In this interview, we hear from Geraint Hughes. Geraint is a Peace Corps volunteer working as an Education volunteer in Georgia. What Geraint shares gives us a better understanding of the work volunteers do. We learn about the challenges, rewards, and personal growth that happens from volunteering in a new place. Geraint talks about living in a different country, working with local people, and dealing with surprise situations. Join us as we learn about Geraint’s journey and see how volunteering with Peace Corps can change lives.
Table of Contents
- Volunteer Experience and Motivation
- Living Arrangements and Cultural Integration
- Surprises and Challenges
- Advice and Support
- Practical Tips and Language Learning
- Impact of Media and Final Thoughts
Volunteer Experience and Motivation
1. Can you tell us more about serving as an Education volunteer in Georgia?
I am in the English and Youth Engagement Program or EYE. I primarily teach English in my village’s school and work on secondary projects in my community and neighboring towns in the afternoon. I teach 18 classes a week in Grades 3 through 12 and run English Clubs, events, and camps after school. This all adds up to about 35 hours a week of work. The focus really is on not just teaching English, but on developing the lifelong skills and capacities of the youth and English teachers.
I typically wake up around 7:45 on a weekday, and I’m at school by 8:40. The first lesson is at 8:50, and I’ll teach until around 12:30 or 1—Georgian school days are not very long. Then I’ll try to get a quick lunch from the local bakery, or go home to eat, or buy shawarma if I feel I’ve earned it–that’s a once-a-week treat though.
I’ll then run a club at school for an hour or two more, until 3, or I’ll often go to the nearby town, either for Georgian lessons or to teach at an English club at the local Youth House, until 5. I’ll then go back home, and relax for a bit before dinner, reading, playing computer games, and studying Georgian, or I’ll go for a run around the village.
Georgians eat dinner quite late, often not until 9 or even 10 (it’s like they’re in Spain or something!). I try to eat earlier, at around 8:30, but I often fail and eat at Georgian time with my host family. I typically go to bed at around 11:45.
On weekends I do laundry and hang out in my village, or engage in my passion for traveling around Georgia using the local marshutka system. (Marshutkas are privately owned minibusses, almost like a Mercedes Sprinter van, that carry passengers on wild rides throughout the country. They are one of God’s greatest inventions.) It’s quite a small country, so even on a weekend, you can see places on the other side of the country from your site. I often try to meet up with the other volunteers, and we’ll explore together or hang out in each other’s villages.
2. What motivated you to join the Peace Corps and choose Georgia?
Why I Chose Peace Corps
I was always vaguely aware of the Peace Corps, and how JFK (or more accurately, Hubert Humphrey—but I digress) created it. I only really discovered it when I was in college and read Peter Hessler’s River Town on a whim. It is an amazing book, about his service in China during the Reform and Opening period, that really fired my imagination about just how impactful a Peace Corps experience could be. All interested applicants should read it!
I graduated in 2020 (a poor choice on my part), and joined AmeriCorps on the advice of a friend who had done it a year before me, with an eye to potentially doing PC afterward. I overall enjoyed AmeriCorps and found working with students meaningful, but there were occasional frustrations due to COVID-19. There was also a bit of a delay to PC, still gradually re-opening from COVID-19, so I worked as a substitute teacher back home in California for a year after finishing AmeriCorps. Ultimately, I was able to be part of the first cohort back in Georgia.
Why I Chose Georgia
As to why I chose Georgia, don’t ever tell any Georgian this, but I was originally going to apply to Armenia or Mongolia (it looks like you beat me to the punch on both Jim). I was a history and Classics double major at university, and I have always loved Roman, Greek, Byzantine, and Imperial Russian history, all of which I studied in college. The Caucasus is where those interests overlap.
As for Mongolia, well, I have only two words: horse archers. Unfortunately for Armenia, by the time I started to apply its application had already closed. And Mongolia was ultimately too cold for this Californian–and it turns out Ulaanbaatar is the most polluted city on Earth. But Georgia’s application was still open, and I discovered it had a much more temperate climate and much less polluted cities.
