Normally, I post a story or an experience on this blog. For this post, I thought I’d post some quick and dirty fun facts about my Peace Corps service. Some of these facts are mentioned in other posts.
We had a pet rooster for about two months. Justin tried training our rooster like a dog.
Cows are everywhere in Georgia and I’ve been obsessed with them lately. Each time I see a cow while walking, I attempt to take a selfie with it.
This is technically a calf, but this still counts as a cow selfie
In my office’s bathroom, there is a bathtub. This is because our office is actually a home converted into an office.
I am the only foreigner at work. All my colleagues are Georgian and we speak Georgian at work.
Georgians are obsessed with mayonnaise. They sell it in tubs and they also drizzle it on pizza.
Here is an entire section of mayo at the market.
I’ve had food poisoning about half a dozen times during service. I’m so well versed with the symptoms that I can predict the play-by-play by the hours.
I strive to combat racism during service. In Peace Corps, I co-lead a diversity awareness summer camp, called DREAM Camp, for Georgian youth. At the end of my first camp, a teenage girl hugged me and told me that she has realized her biases and will strive to change for the better because of my session.
Last year for Thanksgiving, the only way I was able to procure a turkey was to pick one out alive. My boss, Justin, and I went to a live poultry market and paid a grandmother a couple of dollars to kill it for me. I later cleaned the insides and baked it.
During Easter, Georgians only dye their eggs red. There are multiple shades of red. In America, we dye our eggs cute and various pastel colors. That is not a thing here.
At the bazaar during April 2018. You can see the different shades of red for the Easter eggs.
I created a gender-equality committee in Peace Corps called Saqartvelo Smashes Stereotypes. I wrote about the committee on this blog and a prospective Peace Corps applicant read my blog and discussed the committee in her Peace Corps interview. Now, she is a volunteer here and is on the committee with me!
During my Peace Corps Pre-Service Training (PST), I only used an outhouse that was located next to the pig stye and chicken coup. No one in my village had an indoor or western-style toilet.
I currently live without a dishwasher, a dryer, a couch, a TV, a radio, or even an indoor toilet.
I do not have a wide variety of food where I live. Thus, I currently make up my own recipes and I now I consider myself an amateur chef.
I made up this marinara pasta sauce that is incredibly healthy and delicious. No recipe here.
In my first week of Peace Corps, I witnessed my host family’s pig give birth to her nine piglets. She immediately proceeded to murder most of the piglets by eating them and burying them in her feces. I helped my host family save the remaining piglets. Months later, my host family killed the mother pig and we ate her for dinner. I am still traumatized.
The average price for a haircut for females is less than $4 USD. This includes wash, cut, and style. I have cut my hair in Georgia three or four times thus far.
My most recent haircut in the summer (2018). I only paid 10 GEL at this fancy place in town, which is equivalent to about 4 USD.
My office is about a 15-minute walk from my home. I walk every day to and from work.
Georgia sells Oreos, M&Ms, and Pringles. We buy them frequently and consider them great snacks during my long transportation rides to the capital.
Which fact surprised you the most? What else would you like to know?
My first job interview was when I was 17 years old. My sister and I decided that one day we wanted to get a job, so we walked to the biggest employer of our city to see if they had any openings. Back in my day (I’m just kidding, I’m not that old), you could just walk over and ask for a job. We lived close to a theme park and we thought working there might be fun.
I remember thinking to myself that I had no idea what I was doing. No one ever walked me through what an interview is like or what I should expect. Somehow, even though I did not dress in business professional attire, I still got the job after three hours of interviewing. Working as a food hostess was a great professional learning experience. Looking back, I made two big mistakes: I had no resume and I did not dress professionally. Granted, I was applying for a minimum wage job and wore jeans to the interview….but still, not the best idea.
In this regard, the youth in my community and I have that in common. I had little opportunities for mentors and career advice, and so do these youth. However, I did have a school counselor (who was an amazing human). Public schools in Georgia do not have school counselors. In fact, I’m not sure if Georgians are even aware that schools counselors are a thing. Therefore, learning how to write a resume and exploring career goals are not topics discussed in schools.
One of our mentors (left) working with her two female youth on their resumes and 5 year goals
The previous cohort of the Gender Equality Committee did a mentoring project in one community. It was gender split and the beneficiaries were the IDP youth (Internally displaces persons, typically from either Abkhazia or South Ossetia). However, this year, my cohort (the G16s) wanted to expand this program to different regions within Georgia. We held workshops in three regions: Samgerlo, Imereti, and Guria. My friend Kelley was the mastermind behind the whole thing. I helped her run just one of the workshops: the Imereti Region Workshop.
