Afternoon at the River

As we wait out our last few weeks in Bayankhongor, the sun has finally come out - albeit intermittently. It's June 12. It snowed just a few days ago. Snow in June is not as fun as it sounds. Longest... winter... ever.

To celebrate the new-found sun, we walked to the nearby river with our site mates Tysen and Wally. It was the perfect day with temps at 70F (20C) and a clean breeze. Oh, yeah!

We went to our local Ching Hai restaurant, whose spiritual movement invites vegetarianism. They attract followers through small restaurants, and though we have not adopted her particular philosophy, we have been eating there almost every day since it opened late last year. On the menu were steamed rolls with tofu and cucumber, and cookies. We brought our own mustard, honey mustard, hot sauce and soy sauce because the flavor of the "oroomog" rolls is not exactly overwhelmingly strong, though clean and fresh.

With a blanket, Coke and condiments in hand, we made the 10-15 minute walk eastward from the Bayankhongor town center toward the Tuin River (pr. 2-een). The wind was in our hair and sun on our faces. As we sat down for our little feast, we were overwhelmed by the sweet perfume of flowers aggressively wafting past.

Leslie, Tysen and Wally lounge by the Tuin River. What a day for a picnic.

There is a bit of a problem with pollution around these parts. Mongolians usually just throw trash on the ground even when they are at the river for the purpose of communing with nature. Because the wind often blows east toward the river, trash from Bayankhongor winds up in the river too. Plastic bags, plastic bottles, beer bottles, and wrappers fill the slower points and bends in the river.

It's a bit depressing to see all the trash in the river next to such beautiful natural wonders.

After our lovely picnic, we walked past the sports center across the street from our apartment. Apparently, World Cup FEVER has taken hold. The sports center recently got a hold of some artificial turf, and on this Saturday, the field was put to good use.

Mongolia is not in the World Cup, but that doesn't stop them from a little practice.

18 days left before we move out of Bayankhongor. But who's counting?

Close of Service Conference

By the end of next week, we'll have been here for 2 full years. It's kind of hard to believe because it's gone so quickly, but then again, 2 years is a long time.

During the three-day conference at a luxury ger camp between Ulaanbaatar and Darkhan, Mongolia's 2nd largest city where we finished our training 21 months ago, we discussed post-Peace Corps topics like insurance, job hunting, resume writing and social readjustment. There was a panel of 3 guest speakers who work in international development in various capacities for various lengths of time. From this, we learned about the many options for employment we hadn't yet considered that now make post-Peace Corps decisions even more difficult.

We spent a few hours a day learning about our different post-Peace Corps options and discussing our accomplishments over the past two years. Thanks to Kat Pepperted for the photo.

At the cooking competition, Nathan's team one with a trip to the Indian subcontinent. The challenge was to create a salad, an entree, a redesigned Mongolian dish and a dessert. There was a lemongrass curry cole slaw, three curries, sweet and savory samosas with a yogurt sauce (the mod Mongol dish), and a chickpea chocolate surprise. Congrats to Team West for winning best over.

We didn't get any pictures of the competition, but here's a rousing photo of the judges hard at work choosing from the smorgasbord of the best food we've tasted in many a month. Thanks to Kat Pepperted for the photo.

There was also some dancing and general merry making among the 40+ who were there.

On May 31, 2008, 65 of us met in San Francisco. We flew to Seoul, Korea, and then to Mongolia. By our count, 23 terminated their service early either for family, medical, safety, or other reasons. This 35% attrition seems right on par with Peace Corps worldwide according to unofficial statistics at http://www.peacecorpswiki.org/Early_Termination. Those who were missing, especially some recent departures, were missed.

To commemorate our service, Leslie created a slide show. Set to music, the pictures provided by various volunteers showcase highlights of our 2 years from June 2008 to May 2010. Enjoy.

Just after the slide show, we were treated to a magnificent sunset and rainbow. It was quite a majestic site.

The Secret History Ger Camp during our COS and a fiery spring sunset.


Nathan's training group, our Bayankhongor site mates (minus Leila who went to the States unexpectedly and has since returned), and Leslie's training group.

