My Host-Family Kicked Me out, Strangers Took Me in
My first two weeks teaching English in Georgia
This week will be a true story from my time living in Eastern Europe. I know most of you want my Japan-related content so please let me know if you want to keep seeing stories like this (more variety) or only Japan-focused content.
In 2012 I taught English in the nation of Georgia. I went through the Teach and Learn with Georgia (TLG) program and spent about six months in the country.
TLG buys your plane ticket to and from Georgia which was a nice touch. The monthly pay was low, about $100-200 a month, but the cost of living was also very low so it was doable. Not the gig for saving money but definitely for the new experience-minded.
An essential aspect of the program is that you have to live with a host family (save for special requests). You pay the family $100 for the burden of your meals and you have to teach them English once per week.
This is a story about how my first host family not only kicked me out of their house but did so with the prior intent to scam me. I was, as expected, bummed out. But, this horrible situation led to several encounters with strangers that would prove to me that the risk of living abroad was well worth the reward of experiencing the kindness of the people.
The scammer family
My first host family was comprised of a fifty-year-old widow and her mother-in-law. In Georgia, when a woman loses her husband, she is expected to wear black robes and shawls for the rest of her life. The elderly woman of the house did so but my host mom (Dianna) did not.
My first and only week living there was…. awkward. School hadn’t started yet, there was no TV or internet, and I had nothing to do save read Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. I finished it in one week, not because I was amazingly fast, but because there was nothing to do.
My host mom did a lot of chores: cooking, chopping wood, and cleaning up after her mother-in-law’s bathroom accidents. I wanted to help, so I offered to do something almost every day.
This was the death sentence to any relationship.
In Georgia, guests do not help out with things (unless you’re a woman, then maybe you can help cook—maybe). Also, men do not help out with chores like cooking and cleaning at all.
Dianna would grow visibly frustrated every time I tried to help so I quickly learned to shut up, which was difficult for me.
Getting kicked out
A week into living with Dianna I was getting used to the isolation. The surroundings were gorgeous, with rivers, mountains, and wild horses everywhere.
Then came a shocking phone call from TLG.
“Sorry Shawn, your host mother doesn’t want you in her house anymore.”
I asked why but the woman on the phone didn’t know (or didn’t tell). All I was told was that I could stay at Dianna’s house for two more nights but then I had to go. Where to? My handler said there was an opening on the opposite side of the country.
My heart sank. I had just taught my first day at the nearby K-12 (twenty kids in the school, covering all the grades). I was just settling into Dianna’s house. Sure, she never talked to me but her giant Soviet-era mansion was growing on me. Her mother-in-law as well, she was always nice to me.
Depressed and wanting to run away to America into the comforting arms of In-N-Out, I walked around the village with my eyes on the ground.
Kidnapped by a stranger
As I shuffled about the streets, I saw a man wrangling his cows and goats back into his yard. He saw me and shouted, waving his hands and grinning.
I drew near. He was a ruffled man in dirty clothes, smelling a bit of vodka. He smiled, and made a gesture with his knuckles, clinking them together. I understood this as “Hey let’s drink.”
So I did the perfectly safe thing and went into a stranger’s house. His wife was there, looking shocked that a foreigner just materialized in her kitchen. She sat me down and the husband made a bunch of phone calls.
Bit by bit people started coming over to the house to see me. They stared, slapped my shoulders, grunted, and smiled.
A party was about to begin.
The wife prepared a massive meal for me and the people who had come over, numbering about ten. We ate and drank for six, seven, (fuck it) eight hours or so. This was one of my first run-ins with chacha, Georgian moonshine that can run into deadly levels of alcohol levels. It tastes like gasoline and kills brain cells en masse.
As the evening progressed I melted into a drunken mess of blabbering nonsense. I couldn’t speak Georgian then, and nobody spoke English, but somehow we were hanging off each other’s shoulders toasting our mothers and praying for good relations between the US and Georgia.
At least I think that’s what we did.
A little kid named Koba, six years old and BUFF came out and drank wine with his dad. He got drunk fast, picked up a machete, and chased the family dog around while smiling at me.
Turns out he was a first-grader in one of my classes. He made sure to bring up drinking at the start of every class to no horrified looks from any of the other teachers in the room.
At the end of the night, the kids walked me home to Dianna’s sometime past midnight, to her extremely pissed-off face.
Awkward last day
I spent one last day with Dianna after that night. She avoided me and didn’t make my meals for the day. There were no stores in the village and I wasn’t about to mess around in her kitchen, so I went hungry that day. The drunken feast from the prior day was a Godsend.
I got a call from TLG. Someone in the village heard about me and decided to take me in! I was warned that they were a poor family. I didn’t care and said sure, let’s do it.
They took me in just two hours later.
Before I left Dianna’s house, sans Dianna, I said goodbye to the elderly woman clothed in black and left for good.
I later found out that Dianna had hosted five other foreigners before me, all of whom were kicked out within the first week, conveniently after each one had paid the $100 fee to her.
Dianna also spread rumors about me being selfish and lazy to the whole village. Glad I was kicked out.
The new family
My new host family was run by a couple, Iuza and Nana. The home was not as big as Dianna’s and came with some challenges:
Dianna’s had an outhouse with a flowing water system. Iuza had a hole in the ground that smelled like death.
Dianna’s guest room was a mansion. Iuza’s had a hole in the window and the mattress was stuffed with tattered old clothes.
Dianna had a shower (cold water only). Iuza had a car battery hooked up to a hose propped up in his shed….and that’s how I bathed with the thought of electrocution each day.
But there was one significant positive difference:
Iuza and Nana loved me.
I lived with them for four months. At first, the death toilet was a real challenge. But Humans can get used to anything I tell you, only took two weeks to mentally block out the smell.
The stories from Iuza’s house are too numerous to put here. I wrote about a typical day of chaos here.
To give you a hint:
I survived on nothing (literally) but potatoes and moonshine for a month once.
Iuza tried to get me to sleep with a neighbor girl so I would be forced to marry her.
He and I stole metal piping from the sewers and sautered it into a makeshift chimney for his house. It fell and almost crushed my head.
We got drunk one afternoon and cut down apple trees with his chainsaw and chucked the wood stumps at each other.
He let me drive his Soviet-era taxi on a hiking trail and I almost crashed it into a ravine.
There’s more, oh so much more.
Iuza and Nana lost their son Giorgi in a lumber accident a year before I arrived. You could see the pain on their faces whenever his name came up. Nana fussed over me whenever I got sick, worried that I would die.
Iuza was a crooked cop in the 90s. He was purged by the government, fought in a civil war involving the Abkhazia region, and had some of his fingers blown off by a sniper. His former cop buddies (all crooked and now maybe mafia) took a liking to me and would drink with me often.
It was hard, they didn’t speak English so I was forced to learn Georgian. I did grow quickly but it was still lonely a lot of the time. The culture of Georgia is one where people don’t understand why you would want to be alone. I love hanging out by myself, but they often thought I hated them or was depressed when all I wanted to do was read.
But in the end, despite the difficulties, it was a home of love and endless stories of hilarity.
No reward without risk
I was scammed by Dianna. Taken advantage of. This experience almost ruined my idea of living abroad long-term and trusting people.
But the two sets of strangers that took me in, the cow herder for the random party and then my new host family, showed me that the risk can be worth the reward.
I loved this story . I like a mix of stories . Keep up the good work !
Hell of a story