One of the things my wife and I are able to do in Svaneti with some regularity is host volunteer teams of young people from all over the world, for a couple of weeks or more each time. We’ve had them since 2007 (Ushguli, from Bulgaria), mostly in Etseri where we have lived since 2012. From the Netherlands, Australia, South Africa, Argentina and more. They come to run children’s clubs and to help elderly or otherwise disadvantaged people in practical ways in the community. Our Ushguli team, in late October, nearly got snowed in. But they had time to hand-make a slate stone path to the school in which I was about to start teaching English, and we left on time.
There’s always seasonal work: Shoveling snow off sticky roofs in late winter, otherwise they’ll collapse. Road-clearing in winter as well, most of it is plowed, but not all. Hoeing to plant potatoes in late spring, then the planting itself. Digging them up in October. Wood-cutting and splitting for firewood, anytime. Hay-turning once it’s been scythed, to dry and stack for cows’ winter feed. Learning to milk cows, and helping with that, all the way through to making cheese. Special projects like assembling the huge playground I wrote about recently. Helping us, too, in our own large home, in many of the same ways. What they don’t know, they can learn. It’s always a help.
This current team of five are with us for just over two weeks. They cook and clean up after themselves in the upstairs kitchen, to reduce costs, as most such teams do. As I wrote before, their first big job upon arriving was to clean up the fully assembled playground set and level the ground around it; it’s a hit in the village, and we are so glad to be able to have been merely the channel through which it came and was set up.
Wood work in two households has been multi-stage. Dragging pieces of a cut tree from the edge of a river, then taking the wood home. Chainsawing and axe splitting it, then stacking it where it’s out of wet weather, to dry fully for daily use. None of the team have done this kind of thing before, so they’re exercising muscles unused in such ways; but they are pledged to try practically anything, and cheerful about it too. I get them going, and they power through.
They have also helped us with hoeing and weeding our garden, so all the various flowers, fruits and vegetables which my wife has sown can flourish in the relatively short growing season. (May we be protected from hailstorms! Rare up here, but we helplessly saw one once from the school windows, at the start of our Etseri years, which flattened our whole garden and everything else around as well. Very disheartening, and you just have to move on. Farming is this kind of dice-rolling game). In the autumn, there would be picking of pears and plums to do; earlier, cherries which are just now starting to become a regular thing (all of these if early spring frosts haven’t killed their flowers, more common than one would expect, though this year we got away with it).
There are enough people in the village living alone, elderly, physically challenged, or otherwise, dependent on the goodwill of neighbors or relatives to lend a hand. Some are what I would call truly desperate, with too much to do just to survive, and not enough hands, energy or time. I suppose this is typical of subsistence-farming communities. Our teams seem to be able to make a difference, for which we are glad to facilitate them and multiply whatever the two of us could do to benefit this village, which has, from the start, welcomed us and helped us get a start here.
Tony Hanmer has lived in Georgia since 1999, in Svaneti since 2007, and been a weekly writer and photographer for GT since early 2011. He runs the “Svaneti Renaissance” Facebook group, now with over 2000 members, at www.facebook.com/groups/SvanetiRenaissance/
He and his wife also run their own guest house in Etseri: www.facebook.com/hanmer.house.svaneti
Blog by Tony Hanmer
