A Day in the Life...

There is nothing typical about life in Peace Corps Georgia, but here is what passes for ordinary- enjoy.

8:00 - Wake up.  For no reason.  Look at my phone and try very, very hard to comprehend why I would be awake at such an hour. Decide I have no reason to get out of bed before absolutely necessary, roll over, and attempt to go back to sleep.  Something about knowing I have to get up in the next two hours always makes going back to sleep a challenge for me.

9:15 - I finally start slipping into a relaxed sleep.

9:20 - Alarm goes off. The nice British lady, who is inside my phone, politely tells me it is 9:20 and time to get up.  I hit snooze.

9:25 - I know I will get no pleasure out of snoozing this late in the game so I reluctantly roll out of bed before she comes back to tell me it is ten minutes later than the last time we spoke.

9:30 - Get dressed, brush teeth with bottled water, take a baby wipe bath, traipse downstairs to the outside loo (we may not have running water for the next two months, so the upstairs facility is out of commission until further notice- it’s not much fun to lug sufficient amount of water for flushing up and down the stairs everyday- shocking I know), sing some jams while I continue to get dressed upstairs, dawdle, sing some more, use up the rest of my dry shampoo (perfect timing on the water breakdown), add baby powder to my do for good measure, and head downstairs for good.

9:50 – Call Claire.  Part of both of our morning ritual is calling the other as we are frantically make our way from our houses to our schools just in the nick of time.  I refill my water bottle from my filter, and put my two boiled eggs, which are waiting on the table for me when I come downstairs every morning (because my host parents love me, and want to ensure I don’t starve to death after I think they figured out I was never going to get up early enough to cook for myself), and head out the door.  I New York stride to work and got their just in time for the bell, which actually means I’m still technically early as no one is in the classroom until after the bell.

9:55 – I have the pleasure, nay, the privilege of starting my day off every Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday with teenagers!  These teenagers are my 10^th graders.  The one thing I have going for me is half of them believe they will be pro footballers some day and thus cannot be bothered to go to class most days.  I do not encourage truancy, but at least it makes the class size more manageable and lends the classroom to an actual learning environment when most of the students there actually want to be, or at least feel it is an important enough use of their time.  Today they are eerily quiet, even though most of the aforementioned students are actually here today.  I think having Monday off yesterday (to commemorate the Tbilisi Massacre) and knowing we only have school tomorrow until Easter break begins must have a subduing effect on them. Today we are working on a surprise for my big sister’s class in America!

10:45 – 7^th grade.  This class is comprised of 31 kids all stuck in the middle.  They are a lot of work, even with two teachers in the room, but I actually greatly enjoy this class.  I feel they are one of the classes where I have the most opportunity to have an impact on the English learning in the future, as well as their true understanding of American culture and work ethic. 

11:35 – “Jana Mas!” “Jana Mas!” “Jana Mas!”  This is their way of saying “Ms. Price”, (Mastsavlebeli is teacher in Georgian) and anytime they have an issue it is all I hear.  Many “one minutes” follow.  Fighting and shoving commences over who is in whose seat.  Tears flow.  The offended students are upset because they want to sit as close to me as possible.  I’m not going to lie, I kind of relish in how big of a deal I am, even if it is to 10 year olds.  Everyone is ordered to the back of the room.  I tell students to randomly choose a number between one and six, the number of rows in our room, and assign seats randomly according to these numbers.  Everyone seems to be happy in the end.  No more tears for the rest of the day.  I realize at the end of the lesson that we do not have a lesson tomorrow, and will thus not get to do our Easter lesson before Easter, but oh well.

12:20 – Seniors’ abilities to stay focused on school is not just a thing in America.  However, senioritis for Georgian students is American senioritis on steroids.  There are few good things to say about a class full of know it all teenagers who pretty much downright refuse to do anything we ask of them.  I use this time to prepare for my after school classes with students who actually want to learn from me.  Word on the street is these students used to be one of the best and most dedicated classes in the school, but I have never seen anything but the exact opposite; like I said, senioritis on steroids.

1:00 – My counterpart and I have a brief meeting discussing the meeting we would like to have tomorrow with our town’s mayor about the project we are trying to kick off.  Fingers crossed it all works out!  Details to follow.  I eat my breakfast finally, as I did not have time during the breaks due to the Jana Mas symphony.

1:10 – I work out a few more activities I will do in my after school clubs and leave school.  I cannot do the collage activity I want to do, because we do not have a classroom pair of scissors and the last time we borrowed some from my director she apparently had very important working that required cutting at that exact moment, and we were later screamed at for using them in our lesson.

