Vladimir Putin’s Inner-scape is Completely Beside the Point

Originally published on Feb. 15, 2018 in The Cornell Daily Sun's Guest Room in response to GOROKH | Putin’s Fears and Grievances.

I read with mixed feelings Artur Gorokh’s February 13th column Putin’s Fears and Grievances. In it, he asks us to consider Putin not as an evil antagonist ever-bent on chaos, but as more of an antihero — a once-keen idealist turned callous by frustration and circumstance. Gorokh is correct insofar as Putin’s early rhetoric was much easier on the international ear. It is also true that villainizations of Putin by western outlets range from the hypocritical to the absurdly comical. All that aside, it is perhaps most useful of all to look at a few actual events early in Putin’s political career to assess where he falls on what is referred to in superhero circles as “the evil villain spectrum.”

In 2004, on what would be called back-to-school day here in the States, the entire Beslan School No. 1 in North Ossetia was taken hostage by a group of Chechen fighters. After the dust settled from the Russian tanks having blasted the terrorists out of the building, the collateral damages were discovered, as if awaiting burial, already in their best back-to-school clothes. In all, 334 hostage casualties were reported, 186 of them children. Throughout the crisis, the Russian state persistently lied and obstructed the press, and Putin’s aftermath-photo op was not announced until after he’d come and gone. International outrage notwithstanding, this kind of heavy-handed nihilistic response was already par for the course for the Putin presidency.

Photo from Sputnik International

Two years before, Vladimir Putin had taken to the television following a similar incident in Moscow itself to defend the unrestrained response to the takeover of a theatre by Chechen independence fighters. In this case, Russian government agents had pumped a highly toxic gas through the theatre’s air conditioning system after a 3-day standoff. The state-siphoned gas ended up poisoning everybody in the building and killing 130 of the hostages. According to the account of journalist Oliver Bullough who was on the scene, government agents entered the front doors, found the Chechen’s among the fallen bodies, and shot them in the head on the spot.

It was thanks to this early-Putin lack of inhibition that the former KGB agent won the hearts and minds of a terrified Moscow. Moscow had been subjected to years of bombing attacks from Chechen separatists. A decade of violence and tragedy had brought out cruelest aspects of human nature on all sides: the decimation of Chechnya’s capital Grozny by Russian bombs, the conscription of desperate women as suicide-bombers by the terrorists, the endless list of innocent victims, and the debut of Mr. Putin strongman himself. Rereading the accounts, I still struggle to make sense of it, and then I hear Marlon Brando’s heavy and slow voice somewhere in the background, iterating Conrad’s “The horror!.. The horror!”

It was details like these that gave me pause when reading Gorokh’s column this Tuesday morning in The Sun. Here he portrays Vladimir Putin as a sympathetic actor—an idealist turned evil by fear and frustration, “having started with understandable values and noble goals.” For Gorokh, Putin is a tragic figure, a victim of his own good intentions, the classic villain trope we have come to expect, like Vader, like Voldemort (Magneto from X-Men is Gorokh’s choice). It’s just like in the movies: they start out alright before falling victim to circumstance and inner demons.

While I find Gorokh’s characterisation of Putin naive and, well, cartoonish, his column left me conflicted. He rightly points out that much of Putin’s political maneuvers make sense in light of things like NATO’s expansionist ambitions, resentment and international humiliations in double dealings with the US, and a reluctance on the part of Russians to feel like they have become patsies of the West.

But while Gorokh rightly finds fault with the “simplististic narrative” of the Russia and Putin we hear about, he likewise falls into his own caricatures by bringing up of the inner lives of political headliners, and even comparing Mr. Putin and Mr. Trump. Why should we care if President Putin started out with noble intentions? Why are we trying to evaluate his tender hopes and gauge the fragility of his feelings? It is not only Putin’s inner life I don’t give a damn about, but also not Trump’s, not Obama’s, not Aung San Suu Kyi’s, and not Daenerys Targaryen, Queen of Dragons. Why, you ask?

Because politicians should be judged by what they do—not whatever they end up saying in front of TV cameras. Even if every last bit of it isn’t superficial, it might as well be. We will only ever be able to judge such show-people by what they end up doing. What they say is just part of the calculus that somehow put them where they are. A math PhD might put it this way: the better a politician can approximate the best-of-all-possible-combination-of-words, the better they will maximize their preferred outcomes, whatever those outcomes are.

