Christmas 2006

Like I said before, I'm in UB from Christmas through New Year's. There were a lot of people in for IST and a Christmas party at Star Apartments, but now I'm on my own until Nasaa gets here tomorrow. I'm going to a friends apartment to celebrate New Year's Eve Eve. Then, Nasaa and I will go to Sukhbatar Square to see fireworks and drink champagne. I'll have more on that later. Christmas in UB this year was fun. We didn't have any seminars or anything so I just came in two days before and hung out. My friend Rob's parents and girlfriend came in from the states on the 26th. They (his parents) are very understanding. Anyway, he had a hotel suite for an extra couple days and I got to stay there. The UB Guesthouse can be a bit much when it's full of volunteers. Rob's parents even took a group of us out to dinner at this nice Indian place called Hazara. I love visiting parents. I also love the new duty free shop they opened right down the road from the Peace Corps office. They really knew what they were doing.

Vita and I had a good meeting with Ken, our country director, and Miriam, our new programming and training officer, about the business guidebook we're putting together. They're really enthusiastic about it and want to roll it out at PDM. I think that's good, because some volunteers will be doing income generating projects. They told us to show it to a Peace Corps guy in D.C. who is in charge of all business operations. I'll post more about that next week when we're ready to send it off.

I'm all set to go to Vietnam with my friends on the 20th too. We bought the tickets and are waiting for our visas to go through. We'll be going to Saigon and Cambodia and hopefully get a few dives in on an island off the coast. After that, I'll be doing some new catalog work and getting ready to go (almost) home to my brother's wedding in Canada. I think next year will go by fast. Stay tuned.

No room at the inn

This has been a really weird week as far as guests go and it's only Thursday. First, one friend came in from his site for the first time in two weeks. This would not be surprising except that he had not that much time there since the beginning of the summer. He's engaged to another volunteer who lives in the eastern part of the country so he spends a lot of time on the road. He does a lot when he's there and got a large grant for new construction at his school though.

We got some good work done on the newsletter we're putting together. Until this year the PCVL (one volunteer who stays a third year) put together a satirical newsletter, called the Kindling, based on volunteer submissions. Recently several aimags have begun to put their own newsletters together that would have competed with the Kindling. So, in a "if you can't beat 'em join em" move, the PCVLs (we have three this year) decided to have two aimags' submissions compete against each other in each issue.

The first contest was between Dungov and Zavkhan. I've visited both places, but I have to say Zavkhan won handily based on their uncanny parody of an issue of Newsweek. To explain, all Peace Corps volunteers in Mongolia get a free subscription to Newsweek's Asian edition delivered to their site. Some people have no other access to world news so conversations can quickly devolve into "Did you read (blank) in Newsweek?" "Yeah me too." Anyway, they were very faithful to the design and tone of Newsweek and were still able to work in Mongolia and Zavkhan specific jokes such as having the "quotes of the week" section consist completely of Mongolian children saying "hello" and "goodbye" at random to any passing American. The Dungov submission was funny too, but couldn't compete with the standard set by Zavkhan. For me, the standout was a word of the day joke in which one volunteer thought the term Quisling meant a baby quiz used to prepare students for a final.

In the spirit of the Zavkhan group, our submission will be an Onion style newspaper call the Songion (onion in Mongolian). We have a few things done and will have it ready after the newbies finish IST. Rob, one new volunteer, came in shortly after my first guest left. He sprained his ankle playing basketball with Mongolians and needed to go into UB early. He stayed one night and we exchanged some Kindling ideas as well as movies and prank phone calls with fellow Arkhangai volunteer Lizzie. A few hours after he left, Michael showed up to resupply and share some more movies and Kindling submissions. He has a lot of time on his hands (and photoshop) so he produced some cool montages and a few oddly detailed articles on hunkering (a common pastime in Arkhangai) and his love of Ramen. Then, last night, Nasaa showed up drunk at 1:00 AM and wouldn't calm down until I asked Mike to relocate to my room so we could have the living room (not exactly complaining).

So, we'll see what happens the rest of the week. I'm not expecting any other visitors, but who knows. I'll be going into UB on the 23rd and staying through New Year's. There's a Christmas Eve party at Star Apartments and I hear New Year's eve in UB pretty fun. Nasaa will be joining me for that and our 1 year anniversary. Wow. I'll try and post a copy of our Kindling submission and also a copy of the business guidebook we're preparing later. More news and photos on all fronts coming soon.