So I decided to research Georgia a bit, and it immediately set my imagination on fire in a way Armenia and Mongolia hadn’t. Just looking at the photos of it made me want to know more, and scrolling through Wikipedia on its history was a revelation. I turned in my application, and although PC Admissions tried to sway me away from Cambodia, I was dead set on Georgia—and I’m so glad I got this country, it’s perfect in so many ways for me: the food, the climate, and above all the history.
Living Arrangements and Cultural Integration
3. Tell us more about your home situation:
Life in a Georgian Village
I live with a host family in a medium-sized village east of Tbilisi, in the only one-story home in Georgia (Georgian homes are traditionally always two stories—you live in the upper story in the summer and the lower story in the winter, this saves on heating). My village is rural-ish—plenty of people commute to Tbilisi to work, but farming and husbandry still dominate the village itself. Work in my village is very seasonal—not much is getting done in the middle of winter or in the heat of August. But they make up for it in spring and fall–those grapes aren’t going to harvest themselves.
My Host Family and Daily Life
My host family is multigenerational, pretty typical for a Georgian household. The grandma helps look after the children (and me) while my host mom, host dad, and host granddad all work (many Georgian households have struggled with the cost of living and inflation since the end of Communism—many Georgians have relatively large amounts of personal debt too).
I drive to school with my host siblings and host mom, then often walk back on my own in the afternoon or work on secondary projects around the community. I feel I am decently well-known in my community, even if it’s only as an American. I make a big effort to always say hello to people, and chat about the weather or their grandkids or what’s happening at school. I’ve been invited to many funerals, but not yet to a wedding—which should give you a bit of a clue as to the demographics of my village.
I do prefer living with a host family. I know it’s difficult for some volunteers who are so used to living on their own, but my host family really defines my experience here in Georgia. They help me practice my Georgian, introduce me to their neighbors, include me in their holidays, and invite me on their trips. They respect my privacy (which is not a guaranteed thing here), even if they think I spend too much time in my room. In PC Georgia we have the option to move out after the first three months of living with our host families, but I would encourage volunteers to not do that unless there’s no other way.
Georgian Culture: Food, Wine, and Hospitality
Georgian food is famous, at least across Russia and Eastern Europe. I once heard it described to the former Russian Empire what Indian food is to the former British Empire, which maybe you should take with a grain of salt. Georgian food is also very salty and oily, and I personally think it is quite heavy—there is a lot of focus on bread, cheese, and meat; and quite frankly not enough focus on fresh fruit, vegetables, and fiber.
Some typical dishes include khinkali, soup dumplings, which can have meat, mushrooms, or potatoes inside them, the mushroom kind is the best; khachapuri, cheese bread that comes in many regional varieties (often said by travel writers to be Georgian pizza, a take I strongly disagree with); mtsvadi, which are roasted meat skewers, almost always as pork; and many kinds of soups and stews.
Georgia is also the land of grapes and walnuts. Walnuts and walnut sauce are included in many dishes, to my delight—I’m a California boy at heart. Grapes are typically served in their fermented form. Georgians invented wine (they really did, 8,000 years ago!), and no Georgian feast is complete without several liters of homemade wine, no Georgian house is complete without its arbor, and no Georgian family is complete without their ancestral vineyard.
Georgians are more than anything else the People of the Vine, a fact that is reflected everywhere you go throughout Georgia. You will constantly be offered glasses of the local vintage to drink, be sure to toast to the health of your hosts and to God. It’s important to be strategic about how you drink, especially at feasts, where the local men are always eager to drink the resident foreigner under the table. Practice your excuses and know when to say enough is enough.
Challenges and Considerations for Volunteers
Additionally, if you are intent on serving as a vegetarian in Georgia, ask to be placed in Western Georgia—they traditionally have more fruit and vegetable dishes than in the East. I would not advise serving as a vegan—you need the cheese, eggs, and yogurt all Georgians eat, for the protein and calories if nothing else.
