I never had a child in my life. Now I have 300

I wish I could tell you how beautiful Georgia is. So are its kids,
in every way.

 

We were teaching the third grade this afternoon, Medea and I (Medea's name is pronounced with the accent on the first syllable: "MAY-de-ah." This so she won't be confused with anyone from Jason and the Argonauts. )


Most of these kids are eight or nine years old. They're learning their ABCs. In English, that is. They know their Georgian ABCs perfectly.

I didn't want to imply that they're slow. They're fast. I'M the slow one. I've been in Georgia for two months. The Georgian alphabet has 33 letters, and I think I know six of them so far. The English alphabet has 26 letters, and my third-graders already know 16 of them.

Who was it who said, "I pity any adult who gets into a language-learning contest with a child?"

Anyway, put in charge for a few minutes, I was calling around for volunteers to come up to the blackboard and demonstrate how to write, respectively, capital letters and lower-case letters.

There is never any shortage of volunteers. These kids LOVE to come to the blackboard, or to stand up and recite. If I ask for a volunteer, I immediately find myself facing a sea of arms doing the local version of Ted Turner's "Tomahawk Chop." The kids cradle one elbow in the other hand and furiously make a "chopping" motion in the air. That's how schoolkids raise their hands here.

If they're REALLY excited, in addition to the Tomahawk Chop, they leap from their seats and start yelling "Mas! Mas! Mas!" I understand that's Georgian kid-shorthand for "Teacher," you know, like American kids sometimes address their teacher as "Teach." Georgian kids call their teacher "Mas."

After we had completed this exercise and moved on to the next part of the lesson, I noticed a little girl in the front row looking somewhat glum. She had the right side of her face cradled in both hands. Her name is Mari, and like so many little Georgian girls, she is pretty enough to break your heart. All you have to do is look at her and your heart is in a thousand pieces. Mari has big brown eyes, with sandy-blonde hair tied in a braid. She's eight.

Lika, Ani and Mari, three of my fifth-graders.

And Mari is part of a huge Georgian "sorority of beautiful." I keep looking at these little girls' faces and thinking, "Geez, in about ten years, young, dumb Georgian males are going to be lining up like the crowd at the post office to have their hearts broken by these girls."

I see it already, as I walk around the streets of Tbilisi. This city could easily be called Supermodel Land. Young Georgian women love tight-fitting outfits and high, spiked heels. Combine their sartorial tendencies with the long, dark hair and dark brown eyes that are prevalent here, and you have a formula for trouble. All I can say is, I'm glad I'm not 25 anymore. If I were, it would be hard to concentrate on teaching.

But getting back to my third-grade classroom, Mari did not look happy. And if she could break my heart into a thousand pieces when she was okay, imagine how many pieces into which my heart shattered when I saw that she wasn't okay?

Had I done something wrong?

I thought, "Is she sulking because I didn't call on her?"

I didn't remember if I had called on her or not.

But the way she was cradling her cheek in both hands...Did she have a toothache?

Evidently she did. Or something similar. Within moments Medea noticed Mari's distress and we both sort of descended upon the little tyke. Medea stood beside Mari's desk and spoke to her in Georgian. By now Mari had tears rolling down her cheeks.

I knelt in front of her desk. I took her shoulders in my hands. "Is she in pain? Is she sick?" I asked Medea.

"Yes. She has...toothache," Medea said.

Toothache is a place I've been, and I would wish it on nobody. (Well, maybe my second wife.) But I would never wish it on an eight year-old child.

"We have to do something," I said.

"What can we do?" Medea asked.

"I don't know! Does this school have a health office, or a nurse? We have to do something, this child is in pain!"

"I will go fetch the schoolmaster," Medea said.

"Good idea. And have the schoolmaster contact her parents. I'll ride herd on this crowd while you're gone."

Medea went out of the room. There I was, with 30 kids who speak practically no English (but plenty of Georgian, which they proceeded to do, among themselves), and one child in so much pain that she was in tears.

This is another place I've been, the place of pain unto tears when you're small, and when I was even younger than Mari, actually. I used to get horrible earaches when I was about six, and I can remember those earaches coming on me when I was in school, in the first grade.

But I grew up in California. In my childhood schools had nurse's offices where sick children could be sent until their parents could come and get them. Georgian schools don't have nurse's offices.

