Whatever Comes!

It's cold. There's ice on the roads. The mud is frozen most of the day. I wear my thermals most of the time and have taken to sleeping in my sleeping bag. The only source of heat is a large wooden stove in the living room. Everyone gets up late now, and school starts at 930 instead of 900.

One of our English teachers wants to do a musical production with our ninth grade, and I suggested Fiddler on the Roof. I downloaded the music and film and script and burned it all on cds, and the ninth graders are already learning the songs and talking about it all the time. I watched the whole film through just the other day, and got a little weepy.

"And if our good fortune never comes, here's to whatever comes!"

Yesterday I footed it to the hills with my camera and some khachapuri, up to the huge canals that run above the village. They are dry now and about ten feet deep, and go suddenly underground. I walked a little ways into the tunnel and played with the exposure time on my camera.

that wall spot at the end there was looking like a shadowy figure in wait when i'd review the shot in my camera screen

The autumn passed quickly and busily. I spent a lot of it planning and writing an English room grant for our school, and I will find out if we got in a few weeks. I had two Thanksgiving dinners this year. The first was at our annual 3-day All Volunteer Conference, and it was a huge production with at least two hundred people, and other volunteers had been slaving away in the kitchen for days straight. The second was at my friend and follow PCV Misha's place. He hosted a Thanksgiving for all the volunteers in Kakheti, our region, at his huge formally-a-guest-house in Kvareli. I had trouble sleeping and got up and watched the sunrise, and then went back to bed and slept until 2.00 when Misha woke me up and said I'd better go before I missed my marshrutka back.

But on Thanksgiving itself I went to school, and at one point thought, "Oh hey, it's Thursday. That's right. Thanksgiving. Happy Thanksgiving ol' chum."

Since moving from my last site, things have been going well. The family I live with is a kind and happy family, they don't fight much, and don't drink too much, and they work hard. My Georgian's slowly improving as well, now that I've people to talk to, and the teachers are warm and we like working together. The kids are a rowdy bunch but good-natured, and like to chat. Yesterday a couple 2nd graders were walking home next to me. "How old are you? Do you have wife? What kind of Georgian food do you like?" The same questions they all love to ask.

My friend Jake visited a few months ago, before school started, and we traveled all over the country, only failing to make it to the coast. The night I went to the airport to meet him, my Taxi driver was wasted drunk, his lane choice vague and inconsistent. The music was distorted and blasting and he left his blinker on. I was ready at any moment to grab the steering wheel, and would have told him to let me out, but standing on the side of a highway in Georgia at 2am with drunk taxi drivers swooping past sounded even more dangerous. At the airport I paid and said my friend wouldn't be arriving for a while, so better if he didn't wait. Jake and I didn't go straight back to the hostel, but stopped at a nearby all night restaurant and got some food and drank beer. Jake had just been to Turkey, and we stayed there until light discussing and comparing toilet situations, among other things.

He also taught me to tie my shoes, or rather a new way to tie my shoes he'd learned from Lifehacker- not only quicker once you get the hang of it, but also it stays better tied. Our trip to the mountainous region Tusheti with some other PCVs was the highlight of the trip.

Tusheti

I received a package a month or so after he left, with something called an Aeropress in it. It was accompanied by a bag of Peet's Coffee and an attached note informing me that the coffee situation in Georgia is "abominable." I thought about how we had been using powdery espresso-grade Turkish coffee in my french press and shrugged. Maybe he was onto something. So I tried it. As it turns out, the Aeropress, is a world-changing piece of coffee-making technology, compact, efficient, simple to use, funny-looking, peace-spreading, and also fantastic at squirting out damn fine coffee. The quotes from ordinary good-hearted Americans sharing similar sentiments are all over the box, and leave little room for doubt.

Finally, I'm growing a full beard. I've never had proper one before. It's time.

"Kistauri Recalls Soviet Times"

A video I made over a year ago with some of the kids from Kistauri Village on a weekend, during our first three months in training. Thanks my brother Jason for uploading it for me.

ryan has a photoblog!

I intend to upload a photo every day.

 What a good boy am I!

http://ryanhasaphotoblog.blogspot.com/

August 2013

This is Thomas and Lydwin, a lovely couple from Belgium. Below is one of the bikes they bought secondhand online. When fully loaded, each rig runs at about 45 kilo, about 100 lbs, and includes a kickstand each, horns, saddlebags, and rearview mirrors.

On 9/11 2012 they grabbed a cheap flight to Budapest, and started cycling on a popular bicycle route to Croatia. From here they pedaled on to Serbia, to Bulgaria, then ferried across the Black Sea to Istanbul. Winter was coming, so to speed things up they jumped on a bus through Turkey to Iran, where they cycled city to city, camping two out of three nights, and otherwise staying in guesthouses and with couchsurfer hosts. From the coast they took a ferry across the Persian Gulf to Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates, and then biked to Dubai for Christmas and New Year’s. A girl they met on CS put them in touch with friends there, so they wouldn't be camping alone during the holidays.

