Time Is On My Side...

One of my tasks is to teach English to my co-workers 4 days a week and this is my first week. My manager especially needs to learn English because he needs to be able to write grants. No pressure.

Most of my colleagues know at least a little bit of English and have had some sort of formal class as some time or other, but none can speak in complete sentences yet. Think high school Spanish or French. You learn the letters, numbers, some words, and some key phrases of introduction and salutation, but you don’t really know anything past that. So, this week we breezed through introductions and we’re into time.

Time in Mongolia exists much differently than it does in the States. Time is VERY relative, especially when you have a group meeting together. When you set a meeting time, you can bet that means a half hour later than the actual time and it’s no sweat at all. Our friend Bill and my brother Kevin would get along well here. Some reasons we’ve been told and experienced are that often times, it takes so long to travel that people even lose track of the day. Also, because travel is so communal, you’re beholden to the schedules and detours of a whole car load of people, not just yourself. And because everyone knows that a meeting time relative, they plan accordingly. No one wants to be the first one there waiting.

Really, as long as they show up on that day, it’s pretty good. During training, we were set to present a business plan to a small cooperative and we’d confirmed the date a few times. When we showed up, they weren’t there because they thought that date was a Sunday, not a Thursday. We rescheduled and it worked out fine the second time as if nothing had been amiss.

Another time, on our first full day in Bayankhongor, we were told that we would be picked up to go to the countryside at 4 p.m. for dinner. We went to the meeting place at our friend’s ger about ten minutes early and waited; drank some tea; took a long nap; waited; ate; drank some more tea. We were debating whether we wanted to even go or not because Leslie wasn’t feeling well, and we were still dead tired from sleeping on floors and beds like floors for the past week. But we knew they had put a lot of energy into the evening already, so we new we could tough it out for a few hours. At 6:30 they finally showed up. We were worried we wouldn’t have enough light left to make and eat dinner, but everyone was taking their time, so we were just going with the flow. We figured some people were already there with dinner ready for us. As we were waiting for someone else to get into the car around 7:15, we found out we weren’t coming back until Sunday!

I think normally, this wouldn’t be a huge deal, but since our luggage couldn’t fit on the plane, we only had some books, minor toiletries, and the clothes on our back – and we’d been in those for the last 4 days already. Since the next flight into Bayankhongor wasn’t until Sunday evening either, at least we weren’t going to miss our luggage. Though, in an unintentional add of insult to injury, they told us to grab something warm because it was going to be cold out there. We swung home so Leslie could pick up contact solution and we could get our toothbrushes. I was in a pair of jeans, a dress shirt and my suit jacket, which seemed like a good outfit for an hour and twenty minute plane ride 28 hours ago. All Leslie had was a T-shirt, jeans and our friend’s sweatshirt.

The city of Bayankhonger is pretty small, so we thought by “countryside”, they meant at the most a thirty minute drive, similar to our host families’ gatherings. When we got to the “countryside” three hours later over terrain straight from an SUV advertisement with shallow streams and worn dirt roads, it turned out to be a children’s summer camp associated with one of Leslie’s jobs that would later be filled with adults celebrating the end of the summer. As stepped out of the warm car into the pitch black, it was absolutely freezing. We climbed into bed under a mountain of blankets at around 10:30 and quickly went to sleep.

At 12:30, the women came into the room the three of us were sharing and asked us if we wanted to eat the soup they were holding. We all told them no thanks, but it turns out they weren’t asking, they were telling. I received my bowl, ate as much as I could and dove back under the covers. Leslie’s stomach was clearly not in the mood to eat whatever they were bringing, and we think she may have picked up a little food poisoning from something she ate earlier. Whatever the cause, she was up the rest of the night heaving over the balcony.

The next few days were refreshingly pleasant in the clear air and sunshine. We were in a deep valley between to strips of peaked, yet rolling treeless mountains vaguely covered by a mixture course grass and dusty soil. We saw some of the most gorgeous landscapes, I hiked up a mountain with our friend, saw my first herd of yaks, we played ping pong and basketball and lounged around, and we got to bond with some new folks in our community with no schedule at all. Saturday night, we even sang for them at their season closing ceremony and put our dance classes to good use on the Mongolian waltz. On Sunday, they told us we would get back around three so we could go shopping for food and then pick up our luggage, which we thought meant we’d be leaving right after lunch. Instead, we had another horhog meal where they slaughtered a goat for us and cooked it with the hot rocks just like our host families did when we left.

So, tired but fed, we got back into town after everything had closed and in just enough time to go home for an hour to relax before we were picked up to grab our bags at the airport. But for some reason, even though the flight wasn’t coming in until almost 10, we were there at 8:30. You just never can tell.