The Things that Make Me Happy

It’s 3:07 a.m. I can’t sleep. It might have something to do with the raging sinus infection I have–you know, the one I somehow managed to contract while killing a debilitating throat infection with a ten-day course of bubonic plague medication. There is some wild pathogenic magic going on in these parts. I think the plague pills were so strong that they tricked my immune system into believing it wasn’t needed anymore.

Anyway, what better or more productive way to spend insomnia than to engage in my favorite computer pastime (second only to watching “Xena: Warrior Princess,” of course): uploading pictures to my blog.

We’ve been fortunate enough to have had some extremely warm weather. It’s been up in the high 20’s (Fahrenheit) for about a week now. The ways in which a warm spell can remind you what it felt like before the Mongolian Winter set in are startling; your eyes don’t freeze, your running nose doesn’t freeze, and it doesn’t hurt to take a full breath of air in. Check my unwashed faux-hawk, sans hat. No frostbite this week!

(several volunteers, including myself, have suffered frostbite on their ears and noses in the past few weeks. It ain’t pretty.)

It was warm enough recently for me to hike up to Undurlig with a few visitors. I even took my jacket off for part of the walk.

This is Marisa, a Peace Corps Volunteer from the new M20 group. She’s a ton of fun. She came down to Arvaikheer to chill with us for a few days and relax in the relative warmth. Another visiting friend, Tysen, also came on the hike, but all of the pictures of me and him together on the mountain are heinous. Sorry, Tysen.

Once at the top , I pointed down to the Wishing Tree (mentioned in a previous entry) and asked if they were interested. We ended up walking down there to find that we’d intruded upon an elderly woman’s private wishmaking time…She was wandering around the tree and crying, all the while mumbling and clutching a bottle of vodka. I lamented the fact that, after almost two years, I’m still not familiar enough with communicational norms to have asked her if she was ok. Instead we continued on down the mountain and returned to my ger.

The following days were much colder, though still warm enough to produce precipitation. We had some of that  frozen-cloud-snow– the kind that blankets the ground in a dusting of ice particles that are much smaller than the average snowflake. It can’t even be seen in the air when it’s falling unless it’s caught at the right angle to the sun, but it accumulates and looks something like snow after a few hours. Interestingly, huge storm-like clouds dumped this type of snow in the mountains around Arvaikheer today, but never entered the town.I managed to snap some pictures (and sorry about the weird floaters in some of the images):

^This one was taken on my way back from work today, and the one below was from my street. If you look closely, you can see snow falling in the distance in both of them.

So, if I were to try to summarize this entry thus far with any adherence to its title, I’d say the things that make me happy lately are 1))making light of frostbite and bacteria-on-virus action, visitors, and frozen cloud-fall seen from miles away. But all of this is just pretext for debuting my favorite part of every day: MY LITTLE BOY!

His name’s Ding-Dong, which is actually not a Mongolian word or anything. My extremely precocious 3 year-old brother named him. He probably heard it on a cartoon or in a song. Ding-Dong is tied to a runner during the day, and whenever I approach him, he gets extremely excited and wants to bite my ankles and jump all over me. The following images kind of illustrate that, I think.

I should mention here that most Mongolians’ relationship to dogs is not characterized by the same love and friendship as it is in, say, American culture. Captive dogs serve a very specific purpose–to defend the hashaa, or yard, against intruders. They are never allowed inside under any circumstances (except in UB, where they’re sometimes owned as pets). They are usually never touched or spoken to in an affectionate way, and people often throw stones at them or kick them when they’re allowed to roam the alleys. [A lot of UB residents get offended when they read posts like this and insist that it’s not true, but most of these people don’t spend time in countryside places like Arvaikheer. So please take my word that I see this almost every single day and am NOT lying to make Mongolia seem inhumane].

Anyway, this little boy is the happiest part of my day. I love him. I play with him and feed him and talk to him so much that the dog next door, who watches jealously through slits in the fence that divides our hashaas, has come around asking for the same attention. That funny little neighbor even walks me into town sometimes.

This is me trying to wrangle Ding-Dong into a photo. He’s such a love!

K, It’s getting late and I’m starting to fade. I’ve talked myself through feeling okay about not going to work tomorrow…I love my daily life, but the Winter routines are catching up with me and making it impossible for me to get healthy again. So if you were one of the people who had to listen to me convince myself that I deserve a break tomorrow, thanks. More later!

