Akhaltsikhe!

Well, as yours truly is an NGO volunteer, I have internet access in my office... it's a requirement for what I have to do, and a very nice fringe benefit. Carissa's school will hopefully be intergrated into the Deer Leap Project (the Georgian government project to get the internet to every school) but I'm not sure how successful they've been in our region so far. Some interesting tidbits:

1) It used to be a Russian base, so the last 10 or so years have been the only time in the last 80 years that free travel to the region has been allowed. Many Georgians have never been here because of the travel restrictions.

2) It's gonna be cold, kiddies. Cold... -20 to -25 celcius during the winter is expected, with lots and lots of snow. Carissa is thrilled. Winter starts in Novemeber, with the first snowfall by the first week of december. A goodly collection of close villages have no contact with Georgia for 6-7 months out of the year as the snowfall totally blocks the roads. We're definitely in the mountains.

3) We're in a heavily Armenian part of Georgia - about 40% of the population in our town. The good news is that most speak Georgian. The bad news is that if we travel about 30 minutes southeast, no one speaks Georgian - entirely russian/armenian. Darn...

4) My NGO is totally awesome! CHF Internationl - it works mainly with USAID as its main donor. It's very active, and has a ton of projects ongoing. In the next few months, I'll be helping on a 2 1/2 year review, a semi-annual review, and evaluting business plans to do dollar to dollar funding. Exciting stuff! If you have any business plan documents (electronic only) please email them to me or place them into the comments. My skills are pretty good in that area, but I could use some additional resources. If anyone wants to take this back to the faculty at Loma, I would appreciate it. :-)

5) The host fam is nice; but we're back to bucket baths and the infamous soviet sewage system that does not allow paper to be flushed. The house is nice, and our room gets some good light. We'll have to see how cold it gets during the winter.

6) Georgian word of the day: mtzvrtneli (trainer). Good luck practicing your consonants... I'll be one of those, so my pronounciation is actually pretty good on that one. The 'tz' should is a quick, hard one, as a hint.

Much Georgian love...

On my language mid-term evaluation, I hit 'novice-high' which is one level below where I need to be when training is over. There's quite a chasm from novice high to intermediate low, so it's going to take a LOT of work to get there. I'm aiming to get intermediate-medium, and I'm not sure if its possible. Georgian is very difficult - German is a piece of cake comparatively. The most difficult aspect is the simple memorization, as there is an incredible amount of vocabulary that needs to be mastered. One person in our training group of 45 hit intermediate-low on their eval, but his language skills are pretty amazing.

We're going to try to keep our spirits up, as weeks 7/8 tend to be drop out points as well as week one. Our group is substantially underdropping - we've only had one person leave so far, compared to 7 with the last group. I think we're all pretty motivated, and tend to be realistic in our expectations. Hopefully we complete training, and can start our first Georgian winter in style. :-)