Last Week

This week has been a big change from the week before. A lot slower paced with much less going on. In all likelihood it is because almost all of the staff were gone to UB doing stuff at the national office. It didn’t help that the English teacher I work with was also gone as that takes a lot of my time. I had been offered to go to UB as well but told that because everyone was going to be in meetings I wouldn’t have much to do. I thought it better to stay as I could take teach the English classes still. Well, that didn’t work out.
I’ll start with last Friday.
After work I met up with Ethan (Peace corps volunteer/PCV) at 4th school where he teaches to go to Darlene’s (PCV) ger for some dinner. It was a bit of a long walk as it shifted from twilight to dark. Their friend Matt (PCV) was visiting from another soum as he was on his way to UB. Matt is the only foreigner in his small town of less than a thousand so I guess it was nice for him to have people to speak English with. There is also only 1 phone in his town at the post office, with no cellular service. He was a Spanish major, lived in Argentina and Chile for 2 years and yet they sent him to Mongolia.
We made rolls with Vietnamese rice paper which is a thin, stiff, round, translucent sheet that you drop in water for a second and it is soft and ready to roll. Darlene is a vegetarian so we cooked up carrots, potatoes, noodles, and tofu to put in them to be dipped in some tasty peanut butter sauce. They were a little messy as the ingredients are a little heavy compared to the usual lettuce and meat that you normally put in.
Darlene also made some cookies, most of which were in some form burned. We of course gave her a lot of flak for that but all the same enjoyed them.
The rest of the night we chitchatted and played some games. We played Euchre first because I guess that’s what a lot of PCV’s do to which Darlene was highly resistant to learning. We also played Taboo where I was told that I speak too slowly which they credited to being around people that aren’t native English speakers. Scattergories also made it into the mix.
Matt and I stayed in Darlene’s ger while she and Ethan crashed in his ger. We slept in sleeping bags, sharing an almost double bed. Here I was sleeping in a ger for the first time, next to someone I had only met a few hours earlier.
The next day got Matt and I up early. We walked into town so that he could buy a phonecard. The wind was strong, sweeping along dirt and dust, fortunately it was going the same way as us. We ran out of conversation topics kind of quickly. Later we met up with Darlene and Ethan at Ider Onon for lunch.
Darlene had to tutor some students for the upcoming English Olympics so the three guys went back to her ger to watch a college basketball game that Matt had on dvd. At one point on the way back I noticed Ethan suddenly turned around and started walking backwards. I looked up from the uneven ground I had been watching and saw a big gust of dust coming our way, as if a stampede were rushing us. (when I washed my hair the next day I was surprised to see how much dust it had collected)
The basketball game allowed for a lot of sports talk and the NBA trades that have happened recently, but after that I pretty much fell out of conversation. After watching a whole disc of Arrested Development I found it hard to enter into what they were talking about. First it was the hip-hop music that they listened to growing up. Then it went to PCV stories and tales of their friends’ drunken stupidity.

Sunday I went with Jagaa and Bathuyag to Berkh again. WV was sponsoring a chess competition out there and we were going to film and give out the awards. Unfortunately I found myself on the first day of a cold which meant a runny nose without Kleenex and a million sneezes. My second time in Berkh was a lot different. Last time we went we arrived at sunset, this time we got there midmorning. Last time I went there I was in wonder at the vastness of the white blanket that covered the land. Now the blanket had been removed, revealing endless brown earth. We saw several herders along the way, guiding along their horses, sheep, goats, or camels. Unlike most other towns, a lot of the residences are old Russian apartment buildings, abandoned after they left in 1990.
The award ceremony for the chess tournament was a big deal. 3 young girls dressed up in shiny garb and poofy hair thingies opened it up with some singing. Then medal after medal was awarded to the winners, many winning a small cash prize along with a little certificate.
Monday was a day for the young men of the community. The child participation council and WV decided it needed to get the boys involved. This is a problem that spans most of the country—women are much more active in helping out the community. It was an all day conference that I attended about half of, taking pictures and filming when needed. I think this is so important and I hope that guys are inspired to take initiative. Later in the day we did trash pick up along the main road on the occasion that it was “Development Day.” There was so much garbage. No public trashcans are anywhere to be seen in the city so it gets dumped anywhere and everywhere.
Wednesday I was in the office the whole day helping out the staff that had returned from UB. They brought with them more than a hundred gifts and letters for sponsored children. They then had to translate the letters from English into Mongolian. The problem is that the letters come from either Switzerland or France so you have non-native English speakers writing in English and non-native speakers reading them. I helped them understand the general gist of things when they didn’t understand and explained things that the English to Mongolian dictionary didn’t have. Sometimes it was also a matter of not being able to read the handwriting. At one point I found myself struggling to describe a chinchilla. A nocturnal poofy rat that rolls around in some weird dust, how do you explain that?