When we returned to UB, we all had our final physicals and dental check-ups. We're both fit and healthy as a horse-head fiddle. Those of you who have been following the weather with some interest, it made it into the high 70s yesterday, got down to freezing overnight, and has settled in about a high of about 47F again today with a stiff breeze. Nonetheless, it's feeling a little bit more like spring now that we can leave off the long underwear.

For now, Leslie and I will travel back to site, finish up some projects, hopefully put on a summer camp, and then we'll return to UB in early July to complete some other pending projects. Our official last day of service is July 22. We have tickets booked for July to London, the first leg on our European tour that will last until late December 2010.

Mongolian Herding and the Harsh Winter (Dzud)

Mongolia's continental climate with its extreme and sharply fluctuating temperatures can be difficult for herders to weather, and the 2009/2010 winter has proved particularly harsh. According to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the bitter and long winter, which followed a dry summer, killed an estimated 8 million of Mongolia’s 44 million animals (nearly 20%), about a million more livestock than the previously worst winter of 1944. These conditions, known in Mongolian as a “dzud”, also wreaked havoc from 1999-2002 when Mongolians lost an estimated 11 million head over three winters, according to the Adventist Development and Relief Agency (ADRA) that is among the international NGOs that have been operating in Mongolia since the early 1990s.

In 2003, the dzud conditions caused an urban migration as herders and those supported by herding income scrambled to find work. Now the government is waiting to see how the market will handle such an impact before it really intervenes. The UNDP has been paying herders to bury carcasses to prevent the spread of disease. For more on the latest so-called "Cash for Carcasses," click here for the msnbc.com coverage.

Samuel De Jaegere / AFP - Getty Images from msnbc.com

A cow carcass lying frozen in the snow near the fence of a cattle ranch on the outskirts of the Mongolian district of Sergelen Soum.

The Importance of Herding in Mongolia
Central to their livelihood and the basis of their culture, roughly one-quarter of the country's 3 million people are pastoral nomads who move with their households in search of grasses for their animals. Their movement is seasonal, linked to rainfall and the availability of good forage for their animals, and they usually rotate their herds on roughly the same swaths of land that are close together. They depend on those lands to be free each year, though there are usually no formal agreements among herders as to who may use what land or when, herders know the allowable spots. Even still, many herds overlap, though this does not seem to bother most as it is a professional courtesy and code of the steppe is to share and share alike. Because of this lifestyle, herder families are usually remotely located, sometimes hours from their villages where their children attend schools and live in dorms for part of the year. Others raise livestock in or around villages utilizing slat board barns with angled roofs that typically face south to protect against winds from the north.

In Mongolia, the livestock roam free while the people are fenced in. Without pasture fences, livestock meander through villages, towns and most cities as they forage while people are restricted inside adjoining fenced-in properties (khashaa) with their families’ brick, block or wood houses and gers (or in any combination based on region). This also creates frequent traffic hazards as vehicles on approach honk to persuade livestock to provide a gangway.

• For more on herding in Mongolia and the Mongolian economy, click here.
• For more on the dzud from Peace Corps volunteers and the BBC, click here.
• For a succinct Sky News video of the devastation, watch this:

Summer Camp at Uvgun Jargalant: WE CAN DO IT!

After some administrative problems including being told we would have three quarters as many, then twice as many students as we'd planned, we had a good 5 days in the countryside at Uvgun Jargalant, "Ol' Blissful," a summer camp for children nearly 70 kilometers from Bayankhongor.

(Thanks to Peder for this photo). For more photos from the camp week, click here.

Our particular camp focused on English and life skills, and there was some physics rolled up in there too. As you might imagine, the planning and compromises that went into making the camp were many, including a surprise early morning flight back from UB for Leslie because two of the English teachers and the life skills teacher dropped out two days before we were supposed to leave. We nearly canceled the thing altogether because of the many frustrations and misleading, fanciful assertions made by some of the Mongolian staff, but like many kids who are forced to go to camp and then end up loving it, we found ourselves sorry to see the camp end.