Let us reject, along with Gorokh, the simplistic narratives and press releases—but let us also defy the personality narratives that give these politicians much of their dark powers in the first place. It’s hardly a stretch to say that both Russians and Americans are prone to delineate their own identities in terms of the personalities of their leaders. This is always a mistake. Heads of state have more in common with each other than they do with their subjects. Remember the last scene in Animal Farm? It is all about who you are sharing the table cloth with! Likewise, peoples have more in common with each other than with their figureheads. Our bread should be broken thusly. Let’s identify first as citizens of the world, and leave political-puppet pop-psychology and personality analysis to Hollywood Access and TMZ.

Classmates of 43 disappeared students of 2014 Iguala kidnappings, still protesting

In September of 2014, forty-three university students disappeared after being arrested attempting to protest education policies and the poor conditions of the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers' College, in what became known as the Iguala kidnappings. The missing students are believed to have been then handed over to and murdered by criminal gangs. The remains of only two students have since been confirmed through DNA testing. 

This afternoon, my friend Artur and I came upon the classmates of these missing students outside the Ministry of Justice in Mexico City, still demanding justice and protesting corruption three and a half years later. This man approached us to help us understand what was happening. He was kind enough to let us record his take on this situation and also share a bit about himself. Kindly forgive the cellphone shakiness and poor framing,

Life in Modern Day Khevsureti

A short video we made about the challenges of life in Khevsureti, taken from footage shot this past summer.

Confessions of a Climate Change Denier

A version of this article originally appeared in The Cornell Daily Sun

By Artur Gorokh & Ryan Sherman

It was in southern Utah in 2003 that Aron Ralston amputated his own arm to escape the boulder that had crushed him against the wall of a slot canyon. The only implement on hand was a small multi-tool, and in vain he poked, jabbed, and sawed at his arm, and hacked at the canyon wall and dug at the boulder. Five days later, delirious and severely dehydrated, he realized it had been his preoccupation with the useless tool all along that prevented him from seeing what had to be done.

Last week, Prof. Jon Schuldt of the Department of Communication, spoke at a Cornell Amnesty International discussion about the perception of climate change in the American population. Effective communication, he explained to us, is key in raising awareness and bridging partisanship. “Doomsday” rhetoric does not help, he said, but only serves to limit action and discourage engagement. If he is right, this column will be of no help at all.

You have no doubt been informed that the coming decades will see a world of increasing crop failure, flooding, wildfires, infrastructure failures, droughts and exacerbated inequality. This much we’ve all heard before. Much less talked of is a colossal humanitarian crisis of displaced peoples, the so-called climate refugees. Dire though all this may be, few of us have trouble falling asleep with worry for our fellow humans, or terrified of horrific calamities to come. Climate change is slow, it happens quietly in the interim and, by God, does it make for boring television. This non-urgency itself is a deathly feature. It allows us to distract ourselves with less unpleasant solutions and fall into the same mental trap into which Aron Ralston found himself.

Let me illustrate. After Prof. Jon Schuldt talk, a student stood up and to berate non-present Republicans for their sins and ignorance. The line between the right and wrong was demarcated by the aisle between them. Building solar panels, the student said, will replace coal, create jobs and stimulate the economy. Everyone wins. How incomprehensible anyone would refuse to do something so straightforwardly good!

This Teletubby worldview of win-win-win solutions was also the crux of President Obama’s environmental policy and is a denialism of its own kind. As the former administration’s website boasts, our solar output grew 30-fold and thousands of jobs were created along the way. Impressive, to be sure, but let’s fiddle with phrasing a bit put it this way: $160 billion was spent on subsidies, and as a result solar energy now makes up for a mere 0.6 percent of total supply. This infusion of cash rendered other clean sources of energy less competitive, and even forced several nuclear power plants to shut down.

The reality is that, if we are to replace coal and do it fast (say, by 2050), sunshine alone won’t do the job. It won’t even come close. An invasive energy plan, full of government overreach and deals struck with devils should be forthcoming. We might have to get over our nuclear phobia and invest into a new generation of reactors. Natural gas is not renewable nor all that clean, and fracking is controversial, but it makes for a cheap and abundant resource that could be decisive in temporarily replacing coal. Carbon tax very well may hurt the economy, but it also is a powerful incentive for corporations to reduce their emissions. (Stagnating economies also are much more environmentally friendly, by the way.) These strategies would require us to compromise our values, be they wealth, safety or even freedom, to help manage an impending crisis. But any truly effective action is likely to entail such compromise.

