Tamuna is a wonderful woman! She is the police chief's secretary and my sanity. She also acts as the interpreter in my classes at the police station until next week when I will politely kick her out of class. No worries...we talked about it, and she agrees 100% that it'll be good for English language learners to hear and speak only English rather than relying on her translations.
Anyway, Tamuna is a fairly liberal-minded, 29 year old, unmarried Georgian woman. Gasp. 29 and unmarried. One of the first things she ever told me was that her mom believed that education was the most important thing she and her sisters could ever achieve. Already decades ahead of her time. She was not expected to get married and forget about education.
She is always very curious about American culture and asks how things are done there and explains how things are in Georgia and why they are the way they are. We sat down yesterday to lunch, where our conversations usually take place after classes are finished.
I plucked up the courage to ask her about the 2008 war with Russia. It was the first time I really recognized how young of a country I am living in and that everyone I meet has seen war.
Tamuna told me about leaving her home with her mom and two sisters as she heard Abkhazians were coming along with Russians as she remember from her childhood hearing of Abkhazians chopping the heads off of Georgian citizens. Her father stayed behind.
They went to a village 20km away from the main street of Zugdidi to stay with a family member. They were so terrified of the Russian planes overhead targeting houses that they all slept outside. After 4 days, the war was called off, but Russian planes continued bombing. After a week, this small country of Georgia had been rocked by it's big bro to the north.
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