For each workshop, we planned on recruiting 8 mentors (4 female and 4 male). We also wanted 16 youth (8 female and 8 male). The plan was to equally split up the youth with the respective mentor with the same gender. As I’m writing this, I’m giving a little chuckle. Why on earth did we think we could get the perfect number? Just because we wrote in our Let Girls Learn grant that we could 16 youth and 8 mentors, reality always has a different plan in Georgia!
Ryan, Peace Corps Volunteer, (3rd from the left top row) with the male mentors and youth at the Workshop during the gender split session
I co-hosted and organized the Imereti Region Workshop along with my friend Ryan. You’ve should have heard his name by now, I’ve mentioned him in various posts. Ryan calls me five days before the workshop and tells me that we do not have any youth signed up. I nod my head and just sigh. My response was, “Ryan, it is Tuesday afternoon. Friday is a holiday. Do you think we can actually find 16 kids to show up within 2 business-days?”
Optimistically, he responds, “we can try!” I replied, “I guess it does not really matter. Even if we found a bunch of kids, they could just drop out any second. Let’s just try to get kids. If there aren’t many by Thursday afternoon, we will postpone the event.” Thursday rolls around and Ryan calls me back. “So, we actually have more than 16 kids now.” I laughed and said, “of course, we do. But I wouldn’t be surprised if some of them do not come.”
Sure enough, Saturday rolls around and we only had nine kids show up on time. We waited a while and then three more stroll in like being late is still the fashionable thing to do. Kelley, Ryan, and I look at Manana (Ryan’s counterpart) and ask her if more people are coming. Manana said she will be right back and walked out the room. Through the window, I see Manana walk to park in the center of town. I assumed she had a good reason and did not think anything of it. Minutes later, Manana comes back by gently telling a teenage boy she brought with her to sit down. I asked Ryan what happened. Apparently, Manana walked through the park, some a kid, and “invited” him to attend this workshop.
I have to hand it to the Georgians. If they want to make an event happen, it will happen. In America, I would not be so confident to just go to a park and grab a kid. Secondly, I would have been stressed out if days before the event I were to have to registered participants. But so life here….predictably unpredictable.
Other than the little participant count mishaps, the event went without a hitch. Kelley did a great job presenting the various job-related skills. I conducted a session on job interviewing. The kids were very engaged. In fact, I don’t remember seeing any kids trying to sneak in a little Facebook time on their mobile phones. I was pleasantly surprised at how active the youth and the mentors were in the sessions.
Some of our mentors and youth as they were participating in an activity during the Job Interviewing Session.
When the day was over, one of the mentors I invited came up to me and said, “Workshops like these are very important in Georgia. It is a shame that only these youth came. More should have come.” I had also invited Justin’s Georgian tutor and she echoed the sentiment. In fact, she even suggested that Kelley and I should hold the fourth workshop at her private school. Granted, we had only planned for three workshops, but Kelley and I loved the idea of hosting more workshops. In all honesty, I loved that the mentors and the mentees loved the workshop that they volunteered their opinions that more should be conducted.
My organization and I applied and received a grant from the Let Girls Learn project to encourage teenage girls into sustainable, green farming! How? We taught them how to compost and provided them with the materials to do it in their villages!
When I studied abroad in Hong Kong during college, I took a day trip to Mainland China for a Spa Day with a friend. In the cab, on the way to the spa, I saw a milk ad on a billboard. It had a cow, showing its utters, stating how fresh her milk is. Right next to the cow billboard, there was an ad for pork. It had the same set-up, a pig was basically saying, “Hey, I’m yummy. Eat me.” It freaked me out. I realized that American commercials (excluding Chick-fil-A), tends to shy away from things like that.
American culture, regardless of personal values, does not have a strong desire to know where our food comes from. Things are slowly changing, but it is true. When I told people that our “pet chickens” were later “dinner” in Peace Corps, people thought, “oh, my poor thing.” It is completely forgotten that most of the world and human history knows exactly where their food comes from. For centuries, most of food came from our backyard’s or our neighbors.
My PST (Pre-Service Training) Host Family were farmers and grew various vegetables and fruits. I personally picked out these garlic bulbs from the garden back in PST.
For Georgia, this is still the case. According to The Fund Georgian Center for Agribusiness Development, the “agricultural sector employ[s] around 53% of the active workforce.” For less than 4 million people, that is a crazy amount of farmers. In my personal opinion, this is probably an inefficient way to feed a nation. To make matters worse, there are a lot of harmful farming practices in the country.
