True Story: The Impossible Things are Normal

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Hello and welcome to The English Like a Native Podcast. My name is Anna and it's time for a true story. True stories are episodes that, as you may have guessed, involve me telling a true story. Now, today's story doesn't belong to me. It belongs to a member of my team, a gentleman called Mike, who delivers some fantastic lessons within my Community. Now, I am always looking for funny, interesting, frightening, sad, exciting, or even disgusting stories to share with my podcast audience. So, if you have a story that you think is worth sharing, then please feel free to type out your story and send it over to me at hello@englishlikeanative.co.uk. Just write the title of your email True Story. So that I can spot it among the sea of emails that I receive. And if your story intrigues me, then I might just share it. So today's story from Mike is called,"The Impossible Things are Normal" In 2010 and 2011 I worked as an assistant English teacher at a school for 5 to 18-year-olds in the Republic of Georgia. The Georgian president at the time wanted to open the country up more to European and American culture and had initiated a project called Teach and Learn in Georgia. I had been living in Finland for seven years, and as much as I enjoyed being there, I wanted to try something else. I had actually wanted to spend some time in Turkey, so when this opportunity arose to go to Georgia, on the north-eastern border of Turkey, I signed up right away! All the teachers, who were mostly from the USA, went through a week-long induction to the country and its culture, along with a few hours of language training, before being assigned posts to different cities, towns, and villages. It was important to get to know each other during training so the project staff could see who bonded with who, and which groups of people formed naturally; the staff tried to keep these groups together by sending them to the same region of Georgia, albeit not the same town or village. This wasn't always possible and some teachers were sent up into the mountains or next to the Russian border where they felt quite isolated. Luckily for me, I was posted to a region more or less in the centre of the country. I started the school year living with a Georgian family in a village just outside the main town. I worked at the school assisting the teachers, and I was also happy to tutor the family's kids as well as volunteer at the more or less daily after-school English club, which we ran in a government building in the town. There were 3-5 of us there most days, and the others lived with families in the town. All except Jenny, who lived with a single woman called Tamara in a large flat next to the school that they both worked at. It was a three-bedroom flat; one for Tamara, one for Jenny, and one which was used as a classroom for after-school English classes. Tamara had wanted to host a teacher basically because she wanted to go to America during the Christmas holidays. She took on a lot of after-school students to make enough money to be able to do this, and she also needed to have a letter of recommendation from a respectable American citizen, and proof that she would be able to stay somewhere during her time there. Jenny was happy to help and provided Tamara with her home address on the West Coast. As far as she was concerned, Tamara would be welcome to stay there with her family, but naturally, she imagined that Tamara would want to stay in other places, too. This was well and truly confirmed when Tamara announced that she had booked her flight tickets and would be arriving in New York, on the East Coast, three time zones away."Well, that's Georgians for you," we thought! One of our instructors at the training sessions had told us that in Georgia it is the easy things that are impossible and the impossible things that are normal! I stayed in Georgia during Christmas and New Year, while Jenny went home for a break. Just after Christmas, she phoned me; not messaged or emailed me, but actually phoned me: it had to be big news:"So Tamara just called me," she said, before going on in a fake accent;"Jenny, I found husband, I stay in New York. You stay in flat.""Well, that was quick", I replied,"But we knew that the difficult things were normal for Georgians." In fact, it turned out that Tamara had been planning this all along; obviously, she didn't breathe a word of this to Jenny. This wasn't the main issue, though. Jenny was worried:"I don't want to live alone in that flat the landlord comes and goes as he pleases, and Tamara always has lots of, let's call them,'male guests'." I offered to move in with her and she thought that would be OK. In January, we carried on working at different schools. Each morning I walked or hitched a ride back to the village school and then did the same in the afternoon to get back to the after-school English club in town. We did indeed get a few visitors to our flat. Some of them were older kids from the school who really wanted to hang out and speak English and have fun, but some of them were, as Jenny had said,"male visitors" we didn't tend to let them become guests. If I was at home then it was me who opened the door. I would explain that Tamara had gone and that Jenny wasn't in. Generally, they left quite quickly when they finally understood my broken Georgian, some of them hung around for a while in the square outside the block of flats where ours was. My job was then to make myself visible and audible in the window and on the balcony and take photographs of them if necessary. This was little over 10 years ago. A woman living alone in Georgia was then quite unusual, and for many people carried certain implications. Even in the town, women were expected to do all of the housework and were not generally welcome at the dinner table; they had to prepare and serve the food, and they would eat in the kitchen or at a different time. I'm generalising, but that was the experience of the English teachers and certainly the normality of the Georgians that we talked to. Don't get me wrong, I don't want this to sound like I'm criticising Georgia; I loved my time there, it has great natural beauty, and we were generally made to feel very welcome by the sociable people. As I said at the beginning though, the then President wanted the country to feel the influence of countries from the West, and become more modernised. It wasn't long before the headmaster of the school that I was working at found out that I had left the village to live in the town. He asked me why I had left the family home in the village. I tried to avoid the question by telling him that they