I should not be left on my own

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Monday morning involves a bit of a mad rush for school. I always forget that Eka has no lessons on Monday so I’m generally waiting for her to put her shoes on as a sign that our departure is imminent. It doesn’t really matter anyway because we wait until 8.45am and, with no sign of the bus, Mari and I start walking to school as fast as our little legs will carry us. When I get home our neighbour’s two grownup daughters are over visiting so everybody sits in the living room chatting and I sit there trying to pretend I have a clue what they’re talking about. Later Eka tells me that Gala wants her to go to his friend’s birthday the next day in Senaki but that she has three classes. It’s not the subtlest hint in the world but of course I tell her I will teach the classes for her! I wake up late on Tuesday – it’s one of those occasions where you turn your alarm off with every intention of getting out of bed and then go straight back to sleep. Although having said that it seems that, as a family, we’re getting up later and later as the days get colder. As Eka, Mari, Gio and I are waiting for the marshrutka outside the house Gio suddenly decides he doesn’t want to go to school and strolls off back into the house. What the fuck?! Eka makes a kind of half-hearted attempt to stop him but she’s laughing at the same time. Obviously I can’t follow the whole discussion but I still think it’s a little strange. Eka plans to leave school after the first lesson and, as she’s preparing to leave I ask her if they will be back late and she tells me she thinks they will be back tomorrow, which is a bit of a shock! I don’t really mind but at the same time I’m wondering at what point she was planning on telling me if I hadn’t asked! I’m slightly panicked at the prospect of looking after Gio and Mari for an entire afternoon/evening/night, having never been responsible for anyone but myself before, but I try to convince myself that it might be fun.



For the first time since I started I am left to teach classes on my own. My sixth grade lesson is fine and we actually have a lot of fun but the third grade lesson is a nightmare. It starts off ok but then I make the mistake of trying to teach them articles and it all goes a bit wrong. Maybe it’s my teaching methods but I’d rather blame it on the fact that they’re seven and don’t have articles in their language! Anyway, that’s my official classes done for the day but after my sixth grade lesson Maia tells me that some of the sixth grade students want help after school so I hang around for the duration of the next lesson. The history teacher, Chakra, had had his birthday the previous day so I sit in the kitchen with the other teachers eating yummy food until it’s time to go to my first extracurricular class. Only three of the kids are there but I don’t mind. All we do is go through the alphabet and practice writing their letters on the board but it’s fun and it feels good to be teaching on my own. I leave school later than usual and, as a consequence, get caught up with a lot of students walking home. I get chatting to some eighth grade students and they ask me if Gio is ill so I say, ‘no’. Mwah ha ha! Since I was going to be on my own with the kids for the evening and we had no school the following day (Saint George’s day) I had asked Jane to come over but by the time she finished school it as far too late, plus I live a lot further away than she first thought – I think because her and the boys live so close to Kutaisi they don’t realise that it’s a two and a half hour journey for me. When I get home I’m a little concerned about the lunch situation. I know that sounds absurd but I’m not permitted to do anything in my house in the way of housework so I have no idea what we’re supposed to eat, how to prepare it or anything related to kitchen matters. It’s fine though, Gio takes on the role of Deda and we eat leftover soup from the previous day and a big vegetable salad that Eka has left in the fridge. Later, I manage to flood the bathroom and break said fridge. Told you I shouldn’t be left alone! I decide to take the opportunity to wash some clothes since I’m dangerously low on clean underwear. Actually, I’m underplaying it. Before I went away for the weekend I actually washed a load of underwear in the sink. After fiddling with it for some time I manage to get the washing machine going. It takes forever and I check its progress regularly. Eventually it seems to have finished but it’s at that stage where the door isn’t ready to open yet so, again, I check it regularly for any change in its condition. After about 20 minutes I get impatient and decide to unplug the thing from the wall. Five minutes later I am able to open the door…which deposits about five litres of water onto the bathroom floor. I quickly close the door again, floundering about in water, plug the machine in again and manage to find a spin cycle. Unfortunately this only makes things worse as the pipe leading from the washing machine to the drainage pipe as somehow become dislodged so it begins to pump yet more water onto the floor. I shove the pipe back into place and spend the next 20 minutes mopping up water with a cloth and hoping nobody will notice. Having decided that I hadn’t done quite enough damage for one evening I decide that this will be a good time to borrow my adapter back for an hour or so in order to charge my dearly departed laptop. This is my second mistake of the evening. I text Jane and ask her what she thinks the risk level is of unplugging a fridge freezer for an hour. She makes the very good point that the electricity goes out for hours at a time so it should be fine. What I should have asked her was what the risk factor was of pulling a fridge away from the wall in order to reach the plug when it’s secretly balanced on a little plastic stand. The entire thing lurches onto one corner. Luckily the kids have some friends round and are making enough noise in the living room that they don’t hear me effing and blinding and trying to lift a massive fridge freezer off the floor. I manage to get it balanced, relatively precariously, back onto its stand and run away. Later when we’re having supper Gio opens the door and it falls over again, but it’s ok cos this time we’re in it together and the two of us manage to get it fixed much more securely. I decide there’s a reason I’m generally supervised during any household task and make a pact with myself to leave things well alone in future. Jesus, if I’d been left in charge of making dinner I’d probably have burned the place down. I get a call from Jane’s phone but it turns out to be Ally. I figured he’s either lost or broken his phone since the couple of messages I’ve sent him since the weekend bounced back and it turns out he’s done both. What I didn’t realise before was that, whilst I had declined the offer of vodka on the marshrutka back from Khashuri, Ally hadn’t. After disembarking on the main road outside Terjola he apparently decided to tackle the four kilometre walk back to his house, not along the road like a normal person, but across the fields. On reaching a river he proceeded to throw his bag over, take a long run up, and jump. The way he tells it he sailed over the water in some sort of graceful ark. Unfortunately, during his flight, his phone made a bid for freedom from his top pocket and ended up in the river. Anyway, him and Ara had somehow managed to scam Thursday and Friday off school and were just calling to tell me they were off for a few days of ‘man time’, whatever that might entail (I’d rather not know). I get an early night and enjoy my first proper night’s sleep since Friday.