Distracting ourselves with impotent solutions might just prove to be more dangerous in the long run than the outright detachment from reality on the right. What these well-meaning talking points engender are a sense of fighting the good fight by creating an illusion of actionable items. This is evident in the emerging tribal culture based in sustainable garden living, anti-plastic-bag bags and targeted dietary changes. While meritorious on some level to be sure, these are activities that don’t meet climate change in reality, and the good feelings they bring are examples a temporary placebo effect.

Aron Ralston spent days in his own denial before accepting what he had to do to achieve liberation from the boulder that had crushed his arm. Even when faced with the spectre of death, perhaps the truth was just too unpleasant. But severely dehydrated and delirious, he finally abandoned the useless tool and then leveraged his own weight to snap the arm in two, freeing bone from boulder, and allowing himself to escape the canyon (almost) in one piece. But before he was able to do what had to be done, he had to recognize the situation for what it was, and take action that met the problem in reality. Climate does not care from which side of the aisle our political rhetoric derives. It isn’t interested in soothing communication strategies. It doesn't take notice of the scattering of hybrid cars or solar panels. Until our conversations describe facts, and our solutions target reality, we are all climate change deniers.

Is it Possible to Escape Cornell’s 2.5k Student Health Plan?

If you are living on loans, every time you buy a coffee, a fricassee, or tip the pizza guy, you take out a small loan to do so. That transaction leaves you a few more notches in the red. It is debt you will one day get notices about, defer to the future, and eventually pay back with significant interest.

So it is with Cornell’s student health insurance plan. Ask a car rental agency if you need that extra insurance, and you’ll find they aren't all that motivated to help you figure it out and minimize your costs. Fair enough. Yet, if they intentionally obscure relevant details to sell you something you don’t need, I would submit that is quite a different ethical category. Is that what's happening here?

The rub’s as follows: you may have already discovered you are about to be automatically signed up and charged 2.5k a semester for student health insurance. Several emails have no doubt appeared in your inbox informing you of this action and directing you to information on how this service might be waved. Following the blue bread trail takes us to the disheartening language of the Cornell Health Policy: “...requests to waive may be granted with demonstration of alternative insurance that meet [this intimidating list of complicated requirements.]”

Take that with the fact many of us have not arrived, are not yet residents, and so are not yet eligible for alternatives, are incredibly busy, are inclined to give the policies the benefit of the doubt, and you’ll end up with a group of potential customers with very predictable behaviors.

Not only that, but a sizable disincentive is also tacked right after, a $150 fee for anyone who chooses to waive their insurance after the Aug. 16 deadline. Effectively a built in sunk cost factor --- every time a student pauses, wonders, is it worth it?, there’s a $150 floating there, threatening to vanish like a Bernie Sanders afterworld.

We therefore may never discover that for many, many a Cornellian, a much more affordable option is very definitely available. For example, if you are a US citizen, paying your expenses with loans, chances are almost certain you qualify for a state-subsidized health insurance plan. A short phone call or online survey is enough to find out (nystateofhealth.ny.gov). That can turn out to be over 2k/semester that you don’t have to borrow, don’t have to be followed around by, don’t have to pay interest on long into the the unforeseeable future.

All that said, it turns out international students are not allowed the the option of seeking or securing another health insurance, even if they can demonstrate they have a health insurance that meets all of the Office of Student Health Benefits’ conditions. For the arbitrary reason of not being a US citizen, an entirely different standard is applied with large financial implications that could very well end up being prohibitive. As you may know, international scholarships often don’t cover health insurance, and 2.5k is greater than a year’s salary in more countries than it isn't (143/176!).

But this is not a J’accuse!. I’m not railing against an imaginary Big Cornell. Institutions naturally make decisions that facilitates their mandates. And don’t we all went to attend a well-run university? Cornell is itself a complicated institution made up of many entities, the student body included, each with its own raison d'être and occasionally conflicting interests.

As for me, I submit the most equitable solution would involve creating reasonable deadlines that do not preempt and disincentivize other options. Student Health Services should also be compelled to inform students that alternatives exist. What might do the trick is something like, “Students are advised to explore all their health insurance options in the state of New York at nysateofhealth.ny.gov and make the decision that is best for them.” In fact, all those waiver emails could be a good spot for the message.

Cornell Health Services are not swindling us. My graduate assistantship covers my SHP now, and it is great. At worst, Cornell Health Services are taking advantage of an unlevel playing field to charge us for something that might not be our best option. The good news is you may still be able to find a subsidized plan (nystateofhealth.ny.gov). If it all works out and you qualify, you will then waive your SHP, cough up the $150 cancellation fee, receive a bursar refund, reflect on the nature of institutions for a few moments, and then go on about your goddamn business.

