So I've finally got around to uploading my first album of pictures from Mongolia. These start at the beginning of training and go up through swearing-in and my various adventures here at site. You can download any of the pictures using the "download" tab in the upper left above the pictures. Hope you enjoy them.
http://picasaweb.google.com/ned.lederer/Mongolia#
Tuesday, October 12, 2010
Thursday, September 16, 2010
End of the Beginning
First off, my apologies for taking so long to get the word out on what I’ve been up to. The second half of our training this summer was far busier than the first, and it’s only now that I’ve settle in at my new site that I’ve gotten the chance to catch up with myself. However, before I get too far ahead of myself let me begin where I left off.
The second half of our summer began with Nadaam, the festival of the Three Manly Sports, which is the second biggest Mongolian holiday after Tsagaan Sar, the New Year’s festival, in the winter. Most aimag (“eye-mag”) centers (10-30,000 people) and soums (1-10,000) have their own local Nadaams consisting of a few days of wrestling, horseracing and archery competitions. Though a little dull to watch since you can only see the beginning and end of the several kilometer long courses, the horse races are never the less quite the spectacles to observe since the horses often collapse from sheer exhaustion during or after the lengthy races, and the jockeys are almost universally children, some as young as 3, chosen for their light weight. Not surprisingly, the practice has recently been under a lot of criticism as a human rights violation since almost every year a few children are seriously injured or even killed during the races throughout the country.
The wrestling is also quite a spectacle in its own right. The rules are unique in that the object is simply to get your opponent to hit the ground before you do; there are no boundaries or weight classes; and several matches are usually held simultaneously in a large arena. Probably most notably of all, however, are the wrestling outfits they wear. By Western standards, I would wager almost any amount of money that you couldn’t find a more herculean group of men out there, taking themselves so seriously, in such contrastingly emasculative clothing. But rather than try—and undoubtedly fail—to adequately describe the wrestling uniforms, I will simply refer you here.
The story behind these exceptional outfits is that years ago a woman entered and won the preeminent wrestling competition by wearing a man’s deel (the large traditional robes) to hide her gender. This, of course, was an intolerable affront to the male dominated sport, and Mongolian culture at large, so they in turn designed these outfits to universally bar women from participating in the sport, thereby reclaiming the dignity of the rightful male participants. On an unrelated note, no, irony is not a prominently featured topic in Mongolian literature. (My preemptive apologies for the ethnocentric jokes. I just couldn't help myself, and I'm well the US is guilty of far worse fashion movements.)
It was also during Nadaam that I first tried the infamous Mongolian Airag, i.e. the traditional drink of fermented mare’s milk. I was surprised in that it didn’t live up to my expectations of being as formidable as one might imagine, though I was equally surprised by how long the aftertaste lingers in one’s mouth. The best I can describe it is it’s like drinking a milk based wine that hits you with a strong, but tolerable, initial sour punch, followed by a lingering, unsettling milk-like flavor that nature hadn’t ever intended man to drink.
Our Mid-Center Days training was also a lot of fun since it was the first time we all got to see each other again since our first few days in country. Aside from another great middle school style dance party with our trainers and Mongolian teachers, I think my favorite part had to be getting to swap our stories of the quintessentially Mongolian, and otherwise just generally farcical, moments we had all gone through. For instance, one of my good friend’s host family was kind enough to get him a Mongolian horseback riding lesson …and then serve him the same horse for dinner the following evening. People from several different training sites had stories of getting shocked by their local ATMs, and on two separate occasions, it turned out a PCV’s host family had been squatting on their property. One of the times resulting in all of the volunteer’s stuff getting strewn out on the lawn when the family disassembled her ger to move without telling her. A friend of mine was served a sealed beer filled with water, and another volunteer spent the night in a five person car with her host family of seven and two goats because they got lost on the way back from their trip to the hudoo (i.e. the rural countryside).
My own best story was the night I wound up sleep walking into the room where my host brother, 22, and sister, 20, were sleeping. I apparently woke them by tugging on their blankets, mumbling something along the lines of, “It’s like fun…” (which has since become something of our tag line of our training this summer), before my host siblings somehow finally got me to go back to bed without waking me. The next day then played out like the amnesia-driven plot of a B-list movie as I tried to figure out why my family is acting so weird towards me, followed by me trying to profusely apologize and explain the concept of sleepwalking in my broken Mongolian.
