Catch-up & miscellaney

May 24, 2010
I must say I am ‘behinder’ than usual. I have gotten very busy here and other things seem to get in the way of blogging so my apologies to our readers.

I have accepted a volunteer position as Tbilisi State University. In 2005 the national government decided to stop funding state schools and the onus is now on the schools to find addition funds to exist. TBS won a grant that had a consultant perform an assessment of the management system. One recommendation was to create an alumni relations office to maintain communication with alums and hopefully obtain some funds from the more successful alumni. TBS is the oldest (90 years) and largest public university in Georgian. Many politicians, and professionals are graduates of TSU. This year TSU won another grant to develop an alumni relations office. I have volunteered to help the newly hired chief alumni officer develop the program. A consultant will visit TSU three times this summer fro assessment and training. Unfortunately I will miss the first visit. He arrives the day after we leave and leaves two days before our return. Bummer!

We leave Friday, May 28th for a meeting in Atlanta. The meetings start on June 3rd so we will zip up to DC to see our kids for Friday-Tuesday and come back to Atlanta on the 2nd. Then we will drive to SC to see my family on June 10th and drive back on Monday June 14 to catch our plane back here, arriving June 15th. My dear friend James Wall has moved to Atlanta recently so I will spend time with him while Ron is attending his meetings. Another friend of high school lives in Atlanta and James has hooked us up so Nan and I will have 47 years of catching up to do! Yikes, can I be that old?

Things are going much better here for Ron. His work is finally moving along, not as fast as he would like but at least it is now moving! IWA is slowing down for me as we don’t meet again until September so there will be no fundraising activities. This is the perfect time for me to help TSU with their project but I think the fall will be real busy when IWA starts to gear up for fall activities. Hopefully things at TSU will be off to a good start and my work will start to wan by then. How’s that for positive thinking?

We are having spring weather here. It rains often but the sun comes out almost daily. We have taken the wool blankets off the bed and opened the window and turned off all the radiators. Everyone says summers are hot here. We have air conditioners in each room but we prefer fresh air over the AC. My guess is we will need AC in order to sleep.

I planted two packets of nasturtiums that I had ordered from the US and they are all germinating. I hope they survive our being away for 17 days. I have asked my housekeeper to come three times a week to water plants. I planted about 15-17 pots to help soften the concrete castle we live in. I am pleased with the results. Our yard is miniscule and I am grateful that I think I can keep up with the weeds. My gardener doesn’t seem to notice them and I never seem to be here when he is here to show him how to weed. We have a horrid grass weed with roots to China. I dig and dig and never seem to find the bottom. My arthritic fingers don’t much like pulling weeds.

We have been engaging in lots of social activities: dinner parties, meeting friends at restaurants for lunch on Sunday, and having friend here for dinner. I am excited to be working at TSU because I will be working with Georgians as I find I don’t have as much interaction as I would like through my normal course of the day. I am learning first hand about some of our cultural differences. For instance, Georgians sense of time is more casual than ours. Today we had a meeting with the Vice Rector of the university. She is the equivalent to the VP. The meeting was scheduled for 11:00. At 11:05 I asked Mariam the chief alumni officer what time the meeting was with the VR and she said 11:00. A minute or so later we got up to go downstairs to meet with her. It’s what Ron calls GST (Georgian Standard Time). Georgians also don’t plan ahead (as evidenced by the way they drive). It was decided this morning that we should have a meeting this week to inform the key staff about the consultant’s visit next week. He will be meeting with the same staff who will be invited to the meeting to be held on Thursday. But that is one of the benefits of working with Georgians: I will learn more about their way of life.

