part III.
Pankisi – the valley of silence, where you wouldn’t hear sounds of the newest Dua Lipa songs, let alone Beethoven’s moonlight sonata, just sounds of nature, singing birds above your heads, buzzing forest and bell of cows coming back from meadows. Time seems to stop somewhere on earlies 1900. Mountains around you made you feel like you climbed some stairs into Eden garden. Walking the streets, seeing locals men sitting around sipping their coffees, women with long skirts cooking khinkali (sort of dumplings filled with cheese or meat). But like everything, even this Eden has another side of the story.
“Jihadist shadows hang over Georgian’s Pankisi Gorge” headline on BBC from 2016 and hundred more in the same spirit. When we came to Georgia summer of 2018, I spent countless hours watching a documentary or reading articles, basically everything available at that time. I was so eager to get to the work, use all of my uni knowledge on how to do research, my skills to work with marginalized people, and just prove to the whole world that I am here and capable of anything I wanted.
I can see it like yesterday sitting in a small restaurant in the Jokolo village, waiting to meet the Czech ambassador for Georgia. The restaurant was really humble with limited offers. You can get two traditional Georgian dishes, tea/coffee and Georgian lemonades.
“I still coudn’t believe two months before I meant to be someone’s wife, and now I am meeting the politician in this God forgotten place.” was running in my head.
After the brief brainstorming with the ambassador, we were heading into the headmaster of the local school. The headmaster is a woman, and it seems that women take the lead in this valley. Despite language barriers, she promised we could use the school facilities for our events as long as we inform the ministry of education. Oh crap! Another task on our to do list.
We spend the night in the garden of Nazy`s guest house. Nazy is an amazing woman who promotes tourism in this rural area surrounded by Caucasian mountains. The night was warm, the sky full of the stars so bright and so close to you. After all day under the hot Georgian sun, I went to bed with a headache and one thought: We going to make it!
To be continued…