The first two days were treacherously cold and it snowed on and off, sometimes for over an hour. We were advised to bring clothes as if it were winter, and we did a pretty good job layering. Unfortunately, we didn't quite take them as seriously as we should have because as it was snowing through the broken window of our room and we were hunkered down in our sleeping bags, our faces were ice, ice cold. We never thought it would snow in June, and in fact, the other two Peace Corps volunteers who went with us (Peder and Fahd) were so convinced it wouldn't be that cold that they didn't even bring sleeping bags. Brrrr.















Peder & Fahd took some of the kids on a day hike up a smaller peak on one of the surrounding mountains. Notice the storm clouds with snow rolling in.

Nathan, clad in every piece of clothing he brought to camp, waits to receive a pass from a student showing off his best Boomer Esiason.

Despite the cold, we and the 27 campers were outside much of the time. And much of the time was flexibly structured so we knew about what things should happen around what time. Thanks to some last-minute but pretty comprehensive planning, we came up with a schedule for the week and a theme for each day.

Our Daily Schedule at Uvgun Jargalant Camp

9-10	Breakfast
10-11	English lessons in 3 groups by level
11-11:30	Tea, butter crackers
11:30-12:30	Life Skills (1/2 hr), Physics (1/2 hr)
1-2	Lunch
2-3	Free time
3-4	English (language games)
4-4:15	Tea or yogurt
4:15-7	Structured play time (hiking, football, sports tournament, scavenger hunt)
7-8	Dinner
8-11	Event (drag show, dancing, plays, poetry-off)

Themes included family, sports, nature, weather, and incorporated several grammar points based on class level. Each American was partnered with a Mongolian English teacher so the teacher could learn from the lessons as well. With some mixed results among us, the system seemed to work OK, though if we had had more time to plan, the Mongolian teachers could have been more involved.

The first day we arrived at camp in the afternoon, so after a quick break for some soup and the first of many yak milk teas (not even as good as you might think), we interviewed each of the 10-17 year olds and grouped them according skill level resulting in some of the older kids winding up with the youngest kids. No matter, though. All the students were motivated and energized for each lesson, and we didn't have a single discipline or attention span problem.

Students used their bunks as desks and chairs. Much of the teaching was active and involved speaking or drawing, so they got along just fine.

The classroom was useful, but we were outside a lot. In fact, many of the highlights of the week for us included:

1. Nathan's hike up a steep mountain with 4 kids.

The five hiking guys stop for a quick photo.

[Left] The grounds of the camp. [Right] The kids found wild onions and a kind of sour wild leaf vegetable they called red cabbage. It was like grocery shopping on the mountain.

2. Football, including an 11 on 11 game.

Teaching and playing football was a big part of our camp. It started with just throwing the ball and ended in an 11 on 11 game, culminating in a well defended long bomb that hit its receiver on the run for a touchdown!

Early on we taught the campers some sports words and phrases.
Here you can hear them shouting, "Pass it to me!" and, "Throw it to me!"
They had the throwing part down, but receiving never did catch on.

3. And teaching music outdoors.

The kids do their best James Taylor on this Carole King favorite of ours, "You've Got a Friend."

One evening, Leslie and I turned in early while Peder and Fahd attended the camp drag show. We heard they were going to have a "Miss" competition, but didn't know it would be the boys dressing up as girls. Some of them really committed and pulled it off. The one older student dressed his version of Middle Eastern garb won the competition. Maybe less IS more.
















Another day was filled with a Mongolian sports tournament that pitted us against each other in a tug of war. We broke the rope with our awesomeness leaving the competition in a draw.






And at the end of the evening, Leslie put on her dancing shoes to teach the Cha Cha Slide. Think of it as a kind of hip-hop line dance, where the recorded announcer instructs dancers when and what to do, like a solo square dance. It was a big hit.

"Clap your hands. Now hop. Slide to the right. Slide to the left. Cha-cha-cha," and so on.

On the final evening they put on English language skits of Little Red Riding Hood and Goldilocks and the Three Bears (which they knew through Russian influence), and The Boy Who Cried Wolf was new, but a big hit. In the two latter skits, they came up with original dialogue and memorized it in between readings from the narrator. We were impressed.

