The Bumbler and the Democrat: Ogden on Expats in Georgia

OPED

A Georgian friend of mine once told me a joke about some Georgians working in a luxurious mountain hotel in which a group of foreigners were staying. One day, one of the hotel workers sees a dead gorilla outside the building and, not knowing what it was and having never seen anything like it, goes out to examine it with his friend. “Well,” says he, “it’s too hairy for a Svani and too dark for a Megrelian...go back to the hotel, Gio, and check if one of the foreigners is missing.” You’ll note there are two butts to the joke - the appearance of the foreigners and the ignorant workers - but to my mind it gives off a strong sense of fairness. (I have retold that joke with mixed success over the years, with an English friend of mine asking “And was anyone from the hotel missing? No? Oh...bit of a mystery then, what!”)

Western foreigners have been a very divisive influence since arriving in Georgia in significant numbers over ten years ago. To my mind, they can be can be sub-divided into groups, namely The Bumbler, The Democrat, The Stranded and The Genacvale. There is a degree of overlap, but in my experience these categories seem to catch most of the characters one finds here.

The Bumbler - the rarest of the breed - is generally happy to live in Georgia and mind his own business, at ease mixing with Georgians or his fellow foreigners in equal measures. The Bumbler may have opinions about Georgia or Georgians, but will have equally strong views on fellow-foreigners; indeed, The Bumbler is often opposed to The Democrat’s aggressive help-the-natives attitude.

The Democrat arrives in Georgia and, like Napoleon looking at the map of Europe, decides that this won’t do at all. After finishing university and learning everything there is to know about the world and realising exactly how it should be run, The Democrat usually comes to Georgia on a government-sponsored education or development programme. The Democrat may be filled with bizarre enthusiasm about ‘bettering the local people’ and ‘making a difference’, both of which they seem to think can be fulfilled with opinionated behaviour and disregard for anyone else’s opinion. The Democrat will usually only associate with other foreigners, but will still claim to know everything about Georgia and Georgians that you don’t (but remember that a Democrat who claims to have studied Georgia at university is a beast best avoided; the sense of entitlement is stifling). Keep in mind, however, that the Democrat is never wrong.

I am, needless to say, a Bumbler. I will concede that Georgian bicho bicho culture (and if you can’t guess what I mean by that, you haven’t been here long enough) is...unsavoury (I was careful with my wording, there) and supras can be tedious, but I do enjoy living here; for me, Georgia is a national personification of that feeling you get after two or three glasses of wine, that heady confidence that makes you think that anything is possible...and, for the most part, it is, if you’re lucky enough and approach things with the right attitude; Georgians are usually very accommodating to Bumblers. Why, during my time here I have done everything from teaching and writing to training professional boxers and acting in a soap opera (and what an experience that was: lights! Camera! Action! The clapperboard snaps, the cameras roll and the idiot Ogden, grinning like a desperate insurance salesman, delivers his lines and dies standing up).

Attitude, you see – while Bumblers can agree with Democrats in that some things could do with changing, The Democrat’s confrontational way of telling Georgians all that’s wrong with their country can do far more harm than good; Georgians are easily offended by foreign criticism, and who can blame them? A logical response to a critic verbally savaging country and culture is to encourage them to go home, but a lack of understanding on both sides doesn’t help; Georgians don’t understand that The Democrat’s rhetoric, while annoying, is basically well-intentioned: at the same time, The Democrat fails to see that while his ideas are reasonable, his methods are only going to make Georgians more stubborn.

Yet Bumblers can get on well enough with Democrats; it is The Stranded and The Genacvale who grind our gears, but they will have to wait until next week...

Tim Ogden