Bookshelf

Well, we’ve wrapped up the summer camp, and I think it’s fair to call it a success. Of course no one’s gone from zero to fluent in the space of a few weeks, but the kids really enjoyed our games and activities, learned a few songs in English, have pretty much nailed numbers, colors, and animals, and can at least get through a basic “hello, how are you” kind of conversation. All told we had contact with 250 kids during the course of the camp, got to know the wonderful people involved in organizing and running the camp, and we’ve seen some of our games and activities adopted by the counselors and the kids themselves. Now we’re taking a bit of a break and working to plan a few days of English activities for the older (high school) English students before school starts.

Wednesday we were invited to lunch in Akhaltsikhe with the U.S. Ambassador to Georgia, John Bass, and the U.S. Ambassador to Armenia, Marie Yovanovitch. Both are incredibly smart, energetic, and dedicated, extremely knowledgeable about the countries in which they serve, and very engaged with the projects that the U.S. government is funding and encouraging. Melissa and I have really felt proud, walking around Akhalkalaki and talking with people here, of the work that the U.S. has been doing in this community – building roads, funding scholarships and exchange programs, among other things. These are things that matter to people and make a difference. Both ambassadors were also really interested in the work that we volunteers have been and will be doing, and we had a really good exchange.

While we’ve been a good bit busier this summer than initially feared (beyond the camp, we’ve spent a lot of time visiting people and getting to know the community) we’ve still had plenty of time for reading. Thanks to my dad’s timely gift of a Kindle to each of us, we’ve been able to carry hundred-tome libraries here in the space of a pocket book. Since most everything written prior to 1923 and a number of things written since have entered the public domain, we’ve been able to raid Project Gutenberg and Amazon for free books, which is to say books made for the Peace Corps budget. We purchased a few newer books for the Kindles before we left, and the Peace Corps office has a very nice lending library, so we haven’t been dwelling entirely in the 19th century here.

Anyhow, here’s the list of what we’ve been reading or rereading so far…feel free to make suggestions, especially of those old public domain books:

Melissa

The Lord of the Rings (trilogy), J.R.R. Tolkien
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time, Mark Haddon
Middlemarch, George Eliot
The Awakening and Selected Stories, Kate Chopin
Dracula, Bram Stoker
To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
Emma, Jane Austen
Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy
Currently Reading The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Stieg Larsson

Sam

Aesop’s Fables
Foundation, Isaac Asimov
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton
A Game of Thrones, George R.R. Martin
A Clash of Kings, George R.R. Martin
A Storm of Swords, George R.R. Martin
Walden, Henry David Thoreau
The Sorrows of Young Werther, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
My Name is Red, Orhan Pamuk
Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
The Book of Wonder, Lord Dunsany
Othello, William Shakespeare
Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, Edwin Abbott
Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
The Pilgrim’s Progress, John Bunyan
Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Vol. III, Robert Caro
Currently Reading: David Copperfield, Charles Dickens

I’ve also been reading one of the Thousand and One Nights a day, so as not to forget my Arabic (and because they are fantastically great stories – I’m just at the part where Haroun al-Rashid swaps his royal robes for a lice- and flea-ridden fisherman’s shirt so he can go listen to a trespassing pair of musicians without scaring them away – that’s what good music does to you!), and have lately started puzzling through some Dostoevsky in Russian, so as to learn important vocabulary words like “dreamer,” “trance,” and “dusk.”

Hard to believe we’ll go back to school for planning in under two weeks. Until then, we’ll be keeping ourselves busy with our high school camp, Armenian lessons, the grand re-opening of our local church, hopefully a day trip or two, a Peace Corps event in Tbilisi, and Melissa’s voyage to Kharajalara to help Kelsey with her summer camp.

We’re both really excited to start work, and we’ve found a lot that we’d like to do here outside of the schools as well. I’m sure at times it will feel like a slog trying to keep our energy up in the midst of the language barrier and cultural differences, the occasional bout of homesickness, and the workaday routine, but there’s a lot of good work to do, a lot of really great people to do it with, and if we need a break, well, The Lord of the Rings is sitting right there on the Kindle.