In Georgia, as in most of the former Soviet Union, government-supported kindergartens are considered an essential service, providing universal day care for children between ages 2 and 7 for parents who are typically forced to work to make ends meet.
Iraklii Todua of the Education Ministry, said at least 50,000 children in Tbilisi and the bomb-damaged city of Gori won't attend kindergarten until at least Christmas. "All kindergartens have been designated for refugees," she said.
As a result, Salome's parents are juggling their schedules to care for their daughter, whose Kindergarten No. 123 is now home to 17 displaced families, totaling 109 people.
"We can't afford a private kindergarten," said the girl's father, David Lomadze, who normally pays a monthly fee of less than $10 in Kindergarten No. 123, a short walk from his apartment building. The Lomadzes are struggling, they say, because they have a "giant" mortgage on their three-bedroom flat.
The United Nations said at least 100,000 people have been uprooted by the conflict, which erupted Aug. 7 in the separatist territory of South Ossetia. Many of those who fled to Georgia were given shelter in schools. Aid workers said that as of mid-September, at least 100 elementary and secondary schools in Tbilisi were occupied by displaced families.
Faced with relocating them or postponing classes, officials here chose to delay the start of the school year for thousands of children. Kindergartens proved most readily adaptable as emergency housing, officials said, because they were equipped with beds and kitchens.
Todua said that, in addition to the kindergartens, 20 primary and secondary schools in Tbilisi - or about 10 percent of all schools in the city of 1.5 million - have been partially or fully occupied by refugees. Classes in these schools, which normally start in mid-September, have been delayed until Oct. 1, he said.
