Youth With… Etseri, Svaneti

This is the third time, if memory serves, that I or my wife and I have hosted a Christian youth service team from “akhalgazrda miznit” (Youth with a Purpose) in Svaneti in the last ten years. These are multinational groups of up to about ten people who have met and worked and studied together elsewhere and are then sent to another country for a final, cross-cultural project lasting from several weeks to several months. Once such a team stayed with me in Ushguli, and now a team is with us in our village for the second visit here.

This group of eleven comes from Australia, India, the Netherlands, the USA, Chile and Canada, with their interpreter from Tbilisi. They’ll be with us for three weeks. Although it’s been a very rainy and cold spring so far, with everyone complaining about late potato planting for the short season, the group arrived driven straight to my door this morning as I write this in high spirits, and tomorrow, once they’ve got over the train-lag of their Tbilisi-Zugdidi leg, they’ll be ready for action.

We are focusing on single, ill or physically needy people, who could use help around the house, field or barn: chopping firewood, cleaning, hoeing, planting, weeding, fence repair, and so on. And now there are three new garbage dumpsters in the village (hopefully to be followed by twelve more, though they cost a GEL 1000 each). We have already started a big trash cleanup operation with my team, too, and plan to continue this, getting local youth involved. After all, Georgia IS the country God was keeping for Himself, so the legend goes, and a most useful piece of anti-littering propaganda it is! The mayor informs me that these dumpsters’ contents will be trucked weekly to an official dump zone in Zugdidi, not thrown off the nearest Enguri riverbank cliff, so that’s all good. One can only take so much of a beautiful little stream which should be and used to be a trout paradise instead being choked up with… used Pampers, would you believe!

Several visits to people’s homes with the above tasks in mind already have results; but they’re also helping my wife and me with our somewhat heavy load of work in and around the home. Sometimes it’s simply odd jobs which need more than one or two able bodies; sometimes, a thing which is vastly sped up with many hands at it. Attacking the horrible old buried chicken-wire fence near our new wood fence-line, and digging it out: it prevents scything in that area, and the weeds are having a field-day. Building a second set of shelves for the rapidly, continuously expanding shop in our house. Moving and chopping firewood already chain-sawed for the coming winter, stacking it to dry.

And the odd outdoor barbecue, too, when weather allows and the sunsets oblige. I don’t want to work them to exhaustion, but I do want them to fall in love with this place and never forget it in their thoughts and prayers! THEN we really will have accomplished something. Without this part, it’s just a job or two; with it, their lives may be changed forever, and we may even see some of them back here for a return or two, even for a longer stretch… That’s a Purpose.

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 1350 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