They rode on to the "amazing country" of Omam. "So hospital but not pushing,” Lydwin told me. “So friendly, and also one of the safest in the world. We sleep so well in our tent. You can see the sea, you can see the desert, you can see the mountains... it's so quiet.

“They are very traditional, a white dress the men would wear, with fez on their head. All men, even young guys. The infrastructure was amazing. Everyone had like two iPhones, a Blackberry, Samson galaxy, drive big fat car. But they aren't like, 'I'm the man.' They are all nice, and they always joke, 'Who is your favorite dictator?' He is Sultan with absolute power. His is very smart man. He builds the schools and hospitals and he spent all the money to build infrastructure, and so every village now has electricity and roads. In the 70s there was only one school in Oman, and now every village has a school now. The government owns the oil business and so no one paid taxes. He is 75, he doesn't have a wife or children, and everybody thinks he is gay, but of course you can't say this.”

So from Oman, they flew to India, to Mumbai, where the roads are too dangerous to cycle. They took a break from cycling and stayed with friends, working at a hotel where they were responsible for the nonalchoholic rooftop bar, made waffles and sold soda, coffee, and tea. They also lived 12 days in a mudhut in the middle of a farm, weeding a chickpea field. 

Two months passed in India, and then they were on a plane to Kirghistan. From here they rode to Tajikistan, though he mountains to Uzbekistan, (deciding against Afganistan), capital to capital on the famous Pamir Highway I'd never heard of - second highest road in the world apparently.  At the empty endlessness of Kazakhstan they opted for the train and then only across the corner, just to spend five days in the nondescript harbor city of Aktua, waiting for a freight boat that would take them to Baku in Azerbaijan. Here they were issued a seven-day visa, and had to pedal their little Belgium hearts out to get to the border of Georgia, into Lagodekhi. The next day they took the confusing roads out into the Kakheti region, and after a few wrong turns, several text messages, and a friendly truck driver who dropped them off nearby, they found their couchsurfer host, me, in the town Apeni.

They stayed two nights in the big empty village house I had rented and lived in for nine months. They were happy to be able to drink beer again, and wear non-conservative clothing, which amounted to shorts and sleeveless shirts. They'd been on the road nearly a year with only three flat tires altogether.

 They left Wednesday morning towards Tbilisi, and eventually were to cross the country to Batumi where they planned to ferry it to Ukraine, then to Romania, Moldavia maybe, The Czech Republic, Germany, and finally back to Belgium by October. They were my final couchsurfers.

I had several. Couchsurfers show up, hangout, talk in place of paying, and then leave all of a sudden. I have found acquaintanceships work very well in short, discrete bursts. No commitment. Very quaffable. I quite like that. Most of all, it helped me get through living in Apeni.

In July, a young French boy named Andre showed up quite suddenly and surprised while I playing guitar. He had messaged me the week before, but I hadn't heard from him since, and he was a day late. His phone hadn't been working, he’d explained.  His internship in Finland had ended several months before, and he’d since took off, and had been traveling ever since.

Most recently he had wondered somewhat dangerously across the Caucuses down from Russia into Georgia. “Don’t worry,” he’d reassured me. “It’s only dangerous if you go off the main road.” We stayed up late talking. "In Paris, people are all nihilists," he'd said. "They sit around in a cafe not caring about anything all day, not wanting anything, smoking their cigarettes and drinking their coffee, and all wishing they were Baudelaire."

“They all hate McDonald's, but it’s the most popular place to eat. If you go here it’s full of French people, all looking at the ground, all with an excuse for being there.

When he left, Andre hadn't yet decided if he was going to make his way down through Turkey to Iran, or to fly black to Ukraine to reunite with a girl he’d first stolen from her boyfriend in Lviv and then fallen in love with. So on he rumbled the next morning, in the marshrutka, off to surf another couch or some shit like that.

All that's over now. I've changed sites to the charming village Kistauri and am living with a lovely family. I've access to a toilet now, and there's a kitchen, hot water, and not a shower but a shower head, and food not cooked by me. But those are all details, and actually I'd gotten quite used to squatting and bucket-bathing (they have their advantages actually). Most importantly is that the folk I live with are wonderfully nice people, and I think the director and English teachers are serious about having a volunteer as well. The semester starts in exactly one month.

Finally, last weekend I went up north to Khevsureti on an excursion for volunteers hosted generously by our PC training manager Tengo. At one point we were less than 3 kilometers from Dagestan, just a peak in between. It was a beautiful place, mountains and old deserted towns, and stone buildings and towers on the tops of steep hills.

