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- Also available in French
GNA Georgia: Q&A Displaced
Global Needs Assessment, 9 October 2008
Nineli, 58, fled Tskhinvali, capital of the breakaway region of South Ossetia, in 1991. She has been living in the former Hotel Abkhazia in the Georgian capital of Tbilisi ever since.
After living in this collective centre for more than a decade, what do you find hardest?
After having spent 17 years of my life in this building, I still find it hard to say that I have gotten used to the atmosphere. The living conditions in the collective centre are very severe. The rooms are extremely crowded. I stay with my son, my daughter-in-law and grandchildren in this tiny space. The building itself is old. Unfortunately we have no other place to go.
How do you feel about living in the collective centre?
I find it hard to see the collective centre as my home. I do not feel like I belong here and when I say home I think about Tskhinvali. What makes my life easier is the support I feel from other IDPs in the centre. Most of us come from Tskhinvali and we have gone through the same hardship so we know how to support and console each other.
Do you have enough supplies? What are your most important needs?
We find it very difficult to sustain ourselves. It has been a long time since we last received humanitarian aid and none of us works in the family except my son. All of us depend on his income and it is not enough for the family. We lack medicine as well as food supplies.
What are your hopes and fears for the future?
I have the hope of returning back to my home at some point in the future. At the same time, my biggest fear is that this hope will not materialize. In the past, I was much more positive about going back. I have a son who died in the war in 1991. I buried him in the village of Ergneti, the closest village to the South Ossetian boundary. I thought I would be able to go back and tend to the grave. Now I am unable to travel even to Ergneti. Many villages have been destroyed and burned there. My hopes of returning are diminishing and I feel like I am forced to accept the reality that there will be no going back in the near future.
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