However, there have also been some stories that crossed the line from the comically frustrating and uncomfortable into the seriously regrettable. Domestic violence is a huge, and largely unaddressed, problem in Mongolia. Most Mongolians consider it within the rights of each family to resolve internal conflicts, and therefore there is little outside intervention from neighbors, the authorities or anyone else. Out of the 15 volunteers in our town during training, at least three of them observed some form of domestic violence within, or involving, their host family, creating no small amount of tension within their living situations. During our final days in the capital before shipping out, I also witnessed an incredibly violent fight between two women on the steps of a bank, during which the guard standing ten feet away did nothing but stand there and watch. Even from across the street it was hard to stop myself from intervening, but as the Peace Corps warned us, to do so would expose us not only to physical danger, but a Kafkaesque legal system where we would receive little sympathy for having interfered where we didn’t belong. Understandably domestic violence has become an area of focus for many volunteers, and encouragingly the classes they have held seem to have so far been met receptively.
Fortunately though, those experiences have certainly been in the minority, and the second half of our training was overwhelmingly positive. Our first major event was having a Peace Corps sponsored traditional Mongolian horhug with our host families and language teachers. Now a horhug is like a big US barbeque in many respects: you go to a nice outdoor space, play games, and eat meat with your hands. The differences though are quite notable. First, instead of putting the meat in the grill, you put the grill in the meat, by which I mean you literally cook a goat/sheep/whatever by stuffing it full of searing hot rocks about the size of your hand. You then dismember the animal and put the meat in a giant, covered pot with some vegetables and the still hot rocks to cook some more. Then before eating, you remove the rocks and hand them to people to juggle until they are cool enough to hold—for absolutely no apparent reason. And, of course, you just can’t really compare nibbling on a chicken wing to ripping the meat off a goat’s scapula—though I have to admit the lack of A1 or BBQ sauce is a glaring detractor.
However, because our gratitude towards our host families could not be expressed in a single event (and because Peace Corps gave us more money), we had another Host Family Appreciation Day later in the summer. This time though the tables were turned, and the 15 of us volunteers spent the morning sharing an industrial sized kitchen with the staff of a Korean summer camp as we prepared pizza, onion rings, lemonade, brownies, apple cinnamon hoshurs (think small calzones), and pasta salad—which I made, and hence unsurprisingly later primarily served as dog food—all the while listening to the Korean kids and their full-sized, yellow, teddy bear mascot sing camp songs in the adjoining room. The party then consisted of us feasting in the school auditorium, performing via karaoke our limited Mongolian repertoire, as well a few American songs, and then having those of us who were learning dance pieces for our swearing-in ceremony perform those as well. And yes, there is going to be another post covering that whole dancing saga.
The second half of training also held our first community outreaches in conjunction with our family clinics. As much as the projects were designed to benefit the communities we were serving in, they were also designed to familiarize us with the challenges of working in a less results-oriented culture. And did they ever. Despite getting along very well with the counterparts in our clinic, it was quite the challenge to ever actually meet with them to work on our project or hold English classes for them. On the whole, about three times out of four, despite them choosing the time and location of our meetings, they wouldn’t make it for some reason. In fact, one of the most productive meetings we had was when our group of PCVs caught them during a break at a medical training seminar, and we just had an impromptu meeting on the spot.
The real kicker though was the day of our final anti-smoking presentation that we been building up towards for a few weeks. We went to the clinic and not only had we lost our venue, which was previously the poorly lit hallway of a kindergarten next door, but because it was about 50° F with a little wind and drizzle, they thought too few of the 30-40 doctors and nurses we were supposed to present to would come due to the bad weather. That’s right, a little drizzle and light wind at 50 degrees Fahrenheit is insurmountable weather—in Mongolia. However, after a few remarks from our training coordinators behind closed doors—or at least behind a pretty sizable language barrier—and the presentation was back on. We just didn’t quite know where and for whom quite yet…
This led us to another clinic across town where we quickly scrambled to find power outlets, chairs and participants for our hastily rescheduled presentation. Slowly Mongolians of all ages start trickling in as we realize our clinic doctors are simply calling everyone on their contact lists to try to boost attendance. We now faced a couple dozen Mongolians, age 5-75, without the hour of preparation we had expected, in a new, overly crowded venue, with a presentation designed for medical professionals. Wonderful.
