It's really been turning out to be a supremely busy summer here for us. This is really good, generally, because last summer we had a whole lot of time on our hands as we got the feel of our permanent site, got to know people and got used to not having every second of our time planned for us as we did during training. Now we're the old veterans in Peace Corps Georgia; almost all the G9s have departed for their next adventures (we miss them already!) and the G11s are officially sworn-in volunteers (they seem like they'll be a great group!). The clock on our PC service is slowly ticking down, and now with each remaining day we pass the last of that date we'll spend in Georgia as volunteers. We just finished our last July in Georgia. Today? The last August 1st we'll spend here in this run.
But time is a weird thing. It rushes and yet it still moves slowly sometimes (for instance, we do still have a lot of English classes to teach in the coming year, which will undoubtedly be like molasses in January), but this summer we've been rushing through the days. And since we've been so busy and been working on a lot of different things here recently, we'll have a flurry of posts over the next couple of days--great summer reading for anyone interested in that kind of reading, I guess.
Last week, fully recovered from my bout with food poisoning, I was in Tbilisi working with fellow volunteers Erin, Kelsey and Kaitlyn on a summer camp for kids at the Koda community center. Koda is a small village just outside of Tbilisi that occupies the territory of a former Soviet military base, hastily remodeled to house the people living there. It has a small population, about 2000 people, and almost all of them are IDPs (internally displaced people, almost like refugees, but people who don't cross international borders).
Koda
I posted a little about the IDP situation in Georgia earlier in our blog, but here's a little more info on the situation. Georgia has a large IDP population due to its civil war after the break up of the USSR as well as from the 2008 war with Russia. In this small country of about 4.5 million people, about 300,000 are IDPs. That's nearly ten percent of the population. Forced from their homes and homelands by war, strewn about the country in settlements with others in the same situation.
The people living in Koda are those who were forced to flee their homes in South Ossetia or Abkhazia during the 2008 war. This week-long camp I worked with there was really my first experience talking with Georgian IDPs. It was really incredible, hearing how calmly Madonna, the office assistant at the Koda community center, could talk about how much she misses her gardens and orchards in South Ossetia. Or watching the children play and laugh and act just like normal kids, even though they were forced from their homes when they were just a few years old. It made war and its aftermath seem supremely real and the human impact all the more difficult to justify or accept. At the same time, seeing the normality, watching how life moves on, being able to talk with people about it--the experience made me really see the resilience of people, of the human spirit. And it also made me realize how fortunate people in this community are to have the community center and staff they have, helping them pick up the pieces.
Children in the Koda Community Center
Khatia, the director of the community center, is a godsend for Koda. She has been working round the clock to put together great programs for children and adults in the settlement. The center has training courses for adults in various trades, helping people who worked primarily as farmers hone the skills necessary for jobs or trades in Tbilisi. There are lots of programs for kids, too, teaching the older students about leadership, computers and community service and giving the younger children a place to take music classes or do some art or just play with other kids. Khatia told us that more programs were possible last year because the center had more funding from a larger source, but currently the programs are doing a lot of good and helping out not only through training, retraining and education, but also by providing a lot of psychological assistance. One project Khatia told us about was an art therapy project for some of the younger children, recently completed, but with a follow-up to come. She and the staff at the community center (who are made up of both IDPs and non-IDPs) are really dedicated to helping people to move forward and heal and not be held back by the terrible circumstances that led them to this.
During a rousing game of Pictionary
Khatia was also the main driver of the Koda Children's Week, wherein she organized daily activities for children as a pilot run of a summer camp she'd like to keep organizing in Koda. Our part in the Children's Week festivities seemed relatively small. We met with the children in two groups, of "older" and "younger" kids for about an hour or an hour and a half each day, played games with them, taught them some English, gave presentations about America and just spent some time with them. They laughed at our Georgian, but appreciated when we tried and had a lot of enthusiasm (especially on the days when we brought in candy). Khatia and Madonna and the others at the center made it seem like we had done so much more, though. They kept showering us with thanks and making us feel really appreciated, when really, it was Khatia and her staff at the center that should get the thanks and praise. They do some remarkable work, and it isn't work that I can imagine would be easy to do.
Kids working on projects
...and discussing volunteerism
I'm really hoping that PC Georgia will be able to strike up a more formal relationship with the Koda community center in the future. We had a great experience working with the staff there, which is always encouraging. While my fellow PCVs and I are all planning to travel back to Koda in October (Khatia has organized a crafts fair of all the good produced by the adults in the training programs and has invited us), I think a permanent PCV posted to Koda could do a world of good and have a really positive experience, albeit a very challenging one.
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