Tsagaan Sar is the closest thing Mongolia has to Christmas. The name means “white moon” or “white month,” and although it officially lasts only three days, it is celebrated for about a month. Because it is a celebration of the lunar new year, the dates change every year based on the cycles of the moon. Prior to a few generations ago, all Mongolians celebrated their birthdays during Tsagaan Sar. My neighbor tells me that his parents never knew the month and day of their birthday; they only knew the year, and they celebrated their birthdays, along with the birthdays of all their family members, during Tsagaan Sar.

Tsagaan Sar is the biggest spending holiday in Mongolia. Prior to the first day of the holiday, Mongolians crowd into the banks to take out money (from their savings accounts or, more likely, from loans) to pay for the holiday. Families prepare for the holiday by buying large quantities of food. In my province, the typical family makes 3,000 small mutton dumplings and freezes them so they will be ready whenever guests come over. Families also make side dishes and buy condiments and drinks (mainly milk tea and vodka) to accompany the dumplings. The centerpiece of the Tsagaan Sar table is a large round stack of ovular pieces of fried donut-like bread. The stack of bread is topped with a very large cookie, which is itself topped with candies and sugar cubes. This year, a couple of weeks before the start of the holiday, my town set up a temporary Tsagaan Sar market (somewhat like the Christmas markets in Germany), at which townsfolk could purchase Tsagaan Sar supplies and gifts. At one store, I asked for a liter of yogurt. The shopkeeper measured the yogurt, poured it into a plastic grocery bag, and then tied the grocery bag and gave it to me. It was pretty inconvenient to carry that home.

During the holiday, Mongolians dress up in traditional costume and visit their friends and relatives. Visitors often bring ceremonial scarves called hataks, which they use for the formal Tsagaan Sar greetings. Visitors greet the family members in order from eldest to youngest. Both parties outstretch their forearms, and the placement of the arms depends on the relative ages of the participants. With elders, the greeting involves touching both cheeks, almost like the way some Europeans kiss on both cheeks, but there’s no kissing. Visitors stay for at least an hour, eating massive amounts of food and drinking alcohol. Often they play cards and sing traditional songs. Sometimes they watch TV together. At the end of the visit, the host gives gifts (usually money in a decorative envelope) to the visitors.

I didn’t make any visits during the three official days of the holiday, but I’ve made four visits since then. Because I’m a vegetarian, I feel guilty just showing up to someone’s house, which is the local custom for Tsagaan Sar visits (in fact, visits at any time of year are usually spontaneous). When I come over, the host can’t simply pull out some frozen mutton dumplings; he or she has to make a special meal for me, and I hate the feeling of putting someone out. Nevertheless, I enjoyed my visits and had some good food. And, more importantly, I avoided getting sick from alcohol consumption on any of my visits.

Photo Album

Yes, it’s cold in Mongolia, but I can’t say I wasn’t warned before I came here. Every Peace Corps blog and every article on Mongolia mentioned the punishing winters, but this year’s winter was much worse than normal. It was a dzud, an especially long and cold winter that occurs once every ten years or so. Beyond being inconvenient and annoying, a dzud is a major threat to the Mongolian economy, which relies heavily on livestock herding. Mongolians generally don’t shelter or feed their livestock; at most, they just tie blankets to the backs of their cows. Thus a dzud results in devastating damage to the country’s livestock and hence the economy. This article from PBS covers this year’s dzud and the resulting consequences:

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/asia/jan-june10/mongolia_03-02.html

Notwithstanding the cold temperatures and the unusual amount of snow, I’ve weathered the winter pretty comfortably for the most part. My only other experience of harsh winters was the winters in Chicago, which I found soul-crushingly depressing. But Mongolian winters are much different. The worst part of the Chicago winters for me was the nearly incessant grayness, but that’s not a problem here in Mongolia. Even in the dead of winter, the sun shines almost every day. It’s made the transition from Florida much easier for me. And beyond the amount of sunshine, there’s another important mollifying factor: the fact that I live in a house with a radiator. The radiator keeps the temperature in the house from dipping below freezing, so that I don’t have to sleep with my electronics in the sleeping bag, but it’s rarely a totally comfortable temperature in my house. Usually I wear a coat, long underwear, and woolen socks inside my house. Sometimes, I light a fire in the stove in my living room (the school provides me with firewood when I ask for it).

During a typical winter, the weather would be getting warmer at this point. Mongolians track the coldest segment of the winter through something called the nine nines—nine groups of nine days, each of which is associated with a milestone:

The first group of nine days: Homemade vodka will freeze.

The second group: High content vodka will freeze.

The third group: A three-year-old cow’s horn will freeze.

The fourth group: A four-year-old cow’s horn will freeze.

The fifth group: Rice left to set will not freeze.

The sixth group: The surface of the road will appear.

The seventh group: The brown of the small hilltops will appear.

The eighth group: The ground will become moist and damp.

The ninth group: The days will become warm again.

The nine nines culminate in Tsagaan Sar, Mongolia’s biggest holiday. This year, the nines started on December 22nd, and Tsagaan Sar took place February 13th, 14th, and 15th. However, this year the temperatures have not improved dramatically since Tsagaan Sar as one would typically expect. In fact, this week the temperatures hovered around negative 30 Fahrenheit for a couple of nights, and there was a snowstorm last Sunday. This morning, the temperature as I went to the outhouse was probably negative 20, and there was a freezing wind. My co-workers tell me it should start getting much warmer in the next few weeks, and I sincerely hope they’re right.

Smile.

It’s been two months since I finished Pre-Service Training (PST), and I’m feeling grateful—grateful, first of all, to be done with PST and to have moved on to my permanent site but also immensely grateful for the experiences, both good and bad, I had during PST. I have many fond memories from this summer—memories of language classes beside the river, memories of nights spent dancing at New Mongolia, and above all memories of spending time with the friends I made over the summer. But the experience wasn’t without its challenges. In fact, the reigning impression in my mind from PST is of a catharsis, both in the familiar sense of an emotional purging and in the more esoteric sense (described and defended by Martha Nussbaum in “Interlude 2” of The Fragility of Goodness) of an intellectual clarification. And it’s this clarification for which I’m most grateful. I said to myself at the beginning of my service that, if I don’t emerge from this experience with new attitudes and habits, I will not have taken sufficient advantage of the opportunity I’ve been given. But such changes are always accompanied by a certain amount of discomfort, and, in the moment, it’s often difficult to take the proper tack of gratitude. That’s why I’m taking time now to reflect upon the difficulties and discomforts, to distill what I’ve learned from them, to appreciate them, and to be grateful for them.

Be patient.

No one wants to feel like an inferior product. For those who invest much of their pride in their country, it can undermine their sense of worth to learn about a country that exceeds their own in many respects. For those who invest their pride in personal ability, it can be demoralizing to find that they’re less capable in a particular environment than most others and that, under a different system of values, the qualities they’ve so sedulously cultivated in themselves aren’t even noticed, let alone revered. The experience of being in the Peace Corps is full of challenges to self-esteem, both for the PCV and for the host country nationals with whom the PCV associates, and my experience is no exception. Before I left for Mongolia, I had anticipated that there would be many difficulties, including the emotional difficulties of living in a foreign culture and being miles away from home, but the actual emotional and psychological challenges were mostly outside the ambit of my anticipations.

It’s perhaps especially hard for older volunteers who have settled personalities and who have lived successfully and comfortably on their own back in America. In my American life I felt like I had reached the summit of my capability and maturity. I had navigated the complexities of buying and selling a home; I had worked in a high-pressure corporate environment for several years; I had become the adult that, as a child, I never believed I would someday be. But during PST I became a child once more. I was without a car and cell phone, which severely limited my ability to go anywhere on my own, especially at night. I was incapable of expressing myself articulately with anyone but my fellow Americans. And I had to learn how to live on my own all over again, an experience that was, at times, intensely frustrating and humbling.

Moreover, I was dealing with something of a personality crisis during PST. I acutely felt the weight of my responsibilities as a development worker and a representative of America. And I felt like my American personality—which relies for its charms on droll humor and erudition, neither of which translate very well—is not well-suited to the task I’ve been given. I felt like, and I still feel like, I need to renovate my personality, primarily to be more outgoing and buoyant. But I’m thirty years old, and my habits are deeply ensconced. At nights, after a long day of training, I would want nothing more than to eat dinner and retreat into my room to read, but I should have been conversing with my host family, learning Mongolian from them, and teaching them about American culture. Even today, when I walk through the streets of my city and am bombarded with the never-ending hailstorm of hellos from Mongolian schoolchildren, I often find it difficult to muster an attitude of jocular affability; I’m too engrossed in my own thoughts, which are rarely jocular, to make a momentary show of warmth and good humor.

At the end of training, I found out that my closest Mongolian friend had described me as “stubborn and self-centered.” I was thunderstruck by this revelation, not only because my friend had given me no indication of dissatisfaction, but also because I was stunned that someone would choose those two words to describe me. While it’s true that I’m both of those things to some extent, perhaps even more so than the average American, I sincerely hope that that’s not the outstanding impression others have of my personality. I don’t think I act any differently in Mongolia than I do in America; if anything, I’m perhaps slightly more subdued. But it appears that my American personality is slightly off-putting to Mongolians. Rather than taking umbrage at my friend’s comments, I take—and can’t do anything but take—these comments as valuable feedback. In order for me to be successful during my two years here, I must make difficult changes to my attitude and demeanor.

Forgive and forget.