Quickly our well planned concert of educational lectures, interactive games and group competitions, devolved into an exercise in improvisation and damage control as we tried to adapt our materials to the new circumstances sans translator. As we floundered to explain our objectives to our clinic’s head doctor who was doing most of the actual talking, we passed around candy to try to placate our audience, while also realizing we don’t have a way to make hot drinks, a transgression no doubt akin to a personal betrayal given Mongolian culture and the “awful” weather.
After an about an hour or so of awkwardly interrupting ourselves as we stumbled through our presentation, we start to feel the relief that only the end of such a prolonged debacle could bring. Then, entirely unexpectedly, one of the oldest gentlemen in the room stood up, and though we couldn’t understand his exact words, it’s clear he is giving us the most heartfelt expression of appreciation you could ever imagine an anti-smoking presentation receiving. Needless to say, we were stunned. And as the session ended and we started to get feedback from our trainers and our fellow PCVs, we were pleasantly surprised to find that despite the setbacks, they felt we handled it well, and the staff at our clinic were truly impressed with, and very grateful for, the effort we put into the presentation and educational materials we made for them. Then, when a few days later when we went to the clinic to say our final good-byes, the staff each gave us a Chingis Khan key chain, a miniature morinkhuur (the traditional horse-head fiddle), and a lovely card teaching us how to write our names in traditional Mongolian script, which currently resides on the wall of my new apartment.
Then as training wound down, we had our final days all together at site where we received even more warnings about STIs, the Mongolian drinking culture, and our inevitable gastrointestinal ailments—which in fact a few of my site mates and I are suffering from as I write. And, of course, we had a final dance party with our language teachers, PCV trainers and all. Finally the 75 of us packed up our bags, said our tearful good-byes to our host families, and loaded up the buses for our final stretch together in Ulaanbaatar before being flung to the far corners of the steppe.
Once in UB, as one might expect, our group of young twenty-somethings responsibly saved all of our substantial moving-in allowance, and celebrated our last few evenings together modestly, while enjoying the various historical and cultural monuments the world’s coldest capital has to offer…or something like that. I, for one, especially enjoyed my first joint Mexican/Indian food restaurant, and finally got to try the infamous American Burger and Fries, which after two and half months of mutton, did not disappoint. Our days in UB ultimately peaked with our spectacular swearing-in ceremony, which as I hinted at before, will be covered in detail in another update. Though I think it’s very interesting, and worth mentioning here, that Peace Corps Volunteers in fact take the US Oath for Federal employees, i.e. the one you usually associate with military service about protecting the Constitution from all enemies foreign and domestic, etc. If you’re interested, you can find it in its entirety here.
Anyways, our final days together went by far too quickly, and even our final hurrah at a grungy roller rink-disco hybrid with an enormous Scrooge McDuck spray painted on the wall, couldn’t entirely make up for the knowledge that we would soon part ways for several long months with the great friends we made that summer. Fortunately though, as I believe we are the sparsest active Peace Corps country, we are among a small subset of volunteers worldwide that get PC issued cell phones, and with increasingly available internet access, we will at least be able to keep in touch, if not in sight.
The second half of our summer began with Nadaam, the festival of the Three Manly Sports, which is the second biggest Mongolian holiday after Tsagaan Sar, the New Year’s festival, in the winter. Most aimag (“eye-mag”) centers (10-30,000 people) and soums (1-10,000) have their own local Nadaams consisting of a few days of wrestling, horseracing and archery competitions. Though a little dull to watch since you can only see the beginning and end of the several kilometer long courses, the horse races are never the less quite the spectacles to observe since the horses often collapse from sheer exhaustion during or after the lengthy races, and the jockeys are almost universally children, some as young as 3, chosen for their light weight. Not surprisingly, the practice has recently been under a lot of criticism as a human rights violation since almost every year a few children are seriously injured or even killed during the races throughout the country.
