G.L.O.W. Camp

Greeting from G.L.O.W. camp! G.L.O.W.  (Girls Leading Our World) is a week long all girls summer camp that empowers young women to make healthy life decisions. The camp focuses on topics such as: sexual education, nutrition, healthy relationships, career planning, emotional well-being, self esteem and leadership.  This week we have 40+ girls from all of Georgia with ages ranging from 14-16. We have 6 Peace Corps Volunteers and 6 Georgian counselors counterparts who run the camp. PCVs like myself are here to offer support guidance and new ideas during the small group time but the camp for the most part is  facilitated by the Georgian counselors. Through out the week we have large group sessions, small group sessions and exercise routines in the morning. In the evening we have fun activities to do during free time like Bingo, hiking and crafts. Then at night we have fun activities such as movie night, disco night, campfire, talent show and formal dinner.

The girls have been really amazing and engaged in all of our presentations so far. Today we have a guest speaker who is speaking to the girls about the importance of sexual education and healthy relationships and then later we will have discussion groups about gender roles and then we will close the night with a campfire (hopefully if it doesn't rain). Well gotta get back to camp but just thought I would check in. .

Below are links to Glow Camp in case you want to know some more information about it:

GLOW Georgia

G.L.O.W. Camp 2012

Cheers,
Anneke

I've Been Around...

I have been living with my host family for almost two weeks! Things are a little awkward…but what do you expect when you move into a new family and can only speak a few phrases to them. The first two days I completely let myself go and slept for most of the day…PST will wear you out like that. The next day I went on an excursion with 24 15-16 something year old girls to see some of the churches and lakes around the area. At one point I could see the mountains where the boarder of Russia lies. The trip was amazing; it was like being in summer camp again. The girls were braiding each other’s hair in the marsh while others were singing traditional Georgian songs in a round.

Our first stop was to Gremi Church, a 16^th century church. It is the Church of the Archangels in the little town of Gremi in the Kakheti region. It has a secret tunnel and everything. Very Game of Thrones like!

After our visit to Gremi, we went to go see Nekresi Monastery. Nekresi Monastery is a 6^th century monastery located on top of a steep mountain. This place has some interesting history behind it causing it to be the only Christian church where pigs can be sacrificed. Legend has it that during the Muslim Lezghins invasion, people sought the monastery for refuge. They covered the area with pigs’ blood and skin making it impure for the invaders to enter. Very interesting indeed and because of this piece of history, we were allowed to have grilled pork kabobs for dinner.  It was very picturesque and overlooked most of the countryside below it. We even saw the remains of an old pagan structure in the field below us.

Nekresi Monastery

Me at Nekresi Monastary

Well seeing all those churches worked up our appetite so we then had huge women’s supra with water fights, dodge ball and badminton in-between. We later closed the day’s activities by swimming in Illia’s lake.

Getting Ready for a our women's supra

Pagan Site below

Later That Week...
Then this past Saturday a few G13s and I took a trip to the beach to bring our vacation time into full swing.  The beach is quite a journey for me since is on the opposite side of the country…but I made it! It only took 6 different marshutkas, one metro, and a book and a half but I finally made it to the beach and back again in one weekend.   A lot of work to only be at the beach for nine hours but it was totally worth it. There were 11 of us that got together on the beach. Most of the time there we spent trying to figure out the best approach for entering the water…rock beaches and their rocky shores can be hard to navigate.

My weekend Journey to the Beach and Back again:   

Friday:

2:30pm Friday afternoon take 45min marshutka ride from Sagarejo to Tbilisi

3:30 Arrive in Tbilisi…take one metro to the Didube  Bustop in downtown Tbilisi

4:00 Meet Brenna at stop, procure a marshutka ride to Khashuri

 5:30ish Arrive in Khashuri, stay with Melissa for the night

Saturday:

5:30am Get up and board 6am Marshutka for Batumi

10am Arrive in Batumi …hang out at the beach and coffee shop

 7pm board marshutka and drive 3 hours to Kutaisi…Stay at Ann’s for the night

Sunday:

2:30pm Failed to catch a marshutka to take us to the marshutka stop in order to catch another marshutka  to take us to Tbilisi…projected arrival time to Tbilisi at this point, 8pm…last marsh to leave from Tbilisi to Sagarejo leaves at 7:30…screwed.  End up staying another night at Ann’s-

