Typical

As we work back into our autumn groove, as our summer/fall projects wrap up and we look excitedly ahead to new projects to keep our hands from falling idle in the winter months, I want to take some time to go back and fill in the gaps in our blog. Because I tend to be event-oriented in my updates, I have grossly overlooked and failed to mention some of the biggest things we do here.

The day-to-day, the meat of our work, the bulk of our time is spent in two places: school and our host family's house. Included in the time at school, I count the time going to and from school, time waiting in the teachers lounge between classes, time teaching classes, endless time greeting students all over town, time planning with teachers for upcoming lessons, time talking with different teachers and answering questions or debating about America or Georgia, time drinking lots of coffee and eating lots of sweets. At our host family's we spend time eating, sleeping, playing with the kids, chasing the kids away from our computers, cleaning up the food that kids have trailed into our room, talking with our host grandmother about grudges she holds, eating some more, talking with neighbors that come to visit, reading, watching DVDs of tv programs that we didn't watch at home, working on the computer, wasting time on the computer and drinking buckets of tea. We go out and do other things, but the above listed activities make up at least 90% of our time. This isn't just a PCV reality, though. The reality of community integration here seems to involve being really well integrated into the niche you occupy.

For school, Sam and I (like all the Education Volunteers in Peace Corps Georgia) are expected to teach at least 15-20 hours per week. This semester we each have 18 hours, teaching a wide range of ages and ability levels. At my school, one of my counterparts teaches 18 hours a week (she has 6 different classes, all of which meet 3 times per week). The rest of my counterparts teach anywhere from 6 to 15 hours of classes a week. Many of them supplement this work with other work. Teaching private lessons is the most common boost. Even those that don't have other paid employment, however, have round-the-clock engagements cleaning, cooking, taking care of their children and families and generally tackling the "second shift." So for every one of our counterparts, taking time to lesson plan with Sam or me means taking time away from some other thing. Sometimes this "time away" for required lesson planning seems to be seen as a nice respite for our counterparts. Other times, we're acutely aware of the imposition our lesson planning is on our counterparts' time.

Most days, we come home from school pretty much wiped out. I think the number of nights I've made it past midnight in Peace Corps (not including international departures from the Tbilisi airport) could be counted on one hand. If I get less than 8 hours of sleep, I'm a total zombie.

This is a funny thing to me, given the hours I kept working in DC and doing grad school or that Sam spent teaching, holding office hours and grading. I really think I could have counted my 7-8-hours-of-sleep-a-night nights on one hand for all the time we lived in DC (even though Sam always protested that he needed his 8 hours). Now, given how much sleep we get and the hours we keep, I feel almost sheepish thinking about how tired we both are at the end of a school day. Our "longest" school days are 5 class periods, about 5 hours. If you add in travel time to and from school, lesson planning and requisite socializing, we spend, at most, 6 hours any day "at work." We end up making ourselves busier by taking 2-3 Armenian lessons (an hour-and-a-half each session), teaching after school English clubs, leading an Ecology club (Sam) and a fitness club (me). But really, all told, we spend fewer hours actively engaged and working in a traditional sense here.

We do expend a whole lot of brain power and patience doing a whole lot of things that we wouldn't even think about at home. Realizing that I'd forgotten how to say "the pot has boiled over", or trying to understand what a two-year-old is saying in a language I've only spent about a year working on are clearly trying, but relatively small obstacles. Added up over an entire day, however, foreign languages tucker out a PCV.

More than language exhaustion, though, I exhaust my patience here a lot. Sam (the saint) is a whole lot better than me, but I don't think I'm exactly the least patient person in the world. (I mean, c'mon, I grew up with Jenny, Ben and Emily!) Some days I feel like I've got the shortest fuse in the world, though. A lot of this is because my brain still keeps thinking that things "should" happen a certain way. I look for, expect, a certain order of things. I fall into the trap of expecting rationality or logic. In a developing country. That was part of the Soviet Union. Sheesh. My brain gets upset, indignant, angry, frustrated that most of my students have no English textbooks in this, our third full week of school. That the scheduled minibus to a neighboring town has been canceled for no apparent reason. That cab drivers or merchants at the market try to overcharge me because I'm a foreigner. That people talk about me all the time in the street or right in front of me, believing I can't understand them. I meet these frustrations, searching for answers, for a responsible party, and usually find a lot of people who are similarly upset, but who are dissimilarly also resigned. Accepting. Expecting the eventual failure of things to work out or the lack of follow through, however simple it would (in theory) be. People shrug and tell me it's the way things are. It makes me go even crazier. I spend a lot of time trying to walk the line between falling into similar resignation that "things just go that way" and burnout of trying to take on way more than little ol' me is capable of. I think if I solved this problem, though, of knowing when to work and when to walk away, I'd solve the major problem of sustainable international development.

Other things that happen to tax me mentally are just kind of stupid or silly, but still get me when I think about them; these are the little differences that seem earth-shattering sometimes. Like lighting the stove. I'd previously always either used an electric stove or a self-lighting gas stove, so it took some getting used to and some odd fear of striking the stupid match (almost inevitably of a poor quality) and holding it down close enough to the gas to get my tea kettle going. After nearly 17 months in Georgia, I'm obviously not a novice at this and can do it, but I still have my moments where the just-lit gas flares up and momentarily heats my hand uncomfortably and I gasp and jerk my hand away, even though I'm nowhere near burning myself. The always fun flurry of confusion and awkwardness of "should I kiss this person hello/congratulations/goodbye" is another one. I'm not a toucher. I'm not a kisser. Georgia's chock full of folks that kiss on the cheeks for tons of varied reasons. My odd, awkward stance and body language seem to check a lot of unsolicited cheek pecks, but I still do the dance of do-I-or-don't-I at least once a week (if not more frequently). And these silly, easily forgotten awkward moments, at the end of a day full of not quite fitting in, make enough of an impression to make me worry or overanalyze or just rehash in my mind. All of which makes me sleepier.

But we've moved into winter blanket months here in Akhalkalaki, so at least I know I'll be bundled up well, wrapped in my nest of wool and ready for some sweet shuteye when bedtime comes. I hope the rest of you are sleeping well.