The Magic of Mongolia

Monday, widely agreed to be the worst day of the week, regardless of what hemisphere you happen to live in. My workweek started with frigid temperatures and a bruise on my shoulder from sleeping on a clasp of my sleeping bag all night. Not an inspiring beginning. Knowing myself as well as I do, I always set my alarm for 30 minutes earlier than I actually want to get out of bed because it takes me about that long to convince myself that the entire effort is worth it. Today, it took me closer to 40 minutes to reach the conclusion that I had to get up and go about attending to my responsibilities. Even then, it was a masterful effort of will to stumble out of my sleeping bag and dress for work. Because it is only the beginning of the cold season, the only fuel I currently have for my fire is dried dung (no, it doesn’t smell). Dung burns quickly and quite warmly but unless I’m willing to get up multiple times in the night – spoiler: I’m not! – the morning finds my fire dead and my ger cold. A sad but inevitable truth until my winter fuel comes in. Today, due to my hesitation to get out of bed, I didn’t even bother trying to make a fire and instead warmed myself with a cup of instant coffee. (If you missed my description of that particular experience, kindly refer to the previous post.) While not a particularly fulfilling breakfast, it served its main purpose of restoring some warmth and I was able to feel my fingers enough to serve Motzaa her breakfast and find clothes to wear. My initial plans for attire were foiled by the ever-disappearing shirt that apparently takes nightly vacations to Narnia so instead of the black slacks and black turtleneck I’d planned on wearing, I settled on a black dress and sweater. No, I did not intentionally greet Monday with mourning attire but it seems, retrospectively, fitting. With clothes on, make-up applied (because Heavens help me if I should show my face at school without it!) and hair tamed I was ready to go when my khashaa sisters, Nanda and Nanda, (I’m not joking. Their names are Nandantsetseg –which means “precious flower” - and Nandanchimeg – which means “precious ornament” - and they both go by Nanda as a short name!) came to my ger to walk with me to school. This has been a morning ritual since the first day of school and I would find it much more adorable if they didn’t insist upon leaving the khashaa 20-25 minutes before we have to be at the school which is, if we walk very, very slowly, a 10 minute walk from our khashaa. Now, arriving at work 10-15 minutes early sounds like a good thing, I know, but sometimes that extra 10 minutes is the difference between a cup of coffee and a cookie or nothing. Today, however, the coffee at least was accomplished.

Now, I have to admit that I made a very rookie mistake when leaving my ger this morning. I was cold, even in my sweater and I was considering wearing a coat on top of it but when Nanda² came to get me, they were wearing light track-suit jackets over their uniforms so I assumed that, once I got out in the sun, it would be fine. What I did not take into account was the ability of the teenager to ignore the cold in favor of fashion (or, more often in my case when I was that age, stubbornness).By the time I reached the school, my hands were numb and even sticking them under my arms wasn’t enough warm them. So, I spent the morning with fumbling fingers and I had no one to blame but myself. I am currently wearing gloves and I am not ashamed to admit it!

Because I don’t have a 1^st hour class on Mondays, I spent the time in the teacher’s room which somehow manages to be ten degrees colder than the rest of the school but, today, was at least warmer than the outside. 2^nd hour is dedicated to my 6^th grade class that I teach with my main CP, for the purpose of this blog I will call her Y. Now, Y knows (or, at least, I’ve tried to explain) that I am not supposed to solo-teach her classes. I’m here to supplement her lessons, help her improve her English and give her new ideas for engaging students. She also knows that if we don’t lesson plan together, she’s supposed to teach that class herself while I observe. Today, she apparently decided that she didn’t know either of those things and, after greeting the students and taking attendance, promptly handed me the book to the appropriate page and said, “Okay, teach.”

Those of you who know me well can probably imagine the look that wanted to be on my face. A look that might be translated as “B* says what?” However, I am pleased to say that I have managed to school my expressions enough that I was able to give her a blank face, look down at the page and, with a deep breath, proceed to teach the students family vocabulary and how to ask about family members. The lesson went well, the students participated admirably and Y sat in the back doing paperwork. At the conclusion of the lesson, Y gave the students their homework while I took discrete, calming breaths behind her back.