The wrestling is also quite a spectacle in its own right. The rules are unique in that the object is simply to get your opponent to hit the ground before you do; there are no boundaries or weight classes; and several matches are usually held simultaneously in a large arena. Probably most notably of all, however, are the wrestling outfits they wear. By Western standards, I would wager almost any amount of money that you couldn’t find a more herculean group of men out there, taking themselves so seriously, in such contrastingly emasculative clothing. But rather than try—and undoubtedly fail—to adequately describe the wrestling uniforms, I will simply refer you here.
The story behind these exceptional outfits is that years ago a woman entered and won the preeminent wrestling competition by wearing a man’s deel (the large traditional robes) to hide her gender. This, of course, was an intolerable affront to the male dominated sport, and Mongolian culture at large, so they in turn designed these outfits to universally bar women from participating in the sport, thereby reclaiming the dignity of the rightful male participants. On an unrelated note, no, irony is not a prominently featured topic in Mongolian literature. (My preemptive apologies for the ethnocentric jokes. I just couldn't help myself, and I'm well the US is guilty of far worse fashion movements.)
It was also during Nadaam that I first tried the infamous Mongolian Airag, i.e. the traditional drink of fermented mare’s milk. I was surprised in that it didn’t live up to my expectations of being as formidable as one might imagine, though I was equally surprised by how long the aftertaste lingers in one’s mouth. The best I can describe it is it’s like drinking a milk based wine that hits you with a strong, but tolerable, initial sour punch, followed by a lingering, unsettling milk-like flavor that nature hadn’t ever intended man to drink.
Our Mid-Center Days training was also a lot of fun since it was the first time we all got to see each other again since our first few days in country. Aside from another great middle school style dance party with our trainers and Mongolian teachers, I think my favorite part had to be getting to swap our stories of the quintessentially Mongolian, and otherwise just generally farcical, moments we had all gone through. For instance, one of my good friend’s host family was kind enough to get him a Mongolian horseback riding lesson …and then serve him the same horse for dinner the following evening. People from several different training sites had stories of getting shocked by their local ATMs, and on two separate occasions, it turned out a PCV’s host family had been squatting on their property. One of the times resulting in all of the volunteer’s stuff getting strewn out on the lawn when the family disassembled her ger to move without telling her. A friend of mine was served a sealed beer filled with water, and another volunteer spent the night in a five person car with her host family of seven and two goats because they got lost on the way back from their trip to the hudoo (i.e. the rural countryside).
My own best story was the night I wound up sleep walking into the room where my host brother, 22, and sister, 20, were sleeping. I apparently woke them by tugging on their blankets, mumbling something along the lines of, “It’s like fun…” (which has since become something of our tag line of our training this summer), before my host siblings somehow finally got me to go back to bed without waking me. The next day then played out like the amnesia-driven plot of a B-list movie as I tried to figure out why my family is acting so weird towards me, followed by me trying to profusely apologize and explain the concept of sleepwalking in my broken Mongolian.
However, there have also been some stories that crossed the line from the comically frustrating and uncomfortable into the seriously regrettable. Domestic violence is a huge, and largely unaddressed, problem in Mongolia. Most Mongolians consider it within the rights of each family to resolve internal conflicts, and therefore there is little outside intervention from neighbors, the authorities or anyone else. Out of the 15 volunteers in our town during training, at least three of them observed some form of domestic violence within, or involving, their host family, creating no small amount of tension within their living situations. During our final days in the capital before shipping out, I also witnessed an incredibly violent fight between two women on the steps of a bank, during which the guard standing ten feet away did nothing but stand there and watch. Even from across the street it was hard to stop myself from intervening, but as the Peace Corps warned us, to do so would expose us not only to physical danger, but a Kafkaesque legal system where we would receive little sympathy for having interfered where we didn’t belong. Understandably domestic violence has become an area of focus for many volunteers, and encouragingly the classes they have held seem to have so far been met receptively.