Lastly, exercise can be quite difficult in the villages. There are many street dogs of varying dispositions, who think that newcomers to their territory are excellent opportunities to test out their barking (and occasionally biting) skills. I have eventually been able to develop a running routine, after establishing a regular route and walking it several times to give the local dogs a chance to get to know me. I always carry a dog dazer when I am out and about, just in case, and am ready to throw a rock if attacked. Make sure to get your rabies shots folks. Be sure to walk around the cows too—they are generally docile but know how to kick if you get between them and their calves.
4. Any memorable experiences or interactions you’ve had with community members?
Heck, just yesterday was the Harvest Festival—Rtveli. My host family went to their vineyard with their relatives and friends, and we harvested grapes all day. It is sweaty, messy, aching work that leaves your hands stained a dark red, but it’s made easier with a feast at the end, with lots of music and dancing. This morning my host father and I were processing all the grapes, crushing them with a roller and removing the stems before putting the crushed grapes in barrels to begin the fermentation process. There’s nothing quite like that in my suburb in America.
Every time I step outside my door, I feel like I’m on an adventure, there’s always something crazy (in a good way) that might happen. I might get invited to a funeral, or a birzha (a group of men–or women!–hanging out together on the street, drinking, smoking, playing dominoes or backgammon, and eating sunflower seeds), or to help harvest and can fruit. Someone might be having a Christening, or a supra (a proper Georgian feast–these can last several hours, and involve a lot of drinking), or a birthday party, and they need the resident American. Kids always want to race me on their bikes while I’m running, or for me to join in their soccer games (well, football here).
Surprises and Challenges
5. What has surprised you most about Education challenges in Georgia?
The biggest surprise for me is how gendered teaching is in Georgia compared to America. I worked as a teacher in the United States, and it does tend to skew female, but never overwhelmingly so. In contrast, I am one of three male teachers at my school, out of a total staff of around 30. The other two male teachers teach PE. Having visited many other schools across Georgia, History and PE tend to have some male teachers, but all other subjects are mostly just taught by women. This makes me stand out a fair bit at school, and I feel a bit awkward at times.
Social relations are also quite gendered, especially in rural villages. As an unmarried young man, my colleagues are not inviting me to have coffee at their houses or including me in conversation the way they would if I were a female volunteer. But there are challenges for female volunteers as well –I am not cat-called in the street or harassed on marshutka rides, which can be big problems for female volunteers. And the men in the village do invite me to birthday parties, backgammon games, and street birzhas.
Girls in general also tend to be pushed harder to succeed than boys, which is an interesting reflection of Georgia’s culture. Girls are pushed to get good grades, study hard, cook and clean, and take care of the house. Many of them go on to university and end up getting good jobs in Tbilisi. Many boys are simply not pushed to succeed and simply slip farther behind in school, a fact that breaks my heart. It’s an even worse version of the education gender gap we see in the United States, which always bothered me when I was teaching back home.
In my opinion, boys here don’t have enough positive male role models, especially for academics, and are sometimes coddled by their parents. Their role often seems to be simply to inherit the family farm, to give their parents grandchildren, and to work in traditionally “outdoor” jobs such as drivers or construction workers. All the traditionally “indoor” jobs—teaching, child-rearing, retail work—tend to be done by women in the villages. I hope I can be a positive role model for many of my students here.
That being said, I feel compelled to point out that while Georgians are lowercase-c conservative compared to Americans, it is hardly unbearable. Women dress as they want, work outside the home, and are able to marry and divorce as they choose. Georgians are at the same level of small-c conservativeness that many Americans were in the 60s and 70s, and many Americans probably still are. In my experience, the minority communities in Georgia (primarily Armenians and Azerbaijanis) tend to be quite more socially conservative and restrictive.
6. What challenges did you face while working on Education projects with community members?
A Variance Problem
The biggest single challenge I personally face on a regular basis in education is what I call the “variance problem”. There is a large variance in English ability in every single class I teach. There are students who can speak English extremely well in the 3rd grade, and there are some students who struggle to say “hello” to me even as they’re graduating from 12th grade.
