August 30, 2014. 3:20 AM.

The plane came down hard.

The fuselage swayed and skidded as we came to a stop in the middle of the dark tarmac, to rounds of applause from the passengers. For whom the applause was for – the pilot or the impromptu polyphonic singers – I’ll never know for sure.

Tbilisi International Airport had only one terminal, a rectangular building fashioned from transparent turquoise glass. Its curved white roof reminded me of clean white bedsheets. Bed sheets I couldn’t wait to slide under as I shuffled off the plane.

I had finally, finally arrived, once again ahead of schedule despite heavy winds from the north, but my journey still wasn’t over.

Down a set of aircraft airstairs I descended, onto a waiting bendy bus, across the empty tarmac to the gate, and up another set of stairs to baggage claim. After 30 minutes, the conveyor belt regurgitated my luggage.

The mind does weird things when it’s sleep deprived; my body, having lost the capacity for complex thought, moved on autopilot as I dragged my bags through passport control. They felt heavier than they did in the US. I have no memory of my interaction with the border control officer, and I can’t recollect what went through my mind as I breezed through customs.

All I have is more fragments. Flickering fluorescent lights in the arrival’s hall. A pungent haze of cigarette smoke. My pounding sinuses, aching muscles, and parched throat. And a cluster of people – some with bouquets and others waving paper signs.

“Miss Alicia?” a chipper Georgian voice called from the side.

I turned. My neck joints felt like they had rusted onto my spine.

“Gamarjoba, hello and welcome to Georgia!” The voice belonged to a woman of average height, winsome and mature, with bobbed salt and pepper hair and dusky eyes, one of two who held laminated signs. “My name is Rusiko. I’m the Program Lead with TLG. Do you remember me?”

I nodded, my eyelids flickering as I did so. Once her face paired with her voice, I remembered interviewing with Rusiko during the application process. Rusiko was also accompanied by an unfamiliar face; a younger woman with a petite figure, round, fleshy cheeks, and auburn hair clipped tight behind her head, scanned for my name on her clipboard.

“Hello. My name is Keti,” she said, coolly. “Do you have your bags?”

“Yeah,” I said, without glancing to check.

“Good.” She checked off my name. “Now, please sit down over there.” She gestured to a nearby set of metal chairs with her pen, where a 12-strong cluster of Anglophone-looking people idled. “We still have to wait for one more flight before we go to the hotel.”

“I’ve been awake for over 24 hours,” a leggy Englishman with frazzled blond hair and ruddy cheeks, somehow still able to stand, murmured as I plopped into a metal chair.

Had I also not been awake for over 24 hours, I would have taken the Englishman’s words as an invitation to engage in a bond-facilitating round of mutual complaining. About tiny airline seats. About the airline food that irritated my stomach. About why TLG wouldn’t grant their poor volunteers the sweet release of sleep…

Alas, the verbal exchange would not come, for as soon as my ass touched the cold chair, it was lights out until Rusiko’s voice roused the volunteers.

“Everyone!” she chirped. “Rise and shine! The last flight has arrived. We will now go to the hotel.”

I pulled up my eyelids, like how one pulls up a set of stubborn plastic blinds. My phone had died, so I glanced at someone else’s. 40 minutes had passed. It was 4:00 AM. The word “hotel” drew an invisible, collective sigh from the volunteers, of whom now numbered 26. 26 humans, with 52 rolling suitcases and backpacks, sauntered out from the airport like a horde of roaming zombies, into two parked white vans emblazoned with TLG’s logo.

Between puffs of their slim cigarettes, the drivers helped everyone cram their bags into the back, and when the back filled up, the drivers crammed the bags into the passenger’s seats, between and on top of bodies.

I told my graduate school peers that Georgia is challenging, just beyond the event horizon of comfort and familiarity. Had they asked me to specify why Georgia made prospective visitors uncomfortable, however, I wouldn’t have been able to answer them. This was because discomfort and unfamiliarity didn’t present themselves until after the volunteers and I departed the airport, and also because discomfort and unfamiliarity mocked us with one last glimpse of the comfort and familiarity we had left behind.

“Is…is this road really named ‘George W. Bush Street’?” the leggy Englishman remarked.

“It is,” Rusiko replied.

The volunteers’ heads turned as we passed a white tarp banner affixed to a concrete barrier; “President George W. Bush Street”, read two lines of English and Georgian script, next to a superimposed image of the former US president.

Each dysfunctional family is unhappy in its own way. All dysfunctional families, however, unconsciously assign roles to their children, to offload internal shame and avoid painful self-reflection. There’s the scapegoat, the bearer of the family’s sins, invisible during feast and visible during famine. There’s the lost child, who survives neglect by diminishing themselves, by covering their needs, feelings, and presence in a virtual invisibility cloak. And there’s the golden child, the assigned favorite and recipient of their parent’s positive projections.

