Gulara Mardanova is from the village of Iormughanlo in the Kakheti region. She is a farmer and cattle breeder, so she leads a nomadic life and rarely visits her home, where there are no pastures.
Family members only visit Iormughanlo in the fall. They even joke that their relatives plan weddings at this time, because that’s when everybody is in the village. Winter and summer are spent taking care of livestock and doing other things.
The farm is located not far from Tbilisi, a few hours’ drive away, but after turning off the highway, you have to walk along mountain paths and a small river to reach the settlement.
You will not see any shops, hospitals, or other basic facilities along the way. There is no mobile phone service either. Just a few small huts and wagons where farmers and their families live, and lots of livestock and small animals.
Gulara was waiting for us at 6:00 AM to show us how her day begins — by milking the cows. Our visit delayed the process a bit, so she tried to get the job done faster so as not to disturb the cattle and to catch up with her day’s plans.
Before milking, she tied a calf with a rope near the cow and explained to us — if the calf is not near, she will not give us milk, and if I do not tie it, it won’t let me milk the cow. She sat down on a small stool and began to work energetically. When she finished with one, she moved on to the next, and so on, until she had finished milking all the cows.
Then she brought the buckets full of milk into the house, made cheese — separating what to sell and what to give to her daughter to take. She also kneaded the dough and baked the bread.
She fed the chickens, made breakfast, and washed the dishes. She tried to get all of this done before her husband took the cattle to pasture. Her daughter, Tozu, helped her in the process.
She had a hard time finding time to talk to us, with so much to do. We watched her work for several hours, and when we asked her how she managed without basic necessities, she shyly told us that she gets very tired, but she is used to it, having lived as a nomad on different farms for 30 years.
“I do not think about myself, I just think about my four children, to get them on the right path.”
Gulara told us, and throughout the interview, all the heartaches and desires she mentioned were related to her children.
A washing machine, refrigerator, and electricity in general, just like drinking water or a bathroom, are considered luxuries for farm dwellers, not basic necessities.
Despite these challenges, Gulara’s biggest worry in her nomadic life is that she has had difficulty providing an education for her children. If she had had the chance, she would have left her children with their grandmother in the village, because the farms were far from settlements and cars could not move after the rain: “It rains terribly here, everything gets terribly muddy, and it’s cold.”
“I was very jealous of the children who lived with their parents and went to school. I had to choose between staying with my parents or going to school, because my parents were on the farm,” recalls Tozu Gulmamedli, who lived with her grandmother and aunt so she could study, and then moved to Tbilisi, where she says she always misses her mother.
“I couldn’t even accompany my children to buy clothes during school hours. I would give money to relatives and ask them to buy them for us. Sometimes they would buy clothes that were too small or too big. I was always busy with work and had no time,” Gulara said with regret, explaining that no one could understand or imagine the unbearable conditions they had to live in.
Sometimes she dreams that one night her children will be with her, all together, like they used to be, in the summers, when school ended and they returned. This is a current wish, but before she dreamed of having the opportunity to receive a higher education. She regrets that she was could not, saying she was a good student.
To be able to communicate with her children, she has to climb a high hill, to the one place where you can get a network connection, and talk to all four of them for a limited time, 5 minutes each, before returning to her work.
She says she doesn’t like being in the city, but when she has time with all the work she does, she tries to visit her children. She does loves the village, where she feels good and finds spiritual rest. She often misses her home. There is a bathroom and a washing machine, which makes housework easier.
“I have to knead the dough and bake bread. It would be nice if I could at least buy bread, it would make my job easier. What would I wish for? Comfort, that there was a store nearby, if there was drinking water, clean water.”
Gulara told us, explaining that now they come to the city every 10 days to buy produce and stock their supplies.
Unforeseen events also add to the difficult conditions of nomadic people. For example, as Tozu tells us, during the Covid pandemic, when the state provided assistance to the self-employed, farmers were not taken into account, and when travel by car was banned, they were unable to get to the city to buy medicine and their livestock died.