We had a glorious day lazing around on Wednesday. The original plan was to go to Kutaisi for a day out with Jane but when I wake up the weather is miserable so I decide to stay home. I swear I get lazier by the day. I had a lovely day though. What I didn’t realise was that Eka and Gala had come home at around 3am so I got up fairly early just so that they wouldn’t come home and find me still in bed! Then I realised that no one else was getting up and went back to my nest. As I said, it was a lovely day. We had breakfast at about midday followed by a big lunch not very much later. We drank wine to celebrate Saint George’s day. Normally we drink out of little glasses but, as it was a special occasion, we were using what were effectively large champagne flutes. I spent the rest of the day lazing in my chair, but for once everyone else was lazing around too so I didn’t feel too guilty. In the evening I make the kids practice writing their letters and then teach them directions. I’ve drawn a maze for them and have them direct me through it with a pen and then play a game with them where I blindfold one of them and the other has to direct them to another point in the room around obstacles on the floor like bags and piles of books. This is all very well and good until they decide they want to blindfold me at which point I conveniently decide it’s too dangerous and put a stop to it.



On Thursday morning I get up and get ready as usual. By the time I leave my room at about 8.15am I realise no one else is up and I think maybe I have got things confused and there’s no school on Thursday either. I wake Gio up and say, ‘Gio, no school?’ And he says, ‘Yes’, meaning yes we have school, so I point out the time and I’m pretty sure he swears in Georgian. School was fine but I think they’ve turned the radiators down since it’s pretty chilly again. On the way home I get a call from DHL telling me there’s a problem with the package I’ve been sent from home. Of course there is. I can’t really understand what they want to me to do over the phone but I do manage to establish the parcel is in Tbilisi and not Zugdidi so I make an on the spot decision to head to the capital for the weekend. I was kind of at a loose end anyway and my friend Ali has been pestering me to visit him for ages so it seemed like a good opportunity. We come home and have the most fantastic lunch. Gala was home from work and helped prepare it so he’s feeling really pleased with himself and says he is ‘good boy’. We eat friend potatoes (which is so much nicer than it sounds), a pasta dish flavoured with carrots and garlic and homemade corn bread with cheese, all accompanied by plum juice and wine. Normally we would only drink three glasses over lunch but we’re fairly close to the bottom of the bottle so we end up finishing it. As we’re eating we joke that we’re all going to fall asleep afterwards…and then we do. I think Eka’s the first to go and then Gala disappears into their room so I think, ‘Fuck it, if they’re going to…’ Gala wakes me up with a coffee about two hours later. Mari was off school with a temperature so I go through the day’s English lesson with her so that she won’t fall behind. Later one of the neighbours comes round and I am asked to help her to use the internet. I spend quite a long time trying to explain that you can’t log into a Hotmail account with a Yahoo email address but I fear it may have fallen on deaf ears.

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