As good an experiance as you make it

I have loved my time in Georgia though it is coming to a close soon. I have been here 7 months and have found that your experiance here is only what you make of it. Signing up for this program is a little like a game of roulette. I asked for a village and was placed in a tiny city while friends who asked for cities were placed in villages. The program does provide new host families if you are not happy where you are placed. But for the most part, I have loved it here. My host family has chickens and cows that sleep in the back yard, and the street isn't paved, but a two minute walk takes me to paved roads and my school. If I walk another 5 min or so, I am at a big church with a great park, and another 3 min takes me to one of the 3 cafes with english menus and free wifi. There are many other volunteers in my city, which is great and normal for a city, but not normal for a village, which is where the majority of people are placed. Fortunatly, there are easily used (once learned) systems of public transportation that can take you to a central town to city to hang out with other native english speakers if the village life is getting too much. They also provide cell phones which have free calls to all the other volunteers, so you are very rarely without people to talk to.
But you have to be more than willing to spend a lot of your time sitting in a room full of people who are speaking another language that is honestly very difficult to learn and that you probably will not be able to converse in in three months, no matter how good your language skills are. You need to be able to self entertain yourself. I have an e-reader, but it made my family feel like I was cutting them out, so I have taken up knitting.
I am very flexible and go with the flow, and that is very much the georgian way. If you like to follow and strict schedule, Georgia might not be for you. Things change at a moments notice and no one thinks to tell the Volunteer, so you might go to school one day to find that they have pushed back the school day by half an hour, or there just is no school today. Learn to laugh at that, and accept it as "Georgian". You are there to teach English and western culture, but you are also there to learn about Georgian culture. The eating, the drinking, the religion, and the relaxedness. I have reccomended it to friends, they have come over, and we are still friends, so yes, I would reccomend this program for anyone who wants to get out and see a completly different way of living.