Special Reportage
Eka Kevanishvili, Tbilisi
A woman is stilling in the entrance of the school; she is writing a list. Similar lists are being drawn up at the entrances of almost every public and nursery schools in Tbilisi. Most part of IDPs has fled from Tskhinvali region and has sheltered there temporarily. They are registering each other and looking for the missing people; then they make groups of some IDPs. Schooling term has not started yet but schools and nursery schools are crowded; the word used sixteen years ago is again written on the blackboards in the classrooms: Reserved.
Nobody knows the exact amount of the new wave of IDPs. They are just being registered. According to the current data their number has reached 60 000 in Tbilisi. People, who ran away dressed in their casual clothes, cannot find place to lie down. It is difficult to sleep on the school-desk and floor without mattresses but now they are ready for everything. “If we had at least one blanket we could have spread it on the floor and lie on it.”
Some people are erased from the list while others are inserted. A woman from the village of Nikozi, is so much scared that covers her face at the sight of the photo-camera. She explained that some IDPs went to their relatives while others sheltered kind people. The building of the Public School # 161 is half empty. Every door of the classrooms is broken.
School director guards the building till the evening. Then he leaves.
-How many IDPs live in your school?
-About one hundred, but some of them are out at the moment.
The woman busy with the list is crying time by time. Empty bottles are scattered on the floor. The school is under construction. Everything is half destroyed. But there is a note on the door: “Reserved.”
The rooms are blocked with chairs or desks to protect the place from strangers. Some doors have surnames written on; others indicate the names of the villages: “Nikozi. Nobody must enter,” “Reserved”, etc.
“I am out for business and keep away from this room.”
“Before you came here I had taken this room. Don’t dare to enter it!”
“Head of the village of Eredvi,” etc…
A boy is sleeping on the desk in the classroom on the second floor. He is not wearing anything on his feet. Everybody is tired, dirty and hungry; they need to be taken a proper care.
-What do you need most of all?
They are thinking for a minute and then say:
-Everything; we have nothing.
There is a loaf of bread on the desk in the Physics Cabinet. There is no luggage, no personal items. All they have is clothes they are wearing.
Mother is holding one-year-old boy on the third floor. They baby is sleeping and the woman is talking in whisper not to wake her up. Her boy of five is sleeping on the desk; he is in clothes. The third child, daughter, is nowhere to be seen. Mother explained she might be somewhere playing with children.
“Initially we took a taxi to get to a next village; then got to the second village. I managed to pack clothes only for the younger child. We have not taken anything else. My husband was at the City Hall and I do not know how they distributed people. The people came here and we followed them. Now we are in this school.”
The woman who is filling the list does not say her name-she is afraid.
“We left Nikozi two days ago. We endured everything: tanks, gunfire but we got scared of bombing; where could we hide from bombs?! We went down to basements but when bombing lasted endlessly we abandoned the house. We left our homes in the clothes we were wearing. The whole village got empty. Only old people remained there. I have two children; my daughter-in-law is pregnant.
Some people died in the village but nobody remained there to bury them. They killed our neighbor, a 26-year-old boy; we were told his body is in the basement of our neighbor’s house and we do not know who will bury him.”
People fled from the villages of Kurta, Eredvi, Kekhvi, Nikozi… and many other villages. Part of them is standing in the yard of the nursery school # 83 with candles in the hand. They have rooms here too.
“Last night 23 people slept in one room at our relative’s; we could not breathe there,” said a middle-aged-woman from the village of Kurta. We are asking the name but she answers: “Why do you need my name; here we are all equal now and our common name is IDP.”
Residents of Nikozi retell that the church in their village was also bombed. “They damaged even the church. The clergymen remained there but we do not know how they are now. We cannot find our family members too. All the time I have feeling that I will explode like a bomb; I hear bombing constantly. What did they want from us?! We lived our ordinary lives. Now who tells us when we will manage to return to our homes?”
