First and second entries from !MONGOLIA!

This entry consists of three discrete entries; the first is this brief blurb, followed by two others (one of which I didn't get a chance to finish). We have some spotty internet access while in Darkhan for what's called "Mid-Center Days", a brief time away from our host families during which we reconnect with our other volunteers and suss a few things out. 

Darkhan is a beautiful city in its own right, and with its 90,000 people is the second-largest in Mongolia (behind the capital, which boasts 1.5 million). I am quite pleased to be able to spend the next three days with Emily, as before this we had been separated in two different cities (more on that below). It's also nice to have access to a shower with hot, running water. I'm hoping to get a game of Catan going later tonight. 

We miss you all dearly, but are holding steadfast to the cause. I'll try to write more (in consultation with Emily), and post when I can. 

As you might already know, my access (and Emily's) to the interwebs is somewhat limited. As a result, I've not been able to update this here blog, which means: INFO DUMP!

My memory is a little foggy so I'm going to jump around from place to place -- in other words, this won't necessarily be linear. Also, I haven't yet been able to see Emily since we left Darkhan (about nine days ago), so this will be mostly me-centered.

Yesterday (Saturday June 13), my host family and I went for a picnic along the Orkhon River, the longest in Mongolia. My host family consists of my host father, an easy-natured man who likes to laugh; my host mother, equally quick to laugh but possessed of no ability to speak English; the older of my two host brothers, an avid body-builder with ambitions of studying in America; and my younger host brother, perhaps the most easy-going of all, and who has enough English to act as the interpreter. For the most part, my conversations with them have consisted of the "point and say" game; I carry around a little notebook that I can write words and phrases in.

This is the same notebook I use for my English lessons, taught at a high school about a ten minute walk from our house. For the frist couple of times, one or the other of my brothers would walk with me to school, but I now have a somewhat longer leash. Most days, I'm up at about 8, eat, head to Mongolian language class from 9-1, then home for lunch. After lunch (and a possible nap), I'm back at school for what we call "technical session" by 230; these lessons are basically discussing teaching methods and the Peace Corps' philosophy on teaching language more generally. The first week has been mostly what could be described as "theory", but next week (beginning Monday June 15) we will start micro-teaching. These are mini-lessons of about 40 minutes each, where I and a partner work out a lesson plan and teach it to... I think four different classes. We've chosen school-related items, and this week's lesson objective is to teach our students between 5-10 new vocabulary words. Book, pen, chalk, notebook, desk, classroom, school, etc. As of this moment (as of the time of writing), I'm not sure whether we'll introduce any verbs or stick to nouns only; grammar and whatnot don't come until next lesson.

For my part, my Mongolian vocabulary is itself growing, though the grammar is still somewhat of a mystery to me. I understand simple past and simple future, but oddly cannot conjugate verbs in the simple present just yet. I can read Cyrillic pretty well, now, although the letter H in Cyrillic is pronounced "in", and the N is actually "ee", which confuses me. Also, y is pronounced "oo", but not exactly "oo", more like "ou"... if you have a free second, look up the various vowel sounds in Mongolian and look only at the "o" sounds. It's tough. No tougher than learning English, I'm sure, but still tough.

My days are spent mostly idly after school; I do my homework and try to memorize words and vowel associations, spend some time with my host family (usually chit-chatting or playing poker), or trying to get my host brothers to do something physical. On my second day here, they took me to play basketball with their friends. I was dehydrated, dealing with the higher elevation, and generally tired, so I had to check myself out after the first game (and couldn't make a shot to save my life), so they seem to think I'm some sort of invalid at this point. I'm eating well though, despite the fact that my exercise routine has declined to virtually nil; my host family is reluctant to let me go for a run by myself, and I am personally reluctant to go to the public gym in case someone gets angry at the big white guy for... well, for something or other. I suppose I'll have to get over that.

I do stick out like a sore thumb around here; Mongolia is diverse in its own way, but not in the way that an American would recognize -- many ethnicities living in a single country, but those ethnicities are all natively Mongolian. A black person walking down the street would be just as odd as a 6'0 blond American.