Old Man Stops Riding Bicycle

He had been peddling with resigned determination when I saw him, as if he'd always peddled, and always would be peddling. I saw him out on the road several times a week, and then I didn't.

What was that sappy novella I read for a highschool class? I remember it for the beautiful image at the end, an old man dancing away his own mortality. But in that book, the author, mitch alborn?, alboom?, wastes the opportunity and misses the whole point. He turns the reader's head away from mortally and ends on transitory triumph without addressing our own human conflicts. In Tuesday's with Morrie, the character of Death stays home. We are given happy music and uplifting stories meshing into a sort of Sunday school lesson of sentimental existentialism. An old man, was it with cancer?, dancing. Dancing! And what does Mitch do? Waste it on a sentiment! He draws us from heartbreaking truth and leaves us with a silly picture of an person flailing in irrelevancy. That's not very helpful.

This old man here on the bicycle in the arctic reminded me of that book and that old man, but only for a moment as he rod toward the silly, oblivious dancer, and then peddled through dissolving apparition and on through the remote streets of an arctic town.

I found here that the arctic summer is a place of remembering. We go there, and so are taken out of lives of forgetting. We or gently set down into a mild, endless day, where it’s impossible to avoid remembering. And with the slowness of the imperceptible movement toward the end of life, the arctic's endless night slowly shrouds the endless day. Because of this, the arctic is also place of forgetting, as one has to get right down to the business of forgetting again. 

My simple forgettings are pedestrian. Alaska itself speaks to the original grand american forgetting event, the original early American pettifogging! Here the imposition of the imperial minority of whites has not become an historical abstraction, as it is for most of us Southerners. Here it is still a measurable penetration.

"Now we know in part," reads the beautiful passage before sputtering into false wishes. What does one know in the arctic? It is where the Southern world — now swarming with the work and days of hands — once formed, from where came glaciers and new animals, and it is alien and strange and but hauntingly familiar, like a womb. The arctic is where you learn that we will only ever know in part.

Obama in the Arctic: Climate Change Superstar?

*A version of this appeared here in Alaska Dispatch News (but some links and sentences didn't make the cut).

Obama in Kotzebue: Climate Change Superstar?
by Ryan Sherman

It’s no use judging a politician by what they say. That’s how they all get there after all --- they are very good at saying things. We can only judge them by what they do.

President Obama landed yesterday in the sizable native village of Kotzebue, my current place of work and residence, on the last stop on his Alaska climate change circuit. He took the stage that evening in the K-12 school’s gymnasium, and he had a lot to say.

He talked about hiking a glacier in Kenai fjords, performing a traditional Yup’ik dance at a school in Dillingham, and watching Inupiaq fisherman haul in their salmon catch. He talked of the presidents who’d visited Alaska before him. “But there’s one thing no American president has done before,” he told us with a grin, “and that’s travel above the Arctic Circle!” The gymnasium erupted in applause.

“I don’t need to tell people here in Alaska what is happening,” he said. “I met Alaskan natives whose way of life that they’ve practiced for centuries is in danger of slipping away.” He spoke to melting glaciers, native lifestyles, and coastal erosion. He laid out a powerfully compelling case for drastic action to fight climate change. “What’s happening here is America’s wake up call,” he said. “It should be the world’s wake up call.”

Stirred by his words, it was hard to believe this was the same man who only months before opened up the Arctic Chuckchi Sea to Shell drilling. This is the same Chuckchi sea drilling that the Department of Interior’s own assessment statements warned would have long lasting impacts on animals and Arctic communities. The same statement reported a 75 percent risk of at least one large oil spill when these leases are developed.

“We are the world’s number one producer of oil and gas,” the President said to us, “but we are transitioning away from energy that creates the carbon that warms the planet and is threatening our health and our environment.”  While we heard of his great administration’s steps toward clean energy, it was easy to forget that it was on his watch America became the world’s No.1 producer of oil and gas, passing Saudi Arabia two years ago.

The fight to slow down climate change will only truly begin when the huge amounts of profitable and exploitable carbon reserves are left in the ground.

Last night Obama reminded us that America’s carbon emissions had fallen by a 12 percent since he took office. “Last month I announced the first set of nationwide standards to end the limitless carbon emissions from our power plants,” he said. “And that’s the most important step we’ve ever taken on climate change!”

