More News From Urbnisi (II)

            One night this month the televisions in all of the houses announced in union that there would be snow this upcoming Sunday.  Immediately this stirred conversation.  Could it be that winter would come so soon?  

            Throughout the week the paths that run in between the households were sporadically blocked by piles of wood.  The cars, no matter how clever their drivers were, could find no way around them and began to make detours.  The local mshtrutka was not in the least pleased by this change in traffic.  It was about as big of a panic that I can imagine the village finding itself in.   

           Yet everyday life still continued and the kids after school kicked their footballs and ran about doing whatever kids do.  The older kids, the ones fortunate enough to have a computer, lurk inside their living rooms and play video games.  All the students have the same video games; they lend them to one another and copy them onto their computers.  Whether that’s legal or not is another matter, hardly worth enforcing since the games are all pirated anyways.  Yet when they have issues with these games they typically wait outside for me to pass and drag me inside to fix whatever issues they are encountering.

            Besides being kidnapped this week to help an 18 year old play some American Civil War game I was stopped by other students who either have a unique sense of curiosity or are just desperate for conversation.  They stopped me, on my way home from school, to point out to me a tractor.  It was a blue and large, quite rusty and drives up and down the main route in the village everyday accomplishing those feats that only tractors can accomplish.  I’m not entirely sure as to what that is but no matter… 

            “Mike, do you love tractor?” asked the little boy anxiously, his eyes gleaming up as if his happiness for the next few days depended on my answer.

           

“Yes, of course.”

            “Mike, this tractor Belarus,” he responded.

            “Really?  A Belarus tractor?”

            “Yes.  Belarus.  It is good tractor.  You like?”

            “Yes.  Very much.”

           

            He wasn’t alone and they all began jeering and clapping.  Perhaps this is some strange joke or perhaps this really is a cause for celebration.  A few days later however, I noticed something slightly odd in the class room.  It was in the early afternoon and we had just finished with one exercise and there was a brief moment of silence.  Then from the distance the sputtering noise could be heard and the sound of the rough engine got closer.  Their eyes peered dreamily out the window, as they always do when there is a sound or movement and as the tractor approached one raised his hand and asked, “Mike do you love tractor?”

            “Yes I do.”

            “You like tractor Mike?” he asked again, attempting to confirm my appreciation for the blue smoke sputtering monster.

            “Yes.  I drive tractor.  I have many tractors.  I love tractors.”  These words just came out attempting to deflect or rather deflate any upcoming questions regarding the tractor.  And then the inevitable:

            “Mike this tractor Belarus.”

            I acted stunned.  “Belarus,” I stammered.  “There is no way.”  The suspense was built and the class reacted so.

           So far the issue of the Belarusian tractor has died down.  Its luster no longer delivers classroom prate and this is why.  The students have discovered an internet tractor game.  It is the rage.  Out of all the things that the internet offers the tractor game seems to be the cream of the crop.  Thus a war has been sparked between the young and the adolescents, the tractor game versus Spongebob Squarepants.  It’s a daily battle filled with screams and tears and then more screaming.  But that’s ok, because at least they’ve stopped playing with fire.

More News From Urbnisi

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 6^th 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 1^st 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.

Urbnisi

            As of now I’m residing in a small village in the Shida Kartli region of Georgia.  To be more specific it is part of the municipality of the city of K’areli and is called Urbnisi.  It is actually closer to Gori, the home of the infamous Ioseb Dzhugashvili, aka Stalin.  Yes, Stalin was a Georgian and while after some debate that he was part Ossetian it has been held pretty firmly that he was indeed Kartveli.  So far I haven’t tried to bring the topic up but somehow it always seems to surface and it is a 50/50 gamble of encountering someone here who likes him.  This is just a matter on how you view history.

The View From My Balcony/Entrance

            Regardless, Urbnisi, after asking around is a village with a population of 500 families.  That’s about as accurate as it gets.  Most websites don’t have the population number so I just have to accept the local’s testimonies.  A typical family here is somewhere between 3 and 8 people.  So let’s just settle for around 2,500 – 3,000.  I guess it is easier to say 500 families. 

            We have the works.  Satellite TV.  Fig trees.  Hundreds of grape vines.  Chickens.  A teasing internet connection.  Electricity.  Mineral water that comes from the well.  Cows.  Sheep.  Several congresses of dogs.  Volley ball, sans net.  Turkish toilets.  Practically every kind of mutated fruit that exists.  We even have a tona/toona, where we make our bread.  Our roads are more like paths and every morning brings new gifts from cows that have escaped.