When I read the Divine Comedy several years ago, I memorized only one line, and, strangely, it wasn’t one of Dante’s lapidary verses; it was a truncated version of the thirty-first Psalm from the Vulgate (Psalms thirty-two in the KJV), which is later quoted in Romans 4: beati quorum tecta sunt peccata. The full English text is “Blessed is he whose transgressions are forgiven, whose sins are covered.” I can’t fully explain why that line struck me so powerfully. Perhaps it had to do with my mood at the time, or it may have had to do with the location of the passage in the text. But the passage comes back to me sometimes, and it always carries with it a breath of tranquility. It seems to me to encapsulate, in a pithy five-word formulation, the single most appealing aspect of Christianity—the possibility of a God who is infinitely generous and forgiving, a God who washes away our sins and gives us the possibility of starting over with a clean conscience. There’s something inexorably attractive in the prospect of unconditional forgiveness, even to a committed atheist like me.

Yet the vision of the Christian God as a fountain of infinite forgiveness and mercy competes with another prominent vision: God as the punisher of sins and the dispenser of justice. In Matthew 5:22, Jesus tells us that “anyone who is angry with his brother will be subject to judgment. Again, anyone who says to his brother, 'Raca,' is answerable to the Sanhedrin. But anyone who says, 'You fool!' will be in danger of the fire of hell.” This aspect of Jesus seems almost incompatible with the more popular image of a benign and pacific Christ, yet this dichotomy is essential to Jesus’ character and, more broadly, to the success of Christianity in history. Christianity offers the seductive promise of forgiveness, but in order to be effective as a practical guide to private life and public governance, it must also encourage an environment in which there are strict and sometimes severe consequences for misdeeds. Forgiveness and mercy are beautiful, but without punishment, society fails. There must be a balance between strict enforcement and occasional mercy. The difficult question—indeed, one of the most difficult questions in our daily lives—is when to punish and when to forgive.

Dickens addresses this problem, although not entirely satisfactorily, through the character of Harold Skimpole in Bleak House. The main characters of Bleak House, Esther Summerson and her guardian, John Jarndyce, are impossibly meek and ingenuous beings whose first impulse in every situation is to forgive, either because they pity the mistaken perception of the offender or because their exaggerated humility prevents them from passing judgment on the actions of others. Harold Skimpole is an out-of-work actor who claims to have the mentality of a child and therefore to have no clear ideas of money and other adult matters. Even so, he manages to run up constant debts which his involuntary benefactor, Mr. Jarndyce (or any other wealthy, credulous man nearby), dutifully pays. Both Esther and Mr. Jarndyce continue to be extraordinarily generous to Mr. Skimpole until his recklessness endangers their common friend. Only then does Esther start to perceive Mr. Skimpole’s claims of childishness as a disingenuous ploy, but Dickens mostly loses interest in Mr. Skimpole after that. Several chapters before the end, Esther tells us that she never saw Skimpole again, but she heard that he wrote a popular memoir in which he calls Mr. Jarndyce selfish. Instead of pointing out that Esther and Mr. Jarndyce’s celerity of forgiveness and their indulgence of Mr. Skimpole early on directly caused the later problems, Dickens seems to have forgotten the consequences of their behavior, and he leaves the reader with the impression that their attitudes, which appear not to have changed by the end of the book, are laudable and ideal.

I struggled during PST, and continue to struggle, with the problem of finding the right balance of forgiveness and judgment. In fact, I’m just the opposite of Dickens’ saintly characters: my first impulse in most cases is to judge harshly or distrust the motives of others rather than to forgive. The more orderly my life has become and the harder I work to improve myself, the harder it is for me to forgive those who seem not to be trying as hard. Moreover, I have a troubling and irrational habit of forgetting all the times I have benefitted from the forgiveness and generosity of others in the past. As a Peace Corps Volunteer—someone who has travelled halfway around the world to help others—I feel like I should be more like Esther and Mr. Jarndyce, but I can only think of the way their attitudes and behavior led to their being taken advantage of and to their enabling of an incorrigible reprobate.

Be a better person.

At one point during PST, I turned to the Bible for guidance (yes, I have a copy of the Bible on my computer, but don’t jump to any conclusions). I was angry and frustrated about something, and I felt that my attitude was inappropriate to my position as a Peace Corps Volunteer. I was looking for an ideal, a template of the kind of person I should be and a justification for that template, so I looked to the beatitudes from the Sermon on the Mount. What I found there, however, was only disappointment. Not only do the beatitudes fail to provide a comprehensive picture of what a good person should be, but the justifications given presuppose a belief in heaven and hell, which makes them unconvincing and unhelpful to anyone who doesn’t believe in heaven or hell.

I found a much more satisfying template in the character of Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch. Dorothea is much like Esther and Mr. Jarndyce in that her intentions are unfailingly and unimpeachably noble. Her first reaction is always to sympathize with others and to forgive; her only problem is her lack of access to ways of channeling her love for others into effective help. Over the course of the novel, though, she manages to find some outlets for her altruistic inclinations. At one point, she consoles the scorned Mr. Lydgate, and he feels the transcendent power of her benevolence. Eliot superbly captures his feelings at that moment:

The presence of a noble nature, generous in its wishes, ardent in its charity, changes the lights for us: we begin to see things again in their larger, quieter masses, and to believe that we too can be seen and judged in the wholeness of our character.

This vision of the virtuous person is only a silhouette: the “noble nature” is defined by its effect on another person. But it is nevertheless a very beautifully and powerfully illuminated silhouette. The last phrase seems to offer a valuable guideline to the problem of knowing when to forgive: the decision must be made within the context of a broad view of the offender’s character, not just in the context of the offense. This advice, of course, is only useful insofar as one is familiar with the offender’s character. In the case of an offense performed by a stranger, we must make assumptions about the offender’s character. Dorothea Brooke fills out the character of the individual with visions of goodness and vulnerability; I tend to fill in the missing parts with visions of self-interest and scheming. Despite my appreciation for the nobility of Dorothea’s sentiments, I may only have it in me to want to be such a noble nature; I’m not sure I have it in me actually to be one.

See and judge others in the wholeness of their character.

On the flight to Mongolia, I read Halldor Laxness’ World Light, in which I found the following passage:

Human beings, in point of fact, are lonely by nature, and one should feel sorry for them and love them and mourn with them. It is certain that people would understand one another better and love one another more if they would admit to one another how lonely they were, how sad they were in their tormented, anxious longings and feeble hopes.

I try my best to remember these words as I judge the actions of others. And I try to remind myself how much our interactions with others resemble a masquerade ball, in which we rarely, if ever, glimpse another person’s genuine and complete nature behind the mask of their insecurities. Given our imperfect and obscured perception of others, we can only imagine that others are a lot like ourselves, and we would do best to remember Hermann Hesse’s words about the special, and almost mystical, nature of each individual we meet:

[E]very man is more than just himself; he also represent the unique, the very special and always significant and remarkable point at which the world’s phenomena intersect, only once in this way and never again.

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MUSIC and FADE IN

Helicopter shot heading towards the stupas on the hill. Passing over the stupas as the music swells.

CUT TO: People walking across the bridge in the center of town. Another helicopter shot moving along the Chigistei River towards Uliastay. Static shot of the Rich Red Mountain. The Three Brothers rock formation. The bustle at midday in the central market with merchants hawking wares from temporary stands. The theater with people passing by in front. Schoolgirls walking down Main Street arm in arm. During this montage,

NARRATOR

This is Uliastay, the capital of Zavkhan Aimag and the gem of Western Mongolia. Situated near the meeting of the Chigistei and Bogd Rivers, Uliastay lies in a scenic valley. The name “Uliastay” means “with aspen trees,” and these trees can be found throughout the city and in the surrounding countryside. With a population of around 15,000, Uliastay is the largest city in Zavkhan and for hundreds of kilometers in every direction.

MONTAGE CONTINUING: Aspen trees with yellow leaves rustling in the wind. Gers in the countryside on the edge of town. A man riding his horse through the streets of Uliastay. A small child in a del eating aruul. The central square in front of the party headquarters. Overhead shot of the Zavkhan Central Hospital.

NARRATOR (cont.)

Although Zavkhan is the coldest region in Mongolia, Uliastay’s weather is generally mild and pleasant in the summer and early fall. Local residents enjoy fishing in the nearby rivers and camping in the surrounding countryside. There is an airport, hospital, and hotel, and tourists can take horse riding trips in the area. Zavkhan and Uliastay are centers of Tibetan Buddhism in Mongolia because of the many holy places in the area. This spiritual devotion is reflected in Uliastay by the stupas on a hill in the center of town. The stupas are shrines that honor famous Buddhist teachers from Zavkhan.

HELICOPTER SHOT of the stupas during the previous narration.

MONTAGE CONTINUING: Views of: Market stalls, Main Street, the theater, the library.

NARRATOR (cont.)

In the center of Uliastay, there is a shopping district centered around a three-story market building filled with small merchants. Surrounding the large market are several stores, temporary stalls, small eating places, and a supermarket. Main Street runs through the central district and is home to several government offices, a theater, and a library.

MONTAGE CONTINUING: Helicopter shot running along Main Street and along towards the rivers then up to the mountains, turning around and looking back at the city from a distance.

NARRATOR (cont.)

These images offer only a hint of the many charms of Uliastay; the best way to experience it is to come and to see it in person. The people of Uliastay are welcoming and friendly and will be happy to accommodate you during your stay. Come to Uliastay and find out why this city is the gem of Western Mongolia.

FADE OUT

Final Center Days

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There’s a pleasing symmetry in the design of Pre-Service Training (PST). We start by living together in Zuunmod for a week; then we radiate outwards in small groups to our several training sites; and in the end, we reconverge in Zuunmod for Final Center Days, a five day wrap-up culminating in our official swearing in as Peace Corps Volunteers. Returning to Zuunmod and revisiting the scenes of our first experiences in the country provided a tangible measure of our progress over the summer: Where at first we weren’t able even to go out to restaurants by ourselves, we could now go back to those same restaurants and converse with the staff. We felt comfortable shopping in the stores that we wouldn’t dare enter by ourselves during our first stay in Zuunmod, and we could navigate the city without the help of an escort. There was also an emotional satisfaction in the opportunity to return to our beginnings and reunite with old friends.