What Nathan thought was most stunning from the week was how well Leslie was able to really instill some positive qualities through life skills training. Most notably, she taught them about sportsmanship, being a role model, and positive language. After the second day, the motto of the camp was "We Can Do It!" in English. This flavored everything we did from then on as kids happily shouted the moniker to their friends while hiking, working in class, and competing on the field of play.

It was a good week filled with more than we can put on one blog, so check out more of the action here. We look forward to doing the camp again next year working from the strengths and weakness of this year.

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.

Spring is here! Kind of!

This post is for you, Uncle Alan.

"The weather in Mongolia is always changing: some days you can experience all four seasons."

-Traditional Mongolian Proverb

The last few weeks, the weather has been awesome. It snowed about 10 days ago, but it quickly warmed in the late afternoon to temps high enough for a light jacket. Routinely since then, the it's been in the 30's at night and in the 60s-70sF during the days. Consequently, we've put away the long underwear for the season and have now embraced Spring. However, Spring, while it does include mild summer temperatures, also includes mild winter temps as well. This Friday is the last day the city heating plants will be running heat, but it's only 55F in our apartment, so I think they gave up a little early.

It's 55F in our apartment, but the smokestack shows no sign of life.

Leslie's curled in a sleeping bag sarcophagus on a chilly morning.

So you can keep up on all the latest weather in beautiful Bayankhongor, we've added a widget to the left side panel or our blog. Check it out.

Bayanhongor Weather

Bayanhongor Time

Spring = Dust Storms
In all seasons in Bayankhongor, we've noticed that it is windy. But with Spring in Mongolia comes dust storms without warning. We went for a pleasant Easter hike down to the river with one of my counterparts Sunday. We lazily ate jelly beans and chocolate (courtesy of our benevolent site mate Tysen), and shared bread, peanut butter, pickle salads and huushuur. It was a good thing we left when we did, though, because in rolled a storm worthy of a name.

As we walked back toward the city, we could see it enveloped by the flying dirt and debris. Our faces were pelted with small rocks and the whirring wind was so loud in our ears, we could barely hear each other speak. The more we walked, the more intense it became.

And just as suddenly as it had appeared, the clouds of sand and whirling trash came to rest back down to the ground, merely rustling as the wind continued to quietly blow around us.

The Sky is Gray
Since Spring has rolled around, the sky has been noticeably gray and gloomy, but the sun is coming up much earlier now. At Tsagaan Sar in late February, the sun came up at around 8:30 and during January it wasn't up before 9 o'clock. Now in mid-March, it's pleasantly up before 7am and doesn't go down until almost 8pm. This is a good feeling as we climb out of the winter blues.

Spring has been a little gloomy so far, but more people are out and about as the weather eases from the below zeros to the triple-digit summer heat.

A child walks to school next to our building on a gray morning. The metal thing on stilts is where we burn our trash. This is also the field where we've been playing whiffle ball recently.

Construction
Spring is also the time for construction to begin, so of course, they're putting a third floor on our apartment building. It's been a bit noisy as they've been welding and knocking down wood walls to brick up the full loft above us. It will be a welcome addition come next winter. There was no insulation up there, just a slat wood floor, so the heat from our place bled right out.


Our landlord has begun adding a third story to our building. Here they've welded the frame for the next flight of stairs.

As you can tell, construction in Mongolia is a non-specific art. We're not sure what's level here on the new support beams. Try coming up those stairs with no light in the stairwell. We didn't know we'd miss American building codes so much.

Care Packages
Thanks to the Reeders, Michelle and Cindy, and Leslie's parents for awesome care packages full of leisure and travel books, socks, macaroni and cheese, bagged/canned salmon and tuna and chicken, fruits, dry soup and dry soup makings, nuts, peanut butter and all the fun personal notes. We really appreciate it!

And a big thanks to Julie and all the folks at Easter Seals of SE Pennsylvania for sending a box chock full of instruments for the center for children with disabilities. They are quickly being put to use. We can't wait to show you some pictures. (The peanut butter and Mama Mia DVD were awesome surprises too.)