georgia peach

Weeks 3 and 4 of Tbilisi have gone much faster than the first two, when it seemed that we would be kind of doing the same thing every day. Most of us are (at least trying) to get involved in our projects during the week while spending a lot of time planning for travel on the weekends.

We've met several new friends as well. A couple of local social research centers mainly run by expats organized a seminar series on Georgian society, politics, etc., and after two of them we have a few more American friends. Jen is a masters student at Tufts studying public policy (and here for the summer), and Julie is actually a recent graduate of Emory's Rollins School of Public Health, and is working for an NGO to try to change labor and maternity practices in hospitals here to make them more woman-friendly. Julie's been in Tbilisi before, so I'm looking forward to her advice on some different things to do and see. We also met two Spanish guys, Gorge and Sergio, in the hostel in Yerevan, and they have been in Tbilisi for the past couple of days, and we've been hanging out with them. Salome threw a dinner party last night, including the five of us, Sergio and Gorge, Salome's sister Keti, Irina, and Irina's friend and fellow doctor Tami. It was quite fun, and after the Spanish guys made sangria, Salome and Keti showed off their professional dancing skills with Georgian and Spanish dancing. (Both apparently are very well-trained dancers in a variety of different styles.)

With the weather getting hotter and hotter, I find that I was wrong- or at least misinformation from Giorgi and my guidebook lead me to make wrong assumptions- about women's style of dress. I have indeed seen not only shoulders but my fair share of cleavage and a few (but not too many) short skirts. What I was told about women not showing off their sexuality in their dress here was false. Perhaps its a recent trend. Also with the hot weather is coming tons of seasonal fresh fruits to the fruit stands of the city- peaches (in the other Georgia too!), red and white cherries (cherries make me think of my dad), watermelons, plums, and other delicious things. Warm weather also offers us a great time to plan a trip to the coast of the Black Sea at Batumi, very close to the Turkish border. We're going to take the overnight train Friday night to get there for the weekend. Not sure how nice the beaches are, but any beach is fun. I'm also dying to get to Istanbul, and Jen is on board with me. We are trying to put together a last-minute trip from Batumi (which should be cheaper than flying from Tbilisi) that will take up some of next week. We're also applying for a visa to go to Azerbaijan for the following weekend. Rachel has put the travel bug in me, and thanks to her encouragement I am getting ambitious. She has already made it to 9 or so countries this summer, including the Caucasus, Turkey, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand, and others. She's currently in Greece with her boy friend. Jealous.

Oh and work? In keeping with the trend from when I tried to meet with him in the states, Dr. del Rio neglected to answer my emails for 2 weeks, leaving me hanging without any feedback on my alternative project. I'm kind of trying to plug along at something, for lack of any specific knowledge of what I'm supposed to be doing. (One would think that spending $3000+ to send a med student to Georgia would kind of be an investment and you would at least want to facilitate her making something of it. Maybe he's really busy saving Grady hospital or something.) I've been collecting some epidemiological information at the center, as well as reading grant applications and talking to people to learn about health services offered to AIDS patients here. I'd like to make a little more out of it than simply updating the epidemiological information published in 2002. During 2002, a grant from the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB, and Malaria allowed Georgia to offer universal access to antiretroviral therapy, so maybe some kind of evaluation of how that is changing outcomes for AIDS patients here. And as for Armenia and Azerbaijan...? The seminar series has actually offered me some really good contacts for information on health attitudes in the Caucasus. One seminar was on a huge survey of attitudes towards all kinds of social issues, including health and HIV in particular, that I can probably use in the paper, and the second was put on by a woman who has experience studying women, AIDS, and migration (as in, refugee kind of migration) in the Caucasus. And I've been visiting the inpatient clinic about twice a week. I'm not sure if I'm really learning a whole lot about medicine since my baseline knowledge about AIDS treatments are very low, but it's always interesting for me to get in and see patients. I think it also allows me to observe a lot about the state of health care and AIDS treatment in Georgia, since I can see it first-hand as I am reading papers about it. The other day I noticed that the doctor was speaking to the patient in Russian, not Georgian, so I asked where he was from. Turns out he came all the way from South Ossetia, a region of conflict in the western part of Georgia. Georgia is not providing any health facilities to this area, so people from South Ossetia and Abkhazia, the other region of conflict, have to travel far distances to seek more than basic medical treatment. It's frustrating that I can't speak to the patients myself.

By the way, if you're in the Atlanta area and/or care about the state of safety-net health care, keep up with the news about Grady Hospital and the recent task force report, and if you are so inclined, do a little activism on my behalf. : )