Emerging: Etseri, Svaneti
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Spring has come up here, while further down in the lowlands of Georgia, the first vegetable and fruit harvests are trying to happen. Quarantining is making that process quite challenging in some locations, as farmers struggle to access their fields in sufficient numbers to work without getting fined for doing so. Then they need to get the harvest to market, possibly across road closures. It can be heartbreaking, not only the money lost, but the food rotting where it grew or was picked and packed. There are some encouraging reports, though, of the government trying to open things up to prevent these things from happening. Farming, at the mercy of weather year by year, now has new enemies with which to contend.
Meanwhile, in Svaneti… rain contends with snow, the latter slowly giving ground. People are planting their potatoes (the main crop) only now, having manured the fields to enrich them either last autumn or earlier this spring. My wife and I have done our couple of lines, and then added some corn, squash, flowers of various kinds, greens, and tended to the existing strawberries, raspberries and fruit seedlings. A young man with a hand-pushed gasoline-powered tiller did the ground for us, turning up a watchtower’s foundation’s worth of stones to pick out. I rake, hoe, turn soil with a spade between the raspberry canes. We’ve also dug up a few small evergreens from elsewhere and brought them home to add to the garden for future years.
The horrible mess which was the years-old scrap woodpile is finally out of the way, just an eyesore of a memory in photos, and there too flowers and greens will spring up. So we have plenty of physical work outside in the fresh air to keep us busy. That, and a growing set of English lessons and readings of various kinds which we record as videos by cell phone and post to our and other Facebook pages for the common good, we hope. My new nickname is Pinocchio.
We don’t leave the TV on all the time, as its influence, while offering information, can also simply be overwhelming, as the numbers of infections and deaths rise. Besides, there’s too much controversy and even fake news to have to pick through and discard before it can stain one’s soul. We ration it to a minimum, bolstered by downloaded films or TV series chosen to lighten the mood or to boost the courage.
I also have to wonder: how long, once things fully open up again, before the TRUST of strangers with one another returns? How long before public gatherings of whatever kind will feel safe, not harbingers of invisible and silent death a few weeks later? Religious groups are supposed to meet, generally. For now, we are doing this virtually: how will we get back to the broken habits we have now lost? Good riddance, some will say… but not all. How long, if ever, before we can simply hug one another without feeling criminally harmful to our very selves and others too?
It sometimes feels like a nightmare from which one just aches to awaken. But it goes on, increasingly affecting the whole world in fatally interlocked ways. How are the medical people coping with traumatic stress, having even to wait an unknown time before they can add “post-” to the beginning, “disorder” to the end of that phrase, and then start getting counselling for it?
Galadriel’s words were chosen to open the magnificent Lord of the Rings film trilogy of recent decades: “The world is changed.” And here we are, seeing that unfold before our very eyes. We go on, hoping, trying not to give up. May we have the flexibility and strength to cope with the New World.
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