Fun conversations I’ve had in Mongolian lately. Scene the First: lunchtime, waiting for Katie to meet me outside a cafe. Two older Mongolian gentlemen are chatting together on a bench nearby. One, clearly tipsy, wanders over to me. Mongolian Gentleman: Hey, see that guy over there? [pointing to his friend] He’s a good guy. Me: [...]

Look at that, year one is done and we’re now well into year two. And thus it seems about time for me to explain what I’ve been working on. GET READY. Two-sentence summer recap: Katie and I were trainers for the incoming group of volunteers. Then her parents came. And then we got back to [...]

Turns out getting featured in local news clips and commercials in Erdenet is as easy as getting on reality shows in America. I’m a business development volunteer, so naturally I’m now best known in my town as an English teacher, thanks to the following story from the local TV news. These lessons were part of [...]

It’s okay to be a deadbeat blogger if you’ve got a spouse who picks up the slack. My contribution for Tsagaan Sar is the video evidence. You will recognize some folks from Katie’s pictures — they’re the family of one of the teachers she works with. You’ll see a big stack of pastries covered with [...]

We’re celebrating the new year with this brief but goofy appearance on local TV: Eye of Wisdom isn’t a cult, it’s the school where Katie and I teach English together. My feeble attempt to paraphrase the school director in the video: “The Human Development Center offers English lessons and other training. We want to wish [...]

This was going to be a two-month recap, but it’s taken me three extra weeks to get it done. So what have I been doing, anyway? I’m glad you asked. Let’s run through the highlights of my early experiences in Erdenet: The Russian Sales Pitch: My first visit to Erdenet Mining Company (aka the reason [...]

Just when you thought I was slacking on blog posts, here I go with two in a row.  Bam! So nobody chanted for it to happen, but I did give a speech in Mongolian at our swearing-in ceremony last month (as did three of my fellow PCVs).  The beginning isn’t in the video, so read [...]

Did I really just use that title? A few weeks ago our training class swore in and then we all got shipped off to our respective sites.  If you are truly interested in my life, then you will have read the previous post and looked up Erdenet on Wikipedia, or something.  Here’s some more info [...]

I’m writing this on my phone using the Wifi at a cafe in Ulaanbaatar. Mongolia is more developed than you might have thought. We got our site assignment this week: Erdenet. It’s the second- or third-largest city in the country, built about 40 years ago because of the big copper mine there. I will expand [...]

A week from today we’ll get our site assignments.  The speculation amongst trainees reached fever pitch a week or two ago, but it has now subsided into a dull roar in the background.  Most of us are tired of talking about it.  As clues and rumors have trickled through, not much has been clarified, and [...]

Which means family.  From left: Dagva, Sanja, Ehj (Mom), Puka, Aaaaa. “Aaaaa” is Sanja’s name for me.  I know it sounds like I’m making this up, but he’s working with a limited set of sounds right now.  It’s just distinctive enough from “ah-GAA” (big brother) and “aa-VAA” (dad).

Q: OK, first off, what’s up with the X-Y-P-P-backwards Es in the upper-right corner of the page? A: That’s my made-up Cyrillic spelling of ‘hooray,’ which which I’ve seen apocryphally attributed to Mongolians back in the horde days.  By the way, ‘Genghis Khan’ is the bastardized version of Chinggis Khaan.  Soften the ‘k’ a little, [...]

It’s a holiday!  Not a very active one, as evidenced by my spending the morning on a computer.  Today is the third and final day of the official Naadam (rhymes with bottom) festival in Ulaanbaatar.  There are also local versions of Naadam all over Mongolia, held at other times throughout July or possibly going into [...]

Well, it’s a lot harder to access a computer around here now that the kids are on summer vacation. First off: Katie visited last weekend! We found some spaghetti sauce at the market and made pasta for dinner. I don’t think the kids liked it, but whatever. Dagva did a good job of pretending, at [...]

Last Thursday afternoon we left the dorms to move in with our host families. I was picked up by a 20-something woman, her husband, and a 13-year-old boy. This was pretty confusing, since the only woman listed on my host family information sheet was the 40-year-old mother. It took me a few minutes to figure [...]

All right, we made it! I’m sitting in the post office/Internet cafe in my Pre-Service Training city in Tuv aimag (province). Here’s a recap of week 1: We arrived in Mongolia on Saturday, June 5 after spending a day in San Francisco. There were buses waiting to take us to our in-country orientation site, a [...]

Oh, it looks like June 3rd is upon us. We leave for the airport in five and a half hours. This is where I transition from “fully connected with nothing to say” to “lots to say, but no Internet access.” So that’s fun. Our going-away party was also fun. Thanks to everybody who wished us [...]

Country: Mongolia Program: Community Economic Development (CED) Job Title: Business Advisor or Business Development Specialist Pre-Service Training (in Mongolia): June 5 – August 13, 2010 Dates of Service: August 13, 2010 – August 12, 2012 There it is.  Katie and I started our Peace Corps applications in April 2009 and received our invitations in January [...]