Fancy a dance, ladies?

Friendship Sandwich

Amidst all the changes happening in Georgia and its great progressive strides, there is something distinctively non-Western about Tbilisi. Culture aside, the city is still not instinctively accessible. In my experience (a disclaimer that should probably proceed every sentence here), if you aren’t from here, you’ll probably need help getting around, at least at first. I wouldn’t feel comfortable, for instance, landing at the airport, picking up a rental car and cruising around the city. It is the kind of place where people pick you up at the airport.

Paid travel, even budget-NGO travel, is quite a different experience from real shoestring budget travel. Not taking public transportation to and from the airport is kind of amazing, as are budgeted airport meals, nice to very-nice hotels, having a justification for buying wifi other than witty facebook updates. But, I can feel it’s making me travel-soft. When faced with a free night in Tbilisi, I found myself thinking- but, but, how will we find a restaurant? Or order without a Georgian escort? 2008 Becky-in-Armenia would scoff at this new incapableness. With a free weekend on hand, I decided to head down to Yerevan for the weekend on one of the minibuses.

The cities are only about 4.5 hours apart, but the train takes an inexplicable eight hours and flights divert through Istanbul. So minibus it was. They are dirty and smell musty old cigarettes. My friend negotiated my fare and made some phone calls for me, including to the Armenian friend I was meeting, and then we said goodbye. I got the seat next to the driver so as to protect my delicate constitution. Although the driver spoke about 4 languages, none were the 1.3 that I lay claim to, so we resorted to dramatic gesturing. The first important thing, of course, was to put my seatbelt on. The only problem was that the seatbelt didn’t work. It was so broken that they had duct taped something heavy to the end to make it stay, and putting it on involved slinging it across my body and snuggling it down into the seat. Now I can’t be sure why the driver was so adamant that I put on my fake seatbelt before we left, but he was. This leads me to think that maybe there’s some financial penalty for not wearing a seatbelt that might be vaguely enforceable. For anyone who read my 2008 posts about driving in the region, this is nothing short of incredible progress toward vehicular safety. Baby steps, baby steps.

We’re in the minivan cruising to Yerevan, and the driver is really maximizing our time together by simultaneously texting, changing the music, smoking a cigarette, and driving us through windy mountain roads. Thank goodness for the seatbelt. I got quite worried because we got stuck at the border or an extra two hours and I was very late for my Armenian friend to pick me up. My phone stopped working in Armenia and I wasn’t sure how I was going to find her. But on wild adventures, these things happen. I would use my wits to figure it out. We finally pulled into Yerevan and I hopped out to see my friend waiting for me! I was very happy to see her and after a hug or two, I asked if she had been waiting long. She asked why she would have been waiting, and I said because we’re two hours late, of course. She laughed and said, “Becky, I’ve been texting with the driver since you left Yerevan.” Oh.

The weekend in Yerevan was lovely. We didn’t do much but laugh, talk, and catch up. And eat! Both nights we had elaborate meals that started around 12:30 am. On Saturday night, her family came up from the village. At the dinner table, the conversation flows quickly and easily and there wasn’t much time for translation. Her family is so wonderful and loving, it’s a pleasure to just sit back and observe. The next morning, I was wedged in between her grandmother and uncle from the village, munching on leftovers for breakfast. I noticed that they had matching large, deep purple bruises. When I asked what happened, they launched into a long story about how ornery the bull was yesterday.

On the way back, I found myself in the front seat again. A woman leaned over the back seat and handed the driver a homemade sandwich made from lavash and dried meat. The bread was from a grungy bag and the woman’s hands were filthy. Next, she handed me a sandwich. It was such a sweet gesture but I was thrown into a slight panic trying to decide if I’d be able to stomach a few bites of the dirty, weird meat sandwich. Images of pure frozen yogurt and clean salads raced through my head. But this here was friendship rolled up in a smelly little package. I took a couple bites and it was surprisingly good. Then I passed back the rest of my bag of cherries.

