Welcome to real life

This week, all of the news anchors on television have been wearing red flower pins on their jackets. To me the flowers look rather like poppies, but I’ve been told that they’re roses and that they’re being worn to mark the last wave of the Soviet Occupation. I’m assuming that this was the occupation that led to the Rose Revolution, but I’m not sure. And I haven’t had internet for two weeks so I can’t check. (You do realize that I write these daily and then post them in bursts when I get internet, right?)

I’m learning lots of interesting things. My co-teacher ran out of the prescription medication that her dermatologist gave her, so she came to school one day with a bag of different medications and a syringe. She told me that she called her doctor and he told her how to mix her own version of the prescription. I told her that this made me a little nervous. She told me not to worry because mixing medications is ok as long as one is careful with antibiotics. The other teachers seemed just as intrigued as myself when my co-teacher informed them that she would be (in the teacher room at school) mixing her own medication. They all talked about how antibiotics are the scariest of medications and so should be put on the skin but not swallowed. Then they talked about how working at a pharmacy is one of the best jobs that a woman can have because it’s easy and it teaches her useful skills. Meanwhile, my co-teacher pulled out a glass bottle with little white cultures growing in it. She told me that this was the bottle her medicine was in before. She wanted to mix her new medicine in it, and I begged her to boil the bottle first to kill the cultures. She poured a little hot water into it and swirled that around, and then she started grinding up pills and pouring syrups together.

This reminded me of a conversation I’d had with our Nona—who works at a pharmacy—in which she said that young people have been buying the alcoholic syrups that are used as bases when mixing different medicines. Something like rubbing alcohol, but without the poisons that the are added to it in America to prevent people doing just what these kids are doing: mixing it with a bit of water and drinking it.

Young people everywhere do stupid things. Myself included, from time to time…and I have to remember what middle school and junior high were like so that I can temper my reactions to things. Like when today in 8^th grade I noticed a girl pulling her sleeves to cover her knuckles. This was the first time I thought about cutters and self-mutilation as a teenage fad since coming here, and I was a bit uneasy when I had her show me her hands. There were bloody gashes between each of her knuckles. Maybe, I thought, she ran into an angry dog. That happens here, but these were too deliberately made to be dog scratches. Maybe her parents had been angry at her…We have a few students whose parents are drunks or have anger management problems. Worried, I asked my co-teacher when we got back to the teacher room. Our principal was there as well, so I was careful to use enough Georgian that she would understand what was going on. I was a bit distressed when my co-teacher seemed amused rather than disturbed. She informed me that girls sometimes take matches and scratch the initials of the boys they like into their hands. Another 8^th grader—who I hadn’t noticed—apparently had small initials bloodily and neatly scratched into her wrist. I protested that this one girl’s knuckles didn’t have initials on them. My co-teacher suggested that the girl had written many people’s initials or someone’s whole name or written initials and then scratched them out. Luckily, our principal was properly horrified. Not that that means she’ll do anything beyond call the girls stupid and crazy, but it’s a better reaction than empathetic amusement.

Between the bloody knuckles and the dogfights, I’ve started worrying more about these kids. When I first came, I worried that they had nothing to do and so went home right after school each day and stayed there. Now I know that they are actually pretty busy; they go to practices and lessons for dancing, singing, playing piano or panduri, acting, playing basketball, playing soccer, wrestling, and making traditional felt art. They go home after school to eat quickly before running off to wherever. Then most of them go home around 6 or 7 to eat a light dinner (they don’t eat lunch…they eat a supper and a dinner). Then they play computer games or watch television until they go to bed. A 5^th grader upset my co-teacher yesterday by telling her that he had gone to bed at 2am that morning because he had been up watching vampire movies. My co-teacher was aghast. I told the boy that he could do this on Fridays and Saturdays sometimes, but because he’s a school boy he shouldn’t stay up so late during the week. My co-teacher snapped that Fridays and Saturdays are no better because he’s young and so he shouldn’t be up so late. I shrugged and told the kid that I know I’m not his mother and can’t tell him what to do but I know that he’s smart enough to make good decisions, and that I expect him to do so from now on. My co-teacher (who somehow thought the knuckle scratching and dog fights were no problem) was about to continue reproaching him, so I quickly asked to see everyone’s homework and reminded the kids that they have a test next class. Of course staying up to 2 am to watch vampire movies is not ok for a 5^th grader on a school night…but there are bigger things to worry about.

Not all of the games the young people play are violent. They also have their share of handgames and folksongs and little superstitions. I’ve learned that it’s believed that if someone is ticklish then he or she has a girlfriend or boyfriend. When a piece of white string was pulled off my jacket sleeve, the other woman informed me that I must have a white boy. She wrapped it around her finger and said a letter of the Georgian alphabet with each loop. She ended on V and smiled. Apparently this means my “white boy” has a first name that starts with a V. This game was new to me, but I watched two men do the same thing at a supra last night. Again the string was white. I wasn’t wearing anything white, but when the short string suggested that the one man’s “white girl” had a name starting with A, they looked at me and chuckled. I suggested that there are lots of “Ana”s in Oni; they said her name was probably “Anita.” Silly harmless games like this are fine. I’m tempted to tie them to the obsession with marriage here, but then I remember playing similar games when I was younger.

Not that there aren’t lots of other conventions here testifying to the curious dual role of marriage here as all important and fairly meaningless. I had a conversation with another woman about the tradition here of a wife moving into her husband’s (parents’) house. She told me that she would rather have her own house, but that if she has to live with someone’s parents she would rather live with her own parents. She likes them better than her husband’s parents anyway. I later was told by one of her neighbors that her husband’s father is very sick. This combined with the fact that she has no children means that life in her (husband’s parents’) house is most likely not enjoyable for her. The neighbor also hinted that her husband may  have another woman on the side. I suggested that this seems to be very common here; that many married people seem to have affairs. The neighbor agreed more enthusiastically than I had been expecting.

I thought of how this woman we were talking about had told me two stories about being courted. First, she said that when she turned 18 she didn’t like her husband but he was convinced that she was going to be his wife. He didn’t have any money, but his father had given him his wedding ring to sell if he needed money for school. The boy sold the ring and used the money to buy 18 dark red, long-stemmed roses as a birthday present for this girl. She thought it was very romantic. She married him when she was 21. At some point later, a doctor she was seeing about a thyroid problem gave her a very expensive bottle of perfume as a gift. “But,” she said, “I was already married and he knew this. So I don’t know what he was thinking. I just said thanks and left.” She’s a “good girl.”