The man who voted thrice

I'm blaming the infrequency of updates on the fact that the internet connection at home has been pretty terrible lately, usually down for most of the day. At the office, I don't really have the time to spend half an hour just typing stuff up. I try to find teaching material online, which is proving not entirely easy - that is, there are a billion grammar exercises but very few good texts. I want something they can read, that will be one coherent topic relevant to everyday stuff and that will introduce important vocabulary - this is clearly asking too much. Tomorrow I will try to teach pronounciation to my absolute beginners. I'd completely forgotten how many different sounds there are in English, and how little sense the spelling makes. Georgian is one of those languages where everything is pronounced exactly how it's spelled (even though the pronounciation itself isn't easy - try on "tsra" for size: the number nine, I'm never buying nine of anything here), so I guess explaining the English system will be a bit challenging...

Yesterday we went to a presentation by another NGO, DEA (Association for Physically Disabled Women and the Mothers of Physically Disabled Children - the only organisation in the whole of Samegrelo that works with these issues). It was held in the town art gallery and concerned a project DEA had organised before the latest local elections, called "Choose Your Future" which gathered a group of young people (particularly those from villages, since they usually have inadequate access to information) and trained them to be election monitors. This presentation got interesting when the members of the team that worked with the youth told of the many irregularities they had witnessed at the polling stations where they worked - such as people showing up with IDs that weren't their own, and one man who came three times to vote - once in a black shirt, once in a white shirt, once in a red shirt but, as they said, "all the time, the same face"! One member of the audience is a local politician and a member of the government party and of of course felt he had to defend it. It was pretty amusing to witness - of course, none of the people present bought his explanations and everyone had stories of their own of irregularities that they had observed. More on these elections here and here. That being said, there are definitely countries with far worse vote-tampering and voter-intimidating habits.

And then we all had cake, khatchapuri and cherries, and there was much merriment.

I've also visited the Dadiani Palace museum, but due to a severe lack of English signs and the fact that the only English guide had her day off, I didn't understand much so I think I'll just update myself on some of the history of the Dadiani family using the good old internet. But the museum does host one of Napoleon's three death masks, so I've seen that at least!