This is not the first time I have experienced this issue with a CP and I know it will not be the last but it was particularly frustrating today because I’d thought we’d made some progress last week. Apparently, I was mistaken and will have to try to find another way to explain myself. Not an easy endeavor since she speaks about as much English as I do Mongolian. Behold the joys of small soum living.

My next lesson for the day was with my other CP who shall be known as T. T is, primarily, a Russian teacher but she is teaching half of the 7^th and 9^th grade classes this year. Because she is not a trained English teacher, her English is all but non-existent which (if you’re keeping score at home) means that there really isn’t anyone in my soum that I can carry on a conversation with in English that involves questions with more complicated answers than “yes/no”. This is both a blessing and a curse. It means that my Mongolian’s going to be damn good by the time I’m out of here and it means that there is a lot of room for me to help my CP’s improve. I really am looking forward to that but right now, while we’re trying to figure out the ground rules and what my role here is going to be, it’s more than a little frustrating.

Speaking of frustrating. My 3^rd hour is with half of the 9^th grade class. This is the same 9^th grade class that, as a whole, had a 69% rate of failure on their first test. Being the benevolent teachers that we are, we rewrote the test and – after reviewing the tricky parts with the classes – gave them the opportunity to score better. That retake was supposed to be today for T’s students. However, because the woman at the school who controls the copy machine was AWOL, T spent 35 minutes of the 40-minute period trying to find her and copy the test. I was left with squirrelly 9^th graders who know that I don’t have enough Mongolian to properly police them. What they didn’t realize, however, was that scary “you will obey me” rage transcends language. With my very basic understanding of classroom commands, I had them sitting as far from each other as possible and reading their textbooks for at least half of the class. This minor success was, however, not enough to cool my annoyance at the exceptionally poor planning of the day. And this was not the first time that I have been left alone, suddenly, to deal with this particular class. But wait, the amusement was not yet over!

Immediately following 9^th grade is T’s half of 7^th grade. Now, I will be discussing how my lesson planning with T goes in a moment (and how lesson planning with Y goes later) but let me first detail how lesson planning should go. Ideally, when a Peace Corps Volunteer and their CP lesson plan, it is a collaborative effort where the CP lets the PCV know what the students need to know according to the Ministry of Education and the PCV helps the CP come up with interesting and engaging ways to deliver that information to students. Now, let me tell you how lesson planning with T goes: Put simply, it doesn’t. Once, exactly once, I lesson planned when T was in the room and that was the extent of our lesson planning together. Unfortunately, I have not yet gotten a chance to corner her and try to discuss the issue with her. Tomorrow, however, she won’t be able to avoid me in the afternoon so hopefully we can come to an understanding.

Anyway, in a move that’s become far too familiar to me, T greets the students, writes the date on the board and then hands the book to me and says, “Okay, teach.” My patience isn’t infinite. First, Y springs a surprise lesson on me, then T abandons me to the hyper class from Hades and now T is trying to spring a surprise lesson on me too?! And both the surprise lessons are on entirely new units that I haven’t even looked over since no one’s given me any of the English books?! The image of me throwing the book to the floor, uttering an incredulous curse and storming from the classroom with a shout of “Good day, Madam! I said, good day!” flashed through my mind and brought me no small amount of satisfaction. However, I settled with giving her a blank face, looking down at the book with a deep breath and then proceeding to teach the class about conjugating verbs in the present continuous tense. The lesson went fairly well, I got the students out of their seats and acting out the verbs with varying degrees of enthusiasm which is always fun (for me at least).

Then, morning classes were over and I scurried home before I had a chance to so much as glare at Y or T. Lunch consisted of a fried egg scramble with sausage and cucumber and a glass of orange juice which actually tasted like real orange juice instead of the tang-esque stuff that I’d been finding. Joy abounds! After lunch and a brief pause to check facebook and email, I went back to school to meet with Y. Now, lesson planning with Y always starts promisingly. We’re both in the same room, she lets me know what lesson we should be teaching and then my dreams of a cooperative lesson planning session are crushed when she hands pieces of paper to me and says, “Okay, write.” Today was no different. Our last class of the day is the 5^th grade class so I started with them and planned a quick lesson to teach them basic family vocabulary. Then, we moved on to tomorrow’s classes and I planned them as well. After I wrote each one, I would tell her what I wrote and what materials she needed to prepare and then I’d move on to the next. This is how lesson planning has gone with Y since day one and, honestly, I’m not even upset about it. At least not today. Today, I was just tired. So, I planned and she took the plans and then we went to the 5^th grade class and I taught what I planned with a little translation from Y and by the time we were done I just wanted to go home, have some tea and maybe watch Lord of the Rings because Middle Earth is my happy place.

