In august 2008 Georgia got involved in the war with Russia, ruining the plans of lots of people who had been looking forward to relaxing summer holidays. But ruined summer vocations are nothing in comparison to other troubles that even a one week long war can bring.
As a result we have more lost territories, about 22 000 Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) and several hundred lost lives (about 500 people on our side as I know). These are lost lives of soldiers and civilians who also had families, friends, plans, hopes and dreams, dreams which will never ever come true anymore. Expressing our deep sorrow we realize that there is nothing that we can do in order to help those who passed away bravely fighting for our country. There is no substitution to their lives.
However, there are some people who still need our support - IDPs, people who in one day lost everything they had, except for their lives, which now became even harder than it used to be.
Shortly after the ceasefire Georgian government made a fast decision to build about 3 963 individual cottage homes across 13 different locations for those who managed to escape and ran leaving behind their own homes.
Tserovani, one of the IDP settlements close to Tbilisi (click to enlarge)
In such a quick response the government had to balance between three things: speed, cost and quality. According to the report by Transparency International Georgia, an average cost per home was approximately 19.700$ in total making 94.5 million dollars including related infrastructure costs. The budget for those cottages consisted of combination of loans from the World Bank and grants from European Commission.
Before the cottages were built, people were living in tents, the winter was stepping in and conditions were becoming more and more severe and unbearable. The cottages built in three month period, in December became homes for 13,876 individuals. Unfortunately the speed of building process negatively affected the quality of the houses. In a while people started facing different problems like leaking rain water from the ceilings, mold on the walls due to dampness, deformed floors, grass in the rooms and drafty windows and doors. More information concerning the quality of the cottages for IDPs can be found in a report written by Transparency International Georgia.
I hope that Georgian Government together with International and Local Organizations, will continue supporting these people, would that be financial support or voluntary human resource, help them starting new lives, help to overcome the difficulties that suddenly fell on their shoulders as a result of the war that brought nothing but tragedy to all parts that were involved in it.
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