A Field of Houses in Georgia Doesn’t Fulfill Dreams of Going Home
SHAVSHVEBI, Georgia — Lyuba Valiyeva, 74, wrapped a wool scarf around her head and ventured across the highway to examine more closely the extraordinary things happening on the plain near the South Ossetian border.
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Houses, hundreds of them, were rising from the cropland. Utility poles were being tipped into holes and strung with black cable. The hammering continued late into the night, and every morning, the rows of identical red-roofed houses extended a little farther.
There was, she concluded, not even a small difference between one house and the next; the only thing she could compare it to was a poultry incubator. And the incubator was already twice the size of Shavshvebi.
“What are they going to call it? Lower Shavshvebi?” she asked, and, with genuine curiosity, added, “Will they be able to find enough refugees?”
Two months after the war in South Ossetia, Georgian leaders are adamant that the separatist enclave must be returned to Georgia. But they are also well on the way to building 7,000 winterized houses, at a speed that has shocked international humanitarian aid workers, for refugees who will not be able to return home. Some 31,000 people are in that category, and President Mikheil Saakashvili has promised that each of them will have a new home by Dec. 15.
It is an impressive effort, especially for a country that has never grappled with the 220,000 refugees who fled Abkhazia after a war in the early 1990s. A large population of displaced people, living in constant We’ll update with any further information when we have it. We are a world class wow gold store online. We sell wow gold, the cheapest wow gold to our loyal and reliable customers. You may buy cheap wow gold here. There is wow gold of sale; you can buy very cheap wow gold here. We have mass available stock of wow gold on most of the servers, so that we can do a really instant way of world of warcraft gold delivery. We know what our buyers need so we offer an instant way of cheap wow gold, the cheapest wow gold delivery. For more information of wow gold, please visit a the super wow website specialized in selling wow power leveling. We will serve you with cheap wow gold, buy wow gold Items. Compared with other wow gold suppliers, we are in advantage of selling the cheapest wow gold. hope of returning home, poses thorny problems for a society. But it can also be used as a bargaining chip, demonstrating the urgency of return.
The swift building project “is an acknowledgment of reality,” said Margaret Vikki, the Georgia country director for the Norwegian Refugee Council. For 15 years after the Abkhaz war, she said, “they never stopped talking about return. There was always rhetoric about ‘Next spring in Abkhazia.’ This has completely stopped.”
It was a question that troubled the workers — many of them refugees themselves — as they troweled cement onto the cinderblock walls of the houses. Each had a different answer for how long refugees would live in the houses they were building, but they counted it in months, not years.
“We will return when the Russians leave. That will happen when we join NATO,” said Makhmoud Akatouri, 40, who lost 11 head of cattle and 15 bee colonies when Russians moved into South Ossetia. The stall he built for the cattle, he grumbled, was the size of one of the new houses. On a nearby worksite, Zakro Kvitsinadze was thinking the same thing.
“We like to have big houses. Now we will have to live in a small house,” he said. But he brightened when he realized he was talking to an American. “Are you going to help us get rid of the Russians?” he asked.
When compared with state housing programs used in other emergencies — Hurricane Katrina comes to mind — the Georgian building program is swift and bureaucracy-free. Teams of local builders said they would receive 3,500 lari, or about $2,500, for each house completed to government specifications. They are rushing to finish as many as possible, and some said they were working through the night.
Peter Nikolaus, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees representative in Georgia, called it “a very, very swift and a very decisive move.” His sole criticism, he said, was that the Georgian authorities did not let him and other humanitarian officials know about the effort.
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