Living in a Village

May 6^th 2010

So I’ve started PST (pre-service training). This is what the PC is all about. Living in with a host family and spending an insane amount of hours learning a hard language for 10 hours a day. The first few days has been a bit surreal, and it seems I have been here forever. I live with a pretty cool host family, it’s a small family, and a fairly young one at that. The Georgian language is kinda weird in that a mama is a papa. Whenever the 4-yr old kid calls out “mama” the dad comes over, and it confuses me a lot. The kid is the cutest thing I’ve ever seen though. She loves to scamper around the common room, which isn’t that big, and all of us just hang around there most of the time.

The host family is fairly young, in that I find it weird calling my host-mom my host-mom because she’s only 27. I kinda depend on her for a lot, and she’s also a teacher, so she patiently works with me on learning the language when I come back from training. The first day in my host family, I had something called chacha. This is probably the strongest alcohol I’ve ever had. I also took a bath/shower the first night. We have running water! However, no hot water, and the running water is so cold, everytime I pee into the toilet, steam rises. So, we have a bucket that we set on top of the furnace which then I use to give myself a sponge bath. I find myself only using maybe a gallon of water total, which surprises me how little water I can use to take a shower. I’ve yet to take another one. I might tonight.

On the 2^nd day, I fell a tree. We just took a single axe to it, and then climbed it and started chopping at its limbs. It was a dead tree so it cut easily. But the tree was a good 40 ft tall, so it was quite a work-out. I was initially worried I would gain weight living here. But I feel I’m getting a good workout on my legs just walking to my house from school because I’m way up hill. Plus all the squatting going to the toilet has been a good workout.

On the first day of school the school director wanted to greet the Americans with a mid-morning tea. Now you know these people love their alcohol when you get served a shot of vodka with your mid-morning tea. Good times. I’m still getting used to all the nature around here. I keep getting woken up by the roosters around here, and all the dogs howling. Also, randomly on my way to school a cow or bull or pig will go running by me. Getting a lot of stares from people and I’m quite confused all the time. But, I haven’t felt like leaving yet, so tough luck for all those who had me at a week on the when will Eng leave pool.