Are Megrelians (and, by extension, Georgians) a hard-working kind of people? Not terribly so. Most of Megrelians are unemployed but they don't seem to be too concerned about it. Instead of looking for work, (almost invariably all) men just stand around, talk, smoke (i.e. burn money) and let girls and women in their lives do the everyday's load of work (cooking, cleaning, running the household...). The situation is somewhat worsened by tens of thousands IDPs (involuntarily displaced people) from Abkhazia - ethnic Megrelians. They effectively compete only for the taxi driver jobs, so in Zugdidi, for example, you can see tons of taxis abound.
One such an example from my host family. They decided to build a small village shop. Although there are two healthy teenagers in our family, grandfather and his friend or two did vast majority of the work. Sometimes I was helping while other young and healthy male members of the family were just on-lookers. There was usually one working day in a week, sometimes in two. Yes, that's true. Saturday (or Sunday) was dedicated to work and the next working day usually followed a week or two later. The whole construction took as much as three to four months, whereas in other countries the people would pitch in and have the little building erected in less than a week.
And that's way when you are passing Samegrelo, most of the houses along the road or in back alleys look like eternal work-in-progress demo version.