Tbilisi, Revisited

Becky here, signing back into Ullmans on the Road* after a nearly one and half year hiatus in which I graduated from law school, spent three dramatic months studying for the bar, the next four months flopping about in search of a job, and finally moved back to DC with a fantastic job working on international NGO law in the NIS region.

We recently started a new project in the Republic of Georgia and I’ve had the opportunity to go back twice so far, and there are more trips in the future. (Side note: I’ve been sent on five business trips in my career thus far- three to the Republic of Georgia, and one to the state of Georgia, and… one to Ohio.)

Thus far, the job has been…capricious. There have been some serious highs; times when I think I’ve landed the job that I always wanted, doing interesting things that matter in a field I care about. There are also times when I feel like I can’t do anything right. I’ll save my more detailed complaining for emails and phone calls (many thanks to the recipients) but will share one of the happy times.

In Georgia, we are working on the sustainability of the NGO sector. In an otherwise progressive country, NGOs remain dependent on foreign grants for over 90% of their funding, and foreign funding is not a long term solution, especially in Georgia. While it remains a darling of the West, funding for the region decreases substantially every year. Our goal is to identify the causes of this dependency and how they can be fixed. After meetings with NGOs, charities, and government officials, our first stop was the tax code.

The happy time came on the first night of the most recent trip. My boss and I were preparing for meetings the next day and revising the analysis we had prepared. We sat on the 18^th floor of a beautiful hotel in Tbilisi with a panoramic view of the city. Sipping on tea, we waded through the tax code…. It was really great. Seriously. There’s something puzzle-like and satisfying about wading through definitions and cross-references to figure out what’s there…or what’s not. But don’t ask me about VAT because that stuff is wild.

I last left Tbilisi in 2008, approximately 3 hours before the Russian tanks arrived. I followed the events of “The War,” as people there call it, with concern from Istanbul and Mykonos. I knew that the conflict left a lasting mark on the country’s diplomatic interaction with Russia, but upon returning I was struck by how very deep and cultural it is. Most notably, Russian, as a language, is gone from Tbilisi’s exterior. There are no more signs in Russian, not on store fronts, in shops, road signs, or newspapers. It’s still engraved on buildings like the Opera, but apparently that will soon come off as well. As we drove across a bridge that was decorated in Soviet symbols fashioned out of steel, my friend told me that there is a new law that requires the removal of all Soviet symbols, and so the ornamentation on the bridge will be removed as well.

Taking the place of Russian is, unsurprisingly, English. It’s everywhere. And it’s no longer a country in which I would hesitate to just start a conversation in English without first asking. Of course fluency of this kind isn’t something that happens in two years- Georgia’s western orientation started long before that- but this most recent push both toward English and away from Russian is truly remarkable.

A side effect of this push is a division between the young and old. Simply put, the old speak Russian, the young speak English, and everyone in between speaks varying degrees of both. With such a pronounced shift away from Russian/Russia, I worry what happens to older people who do not speak English. They are cut out of a large part of the economy and as evidenced by the many elderly people in the street, the state struggles to provide adequate social services.

Then there is the reference to “The War,” a reference without identifiers. Like Madonna or Bono. Technically, the conflict in 2008 lasted 8 days. In no way do I mean to slight the seriousness of what happened or the tragedy of lives lost, but it does pale in comparison to say, World War II. The War, combined with the global economic crisis, put a stop to the hundreds of large-scale construction projects throughout the city. The construction sites remain quiet.

It seems these efforts to erase Russian are like the final steps in ending the abusive marriage between Russia and Georgia. Georgia is taking back her maiden name, dating other superpowers. She’s lost weight, bought some new and fashionable clothes, but struggles to regain the financial stability she had when married.

*Thanks to Sarah for the suggestion to hop back on here, ie the “BLOG THIS” email.