“I was very active as a child. Well, I’m still very active…” — this is how Aksana begins to recall her childhood, whose energy and activity is evident even without these words. She shows us around the yard and house, as well as the flower corner, which she especially loves and is proud of. She approaches the interview with enthusiasm and tries to answer our questions as comprehensively as possible, and then she quickly prepares the Pelamushi and cuts up fruit so that she can host us before we finish our work, despite our protest.
To interview Aksana Miskariani, we travelled to the Marneuli municipality, which is mainly populated by ethnic minorities, mostly ethnic Azerbaijani citizens of Georgia. However, Aksana is from the village of Damia, which is located near the Georgian-Armenian border and is mainly inhabited by ethnic Armenian citizens of Georgia.
She is 33 years old and has been a primary school teacher at a local school for 13 years.
Her morning starts at 7:30 a.m. She takes her youngest child to kindergarten, her eldest to school, where she also works. After school, she returns home and first has to prepare food and clean up the house. Soon the child returns from school and she has to take care of feeding him, and then it’s time for school.
She proudly tells us that she learned Georgian at the age of 28 — one of the programs was to bring a Georgian-speaking teacher to their school to teach the language to the children.
“I said that I definitely want this teacher to be with us. I really wanted to talk,” says Aksana.
The Georgian teacher has been living in Aksana’s house for 6 years and goes to school from there.
“My Mzia is a very good, extraordinary person. Since the teacher came to school, children already speak the language, this younger generation, but my generation doesn’t. First of all, you need communication. They say about me, ‘Look, look how she speaks Georgian; because Mzia is with you, that’s why you speak Georgian.’ Yes, that’s exactly right — a little bit right, a little bit wrong, a little bit of Russian, and I learned it.”
“I’m a citizen of Georgia, why shouldn’t I speak Georgian?! I wanted it somehow and learned it. I learned it with difficulty, it wasn’t easy — school, home, family, children, teacher trainings, etc. It was a very difficult period, but I learned.”
She likes that there are better opportunities in the village now than there were in her childhood. She recalls her love of singing with regret, adding that there was no space in the village where she could learn, so this desire remained unfulfilled. She jokes that her dream of singing was so big that her husband is a musician.
She also jokes that she was actually only one student in the class:
“Last bell was my private performance,” she says with a laugh, explaining that she only had one classmate who would sometimes come to school and sometimes not.
“I really wanted to get higher education in Tbilisi, but since I didn’t know the language, I continued my studies in Armenia. I studied for 5 years and returned here. In the second year, I started working at the school as a headteacher. Then, when the exams started, I passed the natural sciences and sports.”
We asked her what life is like in the village of Damia today. She jokingly says that it is very good for her, but then adds that it is a little difficult. She is especially concerned that there is almost nothing interesting happening for children, for example, art or sports clubs. The dance club has only been around for 3 years, and now there has been a small playground for two months.
Nevertheless, since there are better opportunities now than when she was a child, Aksana tries to involve her children in various spaces – the children attend Georgian dance and music clubs. In her free time, their mother also joins them in board games or playing ball in the evening, especially now there are summer holidays.
She also says that apart from the school and kindergarten, there are no employment opportunities for the locals, so most of the population is engaged in agriculture and animal husbandry. She shares that she would be happy to learn how to be a stylist, and is also interested in becoming a make-up artist. According to her, there is not a single salon in the village, although there is a need and it is possible to find the appropriate staff.
“I don’t know when it will be, but I think I’ll open a small salon where there will be work for girls. I think it won’t be a problem with my job. It will be mine and I can close it or open it at any time.”
“I learned to drive a car 10 years ago. The older people in the village used to say, ‘Look, Varam’s wife is so smart, she knows how to drive, but I’m afraid to sit next to women.’ There were no such problems in our family — neither with my mother-in-law nor with my father-in-law. Even now, my husband always supports me.”
Among the difficulties, she cites the poor condition of the village’s internal roads, as well as the transport, which leaves for Marneuli at 9:00 in the morning and returns at 11:00.
“If you don’t have a car and you want to go somewhere, you won’t be able to do anything in that time. Or after school. Let’s say, in two hours I want to go somewhere, to the hospital, to the market, to the store, to the salon — at that time there is no transportation.”
Aksana also says that most people in the village do not have drinking water. In July and August, water is supplied to us from 2:00 PM to 8:00 PM, they fill the tanks and use this water for other needs, but there are three places in the village where they bring drinking water from.
Because she and her husband both work, they have little time for agriculture, so they grow only a small amount of fruits and vegetables. Then she adds with a laugh that she doesn’t really like this job.
“I love flowers very much. This year, a lot of roses have rotted, I don’t know what the problem was, maybe the heat. I take care of them myself. My husband is always by my side. Whatever I want to do something, he is always with me. Well, not so much with the flowers… but more about tomatoes, fruits. We did everything together. Soon there will be a second harvest of figs, which he picks and sells himself. It’s a lot for only making jam. There are 40 fig trees,” Aksana notes, adding that she has already prepared apricot jam, grape juice for Tatara, etc.
We also asked her if she had ever experienced discrimination based on ethnicity. She replied that “you can meet all kinds of people in all nationalities, whether they are Armenian, Georgian, or Azerbaijani.”
“We live in Georgia, not just one ethnic group lives here. For example, Azerbaijanis live in a neighboring village. We have normal relations. […] I have many Georgian friends, Yazidis, Azerbaijanis, we speak Georgian together.”