Fortunately though, those experiences have certainly been in the minority, and the second half of our training was overwhelmingly positive. Our first major event was having a Peace Corps sponsored traditional Mongolian horhug with our host families and language teachers. Now a horhug is like a big US barbeque in many respects: you go to a nice outdoor space, play games, and eat meat with your hands. The differences though are quite notable. First, instead of putting the meat in the grill, you put the grill in the meat, by which I mean you literally cook a goat/sheep/whatever by stuffing it full of searing hot rocks about the size of your hand. You then dismember the animal and put the meat in a giant, covered pot with some vegetables and the still hot rocks to cook some more. Then before eating, you remove the rocks and hand them to people to juggle until they are cool enough to hold—for absolutely no apparent reason. And, of course, you just can’t really compare nibbling on a chicken wing to ripping the meat off a goat’s scapula—though I have to admit the lack of A1 or BBQ sauce is a glaring detractor.
However, because our gratitude towards our host families could not be expressed in a single event (and because Peace Corps gave us more money), we had another Host Family Appreciation Day later in the summer. This time though the tables were turned, and the 15 of us volunteers spent the morning sharing an industrial sized kitchen with the staff of a Korean summer camp as we prepared pizza, onion rings, lemonade, brownies, apple cinnamon hoshurs (think small calzones), and pasta salad—which I made, and hence unsurprisingly later primarily served as dog food—all the while listening to the Korean kids and their full-sized, yellow, teddy bear mascot sing camp songs in the adjoining room. The party then consisted of us feasting in the school auditorium, performing via karaoke our limited Mongolian repertoire, as well a few American songs, and then having those of us who were learning dance pieces for our swearing-in ceremony perform those as well. And yes, there is going to be another post covering that whole dancing saga.
The second half of training also held our first community outreaches in conjunction with our family clinics. As much as the projects were designed to benefit the communities we were serving in, they were also designed to familiarize us with the challenges of working in a less results-oriented culture. And did they ever. Despite getting along very well with the counterparts in our clinic, it was quite the challenge to ever actually meet with them to work on our project or hold English classes for them. On the whole, about three times out of four, despite them choosing the time and location of our meetings, they wouldn’t make it for some reason. In fact, one of the most productive meetings we had was when our group of PCVs caught them during a break at a medical training seminar, and we just had an impromptu meeting on the spot.
The real kicker though was the day of our final anti-smoking presentation that we been building up towards for a few weeks. We went to the clinic and not only had we lost our venue, which was previously the poorly lit hallway of a kindergarten next door, but because it was about 50° F with a little wind and drizzle, they thought too few of the 30-40 doctors and nurses we were supposed to present to would come due to the bad weather. That’s right, a little drizzle and light wind at 50 degrees Fahrenheit is insurmountable weather—in Mongolia. However, after a few remarks from our training coordinators behind closed doors—or at least behind a pretty sizable language barrier—and the presentation was back on. We just didn’t quite know where and for whom quite yet…
This led us to another clinic across town where we quickly scrambled to find power outlets, chairs and participants for our hastily rescheduled presentation. Slowly Mongolians of all ages start trickling in as we realize our clinic doctors are simply calling everyone on their contact lists to try to boost attendance. We now faced a couple dozen Mongolians, age 5-75, without the hour of preparation we had expected, in a new, overly crowded venue, with a presentation designed for medical professionals. Wonderful.
Quickly our well planned concert of educational lectures, interactive games and group competitions, devolved into an exercise in improvisation and damage control as we tried to adapt our materials to the new circumstances sans translator. As we floundered to explain our objectives to our clinic’s head doctor who was doing most of the actual talking, we passed around candy to try to placate our audience, while also realizing we don’t have a way to make hot drinks, a transgression no doubt akin to a personal betrayal given Mongolian culture and the “awful” weather.
After an about an hour or so of awkwardly interrupting ourselves as we stumbled through our presentation, we start to feel the relief that only the end of such a prolonged debacle could bring. Then, entirely unexpectedly, one of the oldest gentlemen in the room stood up, and though we couldn’t understand his exact words, it’s clear he is giving us the most heartfelt expression of appreciation you could ever imagine an anti-smoking presentation receiving. Needless to say, we were stunned. And as the session ended and we started to get feedback from our trainers and our fellow PCVs, we were pleasantly surprised to find that despite the setbacks, they felt we handled it well, and the staff at our clinic were truly impressed with, and very grateful for, the effort we put into the presentation and educational materials we made for them. Then, when a few days later when we went to the clinic to say our final good-byes, the staff each gave us a Chingis Khan key chain, a miniature morinkhuur (the traditional horse-head fiddle), and a lovely card teaching us how to write our names in traditional Mongolian script, which currently resides on the wall of my new apartment.
