Hey! Teacher! Leave those kids alone...

Most of the volunteers serving in Mongolia with the Peace Corps are (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) TEFL teachers, but even those of us who are health trainers, in youth development or business will be teaching English to the people we work with and our community members. So to help us with this reality, we received a two-day crash course on how to teach English as a foreign language.

Many of the techniques we learned are experiential, in that we use games and excercises in conjunction with lecture-style teaching. We have found that this is the best way to learn most new information and particularly helpful when learning a new language. We put our work to use last week with small classes. Leslie taught to bankers and Nathan taught to neighborhood kids below the age of 12. Both groups were very receptive and willing participants. Leslie's group wanted them to come back, but unfortunately, it was a one-time learning experience for her group.

There is a strong push in Mongolia to make English the official second language and children are doing well to pick it up. In fact, most people know at least "hello" and "bye" which can make for an interesting walk delivering all those greetings and salutations.

We have also been preparing and delivering presentations and workshops within our areas of expertise, which have gone well. Nathan will be delivery a symposium on customer service to local members of the Chamber of Commerce this weekend. He'll be talking about building relationships and encouraging repeat business through customer service and active selling. In the market and in small shops, there is little competition among vendors who sell similar products and they are often unmotivated to sell their goods. It seems they are afraid to undercut their fellow vendors and are generally happy to make whatever they make in a day. They tend to be more concerned with their direct relationships with each other and strive to serve each other by providing change or referrals, and less worried about selling merchandise. Making a larger profit doesn't seem to outweigh that primary relationship with the people they sell with each day. We had never really considered that until we saw it here. In some ways, it makes a lot of practical sense.

In other news, our new external hard drive bit the dust with all our music, pictures and movies. We're not amused. It worked and then it didn't, just like that. The power gets to it just fine, but no computer recognizes it. Leslie will probably be shipping it to her dad to see if he can get remedy the situation and send back a new drive with our old info.

Nathan talked to his parents Sunday. All seems well with his father who, after heart surgery last month, has dropped 20 lbs and is walking a mile a day with his mother. Both are in extraordinarily great spirits. His dad has been cleared to bowl in August, well ahead of the initial October prognosis.

Next week is our final week with our host families and our final language assessment before going to our site.