Anything to get kids off their screens. Fortunately, up here in Svaneti this is not too hard: they’re such outdoor people, most of them, in this beautiful, rural, mountainous village.
My wife and I received a fooseball table as a gift from an international church in Tbilisi quite a few years ago. It quickly became a staple ingredient in the frequent kids’ clubs we host here, moving from an upstairs room to the new covered gazebo outside, to the cafe building, then back in the house for the last few winters and to the gazebo every summer. It’s remained popular all these years, with ages from about six through high school and young adults. We’re glad that the local young people have a place to hang out away from home, just to socialize, have fun and be themselves. Unsupervised, but we’re just a few steps away if need be.
Board games… we have Scrabble in both English and Georgian, and Monopoly (current favorite) in Georgian, with its streets all to be found in Tbilisi. This game is helping them learn to read and follow rules, cooperate with buying and selling of properties, cope with the good or bad luck of the dice, and work with money and math. Want to own Rustaveli or Chavchavadze Avenues? Now’s your chance.
Scrabble had its first ever iteration in Georgian at my initiation, in about 2008, when I lived in Ushguli for two winters teaching English and learning about that village’s culture. We had frequent power cuts then, some lasting days or even a week or more. What to do when your favorite Turkish evening soap opera isn’t available because the TV is out?! There was exactly one generator in the whole village, fueled by diesel, and no one had the luxury of buying the stuff just for the privilege of watching young, beautiful, rich people in the country west of us scheme and ruin their lives away.
By happy chance, my host family, the Ratianis, had a tablecloth with a grid of large squares on it, about two inches on a side. Georgian, like English and all of the languages of Europe, is written in a straight line, unlike, say, Korean, which has clusters of letters, or the writing systems of China, Iran, the Arab countries and Israel, for example. So you can make crosswords with it. We did some brief textual analysis to determine the relative commonness or rarity of each letter, as is proper with Scrabble, and started paying. Great fun.
Now, all these years later, there is an official Georgian Scrabble game available in toyshops and bookshops here. We bought this, along with Monopoly, as soon as we found it. Not having children of our own, we love hosting them from the village. Board games are experiencing something of a revival since Covid set in, about which I can only be glad.
Other games I like, such as Taboo, need adapting as well as translating for every language, because they are very language-specific. Georgian does not have a very large target population, compared to, say, German, French or Mandarin, so it must wait its turn. But the games I’ve mentioned are a positive sign, whether they bring enough financial return or not.
Frisbees are another experiment of mine, and I recently brought back several of them from Canada. Boomerangs I’m still learning how to throw, before unleashing the children on them and having them get lost in a field somewhere. But frisbee is already taking off, as they learn how to throw AND catch one. It’s a very sports-minded community.
Then there’s the whole, 8 by 12 meter, multi-section American-built playground which we were only a channel for the donating of, and about which I’ve already written here. Installed on the grounds of the school with no problem or paperwork (“Tony’s one of us”) and received with great joy last summer, it is also hugely successful, school in or out, all seasons.
Life can be so serious, with so much pressure to work or study hard, to get ahead (of everyone else), and so much bad news on all sides! Kids, just come and play, while you can, while you want to. Dare I say that play is also learning? This is important. Enjoy.
BLOG by Tony Hanmer
Tony Hanmer has lived in Georgia since 1999, in Svaneti since 2007, and been a weekly writer and photographer for GT since early 2011. He runs the “Svaneti Renaissance” Facebook group, now with over 2000 members, at www.facebook.com/groups/SvanetiRenaissance/
He and his wife also run their own guest house in Etseri: www.facebook.com/hanmer.house.svaneti
