FEATURES: ‘Where Will We Go?’

by Leah Kohlenberg, 3 September 2008

For many refugees of the Caucasus war, homelessness is an all-too-familiar story.

TBILISI Hunched over a makeshift ironing board crafted from a school teacher’s desk, 36-year-old Kristina Mysuradze experienced a frightening sense of déjà vu.

For nearly 15 years, she and her family lived in an abandoned school building in Gori, much like the kindergarten classroom she now occupies. In 1992, Mysuradze fled an Abkhaz village outside the capital, Sukhumi, where she lived when conflict erupted between Abkhazians and Georgians, ultimately chasing 250,000 ethnic Georgians from the separatist region. It was a nightmare she relived in August, when fighting between Russia and Georgia over the breakaway enclave of South Ossetia closed in on the central Georgian town of Gori.

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