Blaming on His Boots the Fault of His Feet

A Sunday evening found me falling asleep outside a Tbilisi metro station, waiting for my taxi to fill up and get on its way. I don't remember the two hour drive east. I'm sure it was dangerous, and I'm sure the music was not to taste – gratuitously energized Eastern European pop or revamped bad hiphop. And yet I catch myself finding it catchy sometimes. Cringe, yes. Sometimes I’m lucky and get Georgian folk or old Russian rock.

I paid the driver in the red glow of taillights and walked the short dirt road, up to the metal gate of a house in which I had never slept, my huge backpack and guitar, and dogs barking somewhere nearby in the darkness.

I worked the corrupt lock contraption for a few frustrating minutes, and then was inside. The lights worked. Relief. Everything will be okay. My belongings in two big piles, on the couch, on the table, all where I’d dumped them eight days before. A dead mouse lay a few feet away.

Imagine this. A hundred or so foreigners scattered across a small country, and months later plucked up from their respective coordinates, thrown back into the same conference room, the same noisy dining hall, the same warm showers, reliable toilets, fast internet, and the same rows of beds, in that same compound where they'd first found themselves green off the plane. A remeshing of personalities after a very thorough shake up: disorientated, lost, rediscovered, broken, fixed, dark, light, up, down, and then back to the compound in Bazaleti.

And then, in Bazaleti, the constant sessions and classes all day, talking late into the night, playing guitar, not enough sleep, food and tables and notes to compare, and drama, and wine. And then, as if all of a sudden, I was standing alone beneath high ceilings, the first night in an empty house. It was quiet, dark outside, and I was exausted.

I moved heavily around the room, stopping with random recollections, staring off for a minute, forgetting what I was doing.

I was preparing to bathe myself. I poured the boiled water from an electric kettle. It was dark brown. I washed it out, reboiled, and soon was standing in my little bathroom in an old metal tub , my bucket and my sponge and a small shampoo tube kifed from a hotel room a few months before.

A few awkward minutes later I shivered out into the kitchen; a spider was twitchingly lowering itself from the ceiling in front of my face.

This was all nearly half a year ago. I've lived in this house since. I've walked back and forth from the nearby school. I've sat in the teacher's room. I've stood about classrooms. I've been at home, at my table, working. I've bought top ramen. I've bought raw beans and rice and potatoes with my last few lari. I've bought chacha in 20oz fanta bottles and mixed it with carbonated mineral water while watching Blackaddar. I've bought more wood than I thought I would ever need, and went through all of it, and bought more.

For a while I cooked on a crumbling concrete hotplate: a floppy metal spring that's coiled around a pattern of concrete fixtures. The end of the coil is twisted with wires that then plug directly into the wall. I cooked on it exclusively until one day with a huge spark it threw the breaker. Since then I've cooked on my pechi.

I've discovered that laundry is mostly getting soap into clothes, and then trying to get it out again. This is my current working theory. I've learned to simply soak my clothes in soapy water, then haul my basket down the road to the fresh spring water that comes out of a pipe. I shove it under and come back an hour or so later so the water’s running clear. Women tell me I'm certainly not a Georgain man. 

You live alone? the women say.

Yes.

And cook?

Yes, yes.

Really? What do you cook?

Soup, I say.

Of course. Soup! You just put things in it! They mime dropping things in a soup and nod and offer warm and somewhat sexist congratulations. Fair enough.

But it's been difficult to write a blog post all this time. It's almost never a good idea to post when feeling down. You end up trying to sound positive; every line full of forced optimism. The subtext becomes some sort of melodramatic stance of brave endurance and future-thinking, and when thrown out into the blogosphere it is the position you must now identify with, and hitherto maintain until further notice. The whole thing is self-conscious and it all inflates and takes up too much space. And then whatever changes might have happened and new insight discovered, these are lost beneath a ballooning posture and a brave and pained expression, hand on forehead.

Better to stoneface, and withdraw a little. Make one's reports infrequent, playful and a little cryptic. In the meantime, reorientate oneself, where one is at, what one's life is now. Study the variables. Avoid big changes. Don't be spontaneous. Seek company when needed and avoid it when it's too much. Try to be understanding before being understood. Avoid cynicism and optimism: both illusory; both ways of misrepresenting things in order to circumnavigate them. And always affirm life, which sometimes means saying yes to darkness and loneliness and embracing them before moving on.

So it's been hard sometimes. Because of the loneliness? No. I was expecting that. Because of a completely new life that leaves one disorientated and exhausted? Not really. I was expecting that too. What's the hardest thing? It's to show up, ready to persevere, to grit ones teeth and march forward, to push on when exhausted, to endure!, and on all this self-satisfied heroic mythmilk, then find only a bare room, an echo, and a mirror.