Just before leaving our training sites, all trainees took an orally-administered language test, and one of the first items of business during Final Center Days was to receive the results of that test. Each trainee received a rating on a graduated scale that ranges from Novice-Low to Intermediate-High. Most trainees received the requisite Novice-High rating; about ten of us received Intermediate-Low ratings; and the rest will work with tutors at their site to ensure their continuing progress in Mongolian language skills. In fact, all PCVs in Mongolia have the option of continuing their language lessons once they arrive at site. The Peace Corps reimburses us for the hiring of a Mongolian language tutor. I plan to take advantage of this opportunity myself but haven’t yet found a tutor.

In the minds of all the trainees, the most important event during Final Center Days was Site Placement, the ceremony during which we learn where we’ll be living and working for the next two years. For this year’s ceremony, there was a large canvas map of Mongolia spread out on the floor of the school gym. As each trainee’s name and site was announced, the trainee moved to his place on the map and stood there until the other trainee names and sites had been announced. Because of the large size of our group, which had only lost three members during PST, the announcements were divided into three groups. I was part of the first group, so my suspense was relieved fairly early. But I soon learned that there is an even greater suspense in knowing the city where you’ll live and having a notebook full of information about your city, employer and living arrangements and yet having to wait several more days before being able to see them for yourself.

I was brought here as a secondary school teacher, but I was pleasantly surprised—because I prefer to work with older students—to learn that my position is at a university. I was also pleased to learn that this university is a business school. Given my background in corporate America, I feel especially well equipped to teach business English and American business etiquette. For the next two years, I’ll be working for the Zavkhan branch of the Mongolian National University. I’m responsible for co-teaching beginner and intermediate English classes as well as two classes a week of business English. I also teach English to my fellow teachers at the school, who have been divided into beginner, intermediate, and advanced levels. My remaining responsibilities include running the school’s English Club, helping to improve curriculum and English teaching methodology, and working to establish a partnership between my school and an American university. In addition to my work at the school, I have ten hours a week set aside to work on projects in the community. Since I’ve arrived at site, I’ve already found some activities to fill this time: I teach English classes two nights a week for a Korean NGO; I work with my fellow PCVs in the area to support all the secondary schools in Zavkhan through a newsletter and periodic teaching seminars; and starting next month, I’ll be teaching weekly English classes for all the secondary school English teachers in Uliastay, the city I live in and the capital of Zavkhan province.

The day after Site Placement, another major milestone occurred: we were introduced to our bosses in a rather awkward ceremony, the awkwardness being partly the natural result of meeting our bosses for the first time and even more so the result of the way in which the announcements are made. Each site was announced in Mongolian, and both the boss and PCV were supposed to join each other in the front of the gym. But since most of us weren’t yet to the point where we could understand Mongolian spoken at normal speed, the announcements had to be made several times before the PCV realized that he or she was being called on, and on a couple of occasions, the wrong PCV went to the front.

My boss is a genial, soft-spoken, and professional-looking man whose English is about as good as my Mongolian. After our first meeting, we had several opportunities to get better acquainted and talk about work. I’m the third Peace Corps Volunteer in this post, although there was no volunteer in the post last year. Because of his previous experience working with the Peace Corps, my boss had a better developed work plan for me than most other bosses had for their volunteers. He had prepared a detailed work plan complete with the number of hours allotted to each activity. Although we’ve already made several changes to that initial work plan, it was very comforting, in those initial conversations, to see the school’s expectations so clearly stated.

Swearing In

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At the end of Final Center Days, there was a Swearing In Ceremony at the theater in Zuunmod. The ceremony was filmed for Mongolian TV (I’m told that highlights appeared on the news later that night), and Mongolia’s Minister of Foreign Affairs was in attendance. In addition to speeches by the Peace Corps Country Director, the US Ambassador to Mongolia, and others, trainees from each of the sites delivered prepared speeches in Mongolian. The second half of the ceremony was essentially a trainee talent show. Throughout PST several trainees had been rehearsing acts to perform during the ceremony. Some chose to sing traditional Mongolian songs, and there were several groups doing traditional Mongolian dancing. The ceremony closed with all the newly sworn-in PCVs singing a nationalistic Mongolian song which we had learned during PST.

Afterwards, there was a brief reception at a nearby children’s center, but the new PCVs had little time to celebrate. We were leaving for the capital that afternoon, so we had to get back to our dorm, change clothes, and finish packing. Only a few hours after swearing in, we were loading our things into trucks and buses and heading for the capital to stay at the Mongolian National University’s international student dorm until we could catch the next available transport to our sites. We also had to go to the Peace Corps-Mongolia headquarters to pick up things like cell phones, sleeping bags, space heaters, and extra medical supplies.

I spent only one night in the capital, since my flight to Zavkhan left the next day. That night I ate dinner at a surprisingly good, and surprisingly expensive, Indian restaurant. Later, a bunch of PCVs went dancing and drinking at a club called Face. The next day, I did some final shopping in the capital and picked up a book of Seamus Heaney’s poetry from the Peace Corps library. At around three o’clock, my boss picked me up from the dorm and took me to the airport. I was on the same flight with two other PCVs and their bosses. There was also a group of New Zealanders heading to Zavkhan for a horse riding trip. Through an arrangement with the airline, we were allowed to carry up to seventy-five kilograms of luggage, much more than the standard limit, on the plane with us. I was just under the limit with seventy-three kilograms of luggage, some of it precariously duct-taped together for the flight.

Arrival at Site

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The flight from UB to Uliastay is only two hours, but the airport is about thirty kilometers from the city, so my flight was followed by a long and bumpy ride in an SUV. A new road is being built between the airport and town, but instead of driving along the finished portions of the road, our driver forged his own path through the rocks and grass. Despite the roughness of the roads, the ride was one of the most beautiful and memorable car rides of my life. We drove through a rugged, verdant valley with infrequent and unobtrusive signs of human habitation; the mountains were rouged with the soft hues of sunset; and fresh autumn air poured into the car through the open windows. This was my first glimpse of the countryside surrounding Uliastay, and I hope to see much more of it during my two years here.

Upon arriving in town, I had only a few moments to set down my things in my new house before my boss shuffled me off to dinner at the Fish Eye Café, the restaurant generally regarded as Uliastay’s finest. Because of the lack of vegetarian options on the menu, I ended up eating a bowl of milk and rice with a layer of vegetable oil floating atop the milk. Afterwards, my boss and I loitered on the dark street outside the restaurant as we waited for a ride home. While we were waiting, my boss took me across the street to the public library to show me the bust of a famous Mongolian poet, and he read me the lines of poetry engraved on the pedestal of the bust. It was a short excerpt from a panegyric extolling the Mongolian sky, and after my first glimpses of the scenery of Zavkhan earlier that evening, I felt closer to understanding the power of such a simple tribute to Mongolia’s natural environment.

The next day my boss came to pick me up early, and the school’s cashier drove us into town to do some shopping. My house was already almost fully furnished by the school, so I had very little shopping to do, but I looked forward to the chance to get acquainted with Uliastay’s central shopping area. The shopping district is faintly reminiscent of a Silk Road bazaar. At its center is a three-story market containing a warren of small, ill-lit shops peddling everything from school supplies to clothes. In front of the market lies a group of metal shipping containers housing small shops. They’re arranged in rows so that there are two alleyways between them. Surrounding them are several smaller merchants working out of temporary stalls. Some of them have tables and canvas roofs to cover their wares; others have nothing more than a chair and some goods laid out on wooden crates; still others have nothing but their goods; and a few merchants sell fruits and vegetables out of the back of their cars. Around this area of stalls and on either side of the three-story market there are several more buildings containing bigger shops and small cafes.

After our shopping excursion, my boss, the school cashier, and I went up to the top of the hill at the center of town to see the stupas for which Uliastay is famous. Stupas are Buddhist shrines, and these particular stupas honor famous Buddhist teachers from Zavkhan. Inset into each stupa is a painting of the memorialized teacher, and in front of each stupa there is a tray in which to place small offerings. Most people offer small gifts like food and candy. But for those of us who don’t come to honor the shrines, the real gift of the stupas is the view afforded by their location on the hilltop. From this vantage point my boss showed me all of the districts of Uliastay and taught me their names. Since maps are hard to come by in Mongolia, the images I hold in my memory from that view are the only map of Uliastay I’ll ever have.

After I finished shopping and getting acquainted with Uliastay, I had a few days to get settled in to my new home and relax before starting work. During that time I met one of my new sitemates, an M19 named Mike (I had met my other M19 sitemate, Ben, in UB on site placement day). Because of Zavkhan’s remoteness, the PCVs here keep their own cache of books and other goods that have been passed down from prior PCVs in the area. The selection of books and movies here is much better than at the Peace Corps headquarters in UB, and I was able to get some kitchen utensils and spices from this stash of PCV leftovers.

Work

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The teachers started work five weekdays before the first day of school. The first day of work for teachers was scarcely distinguishable from a faculty-wide party. Teachers brought chocolates and alcohol and moved from department lounge to department lounge, talking, eating, and drinking. In the following days, the weekly class schedule was determined—although it’s been changed at least three times since then and will likely change again—and the teachers discussed how they would divide their department’s duties. On the Friday of that week, there was a full staff meeting, during which my boss formally introduced me to the faculty and staff. In his introduction he made a point of mentioning that I don’t play sports, I don’t eat meat, and I drink beer but not vodka. Strange as that seemed at the time, in hindsight I think it was quite useful: it’s probably spared me the awkwardness of having to refuse several invitations from co-workers.

