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.
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