Mountain Stuff

Sometimes I like to get above the town to Undurlig (Mongolian for ‘peak’)  for a few minutes to kind of center myself whenever the weather permits. I used to have to walk an hour to get there when I lived on the south side.  Now, though, it’s right behind my house. (Many of you might be bored to death by the same photos I take every time I go up there, but I don’t care, because I love posting them.) Today the temperatures on my mountain were about 20 degrees warmer than they were downtown, so I decided to walk up there for the first time in a while and relax for a bit.

I usually sit right here:

and while I was up there today I listened to this song:

It’s called “My Juvenile,” by Bjork and Antony Hegarty. The original video is nowhere to be found, but luckily a bunch of youtubers made their own (and the above is one of those). I started listening to it a lot when I first got to Mongolia. For me, at least, the minimalist makeup of it kind of lends itself well to looking out over vast expanses of land and letting my mind browse all of the intense and amazing things that have happened in my life over the past few years. I think it holds a special significance to me because of the fact that it’s about a son growing up and leaving home. Listen to the lyrics–they’re actually really poignant.

After I sit for a while, I usually head north and down aways to the Wishing Tree. It was set up by some monks last August, and since then Arvaikheer residents have been tying traditional sacred bolts of cloth to it and making wishes. I walk around it three times, as is common here, and think about all of the nice things I’d like to happen for my family back in America. Out of respect I won’t upload any pictures of it, but I’ll put one up of the stone pile next to it. Circumlocution around the stone pile three times is a kind of blessing which I think is borrowed from Shamanism. At some point during each rotation, people usually throw a pebble onto the pile.

It was a perfect hike. Getting up in the mountains from time to time is essential for me; I need the peace and quiet and visibility of it all to remind myself of where I am, and to purge all the little anxieties and confusions of everyday life here. It’s just an extremely positive feeling.

Also, look at this awesome hat I bought yesterday:

Victory in suede and faux-fur.

FIRST POST!!!!!

So, I’ve been promising friends and family that I’m going to create a blog for my Mongolian experiences for about…seven months now. A few things happened during the holiday season, though, that finally pushed me out of the realm of mere planning…There are so many things that go on here in my life that necessitate a disciplined journaling routine, and I think enough fantastic things have piled up in recent months that I just had to do it now.

And now is the part of my wind-up where I have to say something to the effect of  <The views expressed in this blog do not in any way represent the ideas, opinions, or concerns of the United States Peace Corps, the United States State Department, or of any other second party.>

Anyway, in the interest of not skipping over the first seven months of my stay here, I’ll go through the main points of the experience thus far. I lived in a beautiful mountain village, or soum, in northern Mongolia from June until mid August. I stayed with a Mongolian host family–three boys about my age, a hardworking farmer-cum-teacher father, and a cosmetics-saleswoman mother–the entire time. They turned a cardboard and plaster storage addition into a room for me, and it was cozy and perfect. I was kept awake by what I thought were mice for a large part of the summer, but when I saw little clawed wings poking out through the cracks in the ceiling one night, I was relieved to discover they were bats (which meant the spider/ mosquito population was kept mostly in-check).

During the summer I attended Mongolian language and culture classes for about 6 hours a day with eight other Americans. It was probably one of the most blissful times of my entire life; the heat was intense, the air was more pure than anything I’d ever breathed before, the Milky Way was almost frighteningly bright at night, and the initial inability to communicate with my community forced me into a much more concise and nonverbal communicational persona. It all just felt so clean and perfect.

the view from my front yard during the summer

Concomitant with the summer’s lifestyle-simplification was a total lack of accessibility to the outside world. We had no way of contacting our family or friends in America, except during rare visits to a nearby city, and there was no way for us to even communicate with volunteers in other training sites unless it was done through the passing of notes by our trainers. This dearth of communicational amenities was actually kind of refreshing; I remember being so anxious to tear open the manila folder of letters that our trainers brought from time to time and see what kinds of news there were from other soums.

Eventually the end of the summer came, and what I expected to be a tearful goodbye with my host family turned out to be somewhat of a rushed departure. My host father had decided not to attend our final “host family appreciation” party at a famous monastery in the province, or aimag, and on that day he ended up falling into our well and breaking part of his spine. My host mother was consequently pretty preoccupied during those last few days of training, and her uncharacteristic distance made leaving the soum a lot easier on the heartstrings. We boarded one of those big travel conversion vans (which will hereafter be referred to as “mikrs,” the Mongolian term) and rode to the nearest city, where we had a wonderful swearing-in ceremony complete with talent performances and speeches. I gave a shaky speech in Mongolian…I remember having to pee so bad during the entire thing. I couldn’t have made much sense. Afterwards we were directed outside to a public park which had been designed in the shape of a scale model of Mongolia with geographic borders and labels for aimag capitals. An M-17 or M-18 volunteer called our names and site placements, one by one, and we were made to walk out to the approximate locations of our respective site assignments and stand there until everyone had been called.

