Today is Thanksgiving. I have never thought of Thanksgiving as a super exciting holiday. It mostly consists of preparing a large amount of food, eating a large amount of food, then slipping into a food coma for the rest of the day. However, this year takes the cake for the most boring Thanksgiving ever.
I had 2 classes at school today. I didn't do any Thanksgiving-related activities with them, because in all honesty I forgot it was Thanksgiving week until yesterday.
It was rainy and cold today, which has been the norm for the past few weeks. This creates a few difficulties. The first being that the streets are made of dirt and when it rains it takes all my effort to not slip and fall on my butt walking to school, not to mention trying to get to school with minimal mud on my shoes and pants. It has also gotten pretty cold. Yes, I'm from South Dakota, but in SD we have central heating. Here we have wood stoves. That's what they use to heat the classrooms at school and that's what we use in our house. Unfortunately, my bedroom does not have wood-stove capabilities, i.e. there is no hole in the wall to put the vent through. My host parents got me an electric heater, but this also has it's challenges. Namely, unless I have the fan on the lowest setting, and the heat setting halfway between minimum and maximum, it makes the electricity go out in the house. Even with the settings on high, it doesn't put out enough heat to actually be noticeable. But I have very warm blankets, and, since I turn my heater on when I go to bed, by the time morning comes around my room isn't exactly toasty, but it's definitely a comfortable temperature. So this just means that during the daytime, I can't get much alone time. I'm definitely getting my quality time in with the fam-damily, which can be difficult. The weather also poses some difficulties with laundry. I can leave my clothes on the line for days, and they will still be as wet as when I pulled them out of the dryer. So instead, I hang everything in my room, on my window sills, chair backs, open closet doors, and bedposts. The chairs surround the heaters, and my different pieces of clothing get rotated through.
So today was what I fear will be typical for my next 4 weeks (yes, only 4 weeks left, time is flying) in Georgia. I came home, ate lunch in the kitchen, where the stove was burning. Grabbed a book and my iPod and came back to the kitchen where I alternated between reading and playing Call of Atlantis or Tetris. After about an hour of that, my host mom came home and made us coffee, and fired up the oven in the living room. So then I switched to sitting in the living room and alternating between reading and playing Mah-Jong. Until the electricity went out and I was left in the dark with an almost dead iPod. At that point I turned to my cell phone, where I tried to beat my record at Snake.
And now I am writing my blog. I probably won't be able to post it for a while, since my internet got taken to my cousin's house, and has not found it's way back for the past week or so. Which also makes it hard to work on my TESOL certification course, which would be a lot more productive than playing Snake. I have discovered wi-fi at my school though, so I can still check my email and facebook between classes on my iPod.
[Update: Apparently my internet had returned from my cousin's house and had been sitting in the living room, I just hadn't noticed.]
Ok. Time to stop complaining. It is Thanksgiving after all. So here's what I'm thankful for this year:
-That I'm here. Georgia is a beautiful country and I've been able to travel all around it for next to nothing (my meager salary has surprisingly been covering most of my trips each month).
-That I'm spending 4 months living like a retiree. Let's face it, I'm not actually working hard. I have around 15 hours of classroom time per week. That's about the amount of time a retired woman would spend helping out at church each week. The rest of the time I spend reading. Not reading ethnographies, not reading Latin American short stories, not reading 16th century Spanish literature, but reading books that I want to read. And also getting pretty good at Snake.
-I'm thankful that as I'm writing this, my host dad is sitting on the computer playing a game called Tumblebugs, and it is highly entertaining to watch a grown man do that.
-That the people in my village have been so warm and welcoming for me. When you're having a bad day, the smallest things can make you feel a lot better. Examples: One day I went for a run, and when I was walking up to my house the old neighbor man, who had only been introduced to me once briefly and doesn't speak English, waved me over, smiled, and handed me half of a pomegranate. For no reason. Just to be nice. And yesterday, I had forgotten to bring my umbrella to school, and 2 minutes after I started walking home, it began to pour. I put up my hood and started booking it, but one of our neighbors saw me and told me to come inside. She pulled up a chair by the stove, brought me a glass of grape juice and a plate of churchkhela and I sat and dried by the fire, having as much of a conversation as possible, until they saw my host mom walking home and I went back with her.
-I'm thankful for my students. I love the amount of Helloooo's I get from tiny Georgian children as I walk through the school. I love that 3rd grade Ani shouts at me from the other side of the hallway every time she sees me to say How are you? I love that my 4th graders come up to me every day after class to say How is baby? because my host sister told them about my new niece. I love that my 10th graders invite me to their civic club meetings, and invited me out to lunch in the restaurant in town, bought beer and khinkali, and refused to let me help pay.
-Which brings me to my next point. I'm thankful for the experience I had at school while growing up. I'm thankful that we had computers, projectors, TV's, playground equipment, nice bathrooms, walls that weren't crumbling, chalkboards that weren't curling up and detaching from the walls, heaters, air conditioners, clubs, sports teams. I'm thankful for all our teacher's who somehow managed to not lose their minds and run screaming from the classroom.
-I'm thankful for all my families. My "real-life" family in America (and a healthy new baby niece), my Georgian family, my German family - Regina, Toni, Tobi, Lukas and Carolin - who I miss very much, my Costa Rican mom Rosi who was a giant sweetheart, my Peruvian family in Mama Rosa's house and of course my sister Raquel, who I very much wish still lived down the hall from me.
-Now that I don't have access to them, I realize how much I'm thankful for cell phones and high speed internet which allow me to call or skype my family or friends at any time.
-I'm thankful for the other volunteers here, who keep me sane :)
-I'm thankful for my dog Macy, who I miss terribly.
-And for everything I've learned and experienced, and all the people I've met in the last 3 months.
-I'm thankful that my bestie Kelsey just called me up from America!
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