A few weeks ago my host aunt passed and now her memory lives on in the living room. Her picture sets gently against the wall, near the television separated by a small barrier of religious icons. Above her photo is the calendar and just above that is a clock. It’s a sobering sight if you really think about it.
A small flame, fueled by oil, illuminates her ominous glare and is refilled every so often. Perhaps she is peering at the couch, draped in a thin carpet, no doubt worn from its constant use or maybe she is examining the woodstove that’s next to the couch, which we moved inside while she spent her last hours bedridden. It too burns constantly and does wonders for the downstairs however the heat that it generates slowly escapes through the cracks that litter the walls before the heat can ever grace the upstairs.
On the woodstove sits a metal cooking pot that is filled to the brim with water, slowly evaporating throughout the day. I’m forced to arrive at the conclusion that this is done to provide a degree of humidity in the house, but to be honest, I’m not terribly sure. The woodstove reheats our food and keeps are coffee warm, the clothes strung around it dry much faster than they would if left to the late autumn winds that will soon turn frigid.
Everyone in the village is sick. The boys and girls fill the classrooms with an ever present soundtrack of coughs and sneezes. Giorgi, the young man who lives behind us has also been courting a cough. The men of the Urbnisi are walking slower, their endless rounds of playing dominoes now a distant memory paired with pangs of the suns warmth and the refreshing breezes of the summer. My co-teacher has been sick for the past two weeks and it was only on Friday when I pressed upon her my medication that she said in a futile tone that it was useless. I asked her if she had grip or the flu but she shook her head muttering only “pregnant.”
Yes it seems that the coming winter is bringing along all sorts of surprises and you cannot doubt its path when you see the newly fallen snow dusting the tips of the Trialeti Mountains in the distance. But besides death, pregnancy and illness the season has proven to inspire some new sort of creativity amongst the children in the village. To give an example of such a few weeks ago in my 6th grade class I gave an assignment. The children know, or are at least aware of certain nouns in English: boy, van, man, nut, orange, bag and what have you. Their academic exercises for a painstakingly long period of time have been reading passages from the text, mainly “Look! It is a car. It is blue,” and so forth.
It’s the same format every time and so the assignment was this: I put a list of nouns on the board and distributed plain, white sheets of paper (something of a rarity here) and informed them that they could draw a picture of any of the words that were written on the board and colour it. The catch was that the below the picture they had to write: “Look is a... It is...” The only other stipulation to this was that they had to write “My name is…”
This went over well. Give them the opportunity to draw, yet alone colour something and you are basically guaranteed their full compliance. We collected their assignments and at the end of the class began to grade them.
One stood out from among the rest. It was a drawing of what has to be a Tyrannosaurus Rex (the jury is still out about this in the teachers lounge) and this prehistoric monster was unique in three ways: it was completely coloured red, slightly deformed and I assume quite old since it had only a few strands of hair. The artist’s name was Nika although you would never know it because beneath the balding dinosaur was written at a slanted angle: “my name is DOG”. To say that my presence here is making a difference, I feel that after this performance, that statement is justifiably open to speculation.
Besides creativity, curiosity is also beginning to blossom as well. That small light of remembrance posed just below the photo of my late host aunt has attracted the fleeting attention of the two young boys whom I share the house with. This I have found to be surprising, since they have discovered the high pitch voice of Spongebob Squarepants, and having done so they have made it quite apparent that nothing else is worthy of their audience. It was just a few days ago that Vajiko, the 1st grader and I discovered that tweezers were flammable. He discovered well because he lit them on fire and I discovered this after I saw him marching around the living room with a two pronged torch. Soon after his revolution was put down he began to light small pieces of paper. The following night it was a small stick, which he pretended was a cigarette. Finally two nights ago the eldest of the two boys, Amirani, slightly impressed by Vajiko’s discovery, attempted to make popcorn with a small cornel of corn pinched by the tweezers and set directly in the heart of the monument to his late aunt.
The tweezers caught fire before the notorious “pop” sound could have happened and he could feel his finger tips growing warmer. A small shriek bellowed out from his throat and the piece of corn and the tweezers landed in a dusty pile of books and soon the laughter in the room fell into an awkward silence. The family rushed towards the literature that was now without a doubt lost and Amirani fled into the opposite direction. The stamping of feet could be heard and a jug of water was rushed over and as the water turned the ashes to a thin mud a small pop could be heard.
But I grabbed the tweezers before this could happen, dooming his culinary experiment. He frowned disapprovingly at this change itinerary and slumped back into the chair, fiddling between his fingers the small remainder of the corn, plotting some other adventure. His aunt’s photo just stared.
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