However, Y had other plans. About a week ago, she asked me what my hobbies were and, among other things, I mentioned that I like to paint. Well, Mongolians have a deep love of the arts and she insisted on seeing pictures of my work and I obliged. Like many artists, I both love and abhor showing my work; the desire for praise is often overshadowed by the fear of disdain but Y was a good audience and she even asked me to paint a portrait of her and her baby. I agreed and today, she decided, was the day for me to take photos so I could paint her over the week. So, I went to her mother’s ger where her baby stays during the day and was immediately greeted by Y’s niece and three little cousins as well as Y’s mother and incredibly (and adorably) fat little baby. They sat me down, gave me milk tea and cookies and I took a few reference photos of Y and baby. Then, they gave me a bag of apples and oranges (and an avocado!) that Y’s husband had brought from UB and then Y gave me a smaller bag of dried fruit and Y’s mother told me that she’d be giving me horse meat soon because one of her sons was bringing some by and that I should stop by for dinner again soon and by the time I left that warm, full ger I couldn’t quite remember why I’d been so tired and cranky when I entered it. 

That, my friends, is the magic of Mongolia. More than the endless skies or the rolling landscapes or vibrant history. More than the gers and the camels and the reindeer and the sub-zero temperatures. The people of Mongolia, their hospitality, their friendliness and their utter lack of malice can do more to lift the spirit than a strong cup of coffee on a winter morning. Sometimes, my CPs drive me up the wall, sometimes I just want my khashaa sisters to leave me the hell alone, sometimes I want my coworkers to realize that giggling every time I speak to them in Mongolian is not good for morale! But then, someone gives me a cup of milk tea or asks me if I need help with anything or if I’d like to come visit their family in the countryside and all those things that annoy me suddenly seem so much less important. I feel so fortunate to be in a community that legitimately wants me here and is excited to have my help and information. Yes, it’s going to be a difficult road and the language barrier is going to be one hell of a roadblock but even after the general frustration of the day I was able to return to my cold ger with a bag of fruit in hand and think, “Hey, it could be worse and I can make it even better.”

Each Day is Deserving of Eloquence

I’ve been struggling with that to write in this blog (obviously!) and I’ve recently realized that my main problem stems from the fact that I’ve been normalizing my experiences thus far. I haven’t written a lot partially because I’ve been busy, partially because I haven’t had internet (and by the time I got to the web all my previously prepared blogs seemed irrelevant) but mostly because I haven’t really allowed myself to consider my day-to-day extraordinary enough to write about. Take today for example; I got out of bed around 9, after a night of storms and a very loud cat made for poor sleeping conditions. Then I had some instant coffee and a cookie for breakfast, fed the very loud cat, got online for a bit, had lunch with my khashaa family and then returned home to wash my clothes. Nothing particularly interesting in that day, at least not when told that way, and that’s pretty much the way I’ve been telling everyday I’ve been here; with a few, momentary, exceptions. When I realized this, about half an hour ago, I very nearly smacked myself. I’m a writer, damn it! If I had the perseverance, I’d make a career out of turning the mundane into the fantastic and being a Peace Corps volunteer in any country is certainly not mundane! So, let me try again to describe a simple Sunday as a Peace Corps volunteer in Mongolia.

The wind picked up sometime after sunset. I couldn’t tell you exactly when but with the wind came the chill and I was suddenly very glad that my Counter Part had forgotten to call me to go out with her. She’d said something about celebrating the oldest man and woman in the soum at the Culture Center. It might have been fun, Mongolian celebrations are usually worth going to but I really didn’t love the idea of eating more meat and drinking more fermented mares milk so I was more than content to stay home and re-watch the new Star Trek movies. I blame Benedict Cumberbatch for my failure to notice the growing wind. You can’t honestly expect a person to notice something as blasé as a windstorm with his voice echoing through your ger. By the time Into Darkness ended, I was ready for bed and – after refilling Motzaa’s water – snuggled down into my sleeping bag, covered that with my camel blanket and was ready to drift off into the arms of Morpheus. Unfortunately, in the sudden absence of Mr. Cumberbatch’s voice, it was impossible to ignore the tempest playing outside.

