Interlude, Meditation
I am writing this article from my departure area at Warsaw’s Frederic Chopin International Airport, waiting to return to Tbilisi and then home, to Svaneti. I made a very short trip back to Canada to see off a great, nearly lifelong friend who had just died when a brain aneurysm four years old finally betrayed him into a stroke, a week in hospital, and the end. He and his wife had known of it, but had decided to live their lives as if ignorant, also telling no one. Indeed, they and another couple, all dear friends, had visited us several years ago to build our first proper indoor bathroom. His widow now expressed her gladness that they had seen our mountain fastness in time.
It took me three flights and two ten-hour layovers to make this journey out, and a similar ordeal coming back. But it was required, by the decades of our friendship, his mentorship of me, and my wife’s insistence. We did our best to arrange for someone to come and help her with the farm work and other manual labor while I was away, and I made my most hurried exit from Georgia ever, buying a ticket for the next day in Zugdidi. Aside from the flights, I also had a six-hour evening train from there to Tbilisi and a sleepless night outward, and now await another, all-night sleeper wagon inward. The hours, and the jet-lag, add up.
The funeral: over five hundred people and a wonderful testimony to the lives this man participated in during his nearly seven decades. He was father to many. Gone, suddenly, and we now in shock, grateful for his legacy, clinging to each other for support, especially his widow and three sons and several young grandchildren, too young to understand. But resting in faith, too.
So, that is the why of me being here. When I started writing these articles for GT more than five years ago, it was after a single letter to the newspaper by email from Mestia where my wife and I lived at the time. A single answer, detailing word counts, photos, schedule and payment, and we were off. No other communication necessary, even by phone. It was about six months before I even descended, met anyone at the newspaper’s headquarters in Tbilisi and picked up my first accumulated salary.
I usually write about Svaneti as my home and what’s going on in our lives and in the village and province, occasionally adding other themes if I happen to be elsewhere in Georgia or abroad, including the UK and Zimbabwe and Canada. But the ease of doing this, on a battery-powered laptop which also has all my photographs on it and from which I can email the articles from nearly anywhere on earth, is delightful. I fell into this part-time career with the greatest of ease and luck. It gives me a weekly writing commitment which I have never failed to meet, and makes me find something to write about whether I’m “in the mood” or not.
The themes, sometimes large, sometimes tiny, present themselves for inspection, especially when one is in the habit of seeking them out. I choose, and sometimes make notes for the future when there might be a dry moment. I very much want to describe life in these faraway mountains, to put it on people’s radar (also accessible anywhere in the world where there is internet) and do what I can to ensure that Svaneti is discovered and then never forgotten. Because forgetting would lead to a slow extinction, the death of an entire people, and their funeral would only happen long after the fact. May it never be necessary.
The water birds were picnic visitors in Edmonton, there to replace my sorrow with peace.
Tony Hanmer runs the “Svaneti Renaissance” Facebook group, now with over 1300 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
Tony Hanmer