Powerless: Svaneti

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Oh good, now that those pesky local council elections are over, we can get back to normal life.

The electricity cut off in my village seven times today. And it’s not even winter yet!

Do you know what that’s like? You have no idea when it’s coming back, though of course you can call the electricity guy or the village mayor to see if they know anything or can do anything. But usually you just wait: stoke the wood stove to keep warm, dim the laptop screen to save battery time, cook either on the stove or on a gas burner (bottled, of course, not piped).

Try to run a guest house in these conditions, though. Best to do what some NGO friends of mine did in Tbilisi’s bad, dark Shevardnadze years. They had a separate small building for the house generator, which was always kept full of fuel, and kicked in quickly enough in a power outage that even one’s desktop computer (remember those?) would not miss a beat. There must have been a house-scale voltage stabilizer as well, of course, to keep that electricity not only on, but smooth!

It’s been off very frequently these last weeks, embarrassingly so, elections or no, I have to say. AND it’s not even winter yet! Often enough, when it comes back, you’re not even that glad, because cynically you think, how long until it goes again?

If anything will erode one’s will to stay in these beautiful but faraway mountains, this will do it (assuming that the lawlessness itself doesn’t return). Yes, the electricity in Upper Svaneti has been free from before I arrived here nearly two decades ago! But when it’s unstable in level, or cuts in and out so often, you’re told not to complain. Because replacing the aging local transformers will be expensive enough that your new, regular power will no long be free. So, you shut up, grit your teeth, and dream about a fundraising campaign to replace the old stuff while keeping the juice free. Stock up on candles, or those new solar-powered lanterns which my enterprising wife found recently in Lilo bazaar and imported into our shop, first ones I’ve ever seen.

You make do, but you do indeed feel powerless, not being the millionaire who can make it all go right.

Hmm, feels like a long one this time, so shut the laptop lid altogether.

When I lived in Ushguli ten years ago and this happened, and they all missed their Latino TV soaps, I “invented” Scrabble in Georgian for us to play, with proper letter frequencies based in analysis of a sample text. We cut out the two-inch tiles from paper, and played great games on the nicely gridded dining tablecloth, which they were made to fit. You can’t do the same thing in Korean at all, some friends from Seoul told me; their written language, while using letters, clusters them rather than stringing them in any straight line! So, no crosswords in Korean. It would be interesting to discover which other languages don’t work for Scrabble, and for which reasons. All which have letters in straight lines should work. Such are one’s musings by kerosene lamp (as Ushguli in 2007 offered).

If we’d never had or used electricity, the outages would not happen, of course; it’s losing what we’ve been given that hurts, when we’re so used to it.

I do also remember, living in a B&B in Mere, Wiltshire, UK, in 1990, giving back to the landlady the TV which she had kindly had installed in my room. There was simply nothing worth watching on the four available channels. Four hundred now? Not much different, we often find. So, it’s not a TV addiction thing with me. Just… trying for a regular life, as well as serving the guests.

Do they want us to leave this province, not just the foreigner and his wife from Kakheti, but all of us? Because the demoralization of powerlessness will go a long way towards the diaspora restarting.

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 1700 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