The bus ride to Rustavi was interesting-while we've been in training, we've been kept to a very small part of Georgia and haven't been allowed to go to Tbilisi or its environs (PC is a stricter, more concerned mother than either of us have seen, which says a lot, I think). Mostly this is because we have to stay in our villages to study all the time, but we also have a lot of rules to help keep track of us while we're still pretty helpless in the language.
On the drive to Rustavi, we followed the main east-west highway that cuts across the country through a city named Gori. Gori is an "off-limits" city for us during our training (just as Tbilisi is), although we are allowed to transit it. During the 2008 war between Russia and Georgia, the city of Gori was bombed and eventually occupied by Russian troops (Gori houses a Georgian military base, which was the main target of the Russian attacks, although residential areas of the city were affected as well). There are two major bridges in Gori that the highway passes; currently, one is fully reconstructed and the other is under construction. It is really something to see the remains of the destroyed bridges, and highway traffic comes to a crawl once in Gori due to all the road construction underway. More impressive to me than the remaining rubble, though, is the speed with which the government has rebuilt. If I hadn't known why the roads were under repair in the area, I would never guess. It just seems like your run-of-the-mill road construction project.
A little ways down the road from Gori towards Tbilisi, we passed an odd village. Unlike most Georgian villages, that tend to be just an odd clumping of houses and fields and farms, this village was more ordered and planned than anything I've ever seen. All the houses are the same size, spaced apart identically, with identical color schemes. We asked some of our Georgian teachers what the place was and they told us that it was one of several camps for internally displaced people (IDPs) in Georgia. Georgia had a really nasty civil war following the breakup of the Soviet Union (from 1992-93) and the most recent conflict with Russia (in 2008), which has caused a lot of people to be pushed from their homes (some estimates say there are 220,000 IDPs in Georgia, a remarkable number for a country of about 5 million).
A picture of one of Georgia's IDP camps (from a blog I found called "Georgia and South Caucasus" by Ralph Hälbig)
Although the camps appear, from the road at least, to be fairly monotonous, they do look to be good, solid buildings. Many of the houses have murals painted on the sides, some of flowers, some of children playing, some of the Georgian flag. Riding past the houses in the camps is tough; on the one hand, the murals are hopeful and show the resilience of the human spirit. On the other, the camps themselves just emphasize the extreme costs of wars and the long-lasting effects they have on people. I hope that the conflicts Georgia has faced can be resolved, but I don't know how or how soon they will be.
But moving past thoughts of IDP camps and war rubble, let me move on to talk a bit more about the destination of our journey: beautiful, thriving Rustavi! Arriving into Rustavi was a bit of a shock for many reasons. First, Rustavi is much, much hotter than our little village. It was 90 degrees when we arrived at 6:30pm. Second, Rustavi is very much a town of the Soviet Union. It was made into a center of industry (with lots of different factories and plants, for chemicals and other goods) and was built up to house all the good Soviet workers in the lovely Soviet-style blocs of apartments. It reminded me of being back in the city in Poland where I lived out of high school. We were glad to be in town, though, and get off the bus. Although we had air conditioning for the first 2 hours of our bus ride, it was turned off for the last 30 minutes--the hottest part of our ride--to save gas. We barely squeaked in to the gas station at the entrance of Rustavi.
A picture of Rustavi (taken, for some reason, for a Georgia tourism website. Makes you want to visit, doesn't it?)
We were met at the bus stop (after filling up at the gas station, of course) by one of the current PCVs (Peace Corps Volunteers), who, with her husband, would be hosting us for the weekend. She walked us back to their apartment and it was really a big change for Sam and I to adjust to actually having to watch for cars and to have to cross streets that were not just little dirt paths and to see tons of people we didn't recognize. We've gotten so used to our village life!
As part of the "job shadowing" weekend, we were charged to observe the PCVs in their daily routines, to go with them to their classes and watch how they teach English and work with their Georgian counterparts. It was really helpful--although Sam and I have now had slightly over a month of training and have done some teaching practicum on our own, we haven't yet figured out just how we'll get into the swing of things, especially with team teaching with a counterpart. Watching the current volunteers and how well they work with their counterparts gave us a lot of hope for how things will work when we're out on our own.
We also got a great chance to talk with the PCVs about the secondary projects that they have been undertaking. They range from participation in the Tbilisi Race for the Cure to an English language club, from the organization of a women's health fair to a bathroom renovation/sanitation project, from the starting of a music club to the organization of a spelling bee. We are getting really excited thinking about the types of projects we will want to try to work on outside of classes when we get to our "permanent site" (the place we'll be living and working in Georgia for the next two years).
In Rustavi we also had the chance to eat some really delicious food. Although we've been loving the Georgian cuisine so far, it was pretty luxurious to go out for pizza one night and Indian the next. Also, since most fruits and vegetables haven't come into season yet in our village, we haven't had too much of either (our host family doesn't really eat too much aside from what they produce on their own). Rustavi has a huge bazaar, though, where you can get fruits and vegetables by the kilo, and by the kilo did we purchase them!
I have some more pictures of Rustavi that I will share a little bit later, but I have to run to class now (today we have Russian). I hope you're all well!
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