We shoot through the landscape, I cannot shake loose the image of the accident that has stuck in my mind from last time I traveled this road. I keep looking out the windshield. Next to me my flat mate Marija, we try to keep busy by talking but from the center seat in the back the view is all too alarming, doing 130 km/h, upsettingly often on the wrong side of the road.
Once we reach Kutaisi, feeling of being back again, new ideas, new perspectives after having time to digest the last dose of impressions, feeling this time that I will be able to make some clear distinctions between my feeling and what I see.
We are picked up by the bus station in Kutaisi where the first outlines of a Mac Donald restaurant is being drawn using cast iron and concrete. Some ladies are selling black sunflower seeds and lady stockings on the dusty roadside.
The lady that picks us up is a friend of a friend, she was a soldier during the war, came 18 years ago with her two daughters and her new born baby to Kutaisi. Life took a sharp turn. She is now working with an NGO that is giving legal advice to the IDP’s as well as giving some language courses, English mainly.
Our first stop, a beauty salon. To my surprise a man was given a manicure. I can’t help but wondering if this is something he would go do this along with his male friends. Positively surprised. Moving on through the day, meeting IDP women working on business initiatives in Tskhaltuba, the Soviet architecture, some boys are horseback riding outside Stalin’s favorite retreat. It is an unreal world. Nature and times impact, neither time nor money to hinder the slow collapse of this area.
Finally we end up in our host’s home. The family gathered, an apartment on the first floor in a derelict sanitarium, homemade red wine and toasts for friendship. Boys hanging out, an old BMW in the driveway: their retreat. Smoking cigarettes, reciting stories. Cows are roaming freely in the yard accompanying the evening activities. The washing is taken inside. The sun is setting as we head for a restaurant and the end of a long day.
The people we meet have not just lost their homes and jobs and often relatives and friends. They have lost something more abstract, peace of mind in some sense, the physical connection to their origin. Among all the burned out hope there are some coals still glowing. The women I met, the work they do to level out some of the barriers their situation statues, is remarkable.
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