Life is Busy and the Days are Good

Tbilisoba, the giant City Festival, had the city covered in events and activities a few weekends ago. I stopped by the park to check out the various performances, which included the Air Force Band, traditional dances, opera, trampoline and tumbling, gymnastics, and kids theater. I also browsed the endless stalls selling everything from wigs to dresses to felted animals to drinking horns and honey, and delighted in the fantastic smells of the rows of tents selling meats, cheeses, breads and more. It's a cool event celebrating the culture and history of this thousands-year-old city and country. Also, the dances are intense.

check out the guy in the middle - he danced the whole thing on his toes and leaping in the air

a little taste of home abroad

The NGO I'm working with put on its 2nd Annual Volunteer Conference a week or so ago, and it was all organized by the Volunteer Coordinators. This is one of the capacity building techniques that the last PCRV put into place - create a position tier of volunteer coordinators who are the most organized and motivated of the volunteers, and give them responsibilities and underlings. I don't know how it went last year, but it seemed to go off pretty well this time around, and they did a debrief afterwards to see where they could have done better and what they can do the next time around. Every time I see a monitoring method in place, or I get someone to translate during a meeting or training and find that they are asking critical questions, analyzing responses and looking at the future, I am pleasantly surprised. Spending two years without even the most basic structures in place and education not reaching past sixth grade focused my trainings on an extremely basic level, and I have to keep reminding myself that these people are university students or graduates, and they've had many more trainings than I. What I can bring, I suppose, is a different perspective, a lifetime of exposure to different organizations and a different culture, which sometimes is useful and sometimes isn't. Trying to get audience participation at the Volunteer Conference was an epic failure, but mixing and matching and inventing our own trainings has worked well in the five-day radio journalism workshop. I wasn't sure how it would work for me to give two sessions through a translator, but the participants seemed engaged and active. They spent the last hour working through ideas on how to create short radio shows on Georgian/Abkhazian history and culture to give context to the personal stories they will be sharing throughout the week and coming months. My lack of language makes it hard to judge, but I'm pretty happy with the way things are going so far. It's exciting because this is a training that I helped design and the staff are implementing and making their own, and it's working.

finishing up the Youth Volunteer Conference

The rain pushed me into the bookstore to dry off and get some tea (side note, I think I might buy the third Harry Potter in Georgian just because, and all of the covers make a landscape of Hogwarts if you line up the spines, which is awesome) (side side note, my computer corrects hogwarts to Hogwarts...which means that it classifies it as a real word! Or maybe I've just written it enough times that my computer has resigned itself to its use. Either way, Harry Potter FTW.) Hanging in the bookstore led to a chance meeting with an Azerbaijan RPCV teaching English here and applying for grad school. Later we added a Mongolia RPCV and his Australian girlfriend taking the long route back home after COS. Peace Corps people are awesome. Our takeaway about the similarity between Mongolia and El Salvador? In retrospect we had great experiences, but not ones to repeat or even necessarily recommend to others. El Salvador has its security issues and mosquitoes, Mongolia has its isolation and weather, but you never know how much you can take or how fondly you will look back on it until you've lived it. Despite their problems, at least both still have a program - the Azerbaijan program got shut down when the government dissolved its memorandum of understanding with the organization. The hardship part fades pretty quickly from my mind. I don't know if this is a survival mechanism or just a generally optimistic nature, but it means that I look back pretty happily on my service (except the double dengue part - that will never be ok) and think pretty highly of my fellow volunteers and counterparts. But really, I'm just thrilled that I actually met new people and had good conversation with them. I didn't initiate either of the conversations, but I engaged. Social progress is good. Also, it was great to talk about interesting things that do not involve whether I am married and why I am not married. Whether or not we can eat hot dogs, political and economic instability, and even grad school plans are much more fun. Now I just have to remember to balance the conversation and ask as many questions as I answer. I can't learn from my own stories, so I need to make sure to ask others about theirs and let them expose their opinions so I can learn and expand my own worldview.