Then as training wound down, we had our final days all together at site where we received even more warnings about STIs, the Mongolian drinking culture, and our inevitable gastrointestinal ailments—which in fact a few of my site mates and I are suffering from as I write. And, of course, we had a final dance party with our language teachers, PCV trainers and all. Finally the 75 of us packed up our bags, said our tearful good-byes to our host families, and loaded up the buses for our final stretch together in Ulaanbaatar before being flung to the far corners of the steppe.
Once in UB, as one might expect, our group of young twenty-somethings responsibly saved all of our substantial moving-in allowance, and celebrated our last few evenings together modestly, while enjoying the various historical and cultural monuments the world’s coldest capital has to offer…or something like that. I, for one, especially enjoyed my first joint Mexican/Indian food restaurant, and finally got to try the infamous American Burger and Fries, which after two and half months of mutton, did not disappoint. Our days in UB ultimately peaked with our spectacular swearing-in ceremony, which as I hinted at before, will be covered in detail in another update. Though I think it’s very interesting, and worth mentioning here, that Peace Corps Volunteers in fact take the US Oath for Federal employees, i.e. the one you usually associate with military service about protecting the Constitution from all enemies foreign and domestic, etc. If you’re interested, you can find it in its entirety here.
Anyways, our final days together went by far too quickly, and even our final hurrah at a grungy roller rink-disco hybrid with an enormous Scrooge McDuck spray painted on the wall, couldn’t entirely make up for the knowledge that we would soon part ways for several long months with the great friends we made that summer. Fortunately though, as I believe we are the sparsest active Peace Corps country, we are among a small subset of volunteers worldwide that get PC issued cell phones, and with increasingly available internet access, we will at least be able to keep in touch, if not in sight.
Tuesday, July 6, 2010
Life on the Steppe
Another couple weeks in and time has continued to fly. We’ve definitely found our rhythm of Mongolian class for 4 hours in the mornings, a break for lunch, and then another 3 hours of technical and/or cross-cultural training in the afternoons. On the whole, I think the classes have been as good as one could reasonably expect—especially the language training which I’ve been especially impressed with—though they certainly aren’t without their trying moments. For instance I’ve got a packet on the Mongolian health insurance system that could cure insomnia, and some of the advice we get on how to take of care of ourselves can get a little patronizing, but overall I think it’s been quite well run.
After class we all head back for dinner with our host families, who are in charge of all of our meals, and we’re supposed to be working on list of cultural and domestic activities meant to prepare us living on our own. Most are fairly inane or banal like learning games and cooking Mongolian food, but we’ve also got a few along the lines of herding sheep, observing an animal being slaughtered and learning the Mongolian waltz, which are going to be interesting to say the least (especially for those of you who know how well I can dance).
We’ve also started getting a few good stories under our belts from the last couple weekends. The first was the 13 mile hike that a group of did last week. It started with a hike to the nearby ruins and temples tucked into the hills, and ended with a trail-less ascent of the highest peak we could see from our town. Aside from the fantastic view from the top, my favorite highlight was the boulder fields we crossed that were littered with spiders the size of a silver dollar that would spin webs over every other crevasse.
A couple days ago we also had our first Mongolian karaoke session at the same place I went for my host sister’s 21st birthday—which, it turns out, is because it’s more or less the only night club in town. The main area is also exclusively decorated in red and green, including the lasers, which more or less makes it feel like a perennial disco Christmas party, though aside from that it’s actually surprisingly nice, all things considered. A group of the volunteers here in town all got together with our Mongolian teacher, Oogii, “Aw-gi”, (who I’ve actually gotten to know quite well since she is also a close friend of my host family), and a few of our host family siblings and parents, who we got to tag along for some dancing before moving upstairs to our own karaoke room. Unfortunately only a few songs in the power for the whole town went out, but we still had a great time hanging out by candle light waiting for the power to go back on before the police finally came and told us we should probably go. Undeterred however, we managed to pull some strings and have one of the volunteer’s host mothers open up her ДЭЛГYYP (“delguur”)—i.e. convenience store—for some snacks and drinks before migrating to one of the volunteer’s gers for the remainder of the evening.
