One Year in...

Hi All,
I am sitting here in my room on the first Monday after the last day of school wondering what I will do for the summer. Today is not a good start as it 12:30 and I am still in my pajamas, but in my defense it is raining and has been for two days and that only means one thing, mud and lots of it. Mud is one of the true constants in my life in Georgia and since the 16th was our one year anniversary in country I have had a year to truly study mud in all of its variety. Sticky, sticky mud that somehow migrates halfway up my pant leg on the way to school making me look like I have come in from the fields, but making me wonder why I am the only dirty one.
Does everyone else have a magical teleporter that I don't know about? Is there some sort of secret locker room in the school where everyone changes their clothes and shoes and I am left with mud all over my pants and shoes? I think maybe it is just the incredibly slow paced walking that Georgians have taken to creates a negative entropy thereby turning the mud particles to ice and makes it impossible for them, the mud particles, to leap up all over their clothes. Who knows? I am not going to spend a whole blog entry telling you about the different kinds of mud, but let’s just say I am going to avoid going out today as long as possible and I will not be visiting my garden anytime soon. I would like to instead muse on our year in country.
We have had several visitors to Peace Corps Georgia and some new additions lately in the form of the G8s, so I have had the opportunity to tell people about Georgia, but with the intention of not trying to scare them off. I have been honest, but guarded in some of the grittier details, like the toilet situation, and the cold. We want them to make it through the summer.It has also been nice to see Georgia again with a fresh perspective.
Luckily I have also spent some time in the Autonomous Republic of Adjara lately, which is on par I believe with any of the most beautiful places on earth with its turquoise waters and jungle like citrus-grove covered mountains leading into snow covered peaks. Last weekend we went to the Batumi Botanical gardens which is the 2nd largest Botanical garden in the world. It was just amazing to wind our way down toward the sea through paths of all kinds of wonderfully exotic plants including Giant Sequoias and huge Eucalyptus trees. The only section that looked a little worse for wear was the desert section, but they can be excused, because I am pretty sure no desert plant is accustomed to over 4 meters of rain a year. Luckily it was not raining when we were there, but it was humid and hot, but it felt right for the jungle atmosphere.
We plan on going to Batumi again next weekend, to fully kill any sympathy for us as lowly Peace Corps volunteers. It's a rocky beach, does that count as roughing it? And sometimes people have sexual relations on the beach in front of you which can be a bit traumatizing, especially when boys and girls can barely look at each other in other parts of the country, unless it is to hit each other over the head with their notebooks, ahh 3rd-9th grade such lovely children.
On the Terjola front this summer, it is camp, camp, camp. Though there will be no real camping due to security concerns from a certain unnamed organization that we currently are associated with. There will be a lot of English spoken and the coups de grace will be SPACE camp at the end of the summer. SPACE used in the previous sentence is not an acronym, this will be actual space camp minus space exploration of course but with all of the cool things like egg drops and spaghetti bridge building and hopefully a well attended rocket launch that does not create any international security issues. So if anyone out there has any cool space things, like posters, movies or books that they would like to donate to Terjola's space camp please send it to us at the following address:

PCV Katchinoff
110b Burdzgla
Box 66
0194 Tbilisi
Republic of Georgia

Congratulations to Julien on a successful grant written for mapping software. Soon Terjola's region will be well mapped and labeled. Yippee! This will actually help us a lot on future grant writing because we will be able to explain what we want to do and where with a visual representation. Many maps to come I promise. We will get more pictures up soon as well.
Well I think that will be all. Thank you to all of you who have been so supportive us this past year and we only have 14 months left, See you soon (relatively).
-Martha