A short argument started between the IDPs and representative of the nursery school administration. Both sides are very irritated.
“We have just repaired the building and now they are destroying it.”
“Where should we go? Tell us and we will go”-the dialogue is very familiar.
Both sides have their arguments.
It is getting dark. People are lighting candles in the yard. People are praying. They do not put their bags on the ground as if they would be sent back to their houses in several hours.
A new wave of IDPs has just arrived at the nursery school # 200. They are sitting on the steps at the entrance. They ask numerous questions to every new-comer. The women are crying. The men are smoking though they have few cigarettes. A boy of four is digging the ground in the yard. There are many children here; many of them are little babies.
Residents of Nikozi say that Ossetian side had rescued their women and children from Tskhinvali to Vladikavkaz on August 1, before the disaster started. “Tskhinvali was empty; only men were there. The empty town was being bombed; though those people who were hiding in the basements there cannot be in good conditions either; Russians do not care about them at all. Those people are stuck in the town full of dead bodies and cannot escape from there… And how well we lived there; we sold our fruit in Tskhinvali and could easily travel there.”
The respondent woman cannot remember how many people were sitting in the old car when they were fleeing from the village.
“Only bad thoughts come to me. I am afraid, dogs and pigs are eating dead bodies there now. Young boys are mumbling in the sleep. I saw my house burnt down to the earth. The house which I had built with much effort.”
Kakhniashvili T. from the village of Kekhvi said they are ready to clean their cattle-houses to live in if they manage to return to their village. They will start everything from the very beginning but IDP years must not last for a long time. Her sister is wearing shoes of smaller size; she does not know where her husband is. She showed us a list of medicines and asks: “Maybe somebody will get these medicines for us” and then apologizes: “Sorry for my appearance I am wearing strange clothes.”
A note on the entrance of this school is already familiar: “Every room is occupied in this building.”
First humanitarian aid has already arrived in Tbilisi. Tomorrow these people will receive necessary items and food.
These people have lost everything.
Eka Kevanishvili, Tbilisi
A woman is stilling in the entrance of the school; she is writing a list. Similar lists are being drawn up at the entrances of almost every public and nursery schools in Tbilisi. Most part of IDPs has fled from Tskhinvali region and has sheltered there temporarily. They are registering each other and looking for the missing people; then they make groups of some IDPs. Schooling term has not started yet but schools and nursery schools are crowded; the word used sixteen years ago is again written on the blackboards in the classrooms: Reserved.
Nobody knows the exact amount of the new wave of IDPs. They are just being registered. According to the current data their number has reached 60 000 in Tbilisi. People, who ran away dressed in their casual clothes, cannot find place to lie down. It is difficult to sleep on the school-desk and floor without mattresses but now they are ready for everything. “If we had at least one blanket we could have spread it on the floor and lie on it.”
Some people are erased from the list while others are inserted. A woman from the village of Nikozi, is so much scared that covers her face at the sight of the photo-camera. She explained that some IDPs went to their relatives while others sheltered kind people. The building of the Public School # 161 is half empty. Every door of the classrooms is broken.
School director guards the building till the evening. Then he leaves.
-How many IDPs live in your school?
-About one hundred, but some of them are out at the moment.
The woman busy with the list is crying time by time. Empty bottles are scattered on the floor. The school is under construction. Everything is half destroyed. But there is a note on the door: “Reserved.”
The rooms are blocked with chairs or desks to protect the place from strangers. Some doors have surnames written on; others indicate the names of the villages: “Nikozi. Nobody must enter,” “Reserved”, etc.
“I am out for business and keep away from this room.”
“Before you came here I had taken this room. Don’t dare to enter it!”
“Head of the village of Eredvi,” etc…
A boy is sleeping on the desk in the classroom on the second floor. He is not wearing anything on his feet. Everybody is tired, dirty and hungry; they need to be taken a proper care.
-What do you need most of all?
