The Bear Necessities

Water
According to the information the Peace Corps gave us, as of 2004, only 62% of Mongolians have access to safe drinking water, though where we are - notwithstanding the known microscopic concerns including parasites and bacteria and that the water is pretty hard with dissolved minerals - the water itself seems pretty clean and debris-free.

To ensure our water is safe, Peace Corps gave each volunteer an electric water distiller, which heats the untreated water into vapor and then drips it out through a charcoal filter into a collection basin. It is by far, the cleanest water anyone could ever hope to drink anywhere on the planet, ever in the history of time. After the water is cooked, the inside of the distiller shows exactly how hard the water is as a dried film coats the metal walls and the bottom is layered with a slimy white film. A simple vinegar solution cleans it right up.

As a backup, if the power should be out for an extended period of time and we were unable to distill water or boil it on a stove, our medical kits come stocked with iodine tablets.

Water in our villages comes either from a well on a family’s property, which is free (like Leslie’s host family) or it is sold from a little metered station resembling a wooden kiosk with a hose out the side. Water is usually pretty centrally located and retrieved using a rubber-sealed metal container that holds about 5 gallons (by quick estimation), which is wheeled back on forth from the depot on a useful two-wheeled dolly. The upside is that it’s still rather inexpensive, about ₮2/liter ($.oo17), and the downside is that no matter where you are in the countryside, you have to fetch it. The downhill part is where Nathan’s water is, and the uphill part is where Nathan lives.

For many reasons including money and access limitations and probably other historical and cultural reasons, Mongolians tend to be very frugal with their water and typically only need to get it every few days. Not only do they bathe and launder much less frequently than Americans, (though we’ve noticed that they don’t tend to get funky/smelly like we do after a few days), they also wash hands, dishes, faces, etc. using a ubiquitous gravity reservoir. It’s a small but thick metal bucket mounted above nearly every sink in the countryside that holds a gallon of water or less, and it has a weighted metal rod hanging down through the center bottom. When you need water, you just push the rod up into the reservoir and the water runs out on demand. Drop your hand back down and the metal rod plugs the hole with a rubber seal. It’s simple but genius.

Since there is no running water into the house, there is also no water running out either. Each house in the countryside has a bucket for collecting the waste water under the sink. When it’s full, the bucket is taken outside and either dumped into a gravel/sand sump (rare), tossed in a specific corner of the property or tossed outside the property in the road. After some recent flash flooding, the runoff was a little frothy, probably due to wastewater like this. City apartments have running water with Western style sanitation.

Despite the disposal concerns, Mongolians, overall, use far fewer detergents and much less water than Americans do, and they try to get the most out of them before tossing them out. For instance, when many families do their laundry in the tumpun (small basin we’ve mentioned a couple times before), they wash at least their feet and sometimes more in the somewhat-soapy rinse water before throwing it out. Unfortunately, the downside of using fewer detergents, though, is the lack of soap when washing dishes. They tend to only use water, which has made many of us more than a little nervous about how “clean” they actually get.

Food
From what we can tell, the Mongolian diet where we are is primarily made up of about 5 different ingredients prepared differently, and which are almost always really delicious, including: meat (usually beef or mutton), eggs, bread/noodles, potatoes, and rice. They also sprinkle in some cabbage, carrots, jam, butter and ketchup. In fact, whether it’s a nice dry meat and noodle dish with potatoes, a beef soup with potatoes, cabbage, carrots and noodles, or a steamed wonton filled with meat and potatoes over a plate of rice, Mongolians love to put ketchup on it. Nathan’s middle brother Kevin would probably get along quite nicely here, though he might be disturbed to find out that their ketchup would ever be confused for good ol’ Heinz 57. It’s more like a Hunt’s 23.5, but it gets the job done when you need that little something extra.

The noticeable lack of nutritional diversity hasn’t worn us down yet since every meal has been so tasty up until now, but we can certainly see why volunteers seem to get a little bored. Once we’re on our own, we can diversify a little more and current and former volunteers have compiled a cookbook for us to use, so we’re pretty excited to see what we can get into.

We’ve learned, though, that the budget will be tighter and tighter as food prices continue to rise, even after they have apparently tripled in the last three years. Since most vegetables are imported and are already expensive, this raises a concern for us. Some current volunteers expressed their problems putting together what they consider to be a nutritional diet using the stagnant Peace Corps monthly allowance that has remained the same since 1996 in Mongolia despite high annual inflation rates here and a weaker dollar.

One volunteer reported that last year a loaf of bread was ₮200 and now it’s ₮700. That’s quite a jump. Many volunteers spend money out of their own pockets each month to make ends meet, but since we don’t have that luxury, we’re hoping the recent evaluation being conducted by Peace Corps will yield enough in extra living allowance to cover that gap.

Potty
Before we got here, we read and heard that there were no seats in the outhouses here. And while that’s 99% true for most trainees here in the countryside, we didn’t expect that there would be no place to sit either. Outhouses here are not like the ones in the States for that reason. In most, there is just a board missing from the slatted floor or triangles cut into the floor, perhaps for a little ambiance. That has taken a little getting used to, but our thighs are the better for it. TP (the standard issue stuff is pretty grainy by American standards) goes in the bin inside the outhouse. Like almost all trash here, it’s burned.

Apartment buildings have Russian-style toilets in them, but even those take some getting used to because the waste material sits on a little plateau just under the depositor. When the plunger is pulled straight up through a hole in the center of the tank , water sweeps down carrying the waste to the front of the toilet, then away to who knows where. TP goes in the bin next to the commode.