I don’t think I’d ever felt so much anticipation–two years is a very long time, and the most challenging thing about Peace Corps at that stage had been the months of uncertainty that had built the experience…Uncertainty while waiting for the initial application to go through, uncertainty while waiting to find out to which region we had been invited, uncertainty while waiting to hear which country would accept us, uncertainty when flying away from home and not knowing a single person, uncertainty when arriving in Mongolia and not knowing where our training sites would be, and then the ultimate uncertainty of not knowing how the interpersonal relationships we had built during training would hold up under the added pressure of being geographically separated from one another in the second largest landlocked country on earth.

I was relieved to see that I had been placed in a prominent aimag center with not one or two or three, but seven other sitemates! It was to be located in the dead center of Mongolia, in the only aimag that contains all four of Mongolia’s geographic features: desert, mountains, steppe, and plains. I was given a position as an English teacher at a university in the town, and I was to live in an apartment. I was absolutely thrilled, which is a lot more than many of the other volunteers could say.

A few days later I was nestled in my new apartment with a gorgeous view of the Gobi desert right behind my building , seven excellent sitemates who would soon become my best friends, and a lot of work to do.

one of the first pictures I took at site

So I started work, and on the very first day of planning, my training manager and one of my Mongolian coworkers (hereafter referred to as “counterparts,” peace corps lingo) sat me down and explained to me that I would be taking my senior students to the north of my aimag for a ten-day field trip, during which they were to learn about Mongolian history in English and practice their tourguiding skills. I was flustered at first, because I had literally just gotten to site, but in the end I of course went and had an absolute blast.

When I returned from the trip, my students were speaking better English, and I felt like I had built a good working relationship with my counterpart (who had accompanied me on the excursion). Immediately upon returning, though, I noticed that I had missed out on the first two weeks of crucial reputation-building and vocational niche-carving…Not only was I entering classes two weeks late and having the awkward responsibility of surprising teachers with in-class observations/evaluations, but I was also feeling awkward at having to try to squeeze myself into the workplace after the semester had already begun. Not to mention the fact that the previous volunteer at my host country agency was twice my age. So, from the get go, respect has been an issue–both in the work place and among the youth on campus. I continue to deal with those challenges, but every day brings me closer to integrating with my community on a deeper level.

the view of my town from the mountains

Now that we’re all caught up, I can move onto the reasons why this week inspired me so intensely to blog once and for all: New Years. It was probably the most spectacular celebration I’ve ever witnessed, anywhere, ever. I had participated in several New Years/ Christmas parties with faculty and students all week (Mongolians recognize the two as a single holiday, for some reason), but of course, in accordance with the cultural trends of much of the rest of the world, New Years Eve holds a special significance here in Mongolia as well. On December 31st, I ended up hanging out with my fellow American volunteers in a friend’s ger (circular canvas dwelling) until just around midnight. At 11:45, I believe, we went outside to look at fireworks. I had no idea what I was in store for–HUGE, fourth-of-july-grade mortar explosions in a 360-degree panorama all around the city, lighting up the mountains, shaking the ground. It was so picturesque. People were even shooting them out of their apartment windows, at which point they would fall a few meters and then explode at the bases of the buildings or crash into other apartments. I should have been terrified, especially where I was standing–but I was too mesmerized by the intensity and beauty of it all.

I spent the night at a fellow volunteer’s house that night so as to avoid the streets after such a late hour, and when I awoke the next morning, one of my counterparts called me to make sure I would be “ready for our trip to the countryside in an hour.” I had forgotten all about it, but I lied and told her I was ready. I walked out of my friend’s apartment when I had gotten my things together and was surprised to see the entire city completely covered in perfect, footprint-less snow!

January 1

I strolled home in the warm winter sun and put on my heaviest Mongolian winter boots, brushed my teeth, and jumped in my counterpart’s husband’s mikr. We–my school’s business management faculty, my counterpart, and I–rode into the frozen desert ten or so kilometers outside of the city to barbecue and celebrate the new year. The instant we arrived in the desert, the food preparation began. We found a cluster of small boulders between which to build a fire, and someone had brought a metallic disc with holes in it to place over the fire. I didn’t know what was going on until I saw my counterpart produce a vat filled with spiced and lemon-juiced beef. We tossed the pieces of meat onto the metal disc and watched them sizzle until they were ready. We ate them ravenously for a few hours while chatting and getting acquainted with one another.

snowy desert

The fresh air and food (and copious amounts of vodka) had everyone’s spirits soaring, and the snow and sun had us all at a perfect temperature for the first few hours. (During the Mongolian winter, snow is often associated with warmth. This is due to the fact that -35 degree temperatures and 0 per cent humidity cannot yield precipitation; so, whenever it’s “warm” enough to snow, the contrasts make it feel almost like spring.)

