After two days and a night of partying (which was dancing to some old school rap and having a beer) at an ex-pat bar, I felt a bit dirty and longed to see my Dali and the Georgian village in which I was reborn. I popped up in the bed that first Saturday morning back in Tbilisi and immediately knew that I needed to get out of the city. So I hurriedly gathered a small bag together and made my way to Didube station, where transport could be found towards any place west and north of Tbilisi. Just a few metro stops away from where I was staying was the station, and upon exiting the metro, I walked down a corridor a tables where people were selling toilet paper, candy, batteries, underwear, and soft drinks. When this place opened up into the outdoor station under grey skies, I went to the same place where I found the marshrutkas (vans) that took me to the village even seven and a half years ago. "How much to Borjomi?" I said upon finding the driver. "Eight lari," he said. I wasn't going all the way to Borjomi, but it was the cheapest trip to take that would drop me off by the River Mtkvari and just outside the village. I found my seat just behind the driver and waited for the van to fill. At some point, a man walked up with a plastic bag and said to the driver, "My aunt is very sick and needs this medicine, could you take this to my cousin in Khashuri since you will be passing through there? He would meet you beside the road by the gas station where the main road turns." The driver took it without a word, but when the man who brought the medicine reached for his wallet, the driver spoke up, "That will not be necessary," and put the medicine in the van.
When the van was finally full after ten minutes or so and everyone's money was taken, we set off towards the west. After leaving the city of Tbilisi, we passed through Mtskheta, the ancient Georgian capital, with its two holiest churches surrounded by high hills and separated by the confluence of the Mtkvari and the high Caucasus fed Aragvi. As usual, several people in this transport made the sign of the cross within sight of the hallowed structures, crossing right to left as Eastern Orthodoxy prescribes.
Very soon after leaving Mtskheta's environs and going past the Georgian Military Highway which leads north towards Mount Kazbegi, Chechnya, and other parts of the North Caucasus, suddenly there appeared a sea of tiny houses. These are those which have been built recently for the internally displaced persons (IDPs) from what the world has come to know somewhat incorrectly as South Ossetia. This section of the Georgian heartland of Shida Kartli was the sight of an intense military confrontation between Georgian and Russian military forces back in August 2008, and the end result was damage to Tskhinvali, the main town in the area, and the torching of Georgian villages, effectively completing the ethnic cleansing of Georgians from their own homeland. Thousands of those Georgians who were lucky enough to escape with their lives will end up in new settlements like these that were passing by my window as we sped towards the setting sun. The houses are the size of some sheds in family members' backyards back home and they are aesthetically depressing in their uniformity. A few days later I was to attend a meeting of the Coalition for IDP Rights. While there, a woman told of an IDP man whose complaint about the new houses was, "When I come home drunk, how will I find my own house?"
As we kept moving westward, every so often I would see another new settlement of IDP houses in the waning daylight. They looked like they were parts of a camp or military barracks rather than places where families would act out their daily routines. Near Gori, a city famous for having some of its apartment buildings blown up by Russian missiles in August (one in which members of my host family lived), there were more rows of dreary new houses that would shelter those who have lost much of what made their lives worth living.
And the sun disappeared into the cold night.
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