Visiting Tbilisi in January

It has been some time since I have been able to visit Georgia, but the wedding of a GYR board member Thea Jokhadze provided the perfect opportunity to visit this month. GYR does not pay travel expenses for its volunteer board, and because I am in graduate school, it has not easy to visit often.

Much has changed in the two and a half years since I last visited Tbilisi, especially at the Mkurnali Association. After a nap post-4 AM arrival, Nino Chubabria arrived to take me to see the new shelter building in the Saburtelo neighborhood of the city.

The new building is fantastic! The previous building was really just an office with workshop space, where some 20 street youth had made their homes by moving temporary beds out onto the floors at night. The new building is an actual house with a yard, with dedicated sleeping, living, eating, and workshop spaces. It provides a normal home environment for twenty kids, who are visibly more relaxed in the new facility. The building has allowed Nino to get official shelter status with the government, so that she can now take teens into the shelter as an alternative to serving prison sentences.
In addition to the improvement of having a new building, Nino has acquired additional help. Nana now does the cooking for the organization (which we were lucky enough to sample!), with food partially supplied by the Georgian Orthodox Church. Nino also has help from other friends who take turns supervising and staying at the shelter at night with the kids. And as always, Dato still helps run Berkli, the computer services teaching workshop and business that supplies the organization with part of its cash flow.

The most surprising thing for me was to realize that most of the kids I knew two years ago have moved on. Many have married, are having their own kids, or have moved away from Tbilisi. I only recognized Pavel at the shelter, who is still teaching in the enamel jewelry workshop, now with his little brother Nicolas, who has turned 17 and left the orphanage.

On this trip, I was able to spend some time with Father George, who took me to Saint Nino’s tomb on her namesake feast day.

Because I had to return to my graduate school classes, my visit to Georgia lasted only a short six days. I was unhappy to leave so quickly, but grateful for the opportunity to remember what an inspiration the Mkurnali Association has been for me personally: including the kids, the organization’s dedicated core of volunteers, and its hard-working director, Nino Chubabria.