During those first days at work I was addled nearly to the point of exasperation, not only because of my inability to understand most of what was being said but also because of the many differences between the way things work in Mongolian schools and the way things work in American schools. In the days before the students arrived—indeed, even in the first week after the students arrived—it seemed to me that everything was at sixes and sevens at the school. I wasn’t able to work out my weekly schedule until the second week of classes, after the first major change to the schedule was made. It was also impossible to get definite answers from anyone about how often the schedule would change and how I would know about it. At last I decided just to check the class schedule, of which there is only one copy that gets posted in a hallway on the first floor whenever changes are made, every day. During the first week after the students arrived, I was never quite sure where I should be at any given time. Oftentimes someone would pull me into a room, and I would discover that I was supposed to be co-teaching the class in progress. On two occasions my boss pulled me into a room full of seventy-five or more students and asked me to introduce myself to them in Mongolian.

Since those first couple of weeks, things have mostly settled into a routine. I have my weekly schedule worked out, and it doesn’t look as if the schedule will change for a while. But there are minor changes and surprises all the time. Earlier this week I found out that, for the next two weeks only, I’m teaching one of my classes three times a week instead of twice a week. One day a TV crew from Ulaanbaatar unexpectedly appeared in my classroom and interviewed me in Mongolian for some educational program. Sometimes my fellow teachers will ask for my help, and that might lead to several hours’ worth of discussion and an invitation to come over for dinner later. But I’m mostly enjoying my work. I like my fellow teachers and my boss. I have several promising students. And I really enjoy the classes I teach to my fellow teachers. For those classes I don’t follow a book; I’ve created my own curriculum for each level based on the needs of my classes, and usually those classes are a lot of fun (for me, at least).

Preliminary Goals

Although it may be premature, I’ve already developed some priorities for myself during my tenure here in Uliastay. I list them here both as an appeal for help, in case any of my readers is capable of helping me meet these goals, and as a landmark for myself, something I can look back upon at the end of my two years and against which I can measure my progress and the development of my thoughts.

First, I want to help my school standardize their English curriculum. Right now, there is not a defined set of objectives for each level of English instruction, so it’s not certain what a student will have learned during the course of a year’s worth of study at any level. There is consistency at the level of each individual teacher, but there is not presently any consistency across teachers. I’m told that the school is buying new textbooks for the department. If that happens, all of the English teachers will be able to use the same textbooks, an important first step in the standardization of the curriculum.

Second, I would like to help the English teachers at my school develop sustainable (meaning available after I’m gone, assuming there won’t be a Peace Corps Volunteer filling my post after I leave) method of practicing and improving their English speaking skills. There’s no such thing as a video rental store here. The English-language movies that play on Mongolian television are dubbed, so that you can’t hear the English being spoken. And not all of the teacher’s have access to the internet at home. Thus it’s a great challenge for them to practice their English skills at home.

Third, I would like to cultivate an elite among the English language students—of all ages—in Uliastay and assist them in gaining admission to and finding funding for an education in a developed nation. To this end I am working on familiarizing myself with the TOEFL exam so that later I can offer TOEFL preparation classes to the most advanced students in the city. I’ve also been reviewing the admission requirements for international students at many American and British schools. (By the way, some of you might find this goal surprising. Perhaps you feel that I’m merely facilitating a brain drain away from Mongolia. I’ve certainly considered that, but I still think that, despite the risks, this is the most effective development strategy I can employ as an English teacher. My justification is based partly on my reading of Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point, particularly the chapter about the influence of environment.)

Fourth, I would very much like to help my school achieve its goal of establishing a partnership with an American university. In fact, doing so could perhaps help me meet my second goal, if the American university sends English speakers over for a semester or even just a summer. And if the exchange agreement allows professors from my school to go to the States for a period of time, that would also help meet my third goal. I just have no idea whether any American university is willing to establish such a partnership. I’m looking for universities, especially business schools, with an interest in the economics of developing nations.

Lastly, I would like to start an English-language—or at least Western style—choir in Uliastay as a way of transmitting my knowledge of Western music (and the discipline involved therein) to the young people of Uliastay. I figured a choir would be the most effective route, since Mongolians are quite fond of singing. But I’ve heard that this has been tried in Bayankhongor, by PCVs who are probably better trained to lead a choir than I am, with little success. So although I’m not terribly sanguine about this goal, I still think it’s worth trying.

If any of you have any ideas for the meeting of these goals or can help in any way, I would greatly appreciate any advice and assistance.

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Towards the end of our PST experience, all sites are supposed to hold a host family appreciation event, and the Peace Corps provides 10,000 tugruks per host family for the PCVs to facilitate. There are no guidelines; each site decides what they’d like to do. In G., we made American food for our families and planned on having a picnic/sports day by the river.

A few days before the event, Laura and I went to the capital city together with our language instructor and her husband to go shopping for the event. We scoured six different stores trying to find ingredients for our American food, and we still couldn’t find certain items (graham crackers, for example). The day before the event, Laura, Sarah, and I made a pasta salad of Brobdignagian proportions at my place (we used three kilograms of dry pasta). Since Mongolian families don’t usually have large salad bowls or serving platters, we had to improvise with the serving dishes. We decided the best receptacle for our pasta salad was my tumpun (a plastic basin for washing clothes and bathing). Of course, before I put any food in it I scrubbed it better than Lady Macbeth would have, but several of Mongolians, including my host grandfather and my language instructor, admonished me for using a tumpun for food. Later that night, my entire language class went to Todd’s ger to make hamburger patties for cooking the next day. (By the way, don’t ask about refrigeration or how we covered the food; trust me, you don’t want to know those details. Our practices were consistent with those of many of our host families, though.)

Since it was raining on the day of our event, we had to move the event into the school dormitory’s cafeteria. The day before, we figured it would rain, so we cooked all the hamburgers that morning in Todd’s family’s oven. My family mysteriously absconded on the morning of the event, and I was left by myself to carry a very heavy tumpun full of pasta salad about a mile and a half to school. Dogs were barking at me and following me the whole way, because of the pungent smells coming from the salad. Since it was raining and since Saran wrap is a thing of myth and legend in this country, I covered my tumpun with my bathing towel and had to keep the towel drawn tight over the tumpun while I was walking. Of course, the idea of me carrying a florescent pink tumpun full of pasta salad through the streets in the rain while being followed by a group of dogs probably seems pretty funny to you, but I assure you I was not laughing at the time.

Our American food went over fairly well with our host families. They loved the hamburgers and watermelon, but the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and pasta salad seemed less popular (the Mongolians might have been disgusted out by the use of a tumpun as a serving dish for the pasta salad). After the meal, the rain cleared up enough that we could build a fire next to the school and roast marshmallows for s’mores. Many of the Mongolians abstained, but those who partook really seemed to enjoy the s’mores and the roasting of marshmallows. Soon enough, though, the rains returned, and we were forced to abandon our fire. When we went back inside, we discovered to our horror that our host families had made food for us. By this point, we were fully and painfully stuffed. I myself had eaten as much of the pasta salad as I could so that I could get my tumpun back and not have to deal with leftovers. But we had to find room somehow for more food.

We politely picked away at their food as long as we could. Then Race’s host father showed up with a cardboard box full of alcohol, and that’s when the party really started. As is customary in Mongolian social gatherings, the alcohol consumption was followed by singing. At first, we stuck to Mongolian songs, some of which we’d already learned and others of which we mumbled falteringly with the help of a songbook. We mangled the songs pretty badly, but thankfully the Mongolians were singing loud enough to drown us out. On two occasions, Race’s host father—who looks just like the stereotypical image of Chingis Khan, by the way—was prevailed upon to sing a traditional Mongolian long song for us. Long songs are so called because of the elaborate melisma that the singer does on each syllable, drawing out each word into a long, intricate melodic line. Hearing one of these performances in person was an unforgettable experience. Not only is the singing style a novelty to Occidental ears, but Race’s host father has a uniquely powerful voice. All of us were thoroughly enchanted by the experience. Sarah has even resolved to learn how to perform long songs once she gets to site.

[A brief cultural note about singing in Mongolia: Mongolians love to sing, and singing holds an important place in Mongolian culture. My host mother usually sings while she works in the house, and Mongolians always sing traditional songs together at social gatherings. In my limited experience, I’ve noticed that all Mongolians have excellent voices. Even the ones who say they don’t sing very well have much better voices and a much better sense of pitch than the average American. If you are considering the Peace Corps but are terrified to sing in public, then Mongolia is not the country for you. At any social gathering, you will be asked to lead the whole group in a Mongolian song or sing an English song on your own. Consider yourself warned.]

After a while, the Mongolians asked us to sing some English songs for them, but we were totally unprepared. We had to hold an embarrassingly long conference to determine which songs we could sing for them. We figured that the types of songs we all know (children’s songs, Christmas songs, religious songs, pop songs and patriotic songs) would have been inappropriate. The best we could do was to sing a couple of numbers from The Sound of Music. Thereafter, a pitiful cross-cultural sing-off ensued, with the Mongolians singing a song for us and then expecting us to sing an English song in return. At one point, Scott brought out his iPod and speakers, and we performed miserable renditions of “Yellow Submarine” and Justin Timberlake’s “Cry Me a River.” The only thing keeping me from being mortified as I remember this is the consolation that the Mongolians in the room were probably just as tipsy as we were.

After the singing, and after we washed the dishes and cleaned the cafeteria, the PCVs and some of the host families went to New Mongolia to dance. We stayed there from about 6 pm until 11:30, dancing and drinking the whole time.

