Scouting for Georgians

Wednesday 7^th March 2012

The first time we went back to mass this year there was a new guy with a lovely tenor voice singing in the choir.  Del, from Nebraska, USA, was really friendly and was going to be here until June working with the Universities on behalf of the Georgian Government.  I felt a bit sorry for him and assumed he was probably a bit lonely and didn’t know very many people, invited him for dinner at our place and very nearly invited him to a pancake / cookie bake out that was occurring in ‘Friends Hostel’ the following week to celebrate pancake day (albeit a little late!). 

However it turned out that I was completely wrong and that he has a very busy schedule and in fact was introducing Martin and I into his community of friends and acquaintances.  We were invited to three events in the same week. 

On the Saturday after the pancake do (it would have not been the place to invite him lol) we went to his place and he had cooked a range of delicious curry dishes for some Georgian friends and another visiting American working with the Government to implement health policies regarding non-communicable diseases, particularly cancer.  In Georgia, while the rate of cancer is not higher than other countries, the mortality rate is extremely high.  This is because detection is too late for treatment.  For men, lung cancer is the killer – due to heavy smoking and industrial pollution and for women it is breast cancer.  There is little in the way of health education here or prevention here and no after-care.  Women are not educated about examining their breasts and if they do find a lump, they don’t come forward because of cost and also are afraid that if they lose a breast their husbands will leave them for another woman.  There is no reconstruction surgery either and little in the way of prosthesis so that women can have a normal shape when wearing clothes.  Women tend to stay at home and not socialise because of this and the sense of shame they feel about their situation.  There is of course no money to be made in health prevention and the health service here is not government funded. 

After this we went to a Scout meeting.  Del is a link up kind of guy and has a big interest in the youth of the country and so at 10 o’clock that night the scouts of the Tbilisi Pack were linked up with the Scouts in Lincoln University Nebraska for a mutual sharing of information.  “What do you like to do?”  “What do you want to do when you leave school?”  “How many brothers and sisters do you have?”  It is worth mentioning again about the Soviet mind-set which doesn’t question or use initiative.  In truth, maybe it is too late to change the way many of the adults think in Georgia but by teaching children leadership skills and giving them the opportunity to see that other parts of the world really do exist with real people not just something that is seen in movies this will help them to expand their horizons.  The Scouting movement (boys and girls) is one small part of this process.

In the same vein I attended another event last week which was celebrating civic activities with students in Tbilisi schools.  This is another program which encourages students to think about the needs of the community, to plan a course of action and to carry it out.  There is no culture of volunteering in Georgia and the people have been trained to be passive and to follow instructions and not think so again this is an important part of training young people to actually start thinking and questioning for themselves.  Students had set up displays of the activities they were involved in which included helping at an orphanage and also an investigation into the problems that wheelchair users face in trying to get around in Tbilisi.  While they may not solve the problem the fact that they are even thinking is a huge step forward.  The highlight of the event was as a finale, a young girl sang “I care” by Beyonce.  It brought several tears to my eye.