School Number 2

I know, School Number 2 is not the most creative name for a school, but at least it translates very easily. In Georgia all the schools go by numbers, every city and village has a school number one. I am not sure how many schools there are in Akhaltsikhe, but I know that there are people in the TLG program teaching at school number one and school number five, so there must be at least five. Also all the schools seem to be very close together which I don’t understand, they aren’t exactly neighborhood schools, I am not sure why students go to the school they go to.

            School number 2 is a big, old, and cold building. My original understanding was the school use to by a soviet military building, now I am not sure, maybe it was just built as a school during soviet times. Stories seem to change every time I hear them, I am not sure if it is because the people telling them speak poor English or if it is because culturally in Georgia it is accepted, and commonly practiced, to embellish stories to make them more interesting. You can see from the picture below it is a pretty big building, it looks boring from the outside, when you get up closer you can see the school has been graffitied with the names of American rappers such as Akon and Eminime. The front stairs of the school are all lose or seem like they crumbling, the outside of the building doesn’t look that bad, but it certainly is not a picture of an ideal school.

(School Number 2)

            When you walk in to school number 2 you are welcomed by a large, cold, dilapidated, empty, and dark corridor, if there were not so many people running in to the building it would be easy to believe from the hall that the building had been abandoned for years. Some classrooms are in much better shape then others. You can see that the school use to have electric lights in every room and central heat. I was told they stopped using the central heat when it froze so hard that everything broke. Now every room has a wood burning stove, which does a good job of keeping the rooms warm as long as no one opens the door to the hall for to long and it has less parts to break then central heat. Some rooms do have light bulbs in them but I have never seen one on, most rooms just have wires hanging from the ceiling where lights use to belong.  Almost every classroom has the wood floor boards coming up in at least one place to reveal the concrete beneath, in some rooms the missing wood has been replaced with concrete in what I assume is an attempt to level the floor. Most the desks and chairs are broken in some way or another. Many of the chairs don’t have backs and if you lean to hard on some tables they fall over.

            Despite the seemingly grim picture I have attempted to paint you of school number 2 it is a happy place. You can hear children laughing and screams of joy in the hall. The kids don’t have recess time but every 45 minutes they have a 5 minute break where they run up and down the halls. This time is chaotic and there is very little care from the teachers about what happens. School 2 is also unique compared to the other schools in Akhaltsikhe because it is both a Georgian and a Russian school. The Russian and Georgian sector don’t really mix it is kind of like 2 schools in one building. I am not sure how many students school 2 has because first I was told 250 then I was told there are 300 students in the Russian sector alone. The teachers at School 2 all want to be my friend, but the students are what made me fall in love with the school almost instantly.