It's all over but the dust storms

Our Project Design and Managment (PDM) workshot went really well. I think it was more useful than our In Service Training (IST), although that probably wasn't Peace Corps' intention. At IST, unless you were an English teacher all the sessions were just information about what other sectors were doing. At PDM, they took us through all the stages of a project from an original vision through action planning, budgeting, and monitoring and evaluation. Instead of bringing another Mercy Corps employee, I decided to bring Enkhee who you might remember is awesome. Mercy Corps gives all it's Mongolian staff plenty of training so I thought it would be a good idea to spread the wealth. I won't be seeing most of the other volunteers until we finish service next year, becuase this was our last big Peace Corps event.

Enkhee's idea is to bring the internet to a nearby soum with the help of a local bank. Khaan bank is in every soum in the country and they sometimes allow people to piggyback on their connection. Another volunteer just completed a similar project so we have a model. I still have to go to the soum to get an idea about where the cafe would be and what local support is available. Enkhee is more ambitious than I am, he wants to build a whole new building, and I'm wary of the "if you build it, they will come" ethos common in development work. But, if the need and community support is there, I'll help achieve the goal. I might be looking for help and donations from people stateside, so stay tuned.

In other news, it's been a pretty warm winter especially here in Arkhangai. Because it's so dry and windy, I can look forward to a couple monthes of dust storms. I here it's not as bad as the Gobi, but then again they have dinosaur bones. I should also say that work has been a lot better since I got back. I have a work plan now and, combined with the internet project, plenty of things to keep me busy.

Oh, I have to mention the chili cook-off I went to last Saturday. That's right, a Texas style chili cook-off in UB. It was help at the Star apartments which houses a lot of ex-pats and embassy staff. They had pinatas and guys in cowboy hats and even a kegerator. I almost thought I was back in America until someone snuck some buuz onto the baked goods table. I'll be here in Tsetserleg until May, so it was a good way to say goodbye to UB for while.

Hodoo fever

So, it was Valentine’s Day last week. I realized it was V-day when Naasa gave me a card and some candy. Yes, I’d forgotten. It’s just not the same without the guilt inducing consumerism. I actually had checked the date earlier in the day and February 14th didn’t register at all. Luckily, I had some heart shaped candy (thanks mom), wine, and candles so I managed to salvage a romantic evening. I also cooked dinner, so give me some credit. Naasa asked if I could cook any Mongolian food. I told her that I’d made buuz and hosher last summer. Of course, that was part of my cultural training and we were heavily supervised. She said that she would come over later and show me how to make Tsoyvin (usually noodles, mutton, and vegetables). It was good and I helped. I pretty much just cut the meat and vegetables. Those months as a prep cook at Bradley's are really paying off. I tried taking a picture of Naasa cooking, but she didn’t want to look at the camera. Women.

Actually, it’s amazing how many things about dating a Mongolian are the same as they would be with an American. People gossip so she doesn’t want to tell people at work we’re dating. She tries to introduce me to her friends and I don’t have much to say. Of course, she doesn’t want many people to know she’s dating a foreigner and I’m bad enough at small talk in English. I thought about the whole interracial dating issue after we’d been going out for a while. I mean, technically, I’m dating an Asian girl, but I live in Asia. You’re perspective really changes when you live outside of America. Maybe these issues should be thornier for me, but now I’m just concentrating on learning more Mongolian so I have more to talk about. Naasa is working on her English too and using the dictionary hasn’t gotten old yet. We meet each other halfway in text messages. I guess that’s a good sign.

It should be a big week. People from Uvurkhangai are coming up to help make a work plan for me. I’m not sure how much will change though. Mercy Corps has had volunteers for a while, but they’ve always been in Gobi Initiative offices which are much bigger. There’s always someone to work with the volunteer and several English speakers around. With my RASP office, they’ve never worked with a volunteer before and they just hired me a translator with passable English. Naturally, they don’t understand why I don’t perform like other volunteers they’ve heard about. It’s as if you took a top athlete and said “he performs really well here on Earth. Let’s put him on Mars and see how he does…oh, he’s doing so good. He must be lazy.” The Peace Corps seminar I’m going to next week is about project development and management (PDM). I’m taking Enkhee the bar/restaurant owner. He wants to set up an internet café in Tsenkher soum. If things don’t pick up at work, I want to spend more time on outside projects. After this trip I have three months with no travel planned. I should have a chance to teach more and get things done. I hope.

New Moon

Yesterday Tsetserleg celebrated the first full moon of the (lunar) New Year. A lam from UB came out to our monastery to bless people. At least that's what I think he was doing. I still don't know much about Buddhism. I didn't even know it was a special night until Naasa came by and said her and some friends were going to the monastery. She did a little prayer bow to make sure I understood what she meant. Cute. When we got there, I saw something I'd never seen in Mongolia before. Mongols were in a line. Usually they just elbow up to a counter and shove whatever their holding at the teller/clerk. I even wrote an onionesque story for our newsletter about a volunteer spending his entire service in a store, because he thought he had to wait his turn. Anyway, it turns out that the line was being enforced by the police, because the president was on his way. I didn't actually see him, but a nine SUV convoy with police escort did come and go quickly. He also went by the government house later and talked to Naasa and other workers. I didn't go though. I'd seen him before. After the president left, everyone lunged through the one door through the fence. The police did a good job of making sure no one was crushed and once inside the fence there was a reasonable line.