were great people and that I was still coming to the school every day and the kids could come with me to the English club, etc."But why had I left?" he persisted. Well, I hadn't wanted to seem critical of the Georgian men, but now I had to explain that since Tamara had stayed in America, Jenny was alone."What was the problem Americans can live alone. They have a different culture.""Yes, but sometimes people come to visit her.""This is good!""Sometimes, but sometimes the visitors are men and they want to come into the flat." At this point, the head seemed to realise that this was not a comfortable situation for Jenny, and asked why she didn't call the police."Sometimes it's the police who come", I told him. After he had stopped laughing, he completely accepted the situation and immediately invited us to a party that he would host in our honour. That the police would come is the'true' part of this story. The'story' part is actually yet to come. The cornerstone of Georgian culture is the'supra'. It is a feast where you sit down together and eat and drink as much as you possibly can, but there is a structure to it. Each supra requires a tamada or toastmaker. It is he, and it is always a he, who keeps the party going by periodically standing to propose a toast, giving a speech beforehand in order to justify it. There is also an established sequence to the recipients of the toast, which, if memory serves, begins with a toast to peace mshvidobis gaumarjos’. Subsequent toasts will be made to women, children, guests, Georgia, and anything really that comes to the attention of the tamada during the conversations. On one occasion, I drank at least three toasts to Bobby Charlton, George Best, and Manchester United. I say at least three because although the wine-drinking is regulated and everyone drinks at the same pace, the sessions can be lengthy, and my memory always used to get a bit hazy at these times. The speeches could last for several minutes, but once one is over, everyone is required to drink their drink bolomde to the bottom. You should drain your glass or you will not get a refill. Apart from that you may cause offence and have to explain yourself. This was a very useful piece of cultural knowledge one winter's day when Jenny and I received a visit from a policeman. We were having a teacher's meeting at Tamara's flat one afternoon: me, Jenny and a couple of other female teachers. There was a loud banging at the door of the flat and we heard heavily accented shouts of"Jenny! Party! Party! Modi Jenny Modi!"'Modi' means'come' in Georgian, we heard this word very often! I went to the door, as usual, and asked who it was. He said he was Tamara's brother, Giorgi and so, despite my reservations, I let him in. He almost fell into the flat when I opened the door, but I could see that he was wearing a police uniform and brandishing a revolver. He was accompanied by a woman who seemed too young to be his wife. Something told me that she certainly wasn't a policewoman, either. Now, realising that I shouldn't have opened the door, I tried to make up for this. I latched onto the word'party' and repeated it enthusiastically, helping him into the kitchen, which was the first room that you came to in our flat. As a Georgian man, he certainly didn't want to be in the kitchen, but I had managed to divert him just long enough that I could gesture to the other three teachers that leaving by the still open front door was now Plan A+. I stalled Giorgi with a monologue in broken Georgian that must have sounded like,"Party here, George! Party, you tamada. I got beers and gwine and trink. A toast to police, toast to Mr. Police here." Giorgi made his way to the now empty living room, instructing his companion to find the wine and expecting to find Jenny there. She's in the toilet I said, and miraculously, he accepted this, so we sat down to be served by'Kate' who seemed to have instinctively known where the wine was kept. She thoughtfully also brought out a couple of litre bottles of strong beer, thinking perhaps that as an'American', I would prefer this to wine. Then she dutifully returned to the kitchen. The gun was still in his hand, even as he had the other one on the wine glass ready for the toast. He shouted,"Jenny! Come!" Quite a few times, and when she didn't answer he went to bang on the toilet door and insist, taking the glass with him. The toilet door opened as a result of his banging, but to his surprise, certainly not mine, the toilet, like the living room, was empty.'Kate' had known this, too, as the other three teachers had passed her on the way out. She had now positioned herself very close to Giorgi. Just at the moment that reality hit him and he started to turn back towards me.'Kate' took advantage of the fact that he wouldn't want to spill any wine, whipped the revolver away from him and legged it out of the door before he could react. I don't really know how she managed it, but she did, leaving a bear with a very sore head now shouting quite a lot of words that I couldn't really make out, along with the word'Jenny'. I countered with something like:"Jenny, let's go Kate, let's go Giorgi drink, and go you come," until we were interrupted by his mobile ringing.. Giorgi answered. Do any of you know what the Georgian word'deda' means in English? Although it is pronounced like the English word'dead', I knew enough Georgian by then that I wasn't worried. In fact, it means mother. As Giorgi's mother was also Tamara's mother, Jenny had her phone number as an emergency contact if anything happened at the flat. Jenny had called her telling her that Giorgi was at a party and he was'gizhi' crazy; this was another word that we heard a lot of in Georgian, too. So, of course, his mother called him. Taking this call and appearing sane was now Giorgi's number one priority, and I was easily able to pick up both bottles of beer, slip past him and out of the door to try to catch up with Jenny and the others. They weren't too far away, so we quickly reunited and headed off to the bus station; There was a room on the top floor which held nothing but a table tennis table, and we used to go there to play and drink beer with the locals. Funnily enough, it was located right opposite the police station. And that brings us to the end of this episode. A huge thank you to Mike for sharing that story with us. Remember, if you have a story that you'd like to offer up, please write it out and send it to me hello@englishlikeanative.co.uk Now please take a moment to leave a like if you're listening on YouTube. Or if you're streaming on another platform, I'd really appreciate it if you could leave a rating or review. Until next time, take very good care and goodbye.