It’s the beginning of another week. It’s surprising to recognize it’s only the second week of school; it already feels like it has been much longer. I’m finding a rhythm with my co-teacher, and we’re seeing daily improvements in just about all of the students.
This past weekend TLG organized an excursion for volunteers to Kachreti to harvest grapes, make wine, and eat traditional foods. Saturday monrning hopped on the Tbilisi Marshutka, and after only about half an hour I was dropped where a small road met the highway. The driver pointed down it and waved off my inquiry as to how much I owed him as he pulled back onto the road. A little ways down I found a man and asked him “Koleji, saad aarees?” (Where’s the college?). He pointed down the way towards some larger buildings. When I walked through the gates into a beautifully maintained campus, I was greeted by the director of the professional college. I was the first to arrive. We walked by some small flower gardens and I was sat me down at a table in front of a beautiful basket of grapes and pomegranates. We drank coffee and she described the school to me. It’s a technical and vocational school with somewhere between 300 and 400 students, starting as young as 16. They have vineyards, field crops, bees, and livestock, as well as programs in foreign languages and business.
Other volunteers from Kakheti started arriving a little after 10am, eight or ten of us in all. We sat around the fruit and ran through the requisite questions- where are you from? How long have you been in Georgia? Do you know so and so? How’s your host family? Your school? Etc. It was a couple too many people to really get to know each other, but nice all the same. Around 11:30 we got word that the volunteers coming from Tbilisi had arrived. I was expecting to see a handful of volunteers, maybe twenty, so it was a little bit overwhelming to see fifty something English teachers all off the Tbilisi bus, as well as a couple TV cameras!
We were herded toward the vineyard, given knives and buckets and we started to cut grapes from the vines. It was nice to have some way to keep my hands busy confronted with so many new faces. Between the grape leaves I met a couple new people. “What’s your name? Where you from? When did you get here? Where you living here?” All the preliminaries get a little tedious. I filled up a couple buckets pretty quickly and one of the TLG staff told me to stop working so hard! The buckets were emptied into a large woven basket on a donkey-drawn wagon and brought over to a small house containing a trough to stomp them and an underground vessel, or quevri where the wine will age. I pulled on some boots and helped squash grapes for a while. Of course the TV cameras didn’t want to miss the Americans getting busy in the work.
Now it was time to eat and to drink. There was a generous spread of all the typical fare. There was fresh khinkali and wine made by the first group of TLG volunteers just about exactly a year ago. I took on the role of tamada, the toast master as a number of teachers had gathered in one area. The TV folk overheard and wanted to film me toasting Georgia- “Sakartvelos Gaumarjos!” Music and dancing got underway, some folks started up a game of volleyball, and the feasting and toasting continued. Tim toasted the ground, which supports us, upon which we dance, from which comes all the delicious food we eat, the wine we drink. One of the many I proposed was to delicious food, not just to new foods that we have come to love in Georgia, but also the foods of our own families that we miss and the foods of our heritages, whether from Singapore, or France or India (all represented around our table). And Tom made a toast that struck home for all of us on that day: to TLG. Even with all the dysfunction, all the times they drop the ball, the grand misallocation of resources, ultimately those involved in TLG are mostly doing good work, work that is helping Georgia along the path to development. We drank for the common ground the program gives us here, the new friends we have that would not be a part of our lives were it not for TLG. And we drank for all those involved with TLG, the administrative staff, the people who organized this fantastic day of feasting, the host families, the teachers, and perhaps most importantly the students, who will be the future of this country. Giga, one of TLG’s directors was there to hear our words and also thank us. Sooner or later it was time to make our way back to our respective dwelling places, but not before promises were made to new friends to meet up for hikes or more gatherings around good food. All in all it was a pretty fantastic day. And of course, today in school my celebrity status increased as everyone informed me they had seen me on TV!
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