I continued to gently squeeze Mari's shoulders as the tears of pain trickled down her cheeks. It was the only form of encouragement I could offer. I wished desperately that I could speak Georgian. I wanted to say something of a comforting nature to this suffering little girl, to tell her that help was on the way, something. But all I could do was speak softly in English, which she didn't understand.

Still, I hoped the tone of my voice, if nothing else, communicated something.

"Do you hurt? Are you ill?" I asked her. "Don't worry, honey, your teacher has gone to fetch someone who will help you."

I know she didn't understand me, but she nodded.

Lika, one of my fifth-graders in Tbilisi, prepares to give
the Georgian version of  McDonald's a restaurant review.

 By this time the rest of the class was generating, oh, perhaps 140 decibels worth of noise. I had joked to Medea that now I knew how Beethoven felt when he stuffed his head between two cushions to protect what was left of his hearing as Napoleon was bombing Vienna in 1812.

Actually, I was only half-joking. The school in which I teach is a barnlike old Soviet building with wooden floors and high plaster ceilings. It's a sound cavity. When you have several hundred kids dashing around between classes, with the attendant screaming, laughing and playing tag that goes along with that, you'd swear that the denizens of Dante's Inferno never created such a racket.

So. I tried to "ride herd on that crowd," as I had said I would, but since I speak no Georgian and the kids understand practically no English, it was like trying to "shoe a snake," as my father used to say.

Just raising my voice wasn't going to help; these kids are used to being yelled at, and in their own language too. What good was yelling at them in English going to do?



So I wrote some words on the board to illustrate their new alphabet letters, and prayed that Medea would come back soon.

She did, presently, and brought the schoolmaster with her. The schoolmaster then led little Mari away, and I hope to God they got her quickly to a doctor or a dentist or someone who could ease her pain.

I might not learn the aftermath until next week; I'm teaching in grades one through six, and I can't keep one class straight from another. These little kids all look the same to me...you know, like little kids.

In fact, some of the teachers look like kids to me now. Two of my co-teachers (like my landlady) are young enough to be my daughters. One of them, "Natia," told me just yesterday that I'm the same age as her mother. Thanks, kiddo.

But I do have a lot of fun here, sometimes. There is a windowsill across the hall from the "teacher's room" on the second floor, the "teacher's room" being the place where teachers go between classes to talk, debate, gossip and complain about inadequate or unavailable teaching materials, which is our biggest problem here.

I have found that if I sit on this particular windowsill just before the 1:10 p.m. classes begin, and remember to wear my Mexican cowboy hat and my aviator sunglasses, I will invariably draw a crowd.

The tenth-graders think I'm from Planet Hollywood.

They crowd around me, these 15 year-olds, giggling, being shy, introducing themselves, offering to shake hands, asking me my name...and also asking me the usual questions: "Do you like Georgia?" ("Yes, very much.") "Why?" ("Because it's a beautiful country with very nice people.") "Do you like our food?" ("Some of it, yes.") "How about our wine?" -- this last usually with a snicker.

(Well, Georgia does make some of the best wine in the world.)

But here's the one I hate being asked: "What is your favorite football team?"

When these kids say "football," of course they mean soccer. I'm not really interested in football of any kind, American football or soccer. But I hate to disappoint them, and clearly, soccer is SO popular here, (in most of the world, in fact) it's inconceivable to these kids that somebody might not be a soccer fan.

But I just can't bring myself to disappoint the 10th graders. I have to pick a team. So I usually say "Brazil."

I lived in the capital of Brazil, Brasilia, for three years, and it's the only place I ever lived where I saw people get absolutely fanatical about their soccer team.

(Having said that, when I lived in Cote d'Ivoire, after leaving Brazil, and the Ivorian soccer team beat Ghana in the All-Africa Cup tournament, then-President Felix Houphouet-Boigny gave the entire country two days off to celebrate. Not one day, two.)

But when I think of soccer, I think of Brazil's green-and-yellow flag, and of the afternoon I watched a key soccer match with my Portuguese tutor Miguel, at his apartment. The moment Brazil won that game, we could see, across the lake that forms Brasilia's center, a barrage of exploding firecrackers on the far shore that looked like a small-arms fusillade.

(Getting back to my U.S. embassy apartment that evening was dicey, because within five minutes of Brazil's victory, the main highway consisted of about 100,000 happy drunk drivers, waving Brazilian flags.)

So I say "Brazil," and of course they have to come back and yell the names of all their favorite teams, and since they all yell at the same time, I still don't know who their favorite teams are.

Let tell you about a few of my kids.