Transportation
Gas is about $4 a gallon here, but the cost of living and income is far less than we enjoy in the States, even by those far under the poverty line. We don’t know how much a car is here, but we haven’t seen any new ones or any place to buy them either. Most cars tend to be either compact Hyundai or Toyota sedans, SUVs tend to be old Russian jeeps or tall Toyota Landrovers, and they have large minivan-looking vehicles (“meekers”) with three rows of benches. No matter what you’re cruising in, you are most likely to be packed and stacked as much as the vehicle can allow. A small sedan holds 1-2 in the front and 3-5 in the back. A meeker holds 14 somewhat comfortably and 20 or more routinely.

With no public transportation, low automobile ownership rates, and no apparent laws governing it, if you have a car, you’re a taxi driver. And you probably make OK money. Each short ride (within a few miles) to our villages from the city center is between ₮300-₮500 ($.25-$.45) so if you pack a car, you’ve more than made up the gas. And since you already own the car, there’s no insurance, and you don’t pay taxes on those wages, you just got cash money in your pocket. Good job buying that car.

Culturally, drivers are quite powerful and have the final say on all travel plans, pricing and routes to destinations. Pricing on longer trips are more flexible, and foreigners heavily subsidize the locals. Recently, two trainees with the help of a host mother who is a driver, were only able to get a driver down to ₮20,000 ($17.25) for a 45 minute ride he was charging Mongolians ₮5,000 ($4.30) for. There doesn’t seem to be any specific anger or animosity in it, they just expect that we pay more because they think we can afford it, even though we make less than most Mongolians.

Being a passenger in Mongolia (volunteers are prohibited from driving during service) may be one of the most foreign things about the experience so far. There is only one decent, paved road here and it runs a few hundred miles from Sukhbaatar in North Central Mongolia, south to the capital, Ulan Bator. And even though it’s the best road, it’s still not that great, and mostly resembles a round-top country road in the Midwest. Outside of that, some city streets are paved, and many are full of pot holes, and where they aren’t paved, they tend to be riddled with potholes or have been washed out by heavy rains. Because of this, each driver is compelled to navigate a perceived perfect path, weaving back and forth across the road to ensure he has chosen the route containing what he feels is the least amount of potholes. They drive wildly from side to side, regardless of “lane” or oncoming traffic. If the road is smoother on the left side, they casually play chicken until another car is within about 10-15 yards from their front bumper before returning to the right side. It is a fine, crafted, nerve-wracking art to witness.

Ironically, even though there is next to no adherence to lanes here, we did see a road crew crouched on the good road this weekend using buckets and brushes to paint the center line.

We’ve heard that the U.S. government, through an aid program, just awarded Mongolia a special grant for something like $330mil to help build roads and railways here. Hopefully that doesn’t mean Mongolia will be unveiling a shiny new set of white train tracks any time soon.

Money
About 1,160 Mongolian National Tugrik (MNT or ₮) = 1 USD. All money has the same portrait of Genghis Khan (or as they call him, “Chingiss Khang”, but what do they know), though the bills are different colors and the smallest bills, the 100 and 50 are physically smaller than the 500, 1, 5, 10 and 20,000 denominations.

There are no coins, though slang still refers to money as “silver”.

The exchange rate at banks is better depending on the size of the USD, so if you exchange a $100 bill, you get a better rate than if you exchange 5 $20 bills. We don’t really know why, but we’re not so worried about it since we don’t have any Ben Franklins anyway.
Inflation is high, about 15% per year we’re told.

There is no tipping in Mongolia, but no one is in a hurry to give you your change if don’t ask for it either. For that reason, having correct change is usually the way to go. If you wait too long before insisting on change, you have forfeited your claim to it as one trainee recently discovered in a bar.

The bank loan system seems to work more like credit cards in the U.S. Loans are granted on short terms with monthly compounded interest of about 3.5%. Most loans are due within a year and if they’re not honored, Mongolia still maintains a debtor’s prison. Most people don’t have much collateral, so loans tend to be somewhat tough to come by, but we have heard of folks taking out loans to by cell phones. Needless to say, they’re not big savers. In that regard, they seem pretty well in tune with America.

Health Care
One thing we can count on being exactly as billed is the medical attention. We each received a medical kit stocked with anything one might need including Benadryl, Pepto, antibiotics, disposable thermometers and Ace bandages. From bug spray to sunscreen and band-aids to condoms, they’ve got us covered.

The Ulan Bator hospital is the best in the country, though they still don’t have much in the way of specialists or trauma care. So, if we have anything seriously wrong with us, they’ll stabilize us and put us on a plane to Thailand, where they do have anything we could ever need. One guy broke his arm last year and spent some time there with the Peace Corps medical team. Apparently it’s nice in Bangkok, at least comparatively speaking, because some refer to as the “Posh” Corps. We hope to make it there some time to see for ourselves, though hopefully not because of any medical emergency.

If we’re hurt in a remote location, they have access to planes and helicopters to get us out.
We get a dental checkup once a year, but if we have a problem, we’ll get immediate attention.

For mental health, there is a peer support system made up of individuals who agree to lend an ear. All calls used on Peace Corps cell phones (each volunteer gets one after swearing in in August) can be billed through the medical office and if in-country travel is necessary to help prevent a meltdown or some other such catastrophe, the medical office will pay for that too.

Next blog
Leslie had a great week at an orphanage doing a practicum with the other youth development trainees and Naadam is this week. Stay tuned...