The metal stovepipe that funnels smoke from my ger banged against the window at random intervals with a metallic clang that inspired a small headache just behind my forehead. That, combined with the constant wooden clapping of one of the loose doors in the yard and the thwapping of my canvas walls, made for a percussion section that would be the pride of any demonic band. Above everything was the blustering whistle of the wind itself that blew with such a vengeance that I can only assume I’d insulted its mother sometime in the recent past.

With my patience quickly vanishing, I buried myself deeper into my sleeping bag and piled my Game of Thrones fleece around my head. (Forgetting that Westeros is not exactly a place to go for assistance and that winter is – indeed - coming!) As if on cue, my cat – clearly a Lannister, judging by her roar – started yowling and wandering around the foot of the bed. Why she decided to spend half the night crying some injustice to the stars, I don’t know but it took all of my patience not to kick her (literally) out of my bed and, perhaps, out of the ger!

I’m not sure when I finally fell asleep. Motzaa eventually calmed down after I spent a good half an hour petting her; sadly, I can’t say the same for the wind but I haven’t yet figured out how one would go about petting a windstorm so I guess that’s at least partially my fault. Once I fell asleep, I slept well enough with only a brief interruption at 3AM when Motzaa got her tie-down tangled around the bedpost. (Yes, I have a cat on a tie-down. It’s just until I winterize my ger and eliminate her escape routes. The neighborhood dogs would like nothing more than a Motzaa midnight snack!)

The morning came too early, as it usually does. The windows at the top of my ger guarantee that I see the sun sooner than I ever want to but, since it’s the weekend, I didn’t immediately get out of my warm cocoon. In fact, had it been a workday, I would have been in trouble. What had been a cool wind in the evening had turned downright cold overnight and when I woke, I could see my breath as a mist in front of me! It would have taken more willpower than I usually have in the morning to spring out of bed and prepare for school. Of course, in the months to come, my willpower will be put to quite a test but for today, I managed to happily avoid that trial for at least awhile longer.

When I began to hear people moving around the yard at 9, I finally dragged myself out of bed and pulled a jacket over my pajamas to make my morning trek to the outhouse. The wind immediately accosted me and had it not been for my very full bladder, I would have gone back inside and stayed there for the rest of the day. However, bodily functions won out and I scurried to the outhouse, did my business as quickly as possible and scurried back inside. Upon my return, Motzaa greeted me with her usual thunderous demand for breakfast and, after setting water to boil, I went about slicing pieces of mutton for her to eat. When I first arrived in Deren, the supervisor of my school graciously provided me with a sheep leg (which she then butchered in my ger for me) and because I don’t particularly like meat that seep leg has been Motzaa’s main source of sustenance. She hasn’t complained and neither have I.

After preparing Motzaa’s breakfast I turned to my own hunger and selected a particularly tasty looking cookie from the cookie bag before taking my one mug and filling it with that astounding blend of instant coffee, powdered milk and sugar that has become the closest I can get to a decent caffeine kick in the morning. If you haven’t experienced the joy of 3-in-1 instant coffee packets, I will try to explain.

First, you open the little foil pack and pour the contents into your cup. You find yourself staring down at a small pile of brown and white crystals that couldn’t possibly grow up to be a decent cup of coffee and feel a small twinge of despair. However, in the Gobi desert choices are limited so you take a deep breath and pour boiling water into the cup. You watch with astonishment at the clear liquid turns a gentle brown that looks almost identical to a cup of freshly ground coffee brewed to perfection then mixed with just a bit of cream. Your soul soars! No matter how many times this farce is played out you allow the tiniest glimmer of hope that today will be different. That today, it will actually taste just as it looks. With trembling hands, you raise the mug, inhaling the pleasant coffee-like aroma steaming toward you like an old friend. You blow gently, causing ripples to chase each other across the surface of the liquid before you lower your lips to the rim of the mug and take the smallest, most hesitant sip. And in that moment, you know why hope is double edged blade. It isn’t that the liquid is bad. It’s serviceable as a drink, sweet in a way that you would find pleasing if you could only stop thinking of it as coffee. But it claims to be coffee on the packet. It lies to you in vibrant letters every morning and like a fool, you believe it. You begin to wonder if this is what coffee is supposed to taste like, if your mind has somehow betrayed you and imagined some magical flavor that doesn’t actually exist on this earth. However, like the amputee who still feels their missing limb, you can feel the phantom endorphins shooting through your mind and you know that true coffee still exists, somewhere out there. It’s waiting for you and someday you will return to it. But not today. Not this morning. So you sip your liquid imitation and you eat your cookie and you endure. Because you are patient, you can wait.

