Training of Trainers: New Volunteers on the Horizon

For two weeks we have been in Ulaanbaatar (UB) planning for the arrival of the 20th round of Peace Corps volunteers here, the "M20s."

Leslie was already in UB after doing some seminars in other towns, but Nathan was able to fly in from our Bayankhongor. Interestingly, on May 28, his flight was delayed by three hours because of the (presumably) final snowfall. To fill the time in the low-traffic airport, he watched a rousing makeshift ping pong tournament among the staff.
















By the time the plane arrived, nearly all the snow had melted and the flight was uneventful.

During the week and a half of training, we learned some higher level facilitation techniques, and feedback and evaluation strategies. Training for the new volunteers is broken into two halves. We will be teaching the second half. Because of budget cuts and the devaluation of the dollar, the training this year will be two weeks shorter than our training last year. This posed many new scheduling complications and curriculum adjustments, resulting in us spending much of the time working with our sector groups of three, which included one Mongolian specialist who has been hired for the summer and another volunteer who will be teaching the first half.

Esayas is a Sudanese-born Eritrean. He's lived in the States since he was boy, forced out of his country during the civil unrest of the mid-late 80's in neighboring Ethiopia. Because of his dark skin, flamboyant personality and fluffy hair, he gets a lot of attention wherever he goes, and he's perhaps the most petted American in Mongolian history.

Garrett hails from Summersville, WV, home of the Gaulley River and popular hiking and whitewater rafting destination for Nathan's Boy Scout troop in the mid 1990's. Garrett likes country roads that take him home to place he belongs, has been a WVU football tailgating enthusiast since he was a fetus, and holds a degree in accounting he tries to put behind him.

This is Mola's first year working with Peace Corps' community economic development (CED) training. She lived in Germany for a few years and then Denver, CO, working at the retail chain Old Navy, while her husband earned his masters. She has two little American citizens who live with her and call her mom.

Uugnaa is a university English teacher who has her own small NGO in Mongolia. She was the community youth development (CYD) pre-service training coordinator two years ago, so she can hold her own and really doesn't even need the volunteer trainers.



We worked in our sector groups to revise the teaching curriculum based on our experiences and the adjusted program guidelines negotiated by the Mongolian and American governments.

When training was done this past Friday, we mounted up all of our training materials to bring to the training site, about an hour outside of UB in the neighboring provincial capital.


Peace Corps Mongolia Headquarters.











Peace Corps got some new microbusses this year. They smell new.

Check out this stack of new tumpuns ready for trainee bathing and clothes washing.

After we unpacked and set up our temporary offices, we were treated to a lazy afternoon at a ger camp, how Mongolians do resort life. We had a great time tossing a Frisbee, playing catch with a softball, and hiking around with the Peace Corps staff and Mongolian language teachers discovering the history of the area.




Training Manager Chimgee sports an impossibly large visor. She's a taskmaster and has been quite an asset to Peace Corps during her nearly 20 years.

Some language teachers and Nathan take a break from a short hike up to a rebuilt monastery.

This site used to be a monestary that held over 1200 monks until communist revolutioanries in the late 1930's massacred them leaving only remnants of their quite life in the hills. Notice the terraced landscape around the lonely ger that used to hold the hundreds of gers.

We'll be back in the middle of July to help with the second half of training. In the meantime, we wish the new trainees good luck as we continue some grant writing, work at camps, and work back in Bayankhongor. Once again our separate work schedules will keep us apart for a few weeks, so eventhough we're happy to be busy with productive projects, the distance can be a challenge.