2:00 – The adult English class I teach twice a week at an NGO in my town actually begins on time.  I used our class never starting on time as an example last week, just to show the different times to use prepositions in time speech, but it may have been a subtle hint, that I had not even intended.  Subtlety isn’t my strong suit as most of my peeps can attest to, so it really was innocent, but it seems to have worked nonetheless which is O.K. with me.  I look forward to these classes every week perhaps more than any others.  For one, teaching adults is much different than teaching children.  Not that I don’t love the kids in school, but the exhaustion level is much lower after working with grown-ups.  Also, I have about 20% of the number of students in my school lessons as I do in my adult class- fewer students always equals teacher’s relief.  We continue studying daily routines and times, and the glory that is the existence of “do/does” in our language, which has no equivalent in Georgian.

3:00 – Some of the students who come to my youth English club at the organization also attend a computer class at the same facility.  The students come in and tell us the computer teacher did not have lessons yesterday and informed them they are having it today.  Of course no mention of this was made to me prior to the 5 minutes before beginning the club.  Time to begin. No computer teacher after all.  We go on as usual.  Normally there are close to 20 kids in the club, but today there are only 9.  It is a holiday week so I am not too upset by it.  They are all very active and engaged in the class/ activities, which feels nice.

3:30 – 8:00 – I go to a fellow Western English teacher’s house who works for the Georgian program Teach and Learn Georgia.  The program aims to have as many native speakers in the country as possible, I think with the idea that if there are loads of English speakers running about, it is bound to transfer to the country nationals.  He teaches at the 3^rd school in town, and I at the 1^st.  There are rules against the overlapping in organizations of our two programs.  We get to his house and discuss how long we will be able to handle the water shortage with a smile on our faces.  His host mom has everyone in the house round up as many empty water bottles as they can find and sends his host brother to a tap in the park, which apparently still has running water, with a wheel barrow full of said bottles.  We eat beans which may or may not have been made from the illusive tap water, have no immediate side effects, and decide the water might be alright, at least cooked into food.  His host brother, one of my students, after much prodding, begins his English homework for the night.  Close to an hour later, I have helped him write his 10 sentences using present simple tense with two verbs in each.  It is cruel for a teacher to encounter any students after teaching all day long. Cruel.  After being cornered by his host sister, who is in the other 10^th grade class, as to why I do not teach her class, and kindly explaining to her I do not make the schedule which disables me from working with more than one teacher, I decide it is time to head home.

8:20 - The TLG and I stop to say our goodbyes on the main street, as he was kind enough to walk me home in the dark.  Three men approach him and are speaking with him as they have spoken before. We both surmise they have been drinking as they are all stumbling, struggling to keep their eyes open, and not all together making sense with their conversation.  Despite the content of one of the man’s speech not entirely being all aboard the coherent train, his grammar was excellent.  He informed my friend that he does not ever drink alcohol, which can only leave other things to the imagination.  Who knows?  After 5 minutes of rather unintelligible conversation, a fellow local is kind enough to interrupt and we make our get away.  Once we arrive at my house, we discuss what we tried to speak about before on the main street.  Another man comes stumbling up to us asking for the head of the house.  The ether on this one’s breath is unmistakable and is easily detected from 6 feet away.  I understand his Georgian perfectly well, but pretend not to as I have no idea who this questionable character is, and sometimes if I pretend not to understand people in situations like that they will just move along on their merry way.  He is persistent.  When he switches to Russian to say what I have already understood in Georgian, I go get my host father.  Apparently, he was buying something to do with agriculture, but I couldn’t quite work out what my host parents were talking about.

8:25 – I sit with my host mother and have a nice conversation about our days and this and that.  We always end up talking about history in our long talks and how things used to be here.  I continue to be amazed.  We saw Trump on T.V. and his plans to take over this country as well, and discussed the merits of that venture, as well as the continued government push and economic support of all things related to tourism, while people still struggle to get by from month to month on their salaries and pensions.  I am not asserting my opinion on the matter, merely relaying what we were discussing.  It is a complex issue, but I do feel for those still struggling so greatly.

9:50 – Finally make my way back to my room.  Talk on the phone for about 30 minutes doing my daily recap with my BFF.

10:35 – Begin the 15 minute Ab Ripper X portion of P90X.

10:50 – Confirm what I already knew to be true, that Georgian mineral water, while absolutely amazing, is not an appropriate method of hydration when working out, and I must go refill my water bottle.

10:52 – Begin the hour long Arms and Back portion of P90X.

11:52 – Decide my body could not hurt in more places than it does right now.  Have my final nightly recap with Claire.

11:55- Practice the guitar, though not as much as I’d like, but in the interest of typing this here post for you kind folks, I had to cut my time short.

2:00 – Finally finish this literary masterpiece.  Goodnight.