I believe this happens because English is a mandatory subject in Georgian schools, starting in 1st grade. It is therefore taught by age level—all the 1st graders together, then all the 2nd graders, etc.—not by ability level, like we teach languages in the US (i.e., Spanish 1, Spanish 2 as electives). Unfortunately, kids learn at different paces, and have different resources available to them:
- Some kids receive private tutoring from teachers after school (another challenge for the education system in Georgia—teachers supplement their limited income by moonlighting). These kids tend to be the best at grammar.
- Some learn through social media and YouTube—these tend to be the best at actually speaking and understanding English, but their writing skills are poor.
- Some learn from movies and TV shows—anime and American movies are quite popular here.
- Some even learn from the textbooks!
- And, unfortunately, some never learn much at all–this is the group I want to reach the most.
All these factors combine with the fact that English lessons are only 40-45 minutes each, two or three times a week, for a total of only 1-2 hours of instruction A WEEK. If students aren’t receiving reinforcement in English outside the classroom, this limited classroom exposure might be the only amount of time they spend studying.
This all serves to produce a wide range of student abilities. And kids being kids, and being bad at something doesn’t necessarily incentivize them to try harder. Sometimes it makes them want to disengage more and get the class over with as fast as possible. It even affects those who are good at English—the lessons often move too slowly for them, and they get bored too.
Multi-Level Learning
Now according to PC the best way to overcome this challenge is through Multi-Level learning: planning lessons that engage a variety of learning styles and have different activities for different skill levels. We received training in this during PST, and additional training on it (together with our counterparts!) at IST.
But…….good multi-level lessons require a lot of resources, lesson planning, and buy-in from counterparts. However, our lessons are again only 40 minutes, counterparts do not always have the time to plan, and we don’t always have the resources–printers, projectors, materials–on hand to ensure all students are engaged and learning. So we aren’t always able to implement this solution–but it has worked sometimes, and I do find the training on it valuable.
My preferred solution would be for the school to instead organize English classes by ability, but that would disrupt the schedule (there’s only one school in the entire village, and it has to have a schedule for all kids in the village) for all other subjects, so it’s not feasible. Instead, a stopgap I have been trying to develop is afterschool English clubs. Students that are struggling a bit are invited to come to “Homework Club”, where I can cover concepts at a much slower pace and try to explain rules in Georgian. More advanced students are invited to “Book Club”, where we read articles, poetry, and books in English and try to translate them into Georgian. The “Homework Club” has actually worked fairly well, with decent attendance. The “Book Club” though has been a bit of a failure for me—the more advanced students would rather simply study on their own and spend time with their friends after school.
7. Could you share some of the secondary projects you have been involved?
I am quite fortunate to have an excellent secondary site near me, a Youth House where I can help with summer camps and extracurricular clubs. I’ve helped organize spelling bee competitions for the entire district with them and wrote a grant to help them buy some IT equipment.
At my school, I mostly focus on doing clubs and summer camps. I am currently helping them write a grant to stock their English Cabinet, although there’s still a long way to go on that one.
I am constantly on the road helping other volunteers with camps and awareness days, like trash clean-ups. Working with other volunteers is one of my favorite things about the Peace Corps, and also helps me travel more around Georgia and see all of this amazing country.
Some of the other camps I’ve worked on include an International Peace Camp organized by Servas, an international NGO trying to build understanding across borders, and a Youth Development Camp put on by an American Corner in Georgia.
When it comes to secondary projects, try to start by finding NGOs operating near you and seeing what they need help with. What projects do they already have going on that you can jump in on? After you’ve been at your site for a while, you can start to get a feel for what additional needs your community has, and how you can help fill them.
Advice and Support
8. What advice would you give to someone considering serving as an Education volunteer in Georgia?
Read about Georgian History
Try to read a bit about Georgia’s history and culture before applying. Read some news articles, and watch some YouTube videos. Try to get a feel for why you want to serve in this country, as opposed to others that the Peace Corps serves. Any reason is a good one. If you don’t feel super strongly about Georgia, consider applying with the “serve anywhere” application on the PC website.