If the Soviet Union was a dysfunctional family, headed by the neglectful, yet overbearing, Mother Russia, then Georgia was its golden child. Despite falling under the Soviet umbrella, Georgia was largely spared from Bolshevik atrocities, the systematic famines, forced resettlements, and the Great Terror – spared meaning deaths in the hundreds of thousands instead of the millions. Because Georgia possessed everything Russia wished she could have, warm seas, a warm climate, and fertile soils.

In a dysfunctional family, love is finite and conditional. And for the golden child, the love they receive depends on their ability to feed the family ego with a never-ending supply of over-achievements.

Once assigned, a dysfunctional family’s roles are fixed. So fixed that, without years of self-reflection and therapy, the role follows the child into adulthood, persisting long after they leave the nest. The devils we know are often what’s most comfortable, and in Georgia’s case, she was still the golden child long after the Berlin Wall fell.

In 2003, Georgia consciously knew she had to clean up her act. But subconsciously, Georgia knew she had to keep achieving. Only instead of feeding Russia’s ego, she turned to her chosen family, the West, and fed their ego instead.

“Look at me!” she said during Bush’s state visit in May 2005.

“Look what I can do!” she said as she changed Melaani Drive, the road leading from Tbilisi International Airport to Tbilisi’s city center, to George W. Bush Street. “Out of the entire former Soviet Union, I’m the only country that successfully transitioned to democracy. Look at me! Aren’t I great? Aren’t I special? Aren’t I deserving of your attention, your international aid?”

Following confirmation of the leggy Englishman’s remark, Rusiko offered a rosy explanation. That then-president Saakashvili wanted to honor Georgia’s American allies when he renamed the street.

“It was a new beginning for us. And we were so optimistic,” she finished, her voice tinged with melancholy. “After dark days…”

The volunteers’ Western eyes, our collective interpretations, however, wouldn’t have it. George W. Bush was all it took to bring us back from the dead; the van erupted with panicked twittering, like a final and futile plea to stop the uncomfortable and unfamiliar void that was fast approaching:

“Are you joking?” asked one volunteer.

“Do Georgians have any idea who W is?” said another.

“So embarrassing!” echoed a third.

As quickly as they had emerged, the volunteers’ remarks fell back into the darkness.

Yellow light flickered across Rusiko’s silhouette in the front seat. Over and over. Like a film projector. Her shoulders, tense and rounded.

Yellow light flickered across the volunteers. Their brows, furrowed.

Discomfort.

From both sides.

I’m sure you can imagine why.

The 40-minute ride from the airport ended at a hotel, a two-story rectangular building with curtained clerestory windows, affixed to a restaurant on Tbilisi’s southern outskirts and across from a bus stop with transport bound for Armenia. The words “The Bazaleti Palace”, in English and Georgian, illuminated in red neon, greeted us as the vans pulled into the unloading circle.

I, and presumably the other volunteers, had finally, finally, finally arrived, but my journey still wasn’t over.

Humidity, dust, and the scent of stale cigarettes welcomed the volunteers as we spilled into an empty lobby, its dim overhead lights etched weary crags across our faces. We idled in silence as Rusiko exchanged words with the lone desk attendant and Keti provided a briefing:

“We have assigned roommates at random. Girls with girls. Boys with boys. There are three beds per room and each group of three will get two keys. In your rooms, you will find the itinerary for volunteer orientation, which starts on Sunday at 9 AM.”

Collective discomfort rippled through the group once more. Some volunteers shuffled. Others whispered. I retrieved my cellphone. Sunday was today. Today was 5:32 AM.

“Does anyone have any questions?” Keti finished.

The volunteers had none.

For Keti, that was.

Our collective eyes fell upon a figure emerging from the shadows down the hall. A woman with waist-length hair, garbed in a bodycon dress and platform heels, who stuffed a wad of money into her purse before passing us.

Heads turned as she disappeared into the approaching dawn, to revived twittering from the volunteers.

“I’m going to pretend like I didn’t see that,” said the leggy Englishman.

“What kind of place is this?” lamented an American from behind me.

“At least someone is having fun,” quipped a third, to rounds of nervous laughter.

“Why are you laughing?” Rusiko asked the volunteers, upon returning from the front desk.

No one said it as the program officers divvied out the keys, but you could hear it echo through the volunteers.

Discomfort.

Our collective intuitions cried.

What have we gotten ourselves into?

8. The Bazaleti Palace

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