In The Far Left Corner Is This Stone and Steel Oven Where We
Make Our Bread.  A Fire Is Set In the Center and Rests About A
Meter Below.  The Dough Is Slapped On The Sides and Cooks.

            Urbnisi hosts a church built in 600 A.D.  The village rests along the banks of the river Mtkvari or Kura (the Russian name) which apparently, after some rather recent investigation runs from around Kars, Turkey to Baku on the Caspian Sea, thereby dividing Georgia (Sakartvelo) into two.  The fact that it originates from a lake in Kars does not quite make sense to me, but oh well.  Essentially it would have to flow northeast then just east for the rest of the way until heading slightly south.  In Urbnisi there is a bridge, and while that seems to be a generous word for what it actually is I experienced something far cruder and suicidal in Borjomi (just wait for that post, its coming, I promise), that you can cross to get to the other side.  There after about a kilometer you get to some train tracks and a stop that the train doesn’t stop for but certainly continually toots its horn around 3,00am just to let you know you’ve missed it.  The train itself is the Tbilisi-Gori-Batumi Train and as its name suggests those are its only stops.  Which leads me to wonder why there is a platform complete with office near my village on the train tracks.  I haven’t made it across the tracks but desire to, for across it is the Trialeti Mountain Range.  

            There is no actual postage system here probably because there are no street signs of any kind, nor addresses yet alone any form of a mail box.  Perhaps an even bigger issue is that there are no roads, but once again just our humble, cow explored paths.  This is how the mail system works:  a mshrutka (I may have spelt that wrong) pulls over as someone hails it (which they do by sticking their arm out, pointing towards the ground).  The deathtrap on wheels pulls over quickly, dodging whatever is in its way and the driver, who may be either on the left or right side, sticks his head out the nonfunctioning window and they start talking.  Then the driver turns down the music and they start talking again.  The person hands them a package and some money which can either go to another stop or a postal office.  When the bus of thrills encounters its stop it just pulls over and gives it to someone who is waiting for it.  It works, I’ve personally been witness to it.

            My host father/dad Shamil (Shamyl) works in the fields with the other men all day while his wife takes care of the two boys.  There is an elder woman who lives with us, well actually possibly two but I’m not positive and then there is a girl who comes by and occasionally stays the night but I think she lives a few streets over.  Although I guess she could be living here and just stays there a few nights out of the weeks.  Not quite sure…

            No matter, they buy about two kilos of tomatoes a week, make their own wine in enormous batches and we just have a ton of food.  But no refrigerator.  That too might also be a mistake.  I think there is one (it looks like one of those that 7/11 sells ice cream out of) but I’ve never seen anything in it but the occasional water melon.  Our staples are bread (p’uri), tomatoes (pomidori), and salt.  After that it changes.  For instance two days ago we had something that went along like this:  8 eggs beaten and mixed with flour.  A few zucchini’s that were shaved, mixed together with the batter only to be friend on the stove in sun flower oil and created a pan cake like thing that was awesome.      

            This week my host mother’s sister, Nino, came from Italy.  She speaks Russian, Georgian, Italian, Spanish and French although you wouldn’t know any of this because she only permits herself to speak Italian which really doesn’t help anyone at all.  The two boys, Amirani and Vejikko (whom Shamil calls “terrorist”) can speak some English but they refuse out of fear of making a mistake, a cultural thing.  Finally Irma (whose name I undoubtedly typed wrong) speaks some English, native Georgian and Russian.  Shamil speaks both Russian and Georgian and knows some English.  As you may or may not know after 2008 the Russians are not particularly well liked here so speaking Russian is a no-no.  However after exhausting ourselves with charades and bumping our heads in the language barrier too many times sometimes we revert to language of the great bear up north.

            Naturally since Nino has been here evening and morning tea has turned into multiple rounds of espresso, all sorts of Italian sausage and cured meats, cookies etc. 

            We have a few neighbors but two in particular stand out.  There is Batcho, who gives me grapes and constantly asks me to drink.  Then there is this one guy, who is quite older and only talks to me in Armenian, sometimes a word or two in Russian.  I’ve asked around and apparently he’s not Armenian so I have no idea as to what triggers this.  The only thing he’s ever said to me in English is “trashy” and that accompanies with hand gestures towards my crude facial hair.   

            Whenever I go east, perhaps to Gori, Tbilisi or to wherever looks interesting on a map, I pass at least three installments of refugee camps for those who fled the 2008 August War out of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.  These were built by the US.  I haven’t any photos of them currently but I’ll get some soon.  But that’s a topic for another time…I'll put up more photos of things soon but be patient, it took 3 hours to upload 4 photos.