The emission reductions Obama takes credit for are largely attributed to our own great recession, and since 2013, emissions have risen dramatically. Coal-mining jobs are also up 15.3% since Obama took office, and between 2009 and 2012 our coal exports have more than doubled. The coal we aren’t burning, we’re simply selling to be burned elsewhere. Business is booming.  Our carbon is exported. Our footprint expands. The president grins and waves. So what's going on?

It’s hard to reconcile our president’s moving words to the Alaskan Arctic community with comments like those made back in 2012 to an oil community in Oklahoma:

“Over the last three years, I’ve directed my administration to open up millions of acres for gas and oil exploration across 23 different states… We’ve quadrupled the number of operating rigs to a record high. We’ve added enough new oil and gas pipeline to encircle the Earth and then some.”

Last year Putin, who commands 40 icebreakers to America’s two, also declared a renewed interest in the Arctic. Soon after Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper admitted concerns over militarization of the area. The United States, Canada, Russia, Norway, Denmark, Iceland, Sweden, and Finland all possess territory with Arctic coastlines, and other nations, most notably China, would benefit hugely by a drastically shortened trade route.

The Bering Strait is poised to become one of the most economically strategic waterways in the world, with a projected 13 fold increase in daily traffic according to a 2009 Arctic Council report.

As if all this wasn’t ominous enough, earlier in the day, preempting the President’s speech, five Chinese warships moved into the Bering Sea after participating in a naval exercise with Russia.

At only one point last night were we given a glimpse of the development plans he has in mind. “To boost commerce in the Arctic and to maintain America’s status as an Arctic power,” the President said, slipping the info in between a salute to traditions and a nod to national parks, “We’ve called for the accelerated replacement of the Coast Guard’s heavy duty icebreaker and we are planning for construction of more icebreakers.”

Climate change is ever more a crowd-pleaser, and Arctic development cannot be achieved without enthusiastic Alaskan support. On the other hand, a querulous populace is the most serious potential obstacle to Arctic dominance. The Canadian government learned this the hard way when a small Inuit community halted a five-year license to search for oil and gas on the seafloor of Baffin Bay. 

Open trade routes. Russia. Ice breakers. Shell. Untapped energy. Development. Whatever the merits of Obama’s recent speeches, we should never be in doubt of one thing: we should not expect an Arctic savior, and he is no climate change superstar. A large-scale popular coming together, like America saw in World War II, could save us from the worst.

If it’s already too late, as some grimmer models predict, pulling together in a humanitarian spirit might be the only way to mitigate the human suffering that will occur throughout the world. Whatever else, it will require we embrace a new conception of life. What happens next is up to us.

Ryan the Rock Hound has Audience with Fortunate Eagle

A few months ago I had the wonderful experience of quitting a horrible job. Dismal pay and tedium were factors, but what made it especially horrible was a cynical alcoholic with dangerous halitosis who had, through sheer immobility and availability, waited himself into the position of director at the little nonprofit conservation organization I'd signed up for. A self-described outdoors enthusiast with a passion for the land, he diligently walked the four minutes from home to work morning, lunch, and evening. Beyond this, his interest in getting out in the wilderness was on par with that of his interest in helping clean the office. And after his repertoire of stories of party fouls and herculean feats of drinking had been exhausted, we found ourselves with little to say each other. It was just me and him there, and I was ready to go after four months of doing little more than social media posting and hearing my suggestions summarily poo-pooed. It takes a toll on a man you know.

Most of us know that if you wander west long enough and far enough and find yourself stranded in the desert, you may receive a visit or call in dream or vision from a benevolent Native American. Mine was a phone call, and the facetious old man on the other end identified himself as an old Indian, Adam Fortunate Eagle. He was calling to inquire about our organization's annual artist-in-residence program and to insist that the application requirements for digital representations of the artist's work were an unreasonable expectation for an 87-year-old fogey like himself. I agreed, but my boss, I told him, was not there, and I offered some unhelpful advice and then listened as he boasted a bit and recommended I look him up on the web and also buy his latest book, Scalping Columbus and Other Damn Indian Stories, from Amazon.

After hanging up, I went ahead and looked him right up, read his wikipage and discovered he was one of the principle organizers of a famous Native American protest back in the late 60s in which mostly college-age Native Americans from San Francisco had taken over the recently abandoned island of Alcatraz. The protest was in part a symbolic reclamation loosely grounded in an old treaty from 1868 in which the United States pledged to return all out-of-use federal lands to native peoples. The occupation lasted two years and at its height had 400 people. Difficulties amassed as momentum was lost and the movement suffered sabotage and dwindling numbers. The remaining 15 occupants were forcibly removed on June 11, 1971.