Monday-

12pm Catch the marshutka in Kutaisi a

4pm finally arrive in Tbilisi 

At this point, i  met Emily, the older Response volunteer that was finishing her service and had a few drinks together in order to celebrate her last night of service in Georgia. After drinks we took another marshutka back to our site. I had planned on going to my house and passing out from exhaustion but Emily’s family insisted that I have dinner with them before doing so. She had somehow overheard her director making plans to rent a marshutka and have all the girls in Emily’s organization take it to the airport and surprise her there. We had to pretend to the girls and her director  that we were unaware of said plans….This was much harder than we thought since the girls assumed I didn’t know the plan and kept on insisting that I go to bed…(by this point it was 10pm and they were planning on leaving at 12am). After an hour nap my sister woke me up and told me of the big surprise. We, along with eight other girls and Emily’s director, climbed into a marshutka in the dead of night and took the windy countryside roads out of Sagarejo and to Tbilisi. (Funny, I just left this city 4 hours previous). We “surprised” Emily at the airport and waited with her until her flight left at 3am. Then we piled back on the marshutka and drove the next hour back to Sagarejo.  

 4am crawl into bed…but can’t sleep…at 5am my Skype rings and friends in America want to talk…and so it goes

Like I’ve said, I’ve been around

Ladies and Gentlemen…I now am Finally a Volunteer

July 12th, 2013

I had my Swearing in Ceremony on July 12, 2013! Now I am officially part of the Peace Corps Georgia family! All 30 of us (the trainees) got up super early…6:30ish mumbled goodbyes and farewells to our PST host families and boarded the PC caravan that drove us the hour and half to Tbilisi. 

The Swearing In Ceremony is kind of a swanky event. PC invites one member of your PST host family, one member of your new host family and your school’s/organization’s director. We get all dressed up, give speeches, say oaths, cut cake, and have live performers come and give a performance on stage for us.  It’s so swanky that we have to do a practice run of the whole event. Unfortunately I made the mistake of placing my bag in the marshutka that broke down on the way there so for a while I thought I would have to swear into the government in a pair of jeans and some black converses…The marshutka came in time though.

My cluster mate Ann and I, along with a few other volunteers, performed both Georgian and the American national anthem for the ceremony…we had no idea though that we would be on Georgian tv later that night…another reason I was glad that my formal clothes had arrived on time.

My invitation, Peace Corps Pin, and my certificate. 

It's Official!!! 

Nora, Brenna and I in the front Swearing In

Maura, our country director, cutting cake

My Big Loud Georgian Wedding (Experience that is)

This past weekend I attended my first Georgian wedding reception. No, I didn't get to go to the wedding (the church where it was held is super small and only a handful of guests were invited to actual ceremony), but I did get to attend the reception afterwards. My host dad's cousin was getting married and was having the reception at his house after the ceremony.  As I am told, on the day of the wedding the groom goes to the bride's village to pick up his bride. They then go to the church for the wedding and then have the huge supra/wedding reception at the groom's village. After the wedding ceremony the wedding party begins their dangerous journey to the reception in a fleet of decorated cars. I don't know if these cars did it but from other wedding processions I've witnessed, the cars drive dangerously fast around round abouts disregarding any of the traffic laws or on coming traffic... (usually someone is hanging out the window video tapping the whole event).

Here's where my part of the story comes in:

After the wedding party arrived at the groom's house. The location of the reception was super convenient seeing  that the house where it was being held was less than 500 yards away from my house. The reception was held in the front yard of the house in the middle of their beautiful garden. There were two big tents set up and four huge supra table, and I mean Davinci's Last Super tables huge! The tables were covered with so much food that at some parts of the table, the food was stacked four plates high right on top of each other.

The bride and groom arrived in horse drawn buggy and made their way to their special table located at the front of the reception area. The tamada (toast master) quickly introduced the new couple and began his tamada duties of toasting all night.

Let me tell you, Georgians know how to throw a party. You never knew what was going to come next when it came to the style of music played on the dance floor. One song would be traditional Georgian song where all the movements are very precise and the demeanor is very proper....another song would be gangam style or another contemporary song in which everyone would be fist pumping. You just never knew what the mood would be like after a song ended and the next one began.

My very cute parents at the wedding

Tamada (toastmaster)  and his drinking horn

Bride and Groom

Supra table....so much food

Dance Time!!!

Put the "Black" Back in Blackboard

Before we are allowed to become volunteers, we have to come up with and implement a community project for our town. We decided that the black boards in our school needed to be updated immediately. The previous black boards had a light brownish shiny paint background in which the chalked didn't transfer very well and the sun would reflect off of the board to the point where one had to crane their neck or physically move in class to read the contents on the board. We called our project “Put the Black back in Black Board” hehe Below are some pictures from our project: 

Paint Brigade 

Painting away

Sanding Queen right here lol 

Osiauri Summer Camp!!!!

