Almost every child in the Georgian mountain village of Tkhiliana knows who is the slight, dark-haired woman following the sheep with flowers in her hand. She’s a Tbilisi medical student doing a man’s job as a shepherd.

Like many young, rural Georgians, 21-year-old Mariam Kochashvili, a native of eastern Georgia’s Pshavi region, finds her life split between her village past and her big-city present.

But she takes it all in stride. “When I’m in the village, I am a villager, a shepherd girl. In Tbilisi, I have a different regime. Nothing special. I am an ordinary girl.”

With an extraordinary schedule. In summer, while her friends are on vacation, Mariam, a final-year student at Tbilisi State Medical University, herds sheep during the week and works as a nursing assistant on the weekend at the city’s Children’s Infectious Diseases Hospital.