“Life in the city is simple. You go to work, in the evening you go to the bathroom, wash up. If you want something, you can buy it,” Gulara said, showing us the carriage — one small room where she and her husband live.
Their children also stay here when they are able to visit the farm. They also have to take a bath in this room, which is especially difficult in the winter when other family members have to wait outside in the cold.
The situation is also difficult in terms of access to essential health services. As Gulara says, it is not even possible to contact an ambulance if necessary, and if they manage to, it takes a long time to get there. In such cases, the farm residents try to help each other.
“We can’t even benefit from universal healthcare. I’ll tell you why: Let’s say I’m registered in Sagarejo and my farm is in Lagodekhi. If I need to see a doctor, going to Sagarejo is expensive and I’d rather go to Lagodekhi, given the time constraints. Of course, in this case, my family doctor won’t be in Lagodekhi and I’ll have to pay,” says Tozu, adding that for these reasons, nomads refrain from going to the doctor unless they really need to.
“As a child, when we went to the doctor, the scariest moment was when the doctor would tell us to get some tests done and come back tomorrow, or if we needed to get an injection. We were traveling a very long way, we didn’t even have a car, and going back a second time was awful. How would we even get an injection? There is not a doctor on the farm, so you had to learn on your own.”
Added to this is the discrimination they face in the medical sector. They often hear the phrase “Tatar” and the stereotypical attitude that they are unclean. They say that part of society does not have a sense of solidarity and they are still “unacceptable” to them, and this is the beginning of many problems that ethnic minorities have.
“Where do our women meet with society? In the markets, when they bring their products. Many say that they look down on us, that we are dirty, and because of that they lower the price of the products. This is the biggest pain for women,” Tozu told us.
They say that there was a case when cheese made on the same farm was sold at a higher price in the market simply because it was produced by an ethnic Georgian.
“I don’t know how to ask someone to accept me as I am. I don’t know, my skin is a little dark, I’m not well-groomed, I don’t dye my hair, I have a scarf. What am I? This is who I am and why should accepting me be so hard? I really have this question. Do I have to wear a white shirt to be accepted? With a haircut, makeup and nails done, should I only be accepted like that? I am me, what do you want?! This is what they have a hard time with, and this is the biggest pain of women.
We want solidarity, acceptance of each other. It may seem very banal, but this acceptance is very important. You may not be friends, that’s your choice, but we shouldn’t feel that we are unacceptable.”
One of the problematic issues is the public’s attitude towards early marriage, as if it only happens among ethnic minorities:
“It’s a stereotype, you remember what suits you. Kidnappings happen in Gori too, Imereti is also at the top in terms of early marriage, but you won’t remember this, you will remember what happened in Marneuli. We don’t appear at other times, let alone good and positive news, our everyday life is not visible even in neutral news, we are lost, we are not in the common space and suddenly it seems that a girl was kidnapped in Iormughanlo. What would people remember?”
We also talked to Tozu and Gulara about work at home and gender-specific activities. Gulara told us that men also work a lot on the farm, but housework is mostly done by women. They say that in their family, everyone does what they can and they share the work.
“My husband and I work together, we struggle. We want to build a house together. I don’t want to ignore my husband’s labor,” she told us, explaining that they sell the cheese they make when people come to the farm, or they take it to the market in Rustavi. With the money they earn, they buy hay for their livestock and cover other needs.
Tozu also says that they are trying to divide the labor, but there is still an unfair attitude towards women: “You have to bring firewood, absolutely everything is yours to do. You need to care for the chicks, make cheese, milk the cows, care for children, bring water. In the winter, the work gets even more difficult. If we have sheep, they need specific care, and all this is very difficult. But this earned money, of course, is never considered a woman’s money, it is a man’s money and, at best, family money.”
While we were talking to her daughter, Gulara was following her daily schedule at a fast pace. Despite the heat, she didn’t stop working in the yard, under the scorching sun, while also making sure that we weren’t left unattended and that she had time for Tozu as well.
We left the farm in the afternoon. Gulara still had a lot of work to do that needed to be done in daylight.