What else? The landscape is breathtaking, again in its own way: rolling hills covered in grass, most of it yellow or light green, though you can see darker green patches where the water collects and runs down the side of the hills. The country itself is well above sea level (though I have no idea of its exact elevation), Cattle, sheep, and goats are everywhere including on the city streets. Most people drive cars, but it is not uncommon to see a Mongolian man mounted on a horse ride through town. Khutul itself, the city I've been placed in for training, is not particularly large (about 10,000 people), and was built initially by the Soviets. If I've learned anything about Soviets during my time here thus far, it's that they have a certain fondness for concrete sculptures and central squares: the main park here has a wealth of animal sculptures that were made from concrete, and there is a block of five large apartment buildings that create a square in the middle of the city.

My mental state is good, overall. The bed in which I sleep is much harder than I'm used to, which turns out to be a good thing; the softer beds make my back hurt, for whatever reason. As a result, I'm sleeping pretty well each night. The terrifying Mongolian winter is still at least four or five months away; the weather has been mostly sunny and warm, though some days the wind kicks up with such ferocity that it puts Kansas and Chicago to shame. I'm told the winds are far worse in the Spring, though.

Honestly, the most difficulty I've had in maintaining a good balance mentally so far has been the initial orientation when we first got here. The leaders had a tendency to shush us to get our attention, which is infuriating to me; while I recognize the need to get everyone's attention, I cannot currently think of a more infuriating way to get us to quiet down. I'd rather be yelled at and even verbally insulted than shushed. Also, there were a lot of... "interactive" learning methods. I've just come from graduate school and, not to sound like a prat, I'm not used to teachers making us put together skits or asking endless questions that should be rhetorical, and most of the work I had done was not in groups or pairs. It just... it all seemed extremely childish. So that was frustrating. And some of my American counterparts do very little to counter the stereotype of Americans as being excessively loud, which was also a little irritating.

That section of our experience here seemed to drag on the longest; time is, as we all know, very malleable in the human experience. Perhaps consequently, my time since arriving in Khutul has been far more leisurely and has passed much more easily.

Bright ray of sunshine that I am, this is where I've decided to end this post. The overall impression should be that I quite like Mongolia and its people, am doing well emotionally (though I miss Emily something awful) and physically (though I could stand to exercise), and that things are coming along nicely. Did you get that?

June 24, 2015

This seems like a good time to write another blog post that I can't actually post.

My phone got jacked! It's my own fault, really; we had some access to the school's wifi (it comes and goes randomly), so I set my phone in what I thought was a fairly well-concealed place to download some music while I was in class. However, as you might have guessed, it was not as cleverly hidden as I'd thought, and someone grabbed it. Oh well! As you may already know, I broke my good phone long before I even left Kansas, and had bought a refurbished Galaxy Nexus to replace it. In Mongolia, I'm using what is essentially a Nokia brick phone (the indestructible model), issued by the Peace Corps. I didn't really need the thing, but it was my camera and my portable music player, so it was nice to have.

The weather here has become crazier. For a few days, it grew progressively hotter. This presented a problem of special significance, as we are expected to maintain business casual attire during any official Peace Corps functions. That means that, when walking to and from class, the sun is beating down on you while you wear your nice pants and a button-down. I probably smell(ed) like a yak.

Then, on Monday (June 22), a cold front moved in. There was some rain, though minimal. More impressive was the wind -- if it wasn't maintaining a wind speed of at least 45 mph, I'd be shocked. I truly thought it might rip the roof off of my host family's house. Since then, it's been getting warmer again from a starting point of probably 60-65 degrees. Fahrenheit. Obviously. If it's 60-65 degrees celcius, something has gone seriously wrong.

Language acquisition continues, but no longer at a snail's pace. We (all trainees) had a brief interview with the powers-that-be to make sure we were doing okay and were pretty close to par for the course, and my language teacher (baksh) had nice things to say about me in class. I'm to the point where the language is no longer totally foreign, apparently. We've begun learning tenses and adding more and more useful vocabulary (foods, jobs, numbers, etc.).

One bit of "constructive" feedback that I received during my interview (and which gave me a chuckle) was that I yawn a lot and seem very tired for the first part of class (from 9-10), and that I should therefore start going to bed earlier, say at 8 or 9. No, really. I'm not going to do that; for one thing, the sun doesn't actually set until 1030, and it doesn't get legitimately dark until probably an hour later. For another, it's actually 9 as I write this, and my host parents aren't even back from work yet. I live in a one-room house, and my room is separated from the kitchen by a sliding divider (if anyone from the Peace Corps is reading this, it locks and affords me decent privacy). Perhaps it will suffice to say that sound travels freely.

I get to visit Emily this weekend! Huzzah! She lives in Nomgon, a city about 15 minutes up the road by car.