July 18, 2010 – The border between Azerbaijan e Georgia- The desert that surrounds Baku and the Azerbaijani people selling watermelons and hazelnuts, accompanied us to the border with Georgia. The only resistance on our way out were the oxen who wanted to keep our bus in their homeland, stopping on the road.

The border is the most inconceivable for the western imagination. Paradoxically it may remind someone of a trench, who has never seen neither one nor the other.  For our students it is different.  Guy, Israeli student, knows very well what it means crossing the border.  Students disguise the tension with a smile: a year of friendship in Rondine with those who are on the other side of the border was enough to make pretty surreal this moment. Their faces seem to say: "Hey, we are back."

The boundary is the place where everyone abandons their sense of decency: families, men, women.  The cars are dismantled to the last piece:  they look under the car body to check if the bottom hides some bombs.

On the Azeri side, some men are sitting on the barricade. It is hard to understand why they want to be perched there, where their world ends and another begins. It seems that they are unwilling to go away from that place, not to betray the truth of the facts, not to forget in the heart of their bustling cities and their peaceful countries, the fact that their Caucasus is divided into slices and chunks of distrust and fear.

Our passports, however, are a collage of diverse nationalities. The main problem is not Anna, our Russian student. Instead, it is Tanja the one who slows the transition: for them, she is the first Macedonian to enter Georgia!

First, all the Italians pass the border together. Aleko, our Georgian student, who is waiting down the line with us, is talking to a policeman. In a huge, heavy suitcase, which I drag on for a handle, we carry brochures of our journey of friendship in the South Caucasus. Aleko reassures the officer and asks me on his own initiative to open the suitcase and let them see the brochure calmly. Our Aleksandre has no fear. It almost seems as he wants the man to see and know that.  He wants to say to all his countrymen how important it is what we are doing. And he chooses the most significant place to do it.

'Welcome to Georgia! "And then, after my paradoxical fear of smuggling of peace," we are in Georgia.

Only the dogs cross the border free. The abandoned dogs are suitable for this place where nobody seems to want to have more checking and tricks hunting. The guard at the border is being this sleepy mutt, deprived of caresses and friends.

"At least we can not say that there was not even a dog on the border!" our president joked and then, after waiting an hour and a half, he recovered all his students. The team is ready to return to his dream, not before having dinner in a wooden hut, having visited the turkish bath in the countryside and having celebrated in that place to which will remain loyal, with good khachapuri.