Sam and I headed off to Akhalkalaki with two other volunteers who'll be stationed in the next town. We'd traveled part of the road before on our trip to Abastumani and knew we were in for a pretty drive for at least half of the trip. When we took the road south towards our town, we almost immediately saw some major changes. For one, the road started getting really bad- potholes that could swallow a car like braille covering the majority of the surface for miles. Secondly, we started gaining elevation pretty rapidly. Third of all, we started seeing some pretty drastic changes to the scenery; the Borjomi region's thick forests and rolling mountain ridges faded into sheerer cliffs populated by grasses and the rare tree. We wondered sometimes if our minibus would make it around all the windy, broken up roads up the steep climbs.
But only about 3 hours after departing, we had arrived. Our town is fairly flat itself, but located atop the Javakheti Plateau. We were to spend the next 4 days staying with our new host family, getting to know our new schools and trying to begin thinking about what exactly it is we'll be doing. Our host family was very welcoming. We will live with a host mother and father and their 23-year-old son. They also have a daughter who lives across town with her husband and their two sons, aged 6 and 18 months. Our host family, like about 95% of the town's residents, are Armenian minority citizens of Georgia. Coming into town, the population's identity becomes evident pretty quickly; signs are written in Russian and Armenian script, and the familiar curlicues of Georgian are hard to find.
In town, there are 5 schools, with different languages of instruction. Three schools are Armenian language schools (Sam will be teaching at one of these), one school is a Georgian language school and the fifth and largest school is a Russian school (where I will be teaching). Again, since most of the town's population is of Armenian descent, the bulk of the students at all schools speak Armenian at home with their families. All are taught Russian, English, Armenian and Georgian in the schools, beginning in different grades. Resources for Georgian language education for the town used to be pretty lacking, however, and Georgian education still falls short, creating something of an odd dilemma for students. Most choose to focus their energies on learning either Armenian or Russian extremely well in order to attend universities in either Armenia or Russia, since Georgian instruction can still sometimes be poor or opportunities for gaining a full academic grasp of Georgian limited.
We had some great chances to get to know a lot of interesting people at our schools and in the town and are really looking forward to beginning our work in Akhalkalaki. We will have almost 2 months after arriving in town until the beginning of the school year, so we will be focusing on additional language acquisition. We plan to get tutors for Armenian and Georgian and will be practicing our Russian daily with our host family and others in town (everyone there speaks really fantastic Russian).
Once school starts, most education PC volunteers tend to start working on secondary projects in addition to teaching classes. We'll be trying to plan some activities and get a sense of what needs there are in the community (some were already fairly evident just from our very short visit). It's been exciting to think how close we are getting to being able to really put all this long, grueling training into practice!
We'll be sure to keep the posts coming, and I hope you're still enjoying them... If any of you have any questions or requests on anything we're forgetting to post, please let us know! Until then, here are a few pictures of our new host town.
Pretty view of the big mountain at the Armenia border
View down our street
A view of Akhalkalaki from a nearby hill
Some pretty flowers given to me by some English students at a local school
The very cool water spouts on many of the houses
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