Any Teaching Experience is a Plus
Teaching experience is good, in any form—private tutoring, working as a substitute teacher, working as a camp counselor or scout leader. This helps give a general feel for classroom management and working with youth. Classroom management can be difficult in Georgia, so work on strategies beforehand about how to manage disruptive or unruly students. This isn’t mandatory, plenty of volunteers are able to have great services without any prior experience, but I think it makes the first few months less overwhelming.
Learn How to Deal with Stress
Peace Corps is often called “The Toughest Job You’ll Ever Love”, and I think that’s pretty true. On good days, people want to extend their service for a third year, on bad days they’re often counting down the days until they get to leave. That’s okay. What all volunteers should do before departing to their country of service is work on coping strategies.
If you’re considering serving in Georgia, I’d urge you to work on your strategies to deal with stress. What’s that going to look like? Yoga, jogging, bird watching? Working on crafts, keeping a journal, playing games with friends back home by Discord? Whatever it is, work it out before you go. If you have problems before PC, they’ll still be with you when you arrive on the other side of the world—service doesn’t magically make them disappear. Settle all your affairs before you go, two years is a long time for something to fester.
9. What skills or qualities do you think are most important for an Education volunteer?
Flexibility, flexibility, flexibility.
Flexibility, flexibility, flexibility. I am rarely told about anything happening in my community in advance, and when I do try to make plans in advance with the locals, as often as not they fall through. Someone’s sick, or there’s rain, or they just don’t feel like showing up. Just be open to stuff happening when it does, as opposed to some arbitrary schedule. Always have a backup ready to go—whether that’s plans with friends or another lesson plan you can slide in,
Resiliency
Resiliency is another buzzword that gets tossed around a lot, but there are going to be times when service just absolutely sucks. The kids aren’t listening, the counterparts aren’t collaborating, your host family is acting weird about something, and the people in your community don’t understand why you’re there. That’s when you’re going to need your hobbies, to dig deep inside yourself, and to keep on trucking. Just make it another day, another week, and things will improve—call other volunteers and vent with them, call your family and friends back home and vent with them, it’s okay.
Be extroverted.
Be extroverted as best as you can. This one might be a little controversial, but I’m gonna stick by it. You are going to be around other people a lot, mostly strangers, for hours at a time when you don’t have a language in common to communicate. What are you going to do then? It’s easy to buckle down and focus just on your projects, but it’s so important to spend time with the people in your community and the other volunteers in the country as well. The people in your community are who you are there to serve, and that often involves sitting down and talking to them. The other volunteers are your support system. They understand what you are going through because they are going through it as well. Be friends with them, spend time with them. When things get tricky, they are the people best placed to help you.
Language perseverance.
Language perseverance. That’s not Georgian skills—Georgian is a notoriously difficult language to learn, and many volunteers will never truly master it during their service. That’s perfectly okay—your ability to speak Georgian does not define your service. But you have to keep trying at it. You should try to always show some improvement, and practice a little bit every day. You have to show a good attitude with it—to laugh at your mistakes then keep on trucking. Even knowing only a little bit of Georgian makes Georgians so happy, because so few outsiders (even those living in their country) ever bother to learn their language. Showing that you care about their language, and trying to speak it correctly (even if you’re not able to) is an incredibly important value/skill you need to demonstrate.
Some volunteers get wrapped up during PST with the idea that they need to speak the language perfectly, and it drains the joy out of a lot of what they do. That’s not what I’m trying to get at—just that you need to demonstrate effort.
10. How has the Peace Corps training helped you during your service?
Language Training
The language training is excellent, and I really enjoyed it—but I always liked being a student. For those volunteers who are farther removed from college, or don’t learn best through structured learning, PST (Pre-Service Training, i.e. the first three months) can be quite difficult. There are many restrictions in place, and you’re in class a good 7-8 hours per day, with language homework at the end of it. PST can be quite the pressure cooker, and can sometimes lead to tension among the volunteer cohort. It’s important to remember that volunteers need to treat each other and the staff with grace during PST and to be empathetic to each other’s struggles.