making new memories in this old city

After two years of the same day on repeat, living in a city is CRAZY. I can do things after work, meet random people, attend cultural events, eat everywhere, and generally just be actively involved in life. I can also spend countless hours on the internet, which I do, but it is with significantly less desperation than over the last few years. Not relying on the hours of light in the day means that I have more hours to work with, and I've been taking full advantage of them. After work I visited the Georgian National Museum, which currently has an exhibit on Georgians in WWII. I've also attended an acapella jazz concert, an experimental theater show, various festivals in the park, two birthday parties, and the ballet. I try to make up for my internet hours by forcing myself to walk the city, so sometimes I just pick a street and walk until I'm tired, then wind my way back towards home. It reminds me of endless hours discovering for myself the hidden artwork and earthquake-tilted buildings of Valparaíso, though that port city was a explosion of color while this city tends towards somber hues and a strange mix of innovative and centuries-old architecture. Despite my title, this life is not Peace Corps, or at least not what I've come to understand as Peace Corps service. We sometimes called our service in El Salvador Posh Corps because some volunteers had wi-fi, flushing toilets, and fairly easy access to big cities and to the beach. I know the two-year volunteers here face conservative communities, sometimes latrines, crappy weather, intermittent water and electricity, endless language struggles, failure, sometimes violence, and other hardships. That's Peace Corps. That's what El Salvador was, and as far as I can tell from conversations with others, that's common across PC countries. This feels embarrassingly easy. I have a circus outside my door and a zoo across the street, but these are real establishments, not the circus that passed for school or the zoo that was my host family's livestock in El Salvador. We are having a training for university students in the national parliamentary library, for god's sake.

ballet

jazz concert

city wanderings

cheese festival

I am decisively not the most educated or smartest person in the room. My opinions are just that - opinions. They aren't taken as law, or often even as particularly educated. It's awesome, a little anonymous, and really necessary so that I continue to learn to defend my position and avoid sounding totally ignorant. I sit in on some meetings and listen vaguely as volunteers drift in and out of the office on various assignments. Workshop on Wednesday focused on violence and personal stories of conflict. I could see the participants getting closer, sharing their stories, analyzing their own histories. Ana, the facilitator, said that their stories even made her a little emotional, and made the history real in a way it hadn't been before. This is what we're hoping to convey with the radio shows, and their participation and work in the past week bodes well for some very impactful activities. I wish I could understand the language because these trainings would be so interesting, but I have months to go before that's a possibility. I can talk to a few of them in Spanish, though, which is a blessing.

youth meeting with local government to propose a project helping people with disabilities

Tuesday saw us celebrating my host mom's birthday, which was AWESOME. It was just chill and small - family and a few friends visiting from a TV station - and completely full of food. The table was straining with appetizers and wine, and that was before the khinkali and kachipuri came, and long before all the fresh fruit and cake. The best days are just food and chilling and feeling at home. Also baking. As if we didn't have enough food, I made brownies for the birthday. They turned out dry because I may have gotten distracted and left them in the oven too long. I've taken to baking pretty much every week, with mixed success that is always kindly received with enthusiasm despite it all. The best were definitely nutella brownies, but the most fun are the mini apple pies, not least because I made them the day after the new Pentatonix album came out, so I just blasted it on repeat in the empty apartment while I pressed out dough circles and filled them with cinnamon, sugar and apples. Good days manifest in many ways, and I have been blessed with many of them in the past few months.

peace bridge

city wanderings

looking out from the hill overlooking the city

New books read: 112

Total Books read:154

Recommendations: Carry On by Rainbow Rowell & Assassin's Apprentice by Robin Hobb. Carry On is basically book-ception in a novel, and I adore it. It is a fanfic of the final book in a series that exists only as an inspiration for a character who writes fan fiction in another novel, but that whole invented series is like Harry Potter for the world in the novel. Also, it's just a really great fantasy story reminiscent of Harry Potter with good adventure, great friends, an epic slightly dysfunctional romance, and really witty writing. Assassin's Apprentice is the first in a fantasy story about a bastard prince. I enjoy the world, and it makes the Tawny Man trilogy make a lot more sense since it's all the backstory to that trilogy. If you like fantasy, especially fantasy with intrigue and magic and the occasional animal, this is a solid one in the genre.