They are thinking for a minute and then say:
-Everything; we have nothing.
There is a loaf of bread on the desk in the Physics Cabinet. There is no luggage, no personal items. All they have is clothes they are wearing.
Mother is holding one-year-old boy on the third floor. They baby is sleeping and the woman is talking in whisper not to wake her up. Her boy of five is sleeping on the desk; he is in clothes. The third child, daughter, is nowhere to be seen. Mother explained she might be somewhere playing with children.
“Initially we took a taxi to get to a next village; then got to the second village. I managed to pack clothes only for the younger child. We have not taken anything else. My husband was at the City Hall and I do not know how they distributed people. The people came here and we followed them. Now we are in this school.”
The woman who is filling the list does not say her name-she is afraid.
“We left Nikozi two days ago. We endured everything: tanks, gunfire but we got scared of bombing; where could we hide from bombs?! We went down to basements but when bombing lasted endlessly we abandoned the house. We left our homes in the clothes we were wearing. The whole village got empty. Only old people remained there. I have two children; my daughter-in-law is pregnant.
Some people died in the village but nobody remained there to bury them. They killed our neighbor, a 26-year-old boy; we were told his body is in the basement of our neighbor’s house and we do not know who will bury him.”
People fled from the villages of Kurta, Eredvi, Kekhvi, Nikozi… and many other villages. Part of them is standing in the yard of the nursery school # 83 with candles in the hand. They have rooms here too.
“Last night 23 people slept in one room at our relative’s; we could not breathe there,” said a middle-aged-woman from the village of Kurta. We are asking the name but she answers: “Why do you need my name; here we are all equal now and our common name is IDP.”
Residents of Nikozi retell that the church in their village was also bombed. “They damaged even the church. The clergymen remained there but we do not know how they are now. We cannot find our family members too. All the time I have feeling that I will explode like a bomb; I hear bombing constantly. What did they want from us?! We lived our ordinary lives. Now who tells us when we will manage to return to our homes?”
A short argument started between the IDPs and representative of the nursery school administration. Both sides are very irritated.
“We have just repaired the building and now they are destroying it.”
“Where should we go? Tell us and we will go”-the dialogue is very familiar.
Both sides have their arguments.
It is getting dark. People are lighting candles in the yard. People are praying. They do not put their bags on the ground as if they would be sent back to their houses in several hours.
A new wave of IDPs has just arrived at the nursery school # 200. They are sitting on the steps at the entrance. They ask numerous questions to every new-comer. The women are crying. The men are smoking though they have few cigarettes. A boy of four is digging the ground in the yard. There are many children here; many of them are little babies.
Residents of Nikozi say that Ossetian side had rescued their women and children from Tskhinvali to Vladikavkaz on August 1, before the disaster started. “Tskhinvali was empty; only men were there. The empty town was being bombed; though those people who were hiding in the basements there cannot be in good conditions either; Russians do not care about them at all. Those people are stuck in the town full of dead bodies and cannot escape from there… And how well we lived there; we sold our fruit in Tskhinvali and could easily travel there.”
The respondent woman cannot remember how many people were sitting in the old car when they were fleeing from the village.
“Only bad thoughts come to me. I am afraid, dogs and pigs are eating dead bodies there now. Young boys are mumbling in the sleep. I saw my house burnt down to the earth. The house which I had built with much effort.”
Kakhniashvili T. from the village of Kekhvi said they are ready to clean their cattle-houses to live in if they manage to return to their village. They will start everything from the very beginning but IDP years must not last for a long time. Her sister is wearing shoes of smaller size; she does not know where her husband is. She showed us a list of medicines and asks: “Maybe somebody will get these medicines for us” and then apologizes: “Sorry for my appearance I am wearing strange clothes.”
A note on the entrance of this school is already familiar: “Every room is occupied in this building.”
First humanitarian aid has already arrived in Tbilisi. Tomorrow these people will receive necessary items and food.
These people have lost everything.
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