My host neighbors in PST riding their tractor to the far early in the mornings. I would see this man so many days on my way to training.
Georgian farmers heavily use pesticides and toxic fertilizers. Green farming practices are nearly non-existent on a national level and are not commonly used by local, small-town farmers. According to WECF International, Georgia still uses illegal and toxic pesticides in their farming practices. Many of these pesticides are untested, and they are replicates
of the “western trademark pesticides.” Farmers tend to use these replicates because they are cheaper; however, they contain harmful toxins and pesticides that are also less effective at killing their targeted pest. The improper use and storage of these illegal and banned substances pose a health risk to the farmers and contribute negative effects on the environment.
My youth counterpart and I receiving fresh fruit from one of the farmers in our composting project
Also, men make up about 90% of farmers in Georgia (our own needs assessment). Females may look after small livestock, such as chickens. However, the men are strategically in charge of the farm and make the important decisions. Women, on average, own fewer assets, such as land, livestock, and human capital. They have less access to inputs, such as seeds, fertilizers, labor, and finance. They tend to depend on their husbands for these things. Increasing women’s resources could “help rural women maximize economic opportunities, increase productivity, and improve food security, education and healthcare since women tend to reinvest in their households” (The World Bank).
To alleviate some of this, my youth organization, Youth2Georgia, wanted to do a Composting project in the villages of Imereti. Initially, we submitted the proposal to the German Embassy, but we got denied. Therefore, six months later, we revamped the project idea and submitted it as a Let Girls Learn (LGL) grant. I discussed a bit of what LGL is in this post if you want to read more. We felt that composting was a great way to reduce the dependence of harmful fertilizers and pesticides while increasing female participation in sustainable, green farming practices!
Iberia College Training and Composting Demo. Here, we are building the first composting bin at the Agricultural School at Iberia College.
So for a couple of months, I worked hard with my counterparts. Many times, a Peace Corps Volunteer will write the SPA or LGL grant, but because we were not on a tight deadline, I refused to do that. For nearly two months, I spent several hours a week working with my counterparts. In fact, I did a mini, informal Project Design Management training. I explained all aspects of the Let Girls Learn grant writing process. They even wrote the first draft to the grant. I worked with them on all the edits. In the end, I rewrote a lot of the English and fixed it up. However, it was a truly a group effort and I was very proud of how much we designed the project together.
In total, we delivered three separate trainings. The first training was at Iberia College with about 20 participants. We trained the entire staff under the school of agriculture and their students. The staff and students included both male and female. We strongly believe that in order for gender equality to be achieved both men and women must participate in the process. The second training involved teenage girls and several of their mothers. We were hoping that involving the parents would increase the likelihood of them actually composting.
A picture of our second training. We held the event at a local winery of a famous female winemaker. The well-known female winemaker was also a participant and served as role model for composting.
We have later learned that there was no correlation between parent participation and girls composting. In fact, it seemed that less teenage girls wanted to participate in the training with their parents. Therefore, for our third training, we only invited 20 teenage girls. All the participants were from villages in our region. Therefore, all of them had access to large farms in which they could do composting.
This is the winemaker’s composting bin! I was so proud of how she got started on it and already filled it up half way within a few weeks.
Now, I will admit…We were not the most successful with the turnout. Only about 17% of the participant actually composted on their farms. However, over 80% indicated they understood how composting is made and why it is important as evident by our post-tests. More importantly, they understood why increasing female participation in farming is important (we had a gender component in our training).
On one of our monitoring days, we visited the sites that started the composting. I’m not making this up, but it was one of the most beautiful days I had in my service. I cannot tell you how bright the smiles were of our participants. For those who composted, they loved it! Seeing how proud they were made me proud! It was heartwarming how they took care of their composting bins and how it will change the quality of their farming.
For two of the three trainings, I had partnered with one of my friends and Peace Corps Volunteer Ryan. If you read the Thanksgiving post, he is referred to as Yarn Skallah. He was conducting a grant and a project to teach youth to professionally film and edit videos in the same community I was doing my composting. We thought it would be a great idea to film the composting trainings. If you are interested, here is a YouTube video of my trainings!
Bringing awareness to gender inequality in this country has arguably become my strongest passion. I am promoting gender equality in half of my projects because I have committed my service to it. Thus, when my friend Kate asked me if I would like to collaborate with her on a gender specific project, I said yes. On a cold November afternoon, we both visited the American Corner, in Kutaisi, in hopes to create some sort of a gender-related club. We were both bouncing around ideas like doing a film club featuring strong female role models. Another idea was creating a book club. Essentially, we wanted to break down some of the gender stereotypes and promote gender equality through lively discussions and interactions.
