It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas...

Saturday evening, after everyone came home, the house felt like Christmas. The power was out because Nona’s brother was replacing electric outlets around the house (which involved chiseling into the stone walls…). The weather was absolutely frigid, so we were all gathered in the kitchen. There was music; Maguala made a cake; I helped make a paper swan out of many small pieces of folded paper. We played dominoes and looked at pictures. Eka even brought home a New Year’s tree.

Sunday was fairly uneventful, although I will say that I got a surprise phone call from New York that made me very happy. Monday at school, I was told that a meeting had been arranged at the Educational Resource Center. I was to go after classes and meet the new English teacher. At school, I used an Anansi the Spider story in one class and an Aesop story in another. My students gave me the lyrics to a folk song that they sing all the time. I promised to learn it in a week, but everyone I ask for help tells me that it’s too hard for me to be learning. And tomorrow is Thursday already…

After school I went and met Michael, the new English teacher. He’s in a different school than I am, but it will be nice to have him around. He seems like a nice guy. Nino wants us to teach adult classes once a week at the resource center, and we both agreed. However, she didn’t tell us when she wants these classes…so who knows if they’ll actually happen. I would like to have some extra classes…

And then it was snowing. I actually can’t remember when it started snowing exactly…at this point it’s hard to remember what my street looked like when it wasn’t “datovlili” (snow-covered). Tuesday after school, my co-teacher and her friend and I all went sledding down this enormous hill. I have a huge hill at home, but it’s a busy road so we never actually sled on it. Here, there really isn’t such a thing as a busy road. We had so much fun!!!

She invited me over again today, but I wanted to go try to find Michael because I had forgotten to give him my phone number. Maybe I should mention first that by now there is sooooooooo much snow that I fell four times on the hike to school and twice on the hike home. It’s good snow, too; it isn’t too wet and the flakes are very big. Anyway, after school I trudged off through the snow. When I got to Michael’s house, I yelled for him a few times from the street (standard protocol here). He didn’t answer, but a neighbor came out and offered to help. She yelled a few times for his host-mother, who also didn’t answer. It was nice to have someone offer to help me, though.

Since that adventure was unsuccessful, I headed towards the Resource Center. I thought I would ask Nino about those classes. But I got happily distracted when I discovered oranges in a shop. I was delighted! Oranges!!!!! So I bought a few for Maguala and a few for my friend Keti. And off I went to Keti’s house.

She was in the basement working on her puppet theater. I stayed and we ate together, but I’m going back tomorrow to help her re-build her stage. Today, we talked a bit about what we’ve been up to. She let me read to her in Georgian, and we joked about what vegetables we would like to smuggle from Western Europe. Then we got a little more serious. She told me about how she has a difficult time talking to people here—her old friends and neighbors—because of their different perspectives. She and her husband left because they were dissidents. They made the difficult decision to take their children and leave everything they knew in search of freedom from the Soviet Union. They arrived in London and were disoriented by the realization that Western life was very different from what they had imagined.

They lived in an immigrant neighborhood at first, with all its colors and warmth. Keti liked it very much, although she was often very lonely. At one point, her husband submitted a project idea to a government competition. His idea was to start a volunteer puppet-theater in the neighborhood, and he won the competition so the government gave him grant money. They worked together in the theater for some time, and it became very well known. But then her husband decided that they shouldn’t do it anymore. He made her give up puppetry all together. Then, at some point, he decided that he was a sculptor who needed to discover himself, so he left. She said he’s come back since, but she has changed. She started painting when he left, to help herself cope. She had painted a lot in Georgia, but she hadn’t touched her brushes since moving to England. In starting to create things again, she realized that she hadn’t been taking care of her inner child as she should have been. So now she is painting and writing and making puppets again. She said that she is happy again, because she’s realized that she has to trust people, she has to create things, and she has to make time to play. I think she’s brilliant.

Being back in Oni has been difficult though. She struggled a lot trying to adapt her old viewpoints, values, and definitions to what she found as reality in London when she first moved there. She couldn’t come back for 16 years, in part because her government wouldn’t let her. Now she is a British citizen…with a note in her passport saying that if she takes dual citizenship, the British government won’t be responsible for her. But at least the passport enabled her to come back. She loves the snow and the mountains, but she is a little disheartened when she speaks with people here. They think she abandoned them by leaving, and they say she can’t understand what they have been through…as though they can understand what she’s been through. They complain about Russia bombing them in 2008, but some still talk about wanting the Soviet Union back so that “Russia will protect us.” They are afraid to sign petitions and upset about new laws, because they changed their government but not their mentalities after the revolution. So there are still these old Soviets romanticizing the past and refusing to acknowledge that the real tragedy has been the loss of so many loved ones, not the loss of the USSR.

Keti said that people don’t understand what “freedom” is, what “democracy” looks like, or that life in the West has its challenges, too. She finds it frustrating and sad and a little scary. At least, she said, nationalists in England call themselves nationalists so that she knows to avoid them. Here, though, she said she isn’t sure where people actually stand because they are often afraid to openly think…let alone talk.

Then I was called home, where I ate borscht and found myself craving sweet baked quince. Maybe I’ll miss having a wood stove when I’m back in the U.S.

I don’t remember if I ever wrote about the conversation I once had with a friend about “culture shock.” I usually find the orientation session (to any abroad program) discusses “culture shock,” and I am incredibly bored. I know by now that I will go into a new adventure and at some point have to adjust myself to my new situation. I know by now that this adjustment isn’t easy or comfortable, especially if I am also dealing with difficult classes, a difficult new language, or a difficult relationship. In Georgia, the adjustment has been fairly painless, but I am certainly still adjusting in many ways. All this said, Keti had never heard of “culture shock” before, even though she described having all the symptoms of it multiple times. In the conversation with my friend some time ago, we were debating the existence of “reverse culture-shock.” He insisted that it doesn’t exist in the way “reverse racism” doesn’t exist. I beg to differ. Discrimination based on race is the same from A to B and B to A, because it is based in fear of someone different and unfamiliar (I say this because I refuse to believe that if people really took the time to know and understand each other, they would still be able to hate entire populations so ferociously). With culture-shock, however, the two scenarios are different. When you leave your home country, you know that you are going somewhere new. You expect that things will be different because you will be somewhere new and different. Maybe you can’t anticipate how different they will be or how you will be impacted, but you know that you are going somewhere “not home.” With “reverse culture-shock,” you are going to a place that you expect to understand. You expect that going home means going back to familiar people, familiar food, and familiar customs. In short, you expect to be comforted by returning to a place where you intimately understand the culture. But being away changes people, so instead of seamlessly sliding back into place upon returning home, you have to adjust yet again. Since this scenario involves discomfort in a place that should be familiar, I actually think it is more upsetting and precarious. Especially if a person has been away for a very long time, and if leaving was not a freely made decision.

It’s 2 am. I’m going to sleep now.