Random Thoughts Throughout the Week

July 13

I do like the food here, but when I think about the readily available foods in the US, I start to get cravings. Anything with cheese would be good right about now. I have not come across pepperoni here yet, so I'm assuming it does not exist. Ranch dressing – need I say more? The ice cream I've had here does not taste like ice cream. Strangely enough, you can find Snickers anywhere here and Coca-Cola/Pepsi are very easy to get here also.

Today, I saw my first snake here in Mongolia. Don't worry – I was not in any danger.

The locusts here are very different from anything I've seen. When I was walking around one day, there were several loud clicking sounds surrounding me. I though they were demons or something, especially because I did not know where they were coming from. Anyways, I finally looked up above me, and figured out that these things were hovering in the air. They can travel long distances without needing to touch the ground.


I added some photos to this posting of a bug that we found. I have no idea what it is.

We had many days off this week because of national Naadam. We were provided with sunscreen but I still acquired a sunburn that would make the red ranger jealous. Usually there is a big family get together for the holiday, but my mother's mom is ill. My sister told me that during Naadam, its common for families to eat a sheep. Since there weren't many people here, I figured that it would not happen. The next day when my dad drove home, and all of the sudden a sheep appeared. Then it was dragged onto the porch and killed. So far, this has definitely been the most fascinating and disturbing thing that I have observed here. Not that animals don't get killed in America. I grew up in suburbia, so for all I knew, animal meat came from plastic containers. I personally think that if Americans needed to actually kill the animal in order to eat meat, many people would eat less meat or even stop eating meat altogether. I sometimes get queasy from seeing blood, but I watched the whole thing. It took pretty much the whole day to take off the skin, separate the organs and cut up the meat. The weirdest part for me was seeing them wash out the intestines, stomach etc. If I were slaughtering an animal, I would have just thrown those parts out. Some of my other friends already had eaten animal intestines already, but this was my first experience. They put everything together and boil it in a large soup pan, and I got a sample of everything. I tried not to think about what organ I was eating, but eventually I will want to learn which part is which. Along with the main dish, I drank the broth which was really good. I ate everything that they gave me, but for some reason the last couple bites were very difficult to keep down.

The Naadam sports in UB were on almost every channel, but I mostly just saw the wrestling. The way the horse races were televised, it was hard to follow what was going on. I didn't see any archery – not sure why. The final wrestling match was pretty entertaining. It lasted about 40 minutes because they took many breaks. In a strange way the long pauses made it more intense. I did not want to look away  lest I miss out on the moment of victory. There were 512 wrestlers at the beginning, so its a pretty big deal to win the tournament.

I'm glad that I brought everything that I did, but the most valuable items that I took with me have been my hiking boots, a rechargeable LED flashlight, and an MP3 player. I have been spending a lot of time outside because I will not be able to do any of that during the winter. Then I will switch to reading books and hopefully learning how to play the horse fiddle. I don't think that they are too expensive, but I haven't had a conversation with anyone knows much about them. I probably won't get one until I am at my actual site, so I'm crossing my fingers that there will be people that will help me learn how to start playin

Language Analysis

July 8th

I may be using terms that you aren't familiar with, but no worries. You can ignore them or else you can just imagine that they mean beautiful wonderful things. I am going to talk about some of the unique things about the Mongolian language. They use a different alphabet and have 35 letters total. Initially, its confusing to read because some characters are similar but are a completely different sound. (H in Mongolian is a “N” sound, P in Mongolian is a “R” sound.) I still mix them up sometimes, but its not that hard to adjust to.

Mongolian has some foreign sounds that are not used in English. The letter X is like a hard “H” sound (it might be more helpful think about what it sounds like when Darth Vader is breathing.) The “L” sound is very difficult to explain. It more resembles our “th” sound. (Pretend like you are going to pronounce an “L,” but instead let the air flow through the sides of your mouth.) Anyways, Mongolia loves fricatives (sh, th, s, v) and some of the stops are a little less common (p and k show up mostly from borrowed Russian words.)

Depending on where a letter is placed on the word the sound occasionally changes. The g (which is usually a stop) turns into a fricative when it is in the middle of the word. At the end of words, the normally voiced stops sound voiceless. (Its hard tell whether the final letter is a j/ch, g/k, d/t. The X sporadically is pronounced as a voiceless guttural trill (instead of the Darth Vader breath). It might be just certain words, because I have not found the pattern. The vowels are a little difficult to pronounce, but the sounds are very consistent with the spelling. “A” has one sound in Mongolian. In English, “A” has a number of sounds. I apologize ahead of time to the Mongolians who have to figure out how to pronounce English vowels correctly.