 (The Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 is an interesting read btw, warming the heart right from the opening lines: "If bad men among the whites, or among other people subject to the authority of the United States, shall commit any wrong upon the person or property of the Indians, the United States will, upon proof made to the agent, and forwarded to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs at Washington city, proceed at once to cause the offender to be arrested and punished according to the laws of the United States, and also reimburse the injured person for the loss sustained.")

I had visited Alcatraz the month before and had wandered through the large empty exhibit rooms about the occupation, and with this new found context was all the more eager to chat the next time Adam called.

"Is your boss there yet?" he asked.
"No, sorry, he's still out of town." I answered.
"Well whose ass I gotta kiss to talk to this guy?" He laughed and added helpfully that he one to use satire to drive home his points.

Uninterested in the purpose of his call, I eagerly mentioned I'd just visited Alchatraz myself and read about his involvement. Flattered and expansive, he went on to describe how he had then been blacklisted and watched by the government for decades after for standing up for Native American rights. He seemed to like my mention of Nelson Mandela and how for decades Mandela himself had been considered an enemy terrorist by an apartheid-friendly US Government, until politically expedite to shift alliances. I chatted with him as long as possible, and he gave me his phone number and said I should stop on by sometime.

That was fine by me. On the way back to Utah I pulled into his place and met his wife, and he showed me his numerous art pieces and workshop and a little museum on the property he had made about his life and art. He pointed out a picture of himself dressed in an elaborate Indian costume meeting the pope, assuring me he had not kissed his hand. By the entrance was a little gift shop with copies of his books and DVDs in which he had been featured. He explained the merits of each item, and I asked him what he thought I should purchase. "How much money ya got?" he asked, as if at 20 bucks each every item was a bargain. I mumbled something about not having much and settled for his most recent book, which he signed To Ryan, The rock Hound, Fortunate Eagle. (I have no idea at what point I gave him the impression I was a rock hound.) He showed me around his wonderful house as well, which was full of paintings and gifts from fellow artists and books as well as pictures of his children and grandchildren. I resisted asking him what he thought about Sherman Alexi.


One of my favorite anecdotes of his, told several times, was a publicity stunt for Columbus Day that had received national attention. He had flown over to Italy and conducted a ceremony there to claim Italy for the Native American First Nation.

Back inside at his table he began to talk about the artist-in-residence program again, and I felt a little bad I'd not gotten around to saying I no longer worked there. Still, I'd put in a good word for him with my indifferent former boss, and I'd brought Mr. Eagle a pricey bag of pistachios and some coffee. He is, in my judgement, a wonderful artist and would make a superb artist-in-resident, if the dainty little program can handle him. I was also pleased when he perked up at the the sight of the pistachios.

Adam Fortunate Eagle was a wonderful collection of sound bytes and benevolent admonitions and also always quick to mention any facts related the systematic extermination and expulsion of the Native American population. Everything he said sounded as if he'd said it a thousand times before, and I was a bit disappointed with his answers when I filmed him for a few minutes to ask, after a life of dissent, what he would say in way of advice to young similarly-minded individuals. (Read history, was his reply.) I prodded him a bit more, until I suddenly saw myself as another white tourist badgering an old Native American for my own pithy, inspirational soundbite. I left with a smile and wave. All said, it was an interesting afternoon spent with a charming and somewhat ostentatious elderly Indian living on a reservation in the shadow of his former larger-than-life self.

a voice from the desert

early november morning

Three months after returning to Utah, the predawn morning saw me pushing the last of my cardboard boxes into the backseat of a recently purchased 98 Corolla. I pulled out of the side canyon, and headed west on the main canyon road. 10 days later, most of the boxes were be in the back seat of the car.

By that afternoon, I was in the sizable town of Winnemucca, Nevada, talking with my service coordinator and raising my right hand to recite the platitudinous pledge of service that had been tacked to the wall.

I bought food and started the drive down toward Reno. By the time I had to turn northward off the highway it had started to get dark, and I pulled off the road, checking my maps and printouts in the dirt pullout in front of the small offroad townish furnishings. I'd been right the first time. It was that smallish dark road with no cars or lights, leading north under an overpass.

A dark clench of queasiness at the base of my ribcage had been spinning there all day, and had warmed as I headed farther into the unfamiliar. I am not alone my attempt to ignore the great darkness behind us, catching up, alien, indifferent, and inevitable. It's always there. And at dusk in the desert, with the opening up of depths of dark blue universe, and the outline of distant chains of mountains, and the deep flatness that falls away from a two-lane road, sometimes it reaches right down into you.