My friend Kate and I in Tbilisi in April 2017. She is easily one of my favorite people in Peace Corps 🙂
After much thought, our idea expanded into creating one-day workshops in various villages and towns throughout Georgia. Along with our two other friends, Liv and Rose, Saqartvelo Smashes Stereotypes (SSS) was born. Saqartvelo means Georgia in Georgian and I couldn’t be more proud of my friends for coming up with an awesome name. The strategy was simple: each workshop would have 3 sessions. The sessions are identified through a needs assessment. The community chooses the top 3 topics they would like us to cover. The sessions range from Employability, Social Media Best Practices, Gender Norms/Stereotypes, Community Activism, Domestic Violence/Early marriage, and more. Typically, the local English teachers in the community act as our translators.
My friend Liv and I leading a session on Gender Stereotypes
We have had 5 separate workshops throughout Georgia. Workshops have ranged anywhere from 7 participants to over a 100. During the sensitive gender topics, we have gender-split discussions. Our male Peace Corps Volunteers will lead the discussion for the boys, and we lead the discussions for the girls. The session sparks great conversations and discussions. Sometimes, I will catch the students having side-conversations during the sessions. At first, I want to tell them to pay attention to the topic at hand. However, I’ll eavesdrop and I will notice that they are actually discussing the topic! Since this is not a formal educational session and attendance is optional, we will let the side-conversations continue if they are not distracting.
Other times, the exact thing happens. A student will make a comment and participate in the session, but the comment can derail the discussion. For instance, I was leading a session on gender discrimination in the workplace. I asked the teenagers to provide examples of gender discrimination. They started mumbling amongst themselves for ideas. A brave young girl raised her hand and proclaimed, “There is gender discrimination in the U.S, but there is no gender discrimination in Georgia.” This girl was trying to convince me that Georgia, which is listed as number 79 in the world on the Gender Inequality Index, has no gender inequality! I took a deep breath and said, “Just because we don’t recognize something, it doesn’t mean it is not there.”
Some of the students working on activities that we give them during the ssesions.
These comments fuel my motivation for Saqartvelo Smashes Stereotypes. Girls in Georgia are encouraged to do all the housework while the boys are not. It might not seem like a big deal, but it was a huge cultural shock aspect when I first came to Georgia. During training (PST), Justin and I would take our empty, dirty plates to the kitchen after eating. My host mom and sister welcomed the help- but only from me! In fact, they insisted that Justin leaves the plates on the table. Then, they yelled at me at said, “Bechi Ara! Marto Gogo!” Which translates to, “Boys, no! Only girl!” To combat the gender stereotypes in a polite way, I said, “In America, both can do it. Why only girls? Justin wants to help.” My host sister literally had no answer other than, “this is the way it has always been done.” This is a train of thought that needs to be questioned.
According to the World Bank Group’s Georgia Country Gender Assessment in 2016, “Household responsibilities appear to play a critical role in reducing female labor force participation, but not male labor force participation.” It is important to learn how to identify what is gender discrimination and the simplest forms it can take place. So when I told that teenage girl that example, she remained speechless. I could tell that she too started thinking about the “logic” behind the tradition. If no one ever questioned tradition, women today will not be able to vote or own property- even in the United States.
We also try to instill a sense of self-confidence and self-power. During the domestic violence session, Rose does a beautiful job in explaining that help is available in Georgia. She discusses the resources and the hotlines available in the country. It would be useless if we discuss American self-help tactics, so we provide local resources as much as possible. Domestic violence is a big problem all around the world; however, talking about it is more stigmatized here. According to EurasiaNet, “In 2015, police registered 901 domestic-violence cases – an 88 percent increase over reported instances in 2014, based on police figures cited by the ombudsperson’s office. In 2014, the latest year for which data is available, the government’s emergency-assistance hotline recorded 9,290 calls related to domestic violence.”
The Georgian PSA to make people aware of the Domestic Violence Help Hotline.
Therefore, to aid in positive change, we create a safe space for these discussions. One of my favorite parts of this project is the community involvement. The teachers at these schools are highly involved and are excited to co-lead these discussions. The students that participate come voluntarily; therefore, they are motivated to learn about these topics. Witnessing the community involvement and the student’s eagerness is a sign of a bright future for Georgia in combating these gender stereotypes.