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For Pre-Service Training, all of the groups are required to do some kind of small community event in their respective sites. In G., we hosted a two-part event: the first part was a presentation about trafficking in persons, a problem in Asia and a key priority for Peace Corps-Asia; the second part was a dance. We held the event at the school where we’ve been having our training sessions.

For the trafficking in persons presentation, we used a video provided by MTV Asia (the Mongolian version is narrated by a popular Mongolian rap star) as well as a PowerPoint presentation developed by Peace Corps staff. We relied heavily on our new Mongolian friends and language teachers to host small group discussions and emcee the event. Because of our limited Mongolian skills, our role was confined to organizing the event and setting up the facilities. Some of us also copied out materials in Mongolian by hand, since we have no access to a copy machine here. We also took up a collection among ourselves to provide snacks and drinks at the event.

We weren’t surprised to see that the dance was fairly well-attended, but we were pretty surprised to find out that a member of the school staff was DJ-ing the dance for us. He was an older man who normally acts as something like a janitor or groundskeeper for the school. He set up the sound system for us, but he wouldn’t let us use it. He had some CDs of traditional Russian dance music, which has its charms, but none of his music was of a more recent vintage than a disco version of “Rivers of Babylon.” At first the dance was dominated by kids, but after about half an hour, Larry’s host mother told the children to go home so that the adults could dance. For about half an hour after that, all the lights remained on, and the DJ played Russian music while older couples waltzed around the room. Finally, the lights were lowered, and the DJ played some disco. He eventually told us that we could play some of our American music, but since there was no way for us to connect a computer or iPod to the sound system, we had about fifteen minutes to create a mix CD (someone had to run home to get a blank CD). By the time we handed it to the DJ, there was only time to listen to the first four tracks.

After the dance, many of us, including some of our Mongolian friends who helped out with the event, went out dancing at New Mongolia, a dance club next to Hotel Mongolia. We’ve been there several times, and it’s never very crowded, even on Saturday nights. When we showed up, there was only a handful of people there, but we had a fantastic time, probably more so because we had the place almost to ourselves. Afterwards, as with any night we stay out late, we had to find a Mongolian friend with a car and do a little more dancing to fit everyone into the car. I spent the entire ride home complaining loudly and scurrilously about the lack of participation in the night’s event from certain members our group. My apologies to anyone within earshot of that jeremiad.

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As part of our cross-culture lessons, the Cross-Culture team took us to Ulaanbaatar (called UB by Americans in Mongolia).

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Many of us here in G. have become hooked on a Ukrainian candy called Super Kontik. I myself eat one every day. It comes in five flavors--chocolate, milk, vanilla, peanut, and coconut--and packages of either two or four. It's one of the most reliable pleasures in Mongolia, and you can find it in any food store. For the amusement of my sitemates and to stave off boredom one night, I composed a poem in honor of this new discovery.

Ode to Super Kontik

Tasty tome

published in the Ukraine

and bound in dark leather:

Your chocolate chapters

transport me to distant lands.

Rapt reader,

I turn your perfect pages

quickly to the end.

I devour the sequel

and relish a tetrology.

The crumbs on my fingers,

fall away like fading

memories of characters and plot,

demanding a second reading.

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Yesterday (7/26/09) all of the TEFL volunteers took a trip to Tirilj, a large national park outside the capital. The trip was sponsored by the Cross-Culture team, but there were no activities planned; they just set us loose in Tirilj for seven and a half hours, and we were free to do whatever we wanted. Some people went on long hikes. Some of us took short hikes along the Tuul River or simply lay indolently in the grass. One group spontaneously decided to do some diving off a small footbridge crossing the river. Our individual host families packed us all lunches, but the Cross-Culture folks also provided PB&J (peanut butter is a precious commodity here) and fruit. At the end of the day, the entire group visited the Frog Rock, an iconic rock formation in the park.

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Yes, ankle bones. It’s a game here. In fact, it’s now one of the games at the national Naadam games. I watched the professional version on TV over Naadam weekend. It went like this: some somber-looking Mongolian men in traditional costumes flicked sheep’s ankle bones at other sheep’s ankle bones over impressively long distances. Other somber-looking Mongolian men in traditional costumes nodded in approval or shook their heads disapprovingly.

That’s not the version I was taught how to play. There are actually many ways of playing ankle bones; I know two. One is an approximation of a horse race, in which the ankle bones are used as game board, game pieces, and dice. Another involves throwing down a bunch of ankle bones and flicking matching pieces at each other to eliminate pieces.

Every ankle bone has four sides—sheep, goat, horse, and camel. Most of my PCV friends can’t tell the difference between the different sides, but I’ve picked up on it (or maybe my family just has newer, cleaner ankle bones). We use primarily sheep’s ankles, but we also have horse ankles and camel ankles. My doos have a backpack full of ankle bones to play with. It was a little disturbing to me at first, but I’ve grown accustomed to it. That isn’t to say that I’m getting any better at playing ankle bones. Quite the contrary: my doos kick my ass every time.

Some of you have expressed an interest in coming to visit me in Mongolia. Not only do I welcome such visits, but to entice you further, I’ve decided to post some prices to give you an indication of how far American dollars go in this country. The Mongolian currency is called the tugruk, and the exchange rate is currently about 1,400 tugruks per dollar. Based on that exchange rate, here are the prices in US Dollars for some random items:

Bar of soap: between $0.18 and $0.36

Round loaf of bread: about $0.46 cents

Bell peppers and tomatoes: $1.79/kilogram

Potatoes, onions or carrots: $0.57/kilogram

Bottle of decent Mongolian beer: $0.64

0.5 liter bottle of Coke (bottled in Mongolia): $0.46

12 oz. can of Coke (imported from US): $0.86

Bottle of good Mongolian vodka: $7.86

Pack of gum (sugar-free gum doesn’t exist here, and the sizes of packs are a little different): $0.32

1.5 liter bottle of water: about $0.36

20 minutes at an internet cafe in Nalaikh: $0.25

Watermelon: $2.50 to $3.58

Bag of all-purpose flour: $0.86

Ice cream bar: between $0.29 and $0.57

Dinner at a cheap Mongolian restaurant: $1.50 to $3

Dinner at a nicer (Korean or Russian) restaurant outside the capital: between $1.79 and $5.71

Can of tomato sauce: $1.07

Jar of red cabbage: $2.14

Roll of toilet paper: between $0.18 and $0.57

My monthly salary: $140

Some nights, my doos (little brother and sister—Mongolian doesn’t distinguish the gender of younger siblings) will come into my room for an English lesson. It’s not that they’re particularly interested in learning English (they’re not); they’ve just come to realize that an English lesson from me is often their most promising prospect for entertainment. Mongolian TV has very few channels, and they offer bafflingly little children’s programming. There’s no computer in our house, and the children have very few toys. In fact, you could comfortably fit all of the children’s toys into one grocery bag. Their bedroom looks like, and often serves as, a guest room (The children sleep on the floor when company comes over). Mostly, the kids just run around outside or play cards with each other inside. Consequently, they cherish every opportunity to perform errands for their parents, and they eagerly involve themselves in any activity in the house, whether it be a visit from adult friends or simply the cooking of dinner. They’re so starved for entertainment that, whenever I’ve had friends over to watch a movie on my computer, my doos gratefully watch it with us, even though they can’t understand a word.

In my previous posts, I may have provided an overly flattering portrayal of my town and the actual living conditions of my family, and I should probably balance the scales a bit. While it’s true that my host family is one of the more well-heeled families in town, they’re not living at the level of a typical middle-class—or lower-class, for that matter—American family. For example, I recently realized that, in my summer bag alone, I have as many items of clothing and pairs of shoes as any member of my host family. If you exclude furniture and kitchen wares, the entire family could fit all their belongings into a meeker (To be fair, though, meekers are surprisingly capacious). Perhaps this paucity of possessions can be traced to Mongolian nomadic traditions—after all, my host family is only one generation away from herding sheep in the Gobi—but the family also has much less disposable income than the average American family, and they lack many of the conveniences Americans take for granted.

When we first arrived, most of the Peace Corps Volunteers (PCVs) were surprised and dismayed by certain prominent (to us) details of Mongolian life, notably the amount of trash—especially broken glass—on the ground, the general sanitation standards in the country, and the dearth of options in the stores. Our minds quickly swelled with visions of community improvement projects, usually ways of making Mongolia more like America, and I haven’t been immune from this impulse either: a few days after I arrived in G., I had the idea of placing public trash cans alongside the river so that visitors wouldn’t throw their trash in the water, and I simply assumed that the members of the community would value this addition. It’s hard for us to avoid the temptation to view ourselves as saviors, come to enlighten the Mongolians with our knowledge of superior American practices. On the plane from Seoul to Ulaanbaatar, nearly all of our fellow passengers were American missionaries; in fact, it was hard to distinguish our group members from all the other white Americans on the plane. And I sometimes wonder if we’re not just another sort of missionary.

It’s in my nature to rigorously question the premises and assumptions before proceeding to argument or action, and I suppose it’s also perfectly normal for a PCV to be questioning his commitment at this point, midway through Pre-Service Training. But I’ve been especially skeptical lately. Yesterday (7/16/09), I was introduced to a series of books the CYDs use to teach life skills to Mongolians. Example topics are “Communication Skills” and “Self-Esteem.” I was fairly outraged that we were encouraged to teach such lessons to Mongolians. It struck me as very presumptuous. After all, what are our qualifications? That we were raised and educated in a wealthier country? Of course, we’re not obligated to use those books; they’re just an available resource. But I was still very uncomfortable with the thought of any American coming into a community to hold such sessions, bringing with them, as they do, the assumption that Mongolians are deficient in these areas in ways that Americans aren’t.

