time.
There’s not much else to do around here, and my friend Brett teaches with Tamo
at the other school, so I agreed to go with her.
Brett and Tamo teach at the Jumati School, where Tamo’s
father is the Directori (school principal). He was in the old man posse that
picked us up in Tbilisi.
The school day went by pretty smoothly, and I got a chance
to see what it is like to teach the upper grades (8,9,10) since Tamo only has
one young class (1st grade) at that school. I particularly enjoyed 8th
grade since Brett’s twin 13-year old host sisters, Nino and Nana, are in that
class. They and their two other friends, Nino and Nini, like to give Brett a
hard time. He sasses them back, but it’s 4 versus 1. I quite enjoy this
dynamic.
One thing that stuck out is how ridiculous the textbooks
here can be sometimes. We read a text profiling an actress who lives in Dallas
with her professional soccer player husband. The text states that she has a
house with 6 bedrooms and 7 bathrooms, and that her personal shoe collection
has anywhere from 300-400 pairs of shoes. This does NOT seem like an
appropriate text for kids learning English as a second language. Our students
live in remote villages where they are lucky to have one indoor bathroom, and
the electricity still goes out whenever it feels like it.
After school we briefly stopped by Brett’s house where I got
to meet his host mom. She made some scrambled eggs and sausages, insisting we
eat before walking to my house. We would later be very thankful for this fact.
So yes, back to the walking story. Tamo had told us that it
was a 3km walk between Brett’s house and mine. Wanting to gain a better
understanding of the local geography and how to get from one village to
another, we decided it would be a good idea to learn how to make this walk.
It sounded simple enough. “Walk to the bridge. Take the left
fork. Go 3km from there. Ask people along the way if you want.” Easy. Great!
We should have remembered Mitch’s earlier wisdom: the only
things that are ‘easy’ in this country are getting muddy and being late. If we
had thought about it, we probably would have realized that part of the whole
‘being late’ thing is likely due to ‘being lost’ a considerable amount of the
time.
Needless to say, we apparently did not walk the way that
would simply take us from Brett’s village to mine. We eventually stumbled onto
the paved road (long after we should have been at my house), which we
recognized, hoping that we were close.
As we rounded the bend, we saw the road sign indicating that
we were leaving Ninoshvili. We both did a double-take. Ninoshvili. Mitch’s
village. How on Earth did we get HERE???!!??
We called Mitch to see if he could point us the right way
from there, so he dashed from his house out to the main road to help us. He
joined us for about 30 minutes, but decided to take his leave as we reached the
base of a large hill and finally stumbled upon the sign for my village, Etseri.
At the top of the hill was my school. A shining beacon
letting us know that we were no longer lost. After climbing the hill and
walking the additional ~15 minutes to my house, we finally made it to our
destination after ~2.5 hours of walking.
My host dad drove Brett home later that evening. We tried to
pay attention to see if we could figure out where we went wrong. Turns out we
were on the wrong road from the very beginning. There were also enough twists
and turns, that we doubt we would have been able to find it even if we had
started in the correct direction.
Brett has since learned how to walk to my house, but it
still takes him about 45 minutes and seems longer thank 3km. I guess distance
is relative in the villages!
My solution? Use my house as a meeting place from now on.
Works like a charm.
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