Going Viral
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Having the village shop right in your home, to use, is pretty convenient when you want to isolate yourself. So is having a tourist season which is minimal in winter/spring (our now) and only picks up in summer (a largely unimaginable future). We do have bookings from June onwards, through booking.com and Airbnb, but given the pandemic declaration, I expect those to mostly or all be cancelled as airlines halt and countries close. The villagers might even come to us and ask us to close the guest house, with which request I would feel happy to comply.
The shop will keep running; its clientele is 100% locals at the moment, and they need it. Plus, the infection in the village is zero for now, and the risk through their shopping is minimal anyway: no need for any physical contact at all, and we could insist that all clients have and wear a mask before entering the house (as we will do inside too). Not likely to make us popular, but a useful requirement in any case.
We can continue the trend of knocking elbows instead of the normal handshake and kiss in greeting; ditto for containing coughing. (Mr Spock’s Vulcan greeting, a hand raised with the 4 fingers paired in a V, isn’t catching on here, though I like it a lot. It’s actually derived from a Hebrew blessing, as was Leonard Nimoy himself, who played the character.)
There are ancient Georgian precedents for self-quarantine in the event of having a dangerous infectious disease. Above Shatili in Khevsureti is a “village of the dead”. Stone houses half set into the earth, with windows near ground level. Peer in and you will see… a litter of the bones of those who left their community and went there to die, being fed through the window until this was accomplished. I have seen it myself. Individuals sacrificed themselves and villages were saved. Can Georgians give up their suddenly high-risk wedding, funeral and birthday feasts, though?
It’s hard to predict what the state of the world will be a month from now in the current crisis, let alone in half a year, though one can make educated guesses. Self-isolation, internet use way up, all meetings cancelled with huge knock-on effects in many industries from hospitality to entertainment to sports, and further knock-ons from there. Public transport stopping. Rediscovery of abandoned arts and crafts, self-sufficiency, unfinished projects, home cooking and the joys of reading a book (onscreen or actual ink on paper)? Families forced to communicate face to face? New ways of working from home?
I have long been a natural skeptic in the face of internet-propagated fake news. A very necessary trait with news and advice on the virus too, as some of it is outright panic-mongering or simply wrong suggestions of what to do or not. Who writes these things? Anarchists longing for chaos, I suppose, though if it came to their own door they might not be so gleeful. I am also an optimist, and hope urgently that this is not too wrong an outlook.
Things could be so much worse: we have electricity, and water, and gas where it’s piped in, and communications. We’ve not regressed to 19th century levels, or Dark Age ones. Dystopian fiction offers many scenarios of how this might play out; may we never have to experience them beyond page and screen.
If the villagers show up with pitchforks and burning torches, though, demanding that we share out all remaining shop goods among them, I shall go out giving. Better that than hoard and be remembered for not helping, in this village of Etseri whose very name in Hebrew MEANS help.
Tony Hanmer has lived in Georgia since 1999, in Svaneti since 2007, and been a weekly writer and photographer for GT since early 2011. He runs the “Svaneti Renaissance” Facebook group, now with nearly 2000 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