Anyway, instant coffee in hand, I plugged my modem into my computer and – after my usual ritual of connecting and disconnecting a few times to get it to behave – checked facebook and my email and was in the process of checking pintrest when one of my little khashaa sisters, Naraa, knocked on my door and invited me over to the house for tea. At least, that was the gist of what she said. At five years old, she hasn’t quite grasped the concept that the clearly adult woman living in her yard doesn’t know Mongolian as well as she does. So, she rambles through words that I’ve hardly heard before, let alone recognize enough to understand, and looks at me with the token impatience of a child until I respond one way or the other. Fortunately, today I recognized the words for “my house” and “drink tea” so I nodded, put my jacket and shoes on and walked hand-in-hand with her the ten feet to her house.

As it turns out, “drink tea” actually meant have some milk-tea with rice and meat in it! Oh, and here’s a couple ribs (of what I suspect was goat meat) and eat them too. Now, I love Mongolians and I love that my khashaa family is so concerned with my wellbeing that they insist upon feeding me at every given opportunity but when a person says, “Come have tea!” I imagine a nice cup of black or green tea and maybe some biscuits. Since coming to Mongolia, I have added milk-tea to the list of acceptable teas to drink but I have not (and will not, damn it!) add milk-tea soup and goat ribs to the proper teatime menu! There are some things that a girl just has to put her foot down on. That being said, if the Peace Corps has taught me nothing else, it has certainly taught me to “roll with it” so I drank my milk-tea soup and ate my goat ribs and said, “thanks very much!”

After my impromptu lunch (because, again, SO not teatime!) I returned to my ger to wash my clothes. Now, clothes washing can be a bit of an adventure in Mongolia and I knew from experience that sometimes pants get a little squirrely when they’re being washed. So, I decided that I’d light a fire to keep me warm in the eventuality that my pants splashed all over me. Of course, I had to clean the ashes out of my stove first because I’d been neglecting to do so. The first part, actually shoveling the ashes into the bin so I could take them outside, was easy. The second part, transporting said ashes to their proper trashcan outside, was not so easy. You see, the wind was still in full swing and I stepped out of my ger and promptly got a face full of ash. The wind, obviously finding this hilarious, decided to blow harder and I continued to get a fine stream of ash blown on me as I walked through the yard to dispose of my burden. I think I still have ash in my hair. Teach me to be lazy and not empty my stove on a regular basis.

With that debacle out of the way, I quickly built my fire and set about to washing my clothes. As I’d anticipated, my black slacks got squirrelly and I ended up with one knee of my leggings wet but other than that, clothes washing was a success and they are, even now, hanging up to dry. However, I did use the last of my laundry soap today so I’ll need to remember to buy more. Normally a minor inconvenience but seeing as how difficult it’s been to find things in my soum recently, I am a bit nervous. The other day, I had to go to almost every store here to find bread and I couldn’t find eggs at all. The trials of small town life.

After washing my clothes, I sat down at my computer once more and realized that I’d been a terrible blogger and then had my epiphany as to why I’d been so terrible. I really am ashamed, I want to keep you updated as much as possible on my life. What is becoming commonplace to me – the joys of instant coffee and life in a ger – must still seem strange to many of you. Fortunately, I have a plan to write about every day of this coming week much as I wrote about today. Maybe that will help convince me to write more frequently. We’ll see. For now, I have nothing else to say. This evening, I have been invited to my khashaa family’s for dinner so I might add more about that later. Spoiler: meat will be involved.