People living in high rise flats long ago erected makesift stoves to heat their apartments with wood fires. Dangerous and hardly the stuff of the 21 st century. The sale of Tbilisi s electricity company to an American company last year has not made a jot of difference. There is no public health system everything from drugs to hospital treatment has to be paid for. There is little economic activity.
People seem to neither work nor take vacations, in ways familiar to the West, anyway.
In 1996 I visited the hospital in Tbilisi s main prison where patients lay untended in filth and squalor, many of them on the point of death. The country also hosts over 200,000 refugees from Georgia s war in the breakaway region of Abkhazia. The lucky ones are housed in two of Tbilisi s main hotels. The rest languish in abandoned Soviet buildings all over the country, often living 5 to a room. There was no medication and no help from the numerous international organizations that flood the country.