We also got some mozzarella brought in from UB (Ulaanbaatar) the other day, so a bunch of the volunteers got together to make some pizza. We only got a couple slices each, but thanks to a good friend of mine who provided me with some last minute Italian seasoning and garlic powder they were still absolutely delicious.
Of course it hasn’t all been smooth sailing, however. On Saturday we played a few games of basketball against the business volunteers in almost 100° F heat, which left me with a skinned elbow, a bloody nose and a good case of dehydration despite drinking almost 3 liters of water while we were out there. More so than anything else though, it left me in desperate need of a shower—a real shower (i.e. the kind that doesn’t come from my lime green, plastic tumpen). However, I still had yet to activate my ATM card so that meant a trip to the bank in my sweaty athletic gear, towel in hand, to withdraw the fee I needed for the local bathhouse. Two banks, three attendants and 45 minutes later, I’m walking home in the midday heat, dirty as ever, because “activate an ATM card” never came up in any of the games of charades I’ve ever played.
There were also a few aesthetic details about Mongolia that I’ve realized I failed to mention in my last post. The first comes from the fact that until only a handful of decades ago, Mongolians never used to have anything that wouldn’t get eaten or biodegrade if they just threw it on the ground. This in turn has meant that it’s about as easy to find a public trashcan here as it is to find a blonde Mongolian. Consequently, my first morning here, I awoke from jetlag at about 4:00 am and decided to watch the sunrise. And as I looked across the field outside our dormitory, I noticed the ground was literally sparkling, giving this already picturesque scene a truly fantastic quality. That was of course until I realized they were the shards of countless broken vodka bottles… However, you would be surprised how quickly you get used to the broken glass. What takes a little longer is acclimating to the partially decayed quadruped jawbones and vertebrae speckled amongst the rest of the litter. And what almost certainly takes the longest of all is getting used to the post-slaughter piles of evacuated sheep-bowel contents that occasionally get wrung out along the side of the road. My apologies if you were planning on eating any time soon.
Rumor has it we’ve also had the first member of our M-21 group early terminate (ET). Most of us only knew him for a few days, but he was a cool guy, and hardly one that we would have expected to leave so early. Apparently though he was quite unhappy with the level of English he would be teaching and decided to leave before he got too far into things. I guess you just never know.
The weather has also gotten impressively volatile as of late as well. Contrasted with the early morning frost we had when I wrote my last post, we’ve recently been going through a bone-dry heat wave that regularly gets up to nearly 100° F as I mentioned before. It also comes with pretty spectacular, tree-bending wind, which I’ve heard is usually more characteristic of the spring here. Especially in the afternoons, you can sometimes watch small sandstorms blow in across the town stirring up a sandy haze and generating little dust devils on the corners of buildings. However today the wind finally blew in another cold front, and with it a mild thunderstorm that left us less than dry even after only the few minute walk back from playing frisbee in the park.
Overall though I’d say everyone’s been having a really enjoyable time, and we’ve got a few things coming up to look forward too. We’re about to have our summer holiday for Nadaam, the festival of the three manly sports, and the other volunteers are all coming back to our site for a view days so we can all spend some time together. I have no doubt it will provide some more stories worth sharing.
After class we all head back for dinner with our host families, who are in charge of all of our meals, and we’re supposed to be working on list of cultural and domestic activities meant to prepare us living on our own. Most are fairly inane or banal like learning games and cooking Mongolian food, but we’ve also got a few along the lines of herding sheep, observing an animal being slaughtered and learning the Mongolian waltz, which are going to be interesting to say the least (especially for those of you who know how well I can dance).
We’ve also started getting a few good stories under our belts from the last couple weekends. The first was the 13 mile hike that a group of did last week. It started with a hike to the nearby ruins and temples tucked into the hills, and ended with a trail-less ascent of the highest peak we could see from our town. Aside from the fantastic view from the top, my favorite highlight was the boulder fields we crossed that were littered with spiders the size of a silver dollar that would spin webs over every other crevasse.
