The Self-Sufficient Writer: What I Learned by Leaving the Country

When I left the United States in 2012, I didn’t have self-reliance in mind. The plan was to break out of the cycle of poverty I’d been living in by starting a career teaching English overseas, bouncing around the world as a global nomad. If I landed a good paying ESL job somewhere like the Persian Gulf, I could come back to the States with a couple hundred thousand dollars and not have to worry about money for a long, long time. And even if I didn’t, I’d still get to see the world.

As a side note, there are quite a few people who do exactly that. While I was overseas, I met a lot of ex-pats who haven’t been back to their home country in years, traveling the world as global nomads picking up jobs wherever they can. While ESL can be something of a dead-end if it’s the only thing you pursue, there are tons of opportunities all over the world to teach English. In a lot of places, all you have to do to find work is show up.

After researching my options, I decided to volunteer with the Teach and Learn with Georgia program. The TLG program was set up by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Georgia (formerly part of the Soviet Union) to put a native English speaker in every school in the country. I didn’t speak Georgian at all and I didn’t know anything about the country or the people, but they would take just about anybody and pay for my plane tickets up front. After getting a year of ESL experience, I could get a free ticket basically anywhere in the world—exactly the kind of launching pad that I’d been looking for.

That was the plan anyway. Like most plans, however, it fell apart and turned into something completely different. Instead of launching an ESL career, I learned that I really had no interest teaching English. I did, however, learn quite a lot about self-sufficiency.

Georgia is an interesting country. It’s got a population of about 5 million, with a little over a million people living in the capital and largest city, Tbilisi. The rest are basically scattered across the countryside in towns and villages. Kutais is the second largest city, but it’s really just a very big village with a quaint European town in the center. Yes, people live in fifty year-old communist-era apartments (“Krushchevkas”), but they still kept chickens and livestock in the yard, and usually had a grandparent or two still living in one of the outlying villages who tended to the family land.

For five months, I lived in the Avtokarkhana district in Kutaisi with a local family. After the summer, I spent another four months in Rokhi, a small village between Kutaisi and Vani, at a farmhouse owned by the math teacher at the village school.

I learned a lot of unexpected lessons from my time in Georgia, many of which I’m still parsing through. The two biggest ones that set me on a course of self-sufficiency are this:

Lesson 1: What a collapsed society looks like.

Contemporary Georgia is not a collapsed society. They’re actually growing pretty well, with a large influx of foreign investment and all sorts of recent improvements (including a new police force that makes it one of the safest countries to visit in all of Europe). But in the nineties, the country suffered a major socio-economic collapse, resulting in a civil war and the secession of three separatist regions: Adjara, Abkhazia, and South Ossetia.

All around me, I saw signs of that collapse. Most of the basic infrastructure was built during the communist era, and most of it was dilapidated or barely functional. In Kutaisi, we saved our plastic water bottles and kept them full for times when the water went out (which happened frequently in the summer). In the village, power outages happened almost daily, sometimes forcing me to go to bed at 7:00 pm just because it was too dark to do anything else.

Of course, there was a lot that had survived the collapse. In some places, people probably hardly noticed that a collapse had happened at all. A collapse does not hit all people equally, and there’s a very big difference between the collapse itself and people’s experience of it. The old women who grew up under communism had mostly fond memories of that time and wished that they could return to it. Everyone else’s attitude toward that was basically “hell, no!”

When I came back to the United States, something very strange and disturbing happened. I started to notice ways in which our own society is starting to slide toward the same state of collapse that the people in Georgia are currently pulling themselves out of. Our infrastructure is not as dilapidated as Georgia’s, but give it another ten years and it will be. In some sectors, most notably the state-run sectors like Amtrak, it already is.

We may have won the Cold War, but that doesn’t prove that our socio-economic system works. All it proved was that the Soviets collapsed faster. Our modern American society is not immune from collapse.

Lesson 2: What a home economy looks like.

According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, an economy is “the process or system by which goods and services are produced, sold, and bought in a country or region.” A home economy, then, is the system by which goods and services are produced, sold, and bought within the home. If your home does not produce anything, you do not have a home economy.

As a volunteer, I received a 500 GEL (approximately $300) stipend each month from the Ministry of Education. This was actually more than the base salary for most Georgian school teachers at the time. Georgia is a poor country, but living expenses are certainly much higher than $300 a month—especially for a family. How, then, did school teachers manage to get by?

They had a home economy.

This was especially true in the village. We kept chickens, cows, sheep, and pigs, made our own cheese, grew our own grapes, made our own wine, etc etc. We had our own well, kept a large garden, went hunting when the weather was good, and baked most of our own bread. More than half of what we ate was easily produced right there on our own farm. And because we had a couple of fairly large vineyard, when grapes were in season, we loaded up the back of a truck and sold them at the market in Kutaisi.

For someone who grew up in a middle-class American suburb, this was absolutely fascinating. Most people here in the States do not have a home economy because they do not produce anything. They do not keep a garden, grow their own food, or do much of anything else that would be useful if the US dollar were suddenly to collapse. The only way most people can support themselves is to earn an income outside of the home—that, or go into debt. For almost half of the US population, an unexpected $400 expense would force them to either beg, borrow, or steal.

I have no idea what the personal finances looked like for the family I stayed with, but I know that if all of the outside income dried up, we would still have food on the table. Why? Because we grew it. We grew a lot of it, in fact—enough that we could probably barter for what we didn’t grow. It was hard work living that sort of lifestyle, but it brings a sense of security—real security—that you cannot get in any other way.

More than anything else I saw or experienced, this self-sufficient lifestyle had the greatest impact on me. By the time I was ready to come home, I was already thinking about how I would implement it in my own life. I had learned that true economic security comes not from the government, your job, or society at large, but from living in such a way that you can provide for your own needs and wants—from living a self-sufficient lifestyle. And that’s what I set out to do.

The Self-Sufficient Writer (Index)