The thing I dislike the most about living here is the driving. When we had our security orientation, the security officer said the biggest danger in Georgia was not the possibility of being robbed, murdered or burglarized but getting into a car. He encouraged us to never drive at night due to the amount of drinking and driving that occurs here. I mentioned lack of planning above. Multiple times a day every day I see drivers in the far left lane making right hand turns. They often do this when stopped at a red light, turning in front of three lanes of stopped traffic. Countless times I have witnessed drivers running red lights without even slowing down. My least favorite offense is the drivers who blow through a red light at a specially designated pedestrian crossing. A pedestrian could be crossing the street and the driver would not see the pedestrian until they had run over them. There are few places to make left hand turns here or to find a convenient place to U-turn. Drivers have to go a long way sometimes to make a left handed turn. For instance to get to our fresh market it is illegal to make a left handed turn onto the street where the market is located so Gia drives across the river, exits under the bridge so he can get back onto the bridge on the correct side of the street re-crosses the river and makes a right hand turn. This maneuver take 4 right hand turns. It is a very typical move here. At an intersection near our house many driver blow through the red light so they can turn left before the oncoming traffic has a green light. As a pedestrian, I have to watch out to make sure one of these idiots doesn’t kill me while I am trying to cross that street. I feel very blessed that I don’t have to drive here and am very grateful that Gia is so skillful. He watches all his mirrors and the road ahead constantly checking to see who is doing what around him. I have seen police cars break every traffic law imaginable: driving in the opposing lane of traffic ( a very common practice here by every driver, not just police cars), driving on the sidewalk, running red lights, making illegal u-turns and left hand turns to name a few. Only once have I seen a police car stop a traffic violator, someone driving top speed in a congested commercial/residential area. By the way, almost every street is a mixed use area: commercial on the first floor and residential above. Most buildings here are four-15 stories high and most have small shops/businesses on the first floor and residences above. There are very few individual homes here. The vast majority of people in Tbilisi live in high rise concrete ugly buildings with tiny balconies where they dry their clothes as almost no one owns a clothes dryer. Recently I asked Gia, our driver, how long he had lived in his apartment. He said “All my life.” I almost fell over. I counted up how many places I had lived and came up with 28. Granted I am older but I had lived in three places by the time I was 8! If you went to the villages outside of Tbilisi you would find people living in small houses for the most part and they would be quite humble judging from the outside. I would guess most do not have central heating if any heat at all. The Georgians that I have asked told me they heat one room in their apartments here as it is very expensive. Our housekeeper and Laurie’s housekeeper call and then ask us to call them back on our phones to reduce the cost of their cell phone usage. It is as though their watch every tetri (100 tetri make one lari about $0.53). A friend of ours said he thinks it is more a matter of getting what you can from the system, a holdover from Soviet days. For example Nino, our housekeeper asked me if she could shower here because her house is not heated. It is now spring, much warmer, but she continues to shower here, saving her water usage and electricity to heat water assuming they have a hot water heater. As Americans most of us have an abundance by comparison. I have been to two apartments where Georgians live and have been made aware of how little space they have. Tim, Ron’s predecessor here, told us the Georgians he knew loved to come to his house because they could spread out and really relax because of the space available. I have been in many homes where American are living or other expats and diplomats and we all have large homes or apartments that for the most part are elegant at best and more than adequate at worst. There are some very wealthy Georgians who live well but I would guess most people here are below middle class.

Ron has gotten a wild hair and want to buy an old Russian jeep to be his project car. Not a project to fix up, but a vehicle to use to pick-up project materials for projects around the house. We know we need a new car when we get home and deciding on what to get has always been difficult because he wants to be able to carry a full sheet of plywood. If we have another way to do that, we will have more options on what to buy. Before coming here he was thinking of an old step-side pick-up truck. But now, he’s looking into what it will take to bring one of these things home. Besides, he likes the way these things look. It must be a “guy” thing! They call it a GAZ 69.

I think I menioned before that we purchased a Mafrash a while ago.  Many of you have written to ask:  "Just what is a Mafrash"  Well, it's an original carpet bag, abour 2 feet long by one foot wide and 18 inches deep.  We had a small table/bench built so we can place the Magrash upside down over it and use it as a suitcase stand in one of our guest rooms at home in Vancouver.