As with any Mongolian social gathering, there was a lot of singing and performing. And, of course, competition played a huge role. Mongolians have an incredible competitive streak to them, and this is probably leftover from nomadic times. Before people settled into permanent residences, inter-clan encounters were limited to summer competitions called “Naadam,” during which men from different tribes would come together in one place to show off their wrestling, archery, and horse-racing skills. This desire to prove ones fitness in ones community/personal environment–be it at work, at school, in the countryside, or wherever– remains a large part of Mongolian culture. So, at our little desert party, the women had a foot-race, and the men had a hands-tied-behind-the-back- sumo wrestling competition.

women's foot-race!

I was nervous at first to participate in the wrestling part, because I didn’t know any of my potential opponents, but then I realized that everyone seemed to be really eager to see how I would do. So I competed…

me in a hands-tied-behind-the-back-sumo wrestling match

And I did ok!

victory is mine!

While the sun was out, it was a great day. I think it was an excellent opportunity for me to reach that level of community integration I mentioned earlier in this entry; networking is one thing, but eating spiced beef in a frozen desert for seven hours with a bunch of vodka-drinking New Years Day partygoers is something entirely different.

After the wrestling ended, I convinced everyone to go slide with me on a frozen river a little ways into the valley. We all ran down to the ice, and I figured we would just slide around, but I suppose I should have known that the Mongolians already had a traditional game planned for such an occasion. They split us all into two large groups and set up three full bottles of vodka in a line about 20 meters away from where we stood. Each member of both teams was given two smooth river stones to slide toward any of the three bottles ahead. In this way, it was kind of like shuffleboard, only the object of the game was to hit the bottles. Hitting either of the two outer bottles earned one’s team a single point, and hitting the center bottle earned 10. Of course the bottles shattered on contact, but we made sure to clean the evidence before we left.

As I was one of two sober people at the party, my team won the competition 22 to 0. I unfortunately don’t have any pictures of this game, but I do have one of the river:

frozen river fun!

Ultimately, the sun started receding behind the boulders and the mountains in the distance, and as the shadows lengthened I could feel my lower extremities screaming for some warmth. There was none, unfortunately. The sun went down, and just when I thought it was about time to leave, some of the more inebriated partiers decided they wanted to cook more of the spiced beef. I stood far away from the fire this time, because they were trying to ignite it with a gas-torch, and they all looked a little wobbly. One woman was trying to warm her hands on the flames, but was actually holding her hands in the fire. I tired to help her, but she insisted she was fine. I guess she was. Another man fell face-first into the fire, but was caught before any damage was done. My residual exhaustion from the night before had prevented me from drinking any alcohol during the desert party, and as a result I suppose I was the only person at the party who could actually feel the cold (and the only one who was worried about getting burnt).

Some more singing and toasting occurred, and just when I was beginning to think I might die a horrible, frostbitten death in the snow and sand, someone decided it was time to go home. Before I knew it, I was crouched on my bedroom floor between my space heater and my radiator, rendered immobile by a deep bone chill. Still, though, I was so happy to have had such a wild experience.

Moral of the story? I may be on my way to community integration, but I have a loooong way to go before I can run with the big dogs, so to speak. I know I said that the other partygoers’ alcohol consumption may have staved off feelings of freezing to death out there, but a lot of them were wearing the flimsiest dress shoes with dress socks! No wool or huge Mongol boots like mine! And yet, somehow, I was the one freezing. To be fair, this is my first winter here, but still. Hats off to Mongolians for laughing in the face of extreme conditions.

I hesitate to even include this part…but I woke up the next day with a serious case of bronchitis, which ultimately led to a 103-degree temperature and WILD hallucinations that Oprah was standing in my room and trying to get me to stop spending all day resting in bed like I needed to. I also had an unfortunate hallucination that I was the size of an ant, and so my entire room was terrifying and fascinating for about an hour.

That I can even sit and type this now is a miracle after that! But I’m feeling great, and I’m so grateful to have had such an awesome experience in the desert with my new friends. Stay tuned for more antics as the weeks go by!