Recently, I’ve been reading Middlemarch (thanks to Sarah for lending me her copy), and I can’t help finding parallels between my situation and that of Mr. Lydgate. Tertius Lydgate is a young doctor, come to the provincial district of Middlemarch with a reformer’s zeal and a supercilious attitude towards country doctors. He was brought into the community by a single, reform-minded philanthropist, but his ambitions exceed the scope of his benefactor’s expectations. Ostensibly, he is supposed to bring the latest advances from Paris and London to Middlemarch, but he also harbors unspoken plans to bring fame to himself for medical discoveries. Nevertheless his first discoveries are not of a medical nature: he quickly finds out that the light of his ideals must penetrate a thorn bush of local politics, staid opinions, and the resentment of the existing medical community. Before long a romance with a local woman distracts him from his project of reform; he becomes entangled in debts and other obligations; and he is finally forced to leave Middlemarch ignominiously. I certainly don’t foresee such an end for myself, but I think there are important parallels between Lydgate’s situation and that of mine or any other PCV’s, and I think there are lessons that any PCV can learn from Mr. Lydgate’s story. Most importantly, we should learn from Mr. Lydgate’s failure that a sense of humility is critical in such a situation and that political (in the broadest sense of the word) considerations cannot be neglected.

When we come to this country we see privation everywhere, even where Mongolians are conscious of no lack. Just as Mr. Lydgate pushed reform upon a community that was mostly content with its country doctors, we are urging change where, for the most part, none is wanted or even noticed. The only areas in which the Mongolians seem conscious of a need for improvement are those in which we offer little official assistance, namely, lack of access to American music and movies. I am encouraged, though, by two important ameliorating considerations: (1) that the Peace Corps gives us almost total freedom to follow our own inclinations for community development projects and (2) that the Peace Corps’ approach to community development (PACA) emphasizes community-driven projects that are merely facilitated by PCVs. In fact, the PACA approach places the PCV in much the same role as a corporate project manager: we help the community to identify and clarify its own needs; we help filter those needs for feasibility and help the community develop solutions; then we help the community stay on task to deliver those solutions themselves, possibly helping the community to obtain outside funding along the way. To my mind, this seems like it would be an effective approach. It reminds me of Pope’s advice to critics: “Men must be taught as if you taught them not,/And things unknown proposed as things forgot” (Essay on Criticism 574-575). I’m just concerned, though, that this line will be harder to follow in practice than it sounds in the PACA Handbook. From what I’ve heard, not all PCVs have managed to hew to this approach, and I can easily see how such noble ideals might get lost amidst the welter of conflicting demands placed on a PCV and the struggles of daily life here. I appeal to my readers to help me stay on track if it ever appears that I’m straying. It’s fair to assume I’ll need all the help I can get.

Scenes from a Life in G.

Since I’ve been disappointingly remiss in posting regular blog entries since I arrived, I find myself overwhelmed by a backlog of material. Instead of writing a series of freestanding entries, I decided simply to compile a series of fragments—mostly excerpts from my journal, with editorial insertions and elisions in brackets, and other brief observations.

About My Host Family

There are five members of my host family. The mother, the father, grandpa, an eleven-year-old girl, and a nine-year-old boy. The father is a driver, which is a very lucrative profession in Mongolia, since few people have cars. The mother is a housewife. They’re all very warm, earthy people, but I’ve developed a special bond with the daughter. She’s one of the most capable, considerate, and genuinely good people I’ve ever met. In all situations she thinks of others before herself. If her mother is standing up in the kitchen, she gets a chair for her to sit on. If her father is going out in the cold, she gets a coat for him. She does the dishes after most meals; she’s cooked meals for me several times; and I’ve observed her not only washing her own clothes but even scrubbing her shoes. She walked me to and from the school on my first two days of classes. Yesterday, we were walking down the street, and she saw an elderly man carrying empty containers to the well; she left her own errand to help the stranger fetch water from the well.

She’s been an invaluable resource to me in my helplessness; I don’t know how I would have made it through the past three weeks without her. She helps me with my laundry, and she even vacuumed my room for me yesterday. All I can offer in return is to teach her a little English and some English-language songs and games (She loves “Miss Mary Mack”). I’m grateful beyond words, not only for the help she’s given me, but also for the opportunity to spend my days here around a person who is so pure of heart. People like her are rarities in this country and something like sasquatches in America. It’s a great privilege to have met her.

NB: I find it best to conceal the names of my host family members, so in future entries and photos, I will refer to them by the following initials:

Grandfather: GF

Father: T

Mother: M

Daughter: J

Son: B

On the Mongolian Language

[06.21.09:]Spoken Mongolian, even in the mouths of children, sounds like the casting of spells, and it’s almost always delivered with a tacit reverence for the traditions and history encoded in its syllables. Written Mongolian, on the other hand, still bears the scars of a troubled past.

[…]

The language appears to be missing articles, and it certainly seems poorer for the loss. Not only is there an important difference between such phrases as “This is a place” and “This is the place,” but this peculiarity often makes the language seem like caveman-speak to those of us accustomed to the use of articles.

Food

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Before I came here, I had the impression that Mongolia was something of a black hole from which no vegetarian emerges intact. I heard all the stories of the flamboyantly carnivorous lifestyle of the Mongolian people, and since I’ve been here, I’ve heard several more stories of Peace Corps volunteers renouncing their vegetarianism due to the difficulties associated with it. Yet as of today, I still haven’t consumed any meat. To be sure, I’ve seen what everyone was talking about. Mongolians love meat, and they eat it in ways that would make American meat eaters uneasy. But I’ve been very fortunate. Before I came to the country, the Peace Corps sent me a Host Family Questionnaire intended to match me to a host family based on my wants and needs. On that questionnaire I noted that I was a vegetarian, and I’m very glad I did. The Peace Corps sought out host families that would be comfortable providing vegetarian meals to the vegetarians, and they held a seminar before we arrived to teach the host families about vegetarian cooking. As a result, I’ve been eating extremely well. Mostly we have soups with rice or noodles. Sometimes we have rice plates. A particular favorite of mine is cabbage buuz (steamed dumplings). I eat a lot of bell peppers, potatoes, turnips, carrots, eggs, rice, and noodles. We also occasionally have tomatoes, cucumbers, and fruit.

My one complaint is that the meals are always piping hot. Even on the hottest days of the summer, we’ll have hot soup accompanied by hot tea. I’m often sweating by the end of the meal. And I burn my tongue on the tea every day. Mongolians drink boiling hot tea all the time, and somehow it doesn’t bother them. Slurping the tea is normal and even encouraged, but that still doesn’t prevent one from burning one’s tongue. I’m sure I’ll be glad for the hot tea during the winter, but for now, I’d prefer warm water.

Birthdays, etc.

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[06.20.09:] Today was a day of building. Construction workers toiled at the lot next door, and my host father worked on the roof of the house with the help (or perhaps just the bother) of his elderly father. I too was building today: I made some small additions to my vocabulary, but I’ve progressed no further on my grammar. Like the construction work next door, this is a slow-moving project with many mistakes and setbacks along the way.

Today was my host mother’s birthday, and we all ate lunch in the ger [a traditional Mongolian tent-like dwelling, known in English as a yurt]. There were no presents given, and there was very little ado. Somewhat frustratingly, M was forced to spend hours preparing the meals for her own birthday. After lunch, the family looked through a book that seemed to be an astrological guide. Perhaps they were reading about the auspiciousness of the date.

[…]

The clouds are now dark purple against the lavender sky, and the light is diminishing quickly. GF is watching TV in another room, and M is talking on the phone. Tomorrow is J’s birthday. Perhaps there’ll be more fanfare for her birthday than there was for M’s.

[The next day:]

Just as I was putting down my pen last night, my host father came into my room and sat down on the floor to chat with me. The entire family followed him. I explained that I need to learn a Mongolian song as one of the requirements of my host family stay. I taught the entire family “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” which is oddly relevant to Mongolians, because of their close association with farm animals. In fact, it seemed like it should have been the other way around: They should be teaching me a song about a girl whose lamb follows her to school.

We collectively decided that the Mongolian song J and B had tried to teach me before was too difficult, so M taught me a new song called “Just like Two Suns.” It’s a children’s song in which a child is drawing a sun in his notebook and compares his sun to the real sun. It’s much easier than the other song, but I don’t have it memorized just yet.

T explained that they are actually celebrating both M and J’s birthdays on the same day. We did that today. There was a cake and apricot juice along with a bowl of candies and plates of cucumbers, cold sausage, and grape tomatoes. I gave J a leather bookmark from the Supreme Court. It was given to me as a gift, but I figured it would be more special to her, since she’ll probably never make it to Washington, DC. I gave M a grocery bag that folds into a little ball.

After the birthday party, the entire family helped me prepare for a shower. Even grandpa brought the blanket with which to cover the window. And T pointed out that I can lock the bathroom door as he and the rest of the family stood outside and said farewell. It’s as if they expected me to perform ritual ablutions, rather than just to take a shower. To propitiate the gods and the family, I bathed with a greater sense of reverence than I ordinarily would.

On Courage

[06.25.09:] At lunchtime, M, T, and GF were going out until 6pm, so they gave me the keys to the house and told me to lock up when I leave. Not long thereafter, I went to use the outhouse and let the front door close behind me, momentarily forgetting that the front door automatically locks when closed. I immediately realized I was locked out of the house with nothing but my wallet in my pocket. I had to go to school in the afternoon with no books or supplies and wearing my flip-flops. When I came home, the whole family was already home and had figured out that I had been locked out of the house. They thought it hilarious that I did such a foolish thing and went to school without any books. Of course, that wasn’t necessarily the reaction I was expecting. When I first realized I was locked out, I panicked. Do they even have a spare house key like people do in America? Should I break in somehow? They entrusted me with their house keys—a significant symbol of their trust in me—and I fucked it up in less than an hour. I even considered buying bobby pins at the store and trying to pick the lock, despite the fact that I know nothing about picking locks.

