Time (to) Leave, Guys (TLG)
And it's school opening time again... for some. Etseri school has its largest group of pupils since my wife and I began here five years ago, 67, with seven of them entering grade one (new laptops for these!), and four from a family which had moved from the village now back home. But I was only there as a journalist this time, the first such school opening day for me since we moved here. Some things change.
TLG (Teach and Learn with Georgia) had changed the rules over the summer, now requiring all of us volunteer teachers to move to other locations. Easy for most, when the vast majority of us have been singles staying with host families. But me—this is my house I live in, conveniently located three minutes' walk from Etseri school! My wife is one of my co-teachers. Not so easy to relocate: what would the cattle and chickens say, or do, for that matter?!
A compromise was not possible, to put it in a nutshell, so I find myself not teaching English this year. There's plenty to do around home and village, though. My wife is staying on at the school, her salary boosted by the final arrangement of a "high mountain" addition to salaries up here, long rumored. Her reputation boosted, too, by having passed her first national exams for English teachers this summer with the stunning mark of 84%. I'm really proud of her; she spent weeks swatting and sweating upstairs, at the end of which I told her to wrap it up, as she was ready and couldn't cram in any more, in my opinion.
She hosted one of my former Becho village co-teachers and her family, great new friends, at a feast up there in her "office", having promised them that she would do this if she passed. Flying colors, I'd say, and she feels a quite some weight off her shoulders now.
I look back on my TLG years with nostalgia and gratitude for the years of experience they brought me; and with some surprise that this project of former Georgian president Saakashvili has lasted so long without him. However, there are less than twenty TLG volunteers now, so things are dwindling from the fifty per group we were at the beginning, hundreds in the country at one time. And only one of those a returnee. I taught in Mestia, Becho (two locations) and Etseri, with a total of seven co-teachers; and before TLG even started, in Ushguli, with not one, just someone to help me with discipline while I ran an unintentional prototype of the whole thing.
TLG has branched into other languages, including a substantial Chinese group, and I believe has done the country a considerable service, especially in the less privileged and helped villages where it concentrated the English teaching. I was always telling my pupils that the doors of Europe will eventually open for them, and that they'd better be ready! Visa-free travel there will eventually happen, I still believe. While that might seem less of a hurdle to them than the funding of such travel, for some farmer's child from an unheard of village in the high Caucasus, it was equally challenging for one such as my wife, at the other end of the country. But she saw it happen, visited about 40 countries, used her English everywhere, and has been greatly enriched by it all.
I toast the new TLG group, wish you all great success in your schools, villages and host families, and hope to hear of how your volunteering has changed lives, which I fully expect it will.
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 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