A couple days ago we also had our first Mongolian karaoke session at the same place I went for my host sister’s 21st birthday—which, it turns out, is because it’s more or less the only night club in town. The main area is also exclusively decorated in red and green, including the lasers, which more or less makes it feel like a perennial disco Christmas party, though aside from that it’s actually surprisingly nice, all things considered. A group of the volunteers here in town all got together with our Mongolian teacher, Oogii, “Aw-gi”, (who I’ve actually gotten to know quite well since she is also a close friend of my host family), and a few of our host family siblings and parents, who we got to tag along for some dancing before moving upstairs to our own karaoke room. Unfortunately only a few songs in the power for the whole town went out, but we still had a great time hanging out by candle light waiting for the power to go back on before the police finally came and told us we should probably go. Undeterred however, we managed to pull some strings and have one of the volunteer’s host mothers open up her ДЭЛГYYP (“delguur”)—i.e. convenience store—for some snacks and drinks before migrating to one of the volunteer’s gers for the remainder of the evening.
We also got some mozzarella brought in from UB (Ulaanbaatar) the other day, so a bunch of the volunteers got together to make some pizza. We only got a couple slices each, but thanks to a good friend of mine who provided me with some last minute Italian seasoning and garlic powder they were still absolutely delicious.
Of course it hasn’t all been smooth sailing, however. On Saturday we played a few games of basketball against the business volunteers in almost 100° F heat, which left me with a skinned elbow, a bloody nose and a good case of dehydration despite drinking almost 3 liters of water while we were out there. More so than anything else though, it left me in desperate need of a shower—a real shower (i.e. the kind that doesn’t come from my lime green, plastic tumpen). However, I still had yet to activate my ATM card so that meant a trip to the bank in my sweaty athletic gear, towel in hand, to withdraw the fee I needed for the local bathhouse. Two banks, three attendants and 45 minutes later, I’m walking home in the midday heat, dirty as ever, because “activate an ATM card” never came up in any of the games of charades I’ve ever played.
There were also a few aesthetic details about Mongolia that I’ve realized I failed to mention in my last post. The first comes from the fact that until only a handful of decades ago, Mongolians never used to have anything that wouldn’t get eaten or biodegrade if they just threw it on the ground. This in turn has meant that it’s about as easy to find a public trashcan here as it is to find a blonde Mongolian. Consequently, my first morning here, I awoke from jetlag at about 4:00 am and decided to watch the sunrise. And as I looked across the field outside our dormitory, I noticed the ground was literally sparkling, giving this already picturesque scene a truly fantastic quality. That was of course until I realized they were the shards of countless broken vodka bottles… However, you would be surprised how quickly you get used to the broken glass. What takes a little longer is acclimating to the partially decayed quadruped jawbones and vertebrae speckled amongst the rest of the litter. And what almost certainly takes the longest of all is getting used to the post-slaughter piles of evacuated sheep-bowel contents that occasionally get wrung out along the side of the road. My apologies if you were planning on eating any time soon.
Rumor has it we’ve also had the first member of our M-21 group early terminate (ET). Most of us only knew him for a few days, but he was a cool guy, and hardly one that we would have expected to leave so early. Apparently though he was quite unhappy with the level of English he would be teaching and decided to leave before he got too far into things. I guess you just never know.
The weather has also gotten impressively volatile as of late as well. Contrasted with the early morning frost we had when I wrote my last post, we’ve recently been going through a bone-dry heat wave that regularly gets up to nearly 100° F as I mentioned before. It also comes with pretty spectacular, tree-bending wind, which I’ve heard is usually more characteristic of the spring here. Especially in the afternoons, you can sometimes watch small sandstorms blow in across the town stirring up a sandy haze and generating little dust devils on the corners of buildings. However today the wind finally blew in another cold front, and with it a mild thunderstorm that left us less than dry even after only the few minute walk back from playing frisbee in the park.
Overall though I’d say everyone’s been having a really enjoyable time, and we’ve got a few things coming up to look forward too. We’re about to have our summer holiday for Nadaam, the festival of the three manly sports, and the other volunteers are all coming back to our site for a view days so we can all spend some time together. I have no doubt it will provide some more stories worth sharing.
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