I arrived in this small town late, and met my new director, and currently only employee of the non-profit at which I'd be working. He showed me around our office briefly, and we went to the bar nearby, the bartender of which doubled as the motel check in desk. I'd be staying in a weekly. We had a beer on him, and went round to see the motel. The smell was the first thing I noticed, and I glanced at his face. "Oh yeah, it's about as big as my place," he said. We parted, saying we'd see each other in the morning, I got my sleeping bag and toothbrush and wine out of my car and was soon asleep.

The next day I showered and showed up. After a tour of the office and all our stuff, we took our truck out onto the playa, the massive flat dry bed of ancient sediments. The clayish grey-white silt is impervious to seepage, and it's saltiness allows nothing to grow. The area's also lively with geothermal activity as well, and an archipelago of hotsprings scatters across the desert, several of the hottest ones have a history of fatalities.

Every morning, I awoke with an awful smell in my nostrils. I slept with all the windows open. I tried not to touch anything in the living room. It was becoming difficult to transcend the filthy carpet. On the third morning, nauseated before my eyes were open, I swore I'd sleep in my car before staying there another night. That evening I didn't go back. I pulled my sleeping bag out of my car again, and set it up on our office couch. I had found a few folk on the Internet to email about a place, but that didn't come to fruition. Our director was vague and unhelpful. "I mean, there should be some places around here... ."

Pankisi

Last week I went to a village about half hour north of here with a friend from Telavi University who was giving a presentation to high school students there. The village was in Pankisi Gorge.

Pankisi was settled mostly by the Kists, an ethnic group descended from Chechens who came down through the gorge from Chechnya in the 1800s. Chechnya is now a Russian republic, but the Chechens are an ancient mountain people, independent and querulous, and have a long history of disobedience and declaring sovereignty at any opportunity. When Sopo, my friend from the University, had told me about the people of Pankisi, she talked at some length about their unadulterated Caucasian beauty, and I found myself smiling at how racist these innocent observations would sound to me if casually overheard at somewhere like Barnes and Noble.

There are about 7000 Kist people today, 5000 living near us in the Gorge; they speak three languages, a Chechen dialect, as well as Russian and Georgian. They're an interesting case of assimilation and resistance to assimilation. They are Georgian, they speak Georgian, they are citizens, and they are accepted as a part of Georgia by ethnic Georgians. They've even adopted Georgian last name suffixes, -shvili, child, or -dze, son.

But they are quite different as well, with their own language, temperament, and most of are Muslim, whereas Georgians' Orthodoxy is deeper than, well, even individual religious beliefs. Sopo mentioned that in her youth the Kists were not so conservative as now, and one often didn't even realize they were Kist until hearing their last name. But in the past 20 or so years, "traveling Muslim preachers," as she called them, had engendered a much more strict observance of Islam in the new generation.

Pankisi Goerge leads eventually to Chechnya, and developed quite a reputation in the early 2000s, with reports of it becoming a haven for illegal arms trade, and Chechen rebels. The Chechen rebel military leader Rusian Gelayev is said to recouped there after defeats in Chechnya, and recruited from the local Kist population. They have also been recent reports of Kists having been recruited to fight in Syria, and Georgians have been reported having been killed there.

The school was normal school. The English teacher was a Georgian, and the highschoolers were quiet and good-natured, and I found myself wishing I could spend more time with them. Most of the girls were wearing light and colorful headscarfs, a few students no headwear, and one was completely covered in black, except her face.Yes, I noticed this.

Pankisi is quiet place now, well within Georgia's control, but I had to get permission to visit from our office, and was told not to go to any farther villages. The End.

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.

First Week of School, petals on a wet black bough

My first week of school I've passed well enough through my system now with minimal hiccuping, burps, or gastrointestinal  effervescence. The first day, variables were all yet undefined. No schedules posted, and no lessons planned. We ran through the motions mostly, I tagging along to all grades, first through twelfth.

We are meant to observe each counterpart English teacher, and select whom we would like to work with and for which classes. As it turns out, a stranger watching others from a corner is awkward for everyone involved, and soon I was participating in the lessons where I could, and doing my best to keep a friendly and warm smile on my face as I stood at the front.

In the first grade classroom though I found only rows of little, twitchy aliens, looking up through big eyes. They were small and so strange, each in their own little world, and all quietly arranged up like a delicate bobblehead display. They didn't quite know what they were doing there. I squinted at them, trying to discern by what principles they operated. One sat well, attentive and well-adjusted, and then with what looked like a sneeze coming on, began crying as if suddenly becoming overwhelmed by the recollection of some recent tragic event.