So what's so hard is feeling superfluous. A sense of loss and waste. And lack of options. Why did this school request a volunteer, and then not want to work with me? What were they thinking? Did they not realize it wasn’t just a funding source to capture out of habit, but that a real person was coming? Why would a counterpart teacher openly confess to me that the teachers never wanted a volunteer in the first place? - a unilateral act on the school director’s part. In way of apology? Out of embarrassment perhaps? Or irritably, in hopes I will stop trying? I came all this way, I want to tell them.

I came all this way. The last volunteer established an English resource center, with a laptop that was soon appropriated by the director and taken home (one of two laptops this happened to actually, the other part of some USAid program donation last semester.) Several years ago a room was remodeled on a grant to become an English room. Since then it’s become the director’s and secretary’s office. My director has a sort of naughty child thing about her. Has the naive American put it together yet? But, oh yes, she knows what's she's done, overly friendly and fertive, tst tst, Zoya Zoya. But does he know? What does he know? Such is the guilty conscience. And so, it was with a mix of regret, disgust, irony, and relief, and on the advice of PC staff, that I recently abandoned the writing of my grant to have a nurse room funded. The school doesn't know yet, and I don’t think I ought to tell them. They would surely cool towards me even more.

Best to leave it there, not talk about too much. One reason, the more talk, the more folk will want to chalk it up to attitude and self, “…blaming on his boots the fault of his feet,” as Vladamir says of Estragon.  To dismiss someone's experience as the result of lack of character is easier than extending even a chilly recognition. I just think you should snap out of it, one friend told me.  I’d prefer a shrug thank you. Still, I've done good work here though, outside my site, working with other volunteers, creating resources for other folk, an adult English class in another village.

And here, in my village, I sometimes am overcome with an almost hysterical energy, to try to do everything, grants and classes and clubs,  to overcome all through sheer force of will! Crazy crazy. And I always come back here, and wake up here, and it’s hard. It’s like a solid dark entity is roosting on your organs. Hot and organic. It begins spinning like a like small black planet in darkness, and it spreads out like an oil spill, filling up your chest cavity, pushing aside your lungs, and then it turns into a demented ransacking rodent.

And in time you have to face it. You girdle it, leash and collar it in, clench down the choke ball, yank it hard into the backroom, and tie it to a pipe embedded in concrete. It can thrash about and bleat; it can be quite annoying, but is well-contained in this man before you, this well-postured specimen, save for an occasional sharp intake of breath, like the baby just kicked. Or a subtle strain in the eyes. Or long, hyperbolic blog posts.

One finds oneself watching oneself "getting worse," lapsing into self-neglect. Keeping a clean living space and maintaining personal hygiene takes quite a bit more effort in a village anyway. It is certainly more time consuming, bucket baths, and sweeping, and food preparation. It takes sheer will to force oneself up to get up and start, but once you've managed, it gets easier.

A sense of self-respect must be maintained. Force dignity upon yourself. Don't live a certain way, no matter how you feel. Force your head up when it hangs, and look in the eye everyone. What is paramount to the idea of making the world a better place? Pity and charity, no. Dignity is the essential factor, for oneself and for others.  And for oneself first, for practical reasons, plank-removing reasons.

Is it worth it, being here? I find myself wondering that less often than you’d think. If ever I decided to leave it would be something I just would know, I would one day find myself knowing. Not a conclusion rationally arrived it. Still, I don't think I would leave.

And transcendent experiences occur throughout difficult stretches of life.

I was walking home from the NGO I teach at twice a week. Good lessons by the way, and good people. They always make me coffee. They speak no English and yet we communicate well because we like and appreciate each other and want to work together. I enter the NGO tense and self-conscious after the school, and by the time I leave I've come back, I remember who I am and feel a warm sense of worth. See Ryan, it's not you ol' boy! It's not all your fault! Because no matter how counterintuitive, it still always feels like it's something I did wrong. But then I'm suddenly myself again, all this from being shown some genuine friendliness and appreciation. (Who knew I defined myself so much by circumstance? I had no idea.)

Anyway, I was walking home when it all came into focus and everything was in its right place. It was early evening. People moved, and were talking, and children weaving down the road on their bikes, and it all followed and flowed, with the earth in its great slow rotation and rushing silently through space, and I was a mere instance here, listening to the sound of my breath, my footfalls on a dirt road, and found that the only sense to be found in all of this is in what lay about you when you look up. Yes, all very cliché now, but these are mere reflections  here, in text-form. The quality of the transcendent experience is quite different than what one babbles on about afterward: a series of moments of death and life and beauty and acceptance and letting go.

I think I'll go hiking this weekend with Lucky to carry my stuff.