Some things that have really helped me with language training are using flashcards, translating children’s poetry, writing my own sample sentences every day, and reviewing them with my Georgian teacher. I recognize these techniques will not work for everyone, but I think people should try them at least once. Also, if you wish to truly learn the Georgian alphabet do not transliterate the sounds into English when you write—e.g. writing ქართული# as Kartuli. ქართული# is ქართული#, learn the letters as they are in Georgian, or you will hamper your ability to learn and think in another alphabet.
Lesson Planning
The lesson plan training in PST is valuable, but in my opinion, it should not be followed to the letter immediately—you will often need to “ease” your counterparts into the concept of lesson planning and build up over time to some of the other projects Peace Corps wants you to implement. Rather, the most important takeaway from PST is different ideas for lessons—what are the games you can play with the students, what activities work well for different age groups, and how you can incorporate them in lessons from the textbook. Having some of these activities ready will help you build trust with your counterparts and students so that you can deliver a fun and engaging learning experience.
Try to see the way the language teachers and PST trainers teach you about Georgia and Georgian—with example sentences, pair conversation practice, making posters, and lots of speaking and listening practice—then turn around and try to apply those same techniques to your students at school. After all, if it works on volunteers, it will probably work on Georgian students. Look at the way your language textbook is structured—what parts of language are taught first? How does it include grammar? What is most effective for different types of learners? Try to design lessons that can appeal to auditory, visual, and mechanical learners.
Grant Writing and Project Management
The most effective training I had was the Grant Writing and Project Management training, where we went over the steps to writing a grant, from assessing the needs of a community to filing receipts. It was very practical and filled with a ton of great advice. I would simply recommend being very mentally present at that training, taking lots of notes, and asking a lot of questions (including bouncing some grant ideas off the staff), so you can apply what you’ll learn back at your site.
“After you leave, they won’t remember the lessons you planned, the projects you wrote, or the classes you taught, but they will remember how you made them feel.” Susan, PCV in Georgia
Practical Tips and Language Learning
11. Anything that you packed or didn’t pack that you’d like to tell future Georgia volunteers?
The first I wished I had packed were more solar lanterns to give as gifts—I brought an inflatable solar lantern with me for the inevitable power outages, but both my PST host family and permanent host family were so envious of it that I eventually ordered some more to give as gifts—which they loved!
I also wish I had brought a battery pack for my phone, I’m always running out of battery on long marshutka rides. Luckily PC eventually gave me a solar-powered one that also doubles as a flashlight, but I’ll have to give that back at the end of service.
I wish I had packed a tie. I brought a blazer and slacks, but I didn’t think I’d need a tie. I was wrong—it’d be nice to have it when I’m attending a formal supra or birthday party for one of the teachers. Georgian women love to dress up, but Georgian men don’t—so it’s very easy for me to get compliments with the bare minimum of professional dressing.
Something I desperately needed was a Dog Dazer, in case some of the street dogs decided to give me a nibble. Peace Corps eventually gave me one after several entreaties, but it is a bit weak. They are buying more powerful ones, and it should become a standard issue for volunteers going forward in the future.
Oh, also me being me I brought a bunch of hardcover books. They’re pretty heavy, but I like to read, and I hate Kindles and all e-readers. They’re not real books. Fight me.
(That being said, PC Georgia has quite an extensive English language library at the office in Tbilisi. They have all the Twilight and 50 Shades of Grey books for some reason).
12. How has learning the language been?
Georgian is a Linguist’s Dream (but difficult for most people)
Georgian is one of the most difficult languages in the world for a non-native speaker. The grammar is fundamentally different from that of English, particularly around verbs. It’s not an Indo-European language like Armenian and Russian, nor a Turkic language like Turkish and Azerbaijani, nor even an Afroasiatic language like Arabic and Hebrew. It instead exists in its own unique language family (the Kartvelian Family) along with its three sisters, Laz, Svan, and Megrelian—which are all also spoken in Georgia.
Unfortunately, those three are in various states of dying out as Georgian is increasingly becoming the day-to-day language throughout the country. Some volunteers are placed in communities where they are still spoken though or are placed in communities that speak Armenian or Azerbaijani, so they get to learn two languages!
