"This is one of our classrooms; it's very Dickensian," says Vladimir Lozinski as he ushers me into a narrow room with five or six tables and a blackboard. The children rise up as we enter.
Mr Lozinski helped set up the Roddy Scott Foundation English language school in the Pankisi Gorge, in north-eastern Georgia, in 2008. The foundation is named after a British journalist killed in the mountains nearby in 2002 while documenting the Russian-Chechen war.
"Pankisi was a pretty wrecked and forgotten place in many ways. The only thing this valley was famous for is the Chechen fighters that fought the Russians over the mountains," he says.
"Even for the Georgian government it was a 'no-go' area: you would have been kidnapped. They cleaned them out eventually.
These days, the Pankisi Gorge has won greater notoriety as the home of Omar Shishani, a senior commander of so-called Islamic State (IS). The US says he was killed last month in north-eastern Syria although his death was not confirmed by IS.
Shishani was a former officer in the Georgian army. His real name was Tarkhan Batirashvili and his father still lives in the valley. He is thought to have inspired dozen of young men from Pankisi to join the fight in Syria.
A former imam in the village of Jokolo in the Pankisi Gorge was jailed for 14 years in Georgia in February for helping recruit young men for IS.
Aiup Bochashvili's co-defendants were also given lengthy prison terms.
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