Parents nearby the first grade classroom were not much more normal. They gathered peeking in sometimes, smiling about and exchanging significant glances. A father would occasionally stand at the door, grinning and puffing out his chest like he'd just won a spelling bee. One mother, a gaunt woman with a small frowning mouth and big forehead, didn't leave the class room the whole time, but sat on half her daughter's chair, repeating the lesson sternly into her ear and pushing away the child's hand from her face whenever one came up to cover her mouth, which they did with compulsive frequency.

The rest of the classes were comparable for the most part to my school days, several good girls in the front following the lesson, while a few boys sat in the back sharing smirk-worthy comments, and giving the girls a hard time. Every class seemed to have one loud and funny boy who loved to distract everyone with occasional loud amusing comments, but for the most part seemed to learn alright.

The first day of anything is a good day for strange and unexpected things to happen. Perhaps this is why walking home from school later on I found a gathering of people in the intersection near where I am staying, and glimpsed suddenly a large long box with a greygreen head sticking up out of it. It was a funeral procession, and the coffin had been laid between two chairs. People gathered, talking amongst themselves, paying little attention, ostensibly at least, to the box.

I took all this in and looked back to the deceased. The color was astonishing, the deep greenish-greyness of the head contrasted against the prosaic flusterings and mutterings of the living all around. The only similar color in the world, I think, is that deep greenish grey sometimes on the horizon above the sea.

It was hot outside, and a few women bent over and kissed their former neighbor. It occurred to me then as I was standing there that in spite of the consensus that corpses are cold, or so becoming, and despite the data of cliched phrases like lies cold in the ground, or before his corpse was cold, and so forth, dead bodies are almost always warmer than they should be, freshly dead, in a box, on a battlefield, laid out two days, buried, or otherwise. Anything above frozen is too warm. And I found myself there thinking of Eskimos laid to rest in permafrost, and Scully­ in one of the many scenes when she slides out from the freezer a body on a tray in a basement. These thoughts, morbid to write and no doubt to read, seemed normal at the time.

I was all for leaving it at that, and to slip respectfully by and walk the remaining 30 meters or so the to the gate of house in which I'm living. My timing was bad. I then saw Mrs. Dumbadze, my host-mother by Peace Corps, bringing up the right side of flank of women, moving towards me. Her forehead crinkled when she saw me, her face grew long and her eyes wide, and with her lips pouting out a little she began to whine regretfully, in a slow sympathetic nodding. I was told to come along, and as we followed the procession up the road, the casket hoisted on shoulders of men, I found myself irritably thinking of all the things I had to do, my Georgian lessons in less than two hours, and how I didn't even know this person, and that, yes, it is a little inconsiderate, presumptuous even, to conscript me into a funeral procession without forenotice. I walked quietly, and despite the anguished posturing of a few minutes before, Mrs. Dumbadze was chatting and laughing with her friends. Predictably enough perhaps, I began privately drawing hackneyed parallels to The Emperor of Ice-Cream, an awesome poem nevertheless.

Following alongside us was a train of cars. I thought I caught a whiff of formaldehyde; it may have been just exhaust. Up ahead the bald grey-green crown floated onward in the sun, and I couldn't stop looking at it. Whether it was the green flesh in the sun or just Mrs. Dumbadze's powerful cheap perfume, I started to feel nauseous. We reached the cemetery and I was happy to be in the shade. They carried the body into a small chapel, and a few minutes later back out again, and off they went somewhere deeper into the cemetery.

I could have followed, pressing the moment for some epiphany or ironic truth, like we all tend to do at such times. A take home message. A well-earned meaningful reflection to our own life in some arbitrary context to think about as we walk back. But I was feeling nauseous still, and not particularly pensive, and so I let the dead go on its way and hung back, and when we found a ride out, I declined an invitation to a funeral supra, and went back to my room.

And that was the end of my first day at school.

The rest of the week went well enough, and on Thursday I called up a nearby PCV, Shannon, and asked if he'd like to go hiking over the weekend. He in fact already had plans to go with some of his friends overnight in Lagodekhi National Park, where he works, and I was invited along. It was a beautiful hike in the mountains to a waterfall, and the first night I've used the new tent I hauled with me from The States. We camped near the river, and played chess, and cooked fish in tinfoil, and talked in loud voices because the water was so damn noisy.