This week in PST our cluster had to design and run a three day summer camp for the kids in our village. Our camp is supposed to heavily focus on the English language. We wrote an announcement flyer and had our LCF help us translate it into Georgian. Afterwards we made copies and placed our flyers in various hang out spots around Osiauri. Counting our host brothers and sisters and their mutual friends, we were only expecting around 20 kids to attend our camp…..Big mistake.  On the first day of our camp we had not 20, not 30, not 40 not even 50 but 60, that’s right 60 something kids showed up to our summer camp.  Kind of overshot our projected number by a lot. Fortunately we had considered the possibility of having an insane amount of kids show up (though we didn't think it was likely) and had planned activities/games that could work well with large groups.  

Link to our village's summer camp Youtube video. Osiauri's Super Awesome Fun Summer Camp 2013

Day 1:

2:30 Kids start arriving to school to sign their name on to our sign up list…we run out of paper quickly and have to start doubling up on our lines. Expected to have a bunch of Giorgis sign up but we surprisingly only had two…that being said we had something like 10 girls named Mari so we had to write last names on the name tags too.  Kids ranging from 4 to 17…this might be tricky. Ann, Ana (our LCF/camp translator) and Brenna man the sign up table….Kirk and Aaron play basketball with some of the kids while I entertain a large group of girls with my poor volleyball skills

3:00 summer camp officially begins! We put everyone in a big circle around the gym and explain the rules to our first game. We tell our kids that whoever is in the middle of the circle (a.k.a. IT), they will call out something that other kids might have in common with (Example: I like pizza or I have a dog) and that those who do like or have the same thing will run across the circle and sit down before IT steals an open spot. The person who is left without a spot in the circle is the new IT. Rules explained….whew….and start…chaos ensues.

3:30 Break kids off into various teams.  Kids are left to come up with their team names and make a poster. After much deliberation, Team Spiders, Team Crazy Children, Team Lions and Team Gangnam Style are created.  After a short name game in our groups, we decide that our groups should play an arm tangle game in which everyone in the group crosses their arms over and grabs the hands of two different other people. Once everyone is linked then the group must untangle themselves without letting their hands go….This last point was difficult to explain. Note to self…drill this last part

4:00 Take kids and introduce them to kickball.

4:10 Quickly realize how difficult it is to explain the concept of kickball…start from square one... no you can’t pass your fellow teammate if they are on second and you are on first…this is the fowl line…

5:00 End of summer camp for the day. Only have thirty kids by this point but they seem to be in high spirits. We survived.

7:30 Our cluster meets up and decides to revamp our games and activities for day two…today has served as a trial and error day.

Day 2

2:30 Sign in begins. There are 40 something kids today…lost a few of the older ones but we have gained some new faces too.

3:00 Decided the easiest and most fun route for our first game would be to play a huge game of Duck, Duck Goose. Play game and it is a success!!!!

3:25 Break off into competing teams for scavenger hunt. Have prepared list before hand and hope that the kids will really get into it. Included things like, “Find three things that start with the letter “r”, and “Find someone named Giorgi and sing  to them an English song or preform a dance”, Call Kirk and ask for the password”. Have cameras divided between all of the cluster mates so as to document some of our tasks/objects that we can take back to the school (such as a cow).Scavenger hunt is a success!!! Two for two today. And on the plus side, my team wins scavenger hunt.

4:10 Have two activities simultaneously…hope it works out.  Aaron, Kirk and I help the 20 or so kids that brought shirts with tie dying them. Ann and Brenna play Sharks and Minnows in the gym with the other kids.

5:00 Both are success and we have tons of dye left over so made an announcement for kids to bring a shirt tomorrow that didn't get to tie dye today.

Day 3

2:15!!! The kids are already at school. Warm up with basketball and volleyball before everyone gets here.

3:00 Camp starts. Start playing lava game in which our four teams compete with each other. Kids need to correctly read the English word written on a card and pass it to the next person to read. Once the card has been passed up to the front person, the front person must make a sentence out of the word ...if they do then they are able to place the piece of paper on the ground and use it as  stepping stone to get to the other side of the gym.  Hard to control but fun.

3:25 Play capture the flag and made jail a place where you have to create an English sentence to get out. Didn't foresee that everyone would want to be in jail...Guess that's a good thing...right? 

4:30 Grab water balloons for water balloon toss...kids are excited but don't want just one balloon to work with...game goes a little south and kids want more balloons. 

5:00 By this time the rest of my cluster and I are very tired.  The last few minutes or our summer camp consist of pictures and videotaping goodbyes.