As usual, my fears were far beyond the scope of reality, and I took the worst-case scenario as the likely scenario [just as with my earlier fears about going to Mongolia in general]. One might think that this experience in the Peace Corps would somehow cure me of my irrational fears by providing me an epic confrontation with them. But it hasn’t, and I don’t expect it will. I’m only just getting slightly better at managing them. At Staging, the Staging Lead posted several quotes on poster board around the room, and one of them in particular stood out to me. It was from Georgia O’Keefe, and it went something like the following: “I’ve been terrified while doing every important thing I’ve ever done, but I’ve never let it stop me from doing anything.” Is that courage? If so, it’s the only sort of courage I believe I’m capable of.

My Birthday

[06.26.09:] What a delightfully strange night it’s been. It’s my thirtieth birthday. I’m in wet clothes, and my Mongolian grandfather just used a vacuum cleaner to suck all the bugs out of my room (he really hate bugs). I’m looking at a very stylized, almost abstract swan that my host father carved for me from a tree root as a birthday present [My host family calls me “Swan,” because I explained what my last name means on the first day, and they appear to have confused that for my first name.]. Earlier today, I delivered my first evaluated teaching session, and afterwards, I watched my trainers engage in a paper boat race in the river. After that, I went home for dinner and found out that my host mother expected all twelve of the members of my training class to be there. Apparently, there was a major misunderstanding. The day before, she had asked how many American friends I had in town, and I told her twelve. I had no idea she was expecting them all for my birthday party. Being the polite American I am, I was terrified of imposing on my host’s hospitality, so I assumed my Mongolian family would have as little involvement as possible in my birthday. But that’s not how Mongolians operate. They have a very strict “Mi casa es su casa” policy in this country that applies especially to adopted family members. They bought me a cake and brought out food for the six guests who did come. The whole family sat in the room with us taking pictures, even while we rudely spoke English to each other and made no attempt to talk to them in Mongolian. At some point, fireworks appeared on the horizon (The Hotel Mongolia was having an early Naadam celebration), and we all gathered at the windows. But suddenly my host mother was rushing me into the car to take me to Amanda’s host family’s house to use their internet. T drove my other friends home, because it was raining. It all happened so abruptly, I didn’t even get to say goodbye to anyone.

I exist in a state of nearly perpetual confusion and disorder these days. We all do. Sometimes I laugh myself silly in my bedroom at night remembering all the awkward moments I’ve had so far and all the strange occurrences I’ve either been witness to or heard about from my sitemates. I’ve developed the habit of reviewing my day each night, watching it like a film and looking for the humor in it. Sometimes I play the reel again. With the right attitude of ironic appreciation, one’s experiences here provide an inexhaustible source of entertainment and hilarity for an audience of one. I’ve become a great connoisseur of awkwardness.

Visitors from E.

Photo Album

[07.06.09:] On Saturday (the Fourth of July), a contingent from E. arrived. It included my former Zuunmod roommates Jake and Tom, as well as Alison B. We hung out for a while by the river while J and B circled us on their bicycles. We went to the Hotel Mongolia so that the visitors could eat and we could all see what it was all about. It was just as nice inside as it had appeared on the outside, but the pleasure of the experience was somewhat dampened by exorbitant prices and unfriendly staff. Alison and I spent half an hour arguing with the staff about whether the spaghetti carbonara comes with side dishes (We won the argument, by the way).

Naadam

Photo Album

[07.06.09, continued:] The next morning we went to G.’s local Naadam with Naraa. We packed nine people into her little hatchback (the Law of Meekers apparently applies to all vehicles in Mongolia) and drove for what seemed like hours over rough roads through the mountains to get to the Naadam grounds. But when we got there we quickly realized it was well worth the travel. The Naadam grounds were situated in a beautiful valley. There were gers and horses scattered along the hillside. Several people were selling hosher [deep-friend meat] and other snacks. I tried airag [fermented mare’s milk] and found it to be just okay. It tasted like watered-down aruul, which is not my favorite, and it didn’t even give me a buzz [it’s mildly alcoholic]. But I was too busy enjoying the scene to bother about food. There were so many colorful local characters in colorful dels. Most of them were drunk, some of them already by 10am. There was one in particular we christened “The Captain,” because he looked like a cross between Captain Ahab and the aging kung fu master in an old kung fu film. I wanted so badly to talk to him and get a picture with him, but I lacked the language skills and wasn’t sure if he might be dangerous. As it was, he remained tantalizingly aloof.

[…]

By the end of the day, I was horribly sunburnt. My host mother kindly took me into the car and served me pastries covered in sweetened condensed milk, accompanied by the ubiquitous milk tea. As the festivities were ending and the sun was setting, my host family and their friends gathered in a circle on the ground behind the cars, passing around vodka and cigarettes. They insisted I take both, but I managed to rebuff their efforts. Eventually, though, I caved on one count and took a single shot of vodka. My host father was shitfaced. Even if my Mongolian were much better than it is now, I’m sure I wouldn’t have understood him. On the car ride home, he was mumbling something about Korea, and when we got home, he stumbled directly into bed. I took a cold shower to wash away the astonishing accretion of dirt that had attached itself to my body and filled every exposed orifice.

NB: According to Peace Corps policy, I have to conceal the name of the town where I'm staying. I've abbreviated the city name as "G."

Photo Album

It was a rare overcast day in the land of the blue sky when the meekers took us to our respective sites. For those of us going to G., we drove through the capital and received our first taste of the acrid air of the city in which much of Mongolia’s population lives. When we got to G., the meekers dropped us off one by one. We had no very definite sense of what the town was like. The residential roads in G. aren’t laid out in any discernible geometric pattern. Instead, they curl like arabesques up and around the mountains. The meekers struggled through rocky, muddy roads and delivered us each to our homes. Since I was one of the last to be dropped off, I saw the homes in which most of my fellow G.-ers were to be living. That experience and subsequent visits to friends’ homes have made me very grateful to be placed into the house I was placed.

I live in a modern house with electricity and running water on the river. When I first arrived, my host father (who later established that he is my Mongolian big brother, due to our proximity in age) sat me down alone in a room with grandpa, who was dressed in a traditional Mongolian del. This meeting with Grandpa was my introduction to a type I have now become accustomed to: the wizened and wise Mongolian elder. In keeping with the almost anachronistic traditionalism of his type, he immediately offered me a snuff bottle. Thankfully, my LCFs (Language & Cultural Facilitators on the Peace Corps staff) accompanied me into the room. They explained that I only just have to sniff the bottle and not actually snort any snuff. I was immediately offered milk tea, a traditional Mongolian drink composed of tea steeped in milk with salt, and cookies. But then the rest of the family and my LCFs left me alone with grandpa for an awkwardly long time. I can’t stress strongly enough to you how limited my Mongolian language skills were at that point. I had a Mongolian-English dictionary with me, but I didn’t even know Mongolian word order and verb forms. I was given a phrase book, and my Mongolian family was given the same book. But that wasn’t much help. Mostly, we just sat in silence, nodding and sipping tea, for a very long time.

That is, until I dug out my photo album from my luggage. If you’re ever stuck in a room with Mongolians who speak no English, I highly recommend having a photo album handy. It’s a great icebreaker, and it’s truly remarkable how much information can be conveyed through photos. I knew some of the basic words for family members—it was the last thing we learned in Zuunmod—and that helped considerably. At some point, miraculously, we established that my birthday was the same week as two of the members of my host family. My host father indicated to me that that means I’m part of his family.

After we were finished looking through my photos, the family brought out their own photo albums. It was a fascinating window into Mongolian culture. There were pictures of family members in the snow, in gers (more on those later), sitting on camels, surrounded by sheep. In my language notebook, I can look back at the list of words I learned on my first day with the family, many of them through those photos. Below is a representative sample:

- camel

- mountain

- sheep

- skinny (as in “You are too skinny.”)

- river

- cigarette

- heart

- outhouse

That first night in G., it began to rain, and the rain later turned to snow. It was to be the last snow of the season. The next morning I woke up to crisp air and snow on the tops of the mountains outside my window. The sun was glistening on the blue waters of the river, and the trees were shivering in the breeze. The smell of milk tea was rising up from the kitchen downstairs. I was looking out the window and forward to the next ten weeks.

Photo Album

Staging for the M20s (the twentieth group of Peace Corps volunteers to go to Mongolia) took place in Los Angeles at the Crowne Plaza by the airport. Some of us had met each other—as well as some of the M18s and M19s—through a Facebook group prior to our arrival in LA. We had received information about what and how much to pack via e-mail from the Peace Corps and from current Mongolian volunteers through the Facebook group, and most of us were packed to the maximum allowable limit (two checked bags of no more than fifty pounds each plus two carry-on items). There was a total of sixty-nine M20s at Staging, and, if we assume that we each took the maximum amount of luggage, that’s over 200 pieces (at least 7,000 pounds) of luggage. Needless to say, we were a considerable and conspicuous presence in the hotel.

Because of the large number of us and the amount of paperwork required by the Peace Corps, it took two hours for us all to register. While we were waiting for registration to end and for the staging event to being, we sat outside a conference room getting to know each other. Although the group was surprisingly racially homogeneous, group members came from almost every area of America, including Alaska. Three members of the group were over fifty. One had already served a tour in the Peace Corps in Latin America many years ago. One was supposed to be an M19 but deferred her service for medical reasons. There were three married couples.

