Georgia On His Mind (The Other One): Pinecrest Grad Makes the Most of State Department Scholarship

But Pirum has already graduated from high school at Pinecrest. His school now is a quarter the size of his alma mater: it enrolls fewer than 500 students from pre-kindergarten through high school. And the bus ride to get there takes 90 minutes through the Caucasus Mountains — 6,000 miles from Moore County.

Most of Pirum’s classes at the international school he attends are taught in the Georgian language, and his Thanksgiving last week was hosted by a Georgian-American family and celebrated with a group of American students.

Pirum has been working toward studying abroad since he was in ninth grade. First the COVID-19 pandemic derailed his plans to spend a year in China through the National Security Language Initiative-Youth program.

At that point, Pirum decided with the advice of guidance counselors at Pinecrest to work toward graduating a year early so that he wouldn’t have to worry about earning credits from classes at a foreign school.

He applied a year ago to study in Ukraine through the U.S. Department of State’s Future Leaders Exchange Abroad program.

Pirum, the son of Padiwath and Aileen Ung of Southern Pines, was one of 15 students selected from across the United States for the inaugural year of the FLEX Abroad program. The FLEX program was originally founded in the 1990s to bring students from the formerly Communist nations of Eastern Europe and Eurasia to live and study in the United States.

When Pirum applied last year to be one of the first American students to participate in the reverse exchange, he had the option of studying in Ukraine, Poland or Kazakhstan. The program’s cultural aspect appealed to his long-held dreams of a career in the foreign service.

“Rather than being a language immersion program, they were a cultural immersion program so the main focus of the program was to explore the local culture — take part in dances, learn a lot more about the ethnic history of the country and the cultures associated with it — rather than just necessarily learning the language,” he said.

FLEX Abroad offers an all-expenses-paid experience through the state department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs.

“I had applied to study in Ukraine because it was close to conflict,” Pirum said. “I had researched conflict in the Donbas region for speech and debate and I wanted an inside perspective on it.”

That’s now a topic that most Americans know a bit more about — thanks to circumstances, in the form of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, that again intervened to change Pirum’s plans.

The State Department quickly made arrangements to substitute Georgia for Ukraine, and gave students two weeks to decide if they still wanted to participate. Pirum was familiar with the parallels between Georgia and Ukraine in their relations with Russia, namely the de facto annexation of South Ossetia and Abkhazia after the 2008 invasion, so it wasn’t a hard choice.

“Once Ukraine was invaded it made sense to study in Georgia,” he said. “Ironically it would be a great place to observe the conflict from, but also because Georgia had similar issues to Ukraine.”

Pirum’s host family lives only about 25 miles away from South Ossetia in the Georgian capital, Tbilisi. The city of one million people is home to nearly one-third of the country’s population.

When he arrived in early September, it was his first time outside the United States, other than a visit to the Canadian side of Niagara Falls, since attending a wedding in the Philippines as a young child.

“This is my first abroad experience in a place that’s much different from the U.S. and really getting that immersion and experience as an older and more mature person who is able to understand what’s going on,” Pirum said.

And there’s a lot to understand, not least of which is the Georgian language. Since he doesn’t necessarily need to earn top marks, Pirum dove in headfirst, taking the typical curriculum taught to Georgian students at his school.

That means all classes are taught in Georgian. Georgia’s location between the Black and Caspian seas kept it in relative isolation for much of its history. Caucasian languages constitute a distinct language family spoken by only about 5 million people worldwide.

Students in any American high school language class learn how to ask for permission to use the restroom in the first week of school. But Pirum had to spend a month on the receiving end of confused glances, since the direct translation of ‘bathroom’ in Georgia refers to the sulfur baths of Tbilisi.

But one of his teachers tracked down an English copy of the epic poem “The Knight In Tiger Skin,” a cornerstone of the Georgian canon, and he’s planning to record a podcast about it with some of his classmates. Pirum’s host father was educated in Germany and owns a chain of European clothing stores, so his three host brothers speak fluent English.

Pirum is also getting a front-row seat to some of the fallout from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Georgia isn’t in a position to place economic sanctions or travel restrictions, so an influx of young Russian professionals has immigrated to Tiblisi. That’s given momentum to the city’s economy, but also introduced a level of social tension.

And it doesn’t take a linguistic expert to understand that Russians avoid speaking Russian in public or opining on the war in Ukraine. Native Georgians are quite the opposite.

“I feel like people in Georgia are very, very direct about problems, even passionate,” Pirum said. “There aren’t topics that are taboo to the extent that people don’t talk about it here. People might argue with each other for 15 minutes and then that’s the end of the discussion. They just go back to being friends.”

Outside of school, Pirum has already crossed a few items off his cultural “must do” list. He enrolled in Georgian dancing and cooking classes. Now he can make khinkali, a Georgian dumpling that he previously tried at a restaurant in Washington, D.C., and a cheese tart called khachapuri.

Before he returns to the United States in June, he hopes to attend a traditional Georgian supra: a traditional feast punctuated by elaborate toasts that can rival an epic poem in length and grandiosity.

As something of an ambassador to Georgia, Pirum is aware that he’s been given the kind of opportunity that most Georgian students only dream about. Only two percent of foreign students who apply to visit the United States through the same program are accepted.

“It feels like you’re representing the U.S. in the sense that the FLEX initiative in this country is very, very big. It’s one of the most competitive programs here,” he said.

“Pretty much every Georgian youth knows about it and they have some expectations of how we’re supposed to act and behave. You feel like you’re representing the program, and to an extent the American teenager.”

Though he couldn’t have known as a freshman that fate would position him between his original choices of China and Ukraine, Pirum said that the experience has been worth the effort to squeeze four years of high school into three.

“This has to be your passion, your dream, what you really want to do,” he said. “It was a very challenging process. But if you really want to, there are so many opportunities out there to get more involved with the world around us. All you really have to do is put yourself out there and go for it.”