A School at 60: Ushguli, Svaneti
Blog
My opportunities to return to Ushguli, where I spent the winters of 2007-9 living and teaching English, are rare these days. It’s far and expensive, not to mention a bumpy ride; though the road is steadily improving over time, the concrete extending slowly farther and farther from Mestia through Ipari and towards K’ala.
We have a group of young Christian volunteers who have been living with us in Etseri for a few weeks now, and on their day off they planned to make the trek to Europe’s highest village, so I was able to accompany them as guide. It was gratifying to see some of the changes in the road on the way: although between us and Mestia there are enough bad spots to call shame on the current government (oh, wait, their ouster is being demanded for other reasons at the moment anyway), the road is new enough that frost heave/sink and road drop-off haven’t yet had time to disfigure it. The zig-zag down from the Mulakhi-Ipari pass is nearly complete in concrete now, and even some sections past this are likewise resurfaced. Dumpsters also dot the landscape: surely a far less eye-injuring sight than the garbage strewn about the landscape which was formerly our despair? Progress is in sight!
Near and past K’ala, the road is still its familiar muddy, rough, scary, un-railed self, but this distance is lessening with every hard-won meter of new surface. The cement version will cause some to shudder, as it’s a first there; it WILL bring more, and faster, traffic to delicate Ushguli, this is sure. Whether the village can stand the modernization is another question.
Weather wasn’t marvelous on the day of our trip, cloudy when not actually squally. So we forewent the planned short but steep hike up to Queen Tamar’s Summer Fortress with its glorious views of the village spread out below Mt. Shkhara, Georgia’s highest, which was also playing hide-and-seek anyway. I found myself free to visit my dear and wonderful former hosts, the family of Dato Ratiani and Nanuli Chelidze in their spectacular new Villa Lileo, and also the school where I taught, where Dato’s sister Nona is still director.
Here, I was welcomed back with open arms by my colleagues of a decade ago and discovered that my information about an important date had been wrong. The school’s diamond jubilee, celebrating 60 years of existence, had been last year! The same with the equal commemoration of its oldest serving couple, both teaching there for 60 years too! And… nothing had been recognized, or done, by the local or national governments to recognize and reward this great date. Shame, again! Really, I believe that Odisher and Teona deserve medals from Georgia’s President for their decades of service in one place, and such a difficult one at that! (In the photo, they are 3rd and 4th from right-most.) The school deserves a medal too, similarly.
It was my privilege to work alongside such long-term dedicated teachers, and soon after I left Ushguli, the Teach and Learn with Georgia program began. I agitated non-stop for more teachers of English to take up where I had left off, and for most of this last decade this has been done; I met the current English teacher, a young man from Zugdidi, on this trip and commended him for his work. Such a tourist-frequented location needs its young people, its future generations, to grow up fluent in English, the teaching of which was the village’s idea for me to do when I asked them for permission to live there and for their wish for my use of time. The rest is history.
Tony Hanmer has lived in Georgia since 1999, in Svaneti since 2007, and been a weekly writer for GT since early 2011. He runs the “Svaneti Renaissance” Facebook group, now with nearly 1900 members, at www.facebook.com/groups/SvanetiRenaissance/
He and his wife also run their own guest house in Etseri:
www.facebook.com/hanmer.house.svaneti
By Tony Hanmer