Saturday 15th October
There is an issue, apparently, with the way we are teaching our host children. Maia has been speaking to the school director again about it. Juliet doesn’t know the details just this. She asks me what arrangements I have made and she says that Maia has also spoke to Martin’s director about it. I am livid. More than livid. I ring Martin and he said that he thought it was funny that his school Director had said that he shouldn’t go into the upper school lessons and just stay in the lower school lessons. This, we decided, explained it. Always ready to calm down his hot-headed wife he tells me we will talk about it properly later, we will sort it out, and it will be alright. I am depressed. I have this horrible feeling that this is the beginning of the end of a deteriorating family relationship we will have to change families and move to new schools. Disaster. The mother is just too demanding.
She had been up to the director before because we hadn’t started teaching the girls yet. I had explained to her my intention to do this as soon as I had worked out my timetable as I have potentially long days and wanted to choose the best days, but the language barrier is a big thing. Either way she went and saw the director about this. I was told the director wanted to talk me and I think no matter what age you are, a trip to see the head is always a stomach-churning prospect. That night I had sat down with Maia and agreed a schedule of teaching for the girls and at her request it was from 8 to 9.30, four nights a week, shared by me and Martin. We had been working to this schedule for 2 weeks as agreed, so what could be the problem? The director wasn’t in until the next day and so we could not find out any more information until then.
I didn’t have any lessons until the afternoon the next day so ventured into Kareli all by myself. It is the first time I have been anywhere on my own since we arrived. I was on the search for cartridges for the printer. You have no idea how much of a task this was. There are 3 stationary shops in Kareli and the first one sent me to the one across the road. Next thing I know, the first shop owner is there and when I have no luck, walks me to the third shop. This shop is closed so we wait a while and then I suggest we find out the marshukta times out of town. I am excited by this as you know, I am always looking for the great escape and in particular the times to Borjomi. My co-teacher had given me a list of destinations that go through this spring water town and told me I could get one in Kareli. This is not the case after all. FFS! Anyway for good measure I get the times to Gori and Tbilisi so I am happy. Shopkeeper goes back to his shop and I wander through the little town looking for something exciting. I wander through the Chinese shop (owner is Chinese) and look at small back packs which I think will be useful for our weekend jaunts. (At the moment we pack minimal overnight stuff into an A5 size carrier back and put it into my handbag haha). I resist the urge to buy another scarf just for spending’s sake and then go back to the first stationary shop and spend quite a bit of money on a large Georgian / English dictionary and some large bits of paper to make a display.
Money is tight in the family, we have been on rations of fried spam omelettes and frankfurters, plus the staple of cheese, tomatoes and khachapuri of course. My mind turns back to the family problems again. We’ve all been there with the money thing, it is a misery when you just don’t have enough, so I bought a dozen eggs, 2 chickens and a box of fairly expensive cakes. No idea if it was value for money, but the chickens were on the scraggy side and smallish at £3 each. Expensive by Georgian salary.
On my way back to catch the marshukta home I am reminded that without the luxury of a car, you just can’t buy any volume of items as you have to carry it and walk for half an hour to catch the bus. On the way I stop at the third computer, using my newly purchased dictionary to aid comprehension but there is nothing there. I am advised to go to Tbilisi. I pop into the ERC which stands for the Educational Resource Centre. This is a gross misrepresentation as the day before I’d heard a rumour that you could print at these places and get materials for school displays, but they don’t actually have any stock! So with my new enquiry “How do I get ink for the printer I have just bought without going to Tbilisi?” I go in person. If you can imagine a Town Hall that was built in 1930 that has had no maintenance work done on it for 20 years you will have some idea of what this looks like. It has the feel of an abandoned building, but after trying a couple of doors, I am lead to a modern office on the other side, well it has a computer and a couple of desks – expectations are low here! After an hour, google attempts, 4 people, (one who also happened to be in the 3rd stationary shop), 4 phone calls I finally am put through to the co-ordinator who will find out if there is anywhere available in Gori, I just have to text her the printer number.
When I arrive at the marshutka stop there is an empty minibus with no driver. I wait for 15 minutes and no-one shows so I catch a taxi back to the village straight to the house. I leave my food offerings on the table and go to school. It is such hard work to do the simplest things. We should’ve got the ink when we were in Tbilisi, just couldn’t be arsed to cross over a busy road to the shop. I have learnt my lesson! What it means is that we cannot make the resources we wanted to without the printer for 2 weeks! We can write stuff by hand but that defeats the whole point of buying the printer in the first place.
At school, the first thing I do is to go to the director to see what the problem is with the family. I explain that I have set up lessons 4 times a week for an hour and a half but that the children are often too tired to study after 9 o’clock and want to finish after the hour. I stress that it is not us who are too tired but them and that is the reason we stop early. Nino and Khatia are called down to the office and I am none the wiser as to the conversation that is had other than Nino says she isn’t tired. Khatia looks sheepish. I suspect what is happening is that when Maia asks why they are finished at 9 instead of 9.30 they are saying it is because we are tired and not them.
Discussing this with Martin later that evening we went through the reasons why Maia and Beso (well Maia let’s face it) is unhappy as it is clear it cannot be just because we have finished the lesson a bit early and we conclude it is because we are not mixing with the family enough. This is a really big issue in Georgia and one which is a problem with many host families and that is the amount of time that is spent with the host family. In Georgia, they don’t like to be alone at all and do not understand why you would want to. We of course like to spend time on our own and with each other on our own and since we started at school a month ago we have tended to spend time with the family only at meal times during the week and have been away at the weekend. This isn’t all down to us, in fact we have felt increasingly unhappy about it ourselves. The problem is that there is no communal area to sit other than the dining room table. The lounge is 40 feet long and divided into two by an archway, with one part with a settee and chairs and a piano and the other room is Beso and Maia’s bedroom which serves as the TV room with 2 small armchairs. No-one uses the lounge room. In the summer we sat on the porch in a much more informal way but with the cold weather and no heating in the house we have come home from school and got into bed fully clothed because we were that damned cold. With seven of us in the house it has been difficult to find a space we can all sit comfortably and warmly together.
They have now installed a gas fire in the kitchen and so we cancelled our weekend trip, blaming it on the weather and as there is also a powercut, spend the evening in the kitchen teaching the girls how to sing “Yesterday” with the laptop on battery and Martin wrote out two copies of the words for them. When the power is returned a couple of hours later we carry on listening to music on the laptop. Martin and Beso watch dubbed episodes of the “A” team in the unheated lounge on the two arm chairs while Maia lays in the bed. I sit outside in the kitchen with Khatia going through “Now 72” and “Now 76”. Neli and Nino go to bed. Peace reigns once more and everyone is happy.
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