Georgian has many unique grammatical features that make it a linguist’s dream, including such “fun” features as unique sounds not found in English (the infamous ყ# and ღ#), personal alignment instead of object pronouns, a split-ergative case system, and separate optative and subjunctive verb tenses (which comes from a Latin background I personally find to be a fascinating concept, it took me a while to wrap my head around the distinction).
Know What Your Learning Style Is
I’m a bit of a masochist when it comes to learning, so the fact it’s so difficult makes me like it even more! I am a very visual learner—I cannot repeat a word unless I see it written, conversation just doesn’t cut it for me—so I like to take time to tease apart the underlying mechanics, write sentences, and go to tutoring (which PC reimburses you for). If you are a more auditory learner, there are plenty of opportunities to practice with your host family and community.
Pre-study Should Just Focus on the Alphabet
My advice is for the love of God and all that is holy don’t try to start learning Georgian before staging, unless for some reason you have a native speaker as a tutor. There are very few resources online for a language that is only spoken by 5 million people in one country, and half the resources that do exist are a bit low quality or outright confusing. You might learn bad habits that you will then have to unlearn during PST while your teachers try to teach you the correct rules instead.
In my opinion, what works best is to memorize the alphabet, both how to write it and the sounds the letters make, before departure. Don’t worry about not being able to pronounce all the sounds correctly in the beginning—that will come with time and practice in Georgia itself. The alphabet can be easily learned with YouTube. Then once you arrive you can start learning the language properly, with correct pronunciation and the help of actual Georgian teachers in PST. Memorizing the alphabet can give you a big leg up and approach the first week of language training with confidence.
Impact of Media and Final Thoughts
13. Do you have a blog or YouTube channel?
I have neither a blog nor a YouTube channel. I thought about starting a blog, but then I realized I’d have to let the Country Director and Safety and Security Manager read it, so I passed. I instead keep a journal, save all my photos by date, and communicate regularly with my friends back home about life here and what they’re up to.
14. Any last comments or observations you’d like to pass on to future Georgia volunteers?
Enjoy yourself while you’re here! Travel around Georgia, drink the wine reasonably, talk to the locals, and don’t sweat over the small stuff. I think too many volunteers get wrapped up in the idea that they must have this “perfect” service, where they write the perfect grant, teach perfect lessons, speak the language perfectly, and be perfectly culturally integrated at all times.
One of the other volunteers (Susan) told me: “After you leave, they won’t remember the lessons you planned, the projects you wrote, or the classes you taught, but they will remember how you made them feel.” And that’s absolutely true!
Play soccer with the kids, compliment the grandma’s cooking, and have some beers with the local men (or coffee with the local women, if you’re a woman). Try practicing Georgian, but if you make mistakes don’t get discouraged—mistakes are how we learn. Form good memories, whether that’s harvesting grapes with your host family, going on a school excursion with your favorite classes, visiting Tbilisi with the other volunteers, or hiking around Kazbegi.
We’re here in PC to serve these communities and serve America, but of equal importance is the fact we are here for ourselves, for our own journeys and self-growth. If you’re only here because of your devotion to service, your devotion to helping others, at some point the locals’ intransigence and cultural conservatism are going to wear you down and you’ll burn out and/or have a personal crisis. It’s in those moments that you need to remind yourself you’re here for you (repeat this in a mirror if you want).
The flip side of this of course is that we are also here for our local communities—they are what makes our service special, and our ties with them distinguish us from being just another kind of tourist or some ineffectual foreign intervention. We are neither Nestorians nor Monophysites, but Chalcedonians. (To use an Orthodox Church reference).
Also, study Georgian history.
What are you waiting for? Opportunities like this don’t come often. If you have a passion for service and an adventurous spirit like Geraint’s, apply to the Peace Corps today. Expand your horizons, push your limits, and create positive impact as a volunteer. You never know how serving as a Peace Corps volunteer could change your life.
The content of this post does not necessarily reflect the views of the U.S. Government, the Peace Corps, or Georgia Government.