Staging had the feel of college orientation. Despite the presence of the older volunteers, it was a very young crowd. Words like “stoked” and “sick” wafted in the air, and, if we hadn’t been dressed in business casual attire, a game of Frisbee or hacky-sack would surely have broken out. That was more or less what I expected—this is the Peace Corps, after all, and it takes a good amount of youthful energy and enthusiasm, even in older people, to do something like this. For my part, I was glad the atmosphere was boisterous and flippant: what better atmosphere is there for such a serious moment?

Staging was led by a woman who had served in Papua New Guinea in the eighties with her husband, and I think she did an excellent job. The purpose of Staging was to introduce us to Peace Corps policies and the realities of service and to impress upon us the magnitude of what we were about to do, in case we hadn’t considered it sufficiently beforehand. But I was most impressed by what wasn’t said at Staging. There were no prayers, no references to God, no pertinent passages from the Bible. I was filled with a mild, and mildly nationalistic, pride that there was such a thing as the Peace Corps—a purely secular service organization, a government-sponsored outlet for the non-religious to serve others without having that experience framed for them in religious terms. Undoubtedly some of the volunteers were inwardly motivated by a desire to serve God, but their motivations remained, as the rest of ours, private.

Staging lasted only a day. The next morning, we had to be in the lobby by 7:30 to check out and head to the airport. My last night in America was spent at the hotel bar listening to a jazz ensemble and drinking Stella with a couple of other volunteers. The next morning, in keeping with Peace Corps tradition, we all tied pieces of brightly-colored yarn to our luggage and packed ourselves and our luggage into buses in front of the hotel. We said goodbye to the Peace Corps staff at the hotel, and we were on our own until we reached Ulaanbaatar, where the Mongolian Peace Corps staff would greet us.

Of course, it was an obnoxiously long flight; after all, Mongolia is nearly the antipode of America. It took twelve and a half hours to fly from LA to Seoul. We had a three-hour layover in Seoul. Then we still had a three-and-a-half-hour flight to Ulaanbaatar. Many people slept. Others took the opportunity to get to know their fellow volunteers better. Others watched the in-flight movies. I read a book.

We arrived at 10:45pm and were greeted by the country director as well as a very ebullient—and, I suspect, drunk—contingent of current volunteers who had made the trip to the capital to welcome us. But immediately we had to pack into yet more buses to travel to Zuunmod, where we would stay for the next week. By that time, we were mostly drained of energy and ready to be done with traveling. It took about half an hour to get to Zuunmod. We got out at the school dormitory where we were staying, and we found our assigned rooms and roommates. Except in the case of married couples, there were four same-sex volunteers, sleeping in bunk beds, in each room. We probably didn’t get to sleep until 2am that night, but we had an orientation event at 9am that morning.

In the morning we got our first good look at Mongolia. A walk outside the school dormitory revealed mountains in every direction. Cattle roamed free through the countryside around the city; some even grazed directly outside the dormitory. That morning, and every morning thereafter, we all met in the breakfast room at 8am to eat. The meals mostly had an American or generically Western theme. I think the first morning we had omelets. Since Mongolians don’t usually make a big deal of breakfast, the breakfasts we ate in Zuunmod were inevitably non-traditional. We ate meals like hard-boiled eggs and cabbage salad or rice porridge with bread and jam.

All the orientation events were held in the school with which the dormitory we were staying in was associated. The first morning we met the Peace Corps-Mongolia country director and most of the Peace Corps-Mongolia staff members. The Peace Corps Medical Officer in Mongolia is an especially colorful character who has been in his position in Mongolia for the past eight years and in other countries in the Peace Corps for several more years. Throughout Orientation, his candid—and often comically peremptory—style made his talks the most popular events on the calendar. Every day during Orientation we all ate lunch together at a Russian restaurant in town. On the first day, the U.S. Ambassador to Mongolia met us for lunch, and I was able to have my picture taken with him.

Even though Orientation lasted only a week, it seemed like an eternity. Not only was there a surcharged amount of information covered in each day’s sessions—including some rudimentary language lessons—but there were so many unofficial social activities stuffed into the crevices between official sessions. Spurred by the uniqueness and urgency of our situation, the sixty-nine of us got to know each other very well in a very short span of time. Some went on hikes. Others stayed up talking at night. There was always an impromptu social gathering in the bathrooms in the morning. Our dormitory quickly began to resemble the stereotypical college dorm in any 1980s college film. Someone would be playing banjo in one room with the door open. Someone else might be walking by in pajamas and socks. Another group might be discussing philosophy in the hallway. I myself made several new friends and learned the names of everyone but perhaps three people by the end of the week.

[A brief word on accommodations (and commode-ations): For the sixty-nine of us plus staff members staying in the dormitory, there were only six toilets in one unisex bathroom area and two showers. Sometimes only one of the showers was open. Other times both were closed. At no time did it seem that both were working with hot water (they both were equipped with barely functioning water heaters). So if in the pictures I post we all seem a little greasy, please show some compassion. Mostly, since I’ve been here, I’ve only been able to wash myself with a damp washcloth.

Even though there were sit-down toilets in the dorm—a rarity in this country, as I’ve already discovered—one can’t flush the toilet paper; instead, one puts the used toilet paper into a waste basket beside the toilet. And there is no guarantee that the bathrooms will have toilet paper, so we learned quickly to keep a supply on our person at all times. At the school where the orientation events were held, the toilets were just porcelain holes in the ground which could be flushed (but again—toilet paper could not be flushed). This style of indoor toilet appears to be popular in Mongolia.]

By the end of Orientation, we had all been split into groups based on our work areas and other factors, and we knew which cities we would be living in for the ten weeks of Pre-Service Training. I was in a group with the university teachers and other secondary school teachers, and we were headed for G., a resort town in a river valley near the capital. On the last day of Orientation, a group of volunteers put together and read a list of superlatives (e.g., “Most Likely to Be the First To Use the Peace Corps-Issued Condoms”) at lunch. That night, since it was our final night together as a group, we held a dance at the school which turned out to be surprisingly well-attended. When it was first announced, a few of us grumbled at the idea of a dance party, but apparently we were all a little stressed out and anxious and ready to let off some steam. Despite the fact that it was the only “dry” day of the month in Zuunmod, the volunteers had managed to stockpile some vodka and show up en masse (and en-smashed). Fueled by untold liters of Mongolian vodka, the volunteers and a group of Mongolian staffers did their best to stomp the paint from the floorboards while American music poured out of building into the sleepy streets of Zuunmod. At midnight the dance party ended, and a block party formed at the entrance to the dormitory. To add to the generally surreal quality of the night, I ended up having a fairly long conversation in German with Alison B. on the wall of the steps to the dorm. I’m not sure when we got to bed that night, but probably none of us were as rested as we should have been for our journey to our PST sites the next day.

The next morning a long line of meekers (small Russian vans) stood facing the dormitory, waiting to be crammed with luggage and sweaty Peace Corps volunteers. In addition to the luggage we had brought with us to LA, we were each laden with a Peace Corps-issued water purifier, a tumpun (a plastic wash basin), and a sub-zero sleeping bag. We said our goodbyes and took some pictures, and we received our first introduction to the universal Law of Meekers, to wit, “If it seems that the meeker is painfully overstuffed, there is always room for one more person.”

Three years ago I was sitting behind a desk in my office at Chase Card Services in Orlando, thinking about APRs and credit risk. I was twenty-seven years old, and I had a house and a car but no college degree. I drove half an hour in traffic on the interstate every morning and evening to get to and from work. I ate lunch at the same restaurant every Saturday with the same group of friends and was a regular at almost every place of business I went to. I spent every Sunday evening with my grandparents and all the major holidays with my family. I enjoyed all the comforts that life in America can offer, not the least of which is the comfort of routine. And I had the freedom to do whatever I wanted—to watch any movie I wanted whenever I wanted, to read any book I wanted, to go on vacation where and when I wanted to. It seems hard—and it’s sometimes hard on me—to imagine all that now. I’m sitting on a rug in a room in Mongolia, drinking river water that I purified myself. I’m living with a family I met only three weeks ago and who speak only whatever English I’ve taught them. Yesterday at this time, I was sitting on a stranger’s concrete floor, avoiding eye contact with the bloody sheep carcass next to me and sipping milk tea while a group of Mongolians lustily devoured the sheep’s innards from a steaming dish in the center of the room. My only access to the internet is through a computer in a little food shop up the hill from my house. There are cows mooing outside my window. And yet, for the most part, I’m having the time of my life. This blog does not tell the convoluted and mostly prosaic story of how I got to this point over the past three years. Suffice it to say that I availed myself of the nearly limitless freedom my American life afforded me. This blog does, however, tell the story of how a person like me, an inveterate creature of routine with a rather provincial and conventional suburban background, gets by in the Peace Corps in Mongolia. When I was considering the Peace Corps, I greedily read all the Peace Corps blogs I could find as part of my decision-making process. I knew just what I was looking for—a candid and comprehensive portrait of quotidian life in the Peace Corps with plenty of pictures—and that’s just what I hope to offer. I want to do for my readers what the many Peace Corps bloggers who preceded me did for me. And I’ll do my best to be as honest and detailed as possible and to post as many pictures as I can. Some of you simply wish to live vicariously through me or to check in on me periodically to make sure I’m still healthy and happy. And that’s fine too. My only request is that you return the favor. Post comments; send me e-mails. Keep me apprised of your lives and the happenings back home. I miss all of you just as much as you miss me. Possibly more. So whatever your reason for reading this, whoever you are, read on and enjoy. This blog is for all of you.