As the plane began its descent into the Tbilisi airport, the young Georgian man sitting next to me, returning home after three months of study in London, looked out over the largely darkened city. “That’s Tbilisi,” he confirmed, “but you don’t see most of it because of the electrical blackouts. Can you believe it? In the 21st century? What kind of a country is it that can’t provide basic electricity to its citizens?”

It was a question (“What kind of a country is it that can’t/won’t…?”) repeated many times during my eight-week stay in the Republic of Georgia and one that revealed a great deal about its turbulent recent past. Most Americans associate Georgia with the former Soviet Union, unaware that Georgia has its own language and own alphabet that date back to the 5th century. In 1991, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, Georgia reclaimed its independence for the first time since the Bolshevik Revolution. But soon thereafter, it plunged into a bloody civil war.

The fighting created difficult conditions that persist today. Georgia and other former Soviet republics are often referred to as “cosmetic democracies,” possessing the external trappings of a democracy but not truly functioning as one. One of the major roles played by legal aid organizations is to turn “cosmetic” democracies into real, sustainable ones.

I came to Georgia under a subcontract with IRIS Georgia, a nonprofit group based at the University of Maryland, to improve the management systems of several local legal aid programs. IRIS staff advocates were overwhelmingly young, yet their life experience belied their years. Georgians have seen more change, and more bloodshed, in their country over the last 15 years than most people see in a lifetime. They witnessed the massacre of Georgians by the Soviet Army in 1989, and they saw their country declare independence after communism’s fall, only to descend into a savage civil war. Today, legal aid organizations in Georgia work to uphold promises made in their Constitution and in their laws guaranteeing free speech, freedom of religion, and free and fair elections.

Legal aid is important in this country because it helps Americans access the law. In developing countries, legal aid establishes the very bedrock concept of “rule of law” taken for granted in America. What I learned in Georgia was that representing a journalist or small newspaper in a defamation suit is critical to the preservation of free speech. A wealthy person filing a defamation suit is likely to win at the trial level, and that’s enough to put most local papers out of business. I learned that people get arrested and convicted on trumped-up charges with lists of phony witnesses, and I learned that draftees into the Georgian army are sometimes victims of abuse by senior officers.

Legal aid advocates are also at the forefront of the very important process of educating citizens about their rights—through publications, posters, and telephone interviews. These activities are aimed at identifying and helping Georgians whose civil rights are being violated. Written constitutions and laws, after all, have little impact if they are not enforced.

While Georgian culture is based on a strong system of family alliances, it also has a culturally embedded distrust of government. Getting people to assert their rights can be a difficult process. I personally witnessed this distrust of “government” visiting a mobile legal aid clinic in a small village where local residents gathered to discuss their problems. An elderly woman seeking transportation to her doctor pointed to me and said in Georgian, “If I could speak English, I’d tell him what it’s really like here, because I know that they’re not translating everything that I say.” The audience laughed, and I understood that many shared her disillusionment. Elsewhere, I heard pensioner after pensioner complain about the meager pensions they received—$7 a month after working more than 40 years. Others complained about receiving no pensions at all. What kind of a country is it that can’t provide for its citizens in their retirement?

As I write this article, Georgia’s fragile democracy is facing its greatest challenge after the Georgian government presided over an election that was, by all accounts, a fraud. For the last 11 days, I have watched thousands of Georgians peacefully gather in front of parliament to protest. They have had enough of the corruption, the economic stagnation, and the failure of national leadership.

Joe Dailing is executive director of Prairie State (Ill.) Legal Services, an LSC grantee, and a debonair world traveler.