Another major difference between Mongolian and English is case endings. For those of you who have studied languages like Greek or Latin, you might be familiar with some of the terms: Nominative, Dative, Genitive, Accusative, Ablative and Comitative. In English, we use prepositions as a substitute for many of them. (with a dog, from the store, by car) In Mongolian, a suffix is added to the end of the word.  (dogtei, storeaac, caraar) Also there are endings to indicate possession, verb tense, and direct objects.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot to mention that Mongolia uses a lot of lengthened vowels. In some cases there are two words that sound exactly the same except for the vowel lengthening. Paper is “tsaas,” and snow is “tsas.” “Han” means “a wall,” and “haan” means “where?” There are many words that sound similar. One day I was trying to say the word “twenty,” but I accidentally said the word for poison. Its amusing to see people's reaction when I mispronounce something and it actually means an entirely different word. To be continued...

Local Naadam

July 6

During the past couple days, our town celebrated Naadam, one of Mongolia's biggest holidays. (I'll try not to blow your mind, but the first day of Naadam was happening at the same time as your July 4th due to the 13 hour time difference. We did celebrate July 4th the day before, which to you would have been July 3rd) One of the traditions here is to get new clothes for the event. Each of our families got us Americans a dell to wear as well. I really like the designs on them and they are very shiny. It was a hot day out, but they were comfortable because they are so light. During Naadam, there was some dancing and music, but the main event is the “three manly sports” - horse racing, wrestling, and archery. It was kind of difficult to watch the horse racing because you had no idea when the riders were near the finish line, and they would already be gone by the time you get to the area where the finish line was. The wrestling was pretty fun to watch. Rules are a little different, if your elbow, knee, or back touch the ground, you lose the match. For archery, the target is a bunch of rocks lined up on the ground. They actually let me try firing an arrow, but it didn't end well. The popular foods for Naadam are hushur and airag. If you ever go to Mongolia, you should try some hushur. They are kind of like deep fried tacos with just meat. Airag is fermented mare's milk. Its strange, but I'll probably get used to it over time.

Some of the people at Naadam were dressed up, but it seemed like most of the people were wearing regular clothes. I found that funny since all of the Americans were wearing dells. On the first night there was a big dance concert afterwords. It was a good time, but I felt awkward because I don't know how to dance. I'm sure some people had a similar thought that I had about them not wearing their traditional clothes when they knew more about modern dancing than one of the Americans. I realized that it really didn't matter whether I am good at it or not because its just for fun. I think it was a good way for us to interact with Mongolians without having to deal with the language barrier problem. Mongolians really like modern music and were glad to have us Americans party with them.

Summer Project

July 1

The Peace Corps is an organization that operates under the following premises -  world peace is possible, communities have the capacity to develop indigenously, and every type of peoples regardless of nationality/origin can learn to appreciate their differences. And we all lived happily ever after. This isn't a criticism, I'm just pointing out that those goals are very idealistic.

During training, the people at our site are working on TEFL, the Mongolian language, and community development simultaneously. At this point I don't think anyone can actually be successful at one of these (let alone all three). I think that the hopeless optimism of the Peace Corps is telling us that if we try to do these impossible tasks, there is a slight chance we will be successful. Also, when we get to a site, the workload will become even more intense. We will be teaching for real, trying to become proficient at the language, and also making a difference within the community. I don't think the Peace Corps expects us to be perfect, but if we strive to succeed in all three areas, we might actually make a difference here.

I'll be straightforward, the community project that me and another PCV are trying to get going is not looking too good. Lesson number 1: Plans change most of the time. We had 2 weeks to get started, and nothing happened for about a week an a half. The day that we finally got some work done, we  didn't end up working on it until late that night. Lesson number 2: You can't force good ideas. We made some questions for the intention of figuring out what the people here value and what types problems they face. I don't know if there was a translation issue or if the questions were worded wrong, but the answers that they wrote down did not give us much to work off of.

So now what? I'm not sure. There's not much time for a project to happen this summer :( When I get to my site, I definitely want to be more thorough with the assessment phase. It will take some patience, but if I am persistent I could discover an idea that could really take off. Will there be roadblocks and dead ends along the way? Of course.