Miskhaldidi means
big pear
in Georgian. The predominantly Azeri village, located north of Tbilisi, stays true to its name. One side of the village is perched on a mountain area, while the other three sides are surrounded with deep forests with plentiful pear trees of all sorts. The area is also rich with walnut trees and rose hips.
Words fail to describe the beauty of this village, its crisp weather and ice-cold springs. People come to visit this place in summertime. The picturesque village is situated just outside Mtskheta, Georgia’s old capital, on the road to Joseph Stalin’s hometown, Gori.
Visitors brave the bumpy roads and dusty tracks to get to the center of the village on a mini-bus. When approaching the center, however, one can sense the simmering discontent of local residents. One sees girls and young women carry heavy water buckets, or make fires to prepare meals in their backyards.
Local resident Khalida Abbasova says that in wintertime, the roads are so ruined that even drivers refuse to drive into the village. Their relentless pleas to government institutions were left unheeded.
“We go to work in these conditions every day,” she says. “There is only one bus to take, and when that one breaks down, we have to rely on taxis. Poor condition of the roads is the reason why taxis are so expensive. In wintertime, we do not even have that option.”
Women with raspberry buckets
Miskhaldidi residents sell buckets full of raspberries either in Tbilisi bazaar or on its streets. They commute every day down this hardscrabble road.
According to Marina Karimova, it takes a whole hour to get from the village to the market.
“We would save a lot of time on commuting if the road was fixed,” she says. “In order to make it to the wholesale, we have to wake up at 6 a.m. and rush to work. I don’t even know what a breakfast in summertime feels like anymore. It is still dark outside when we wake up to make it to work. It is hard to imagine what it feels like to commute through these bumpy roads with an empty stomach every day.”
Very few people breed cattle in the village as it is challenging to feed them in wintertime. The poor condition of the road is the reason why it costs so much to stock up for winter.
14-year-old brides
In this village, women marry and give birth early. Almost every household has a young woman carrying a baby in her arms. In general, no girl reaches 19 years without getting married in Miskhaldidi. According to the villagers, no one forces girls into marriage. However, the lifestyle, lack of education or sustainable infrastructure for youth leave no choice for young girls but marriage.
Sahiba, 20, has a son who is already in the second grade. The woman says she got engaged at 14 and married four months later.
“I didn’t continue my education, and the guy was both our neighbor and a relative. I would have studied if I had been given an opportunity to do so. The school only offers classes up to the 9th grade. Who on earth would ever let us go ahead and study in Tbilisi?! Moreover, the commute is impossible, it is a long distance, and the road is in a horrible condition,” she sighs.
There is no kindergarten in the village, and the school cannot provide complete education. One would be hard-pressed to find a child who studied past the 8th grade.
Left with no education and a grueling commute, young women face a painful dilemma: marriage or social opprobrium.
“I would have loved to study, but the customs around here are different. Once a girl is a grown up, she needs to be married off,” says Gunay, 17, who is also a mother. “We need to commute to the city in order to go on with studies. One needs money and a car to do that. It didn’t work out for me. What would I do just sitting around at home?! If I were not married, people would be calling me a ‘spinster’.”
“Lack of financial and moral means”
Akbar Nasirov, the director of the village school, says that students’ school attendance is very poor: “In the best case scenario, girls attend school until the 5th grade. Boys sometimes attend, sometimes they don’t. The school is incomplete. Therefore, no one attends it properly. It is a real challenge to convince parents who haven’t attended schools themselves to send their children to school.”
“The main issue is they lack both financial and moral means to continue their children’s education,” he adds.
The struggles of Miskhaldidi residents are not over here. There is no water canal in the village, which forces residents to fetch water in buckets. Some of them have manually constructed primitive canals from the springs to their houses. There is also no gas in the village.
Abbas Naghiyev says that all the other neighboring Georgian villages are provided with gas but not Miskhaldidi.
He says that the State Oil Company of Azerbaijan Republic, Azerbaijan’s oil giant, “sells gas to the whole Georgian nation, yet Azerbaijanis here are left without any gas.”
SOCAR Energy Georgia refused to comment on the matter.
“They don’t build pipes. We gathered all the residents and collected money for the pipe. They came and had a look at it, took notes but did not do anything further. Aren’t we Azerbaijanis as well after all?” he wonders.