There is "Sandro," who looks like a miniature, redheaded version of Jay Leno. He has "the chin." And big brown eyes. Sandro is a treasure. He's so eager, tries very hard, always wants to come to the blackboard. He doesn't always get everything right, but Sandro is a trouper. His eagerness never flags.

There is "Nana," one of the prettiest little girls in a country that's filled with pretty little girls.

Nana wears her dark hair cropped short, the way my ex-wife used to wear hers. Nana has not brown, but black eyes, which makes her that much more lovely, and in the third-grade class where I teach with Medea, she sits in the only available space, which is not part of any of the rows. She has a row to herself.

Hence, this afternoon when we were pairing the kids off to talk to each other, ("What is your name? My name is Luka. What is your name? My name is Gio.") Nana was the 13th bowling pin. She doesn't sit right next to anybody, so she had no partner with whom to engage in this little dialogue.

"Okay, Nana, you get me," I said.

She was a bit flustered at having to "do" this dialogue with an adult instead of another kid, but I helped and we got through. "What is your name?"  "My name is Nana."  "What is your name?" "My name is Kelley."

I asked all the kids to make little name-cards for themselves and put them on their desks to assist me in learning their names.

Nana wrote her name down in colored pencils, and drew valentines all around it.

Then there's my buddy "Bacho." Bacho is a character. He's all over the place. I swear, today I saw him five times before I saw him in class. He's a blue-eyed blond kid with the usual snaggled baby teeth. He sits right down front, and let me tell you, when Bacho wants to contribute, he's about as subtle as a seven-car pileup. I was asking for volunteers to come to the board this afternoon and Bacho was all but on his knees, begging me to call on him. When I picked someone else, he looked heartbroken.

Then, shortly before the end of class, he unleashed a barrage of Georgian on Medea. I listened to this while sitting at the teachers' desk, unable to understand a word, but figuring if Medea wanted me to know what Bacho was saying, she would tell me. She finally turned to me.



More of my Tbilisi crowd. The one in the middle, wearing
a fancy Georgian costume, is Nutsi. Nutsi is a pistol.

"He is saying that his mother is in Turkey," Medea said. "And when she comes back he wants you to teach him how to ask her, in English, for something he wants her to buy for him. He described it. It is a musical instrument. I believe it's some kind of drum."

That's all the world needs: Bacho, armed with a drum.

Nutsi, one of my fifth-graders, is a pistol by anyone's definition. She's 11-going-on-15, if you get my drift. She writes left-handed, can do a mean hula hoop, and goes from deadly-serious to making silly faces in about eight nanoseconds. She wants to visit New York.

"Nino" is a drop-dead gorgeous eight year-old girl. (Yes, here in Georgia, "Nino" is a girl's name.)

I've been trying to figure out who the heck Nino reminds me of, and I just now realized. She reminds me of my cousin John's first wife, whose name was Lindsey.

Their coloring isn't the same, Lindsey and Nino (hell, Lindsey is MY age, and I'll be 56 next Wednesday!) but the high cheekbones and the big, bright eyes are identical. Lindsey, whom I have not seen in more than 30 years, was beautiful, and so is Nino.

Nino gets a little antsy now and then and has to reminded to settle down. Well, you know, she's eight. When I was eight, they couldn't get me to settle down either. (Come to think of it, when I was 50 they couldn't get me to settle down.)

This afternoon, bored, Nino started writing something in Georgian, in pencil, on the surface of her desk.

"Nino," I said. She didn't hear me.

"Nino!" I repeated. She looked at me. I used sign language. I pointed to the scribbling on the desk and waved my index finger in the international signal of "mustn't do that."

She smiled at me somewhat apologetically and duly erased her art work.

As she was doing so, I thought to myself, "If I don't stop this kid now, the next step will be graffiti. Who knows? She might become a tagger."

Then I thought about what a challenge it would be to explain to a bunch of Georgian kids what a "tagger" is.

I'm an American, a Californian to be specific, and I didn't know what a "tagger" was, myself, until about seven years ago. ("Gang member: spray-paints graffiti to mark his gang's territory.")

Nino made sure that I saw her applying the eraser to her desktop graffiti. As she did so, she caught me thinking back 45 years, to a time when I myself was so crushingly bored in my own sixth-grade classroom that I started drawing cartoons in pen on my own desk, and duly got yelled at for it by my teacher, Mrs. Hale.

Closing circles. Don't you just love closing circles?

I just love these kids.