Inside the monastery people filed by various shrines and approached the lam. His bouncers let one person through at a time and then he tapped you on the head with a little brass thing. Funny, I don't feel different. There was also more candle lighting on the mountain. Hopefully, this marks the end of the new year season. People are still trickling back into town/schools from greeting in the countryside. The market manager, who I'm working on a business plan with, checked into the local hospital last week. She may be sick, but I think she just went in for a rest. My teacher this summer scheduled a three day stay after training was over.

No other news for now. Next week, people from the Uvurkhangai office are coming up to help my staff do a work plan for me. They have a lot more experience with volunteers and how to use them. I want to be a lot busier. RASP offices have a lot fewer employees and no dedicated translators (until my office hired their first for me) so it's hard to get one on one attention. I just want to accomplish as much as other business volunteers here. Working with new clients this year and helping with the trade fair should give me the opportunity.

Meet the parents

I made it through Tsagaan Sar reasonably unscathed. The Peace Corps training and advice from other volunteers came in handy. I only visited four homes, so I wasn’t overwhelmed. The holiday itself revolves around visiting other people’s houses. It’s kind of a cross between Thanksgiving Day and a pub-crawl time three. Each household prepares the exact same food and goes through the same rituals. In America, people would try to make theirs unique and outdo each other. Here things are very tradition oriented. You go in and greet everyone in the room by holding your arms out palms up below (or above if you’re older) the other person’s. Then, you eat potato salad, some sheep meat, and finally buuz. The whole time you’re also drinking milk tea, berry juice, and rounds of vodka shots. At the end of the visit, you look at photo albums and exchange gifts.

When I went to coworkers houses, the visit was perfunctory. It was just like any other work party. At my girlfriend’s brother’s ger, things were more festive. Oh yeah, I have a girlfriend now. I haven’t really told anyone back home, so this is my coming out post. I was going to tell my brother, but he’d probably blog about it before me. He’s even worse at keeping secrets than I am. We’d make terrible, terrible spies. Not being an incrementalist, I didn’t think it was worth the time to tell people individually. Hope you don’t mind.

Here are some preemptive FAQ answers:

Here name is Naasanjargal
She is 26 and her birthday is February 28th
She works for a judge and plans to be come one herself after getting work experience
We speak mostly in Mongolian so my language and texting has had to improve
We are not married

Peace Corps had a special cross-cultural training session about sex and dating. They went over what Mongolians expect from a relationship with an American. A lot of them expect you to stay or take them home with you. We discussed me leaving in two years and it hasn’t come up again. It’s common for male volunteers to have Mongol girlfriends. It’s less common for female volunteers to have Mongol boyfriends, mostly because young Mongol guys tend to be assholes. That is, except for Enkhee who owns the bar where I met Naasa. Enkhee is awesome.

This post should be the talk of the water cooler tomorrow. Feel free to comment. Here’s one last thing. When I was in grad school at UW, I had a friend named Paul who had taught English in Korea for several years. He had a girlfriend who he stayed with even after he came back to America. I was joking with him once about it and I said he was like a GI with a local girl. When he heard I was joining Peace Corps he said, “just you wait”. Thanks for the heads up Paul.

Next year in Vegas

The January meeting in UB was kind of surreal. It was held in the Chingis Khan hotel, not to be confused with the Khan Palace hotel around the corner. You can’t swing a marmot in UB without hitting something named after Chingis. The hotel is really nice and if it weren’t for all the Mongolians, you’d think you were in any other hotel conference room in the world. The meeting itself was 9-4 Monday to Friday. All the aimag and UB staffs were there. Each section got to give a presentation. I had a reputation for making good Power Points in grad school, not to toot my own horn. So, it was kind of painful watching the Mongolian presentations. It takes of almost twice as many words to say something in Mongolian than in English. Most of you know what it’s like to see a someone read and entire slide worth of text. Now imagine that and then having a translator repeat three sentences into your ear. You feel gypped and bored at the same time.

All the other Mercy Corps PCVs got to give presentations. I feel kind of out in the wilderness sometimes, because the word RURAL is on the front of my program’s name. I asked the new country director to send an experienced counterpart out to my aimag to help my supervisors make a real work plan for me. I should be careful what I ask for. This week they’ve been pressing me to write a plan before I have more help and I’ve had more offers to teach English all over the place. I want to concentrate on teaching at the market and doing some computer lessons. I’ll have a better idea of what I’ll be dong after the final Peace Corps training in February.

Everyone in the country is busy preparing for Tsagaan Sar. It’s the Mongolian celebration of the lunar New Year. Regular new year’s, which the Mongols absorbed from the Russians along with vodka and bad dance music, is celebrated in the last week in December with big employees only work parties. You’d think a people so prone to gossip would let spouses in to tamp the rumors down. New Year’s eve itself was weird, because around 12:00 almost everyone left the club I was at and went home. They all came back a few minutes later. Apparently, it’s bad luck to be out at the stroke of midnight. Tsagaan Sar officially lasts three days and mostly involves visiting relatives’ families in the order of seniority and giving gifts and such. It’s supposed last three days, but I get the impression that in the countryside it turns into a month-long mutton induced bender. Should I hyphenate mutton induced?

There are some other developments that I won’t get into now. I’ll see how Tsagaan Sar goes. Then I should finally get started teaching at the market and working on a long-term non-mercy corps project. I look forward to comments and mail as always. Don’t click on the envelope unless you want to send a post to someone else. And no, it’s not as cold as they say.

New address and wishlist

My office moved to a new building so I had to update my address label. It's pretty much the same except that you don't need the name of the building anymore. That never really mattered, because they don't have direct mail delivery anyway. Also, here is a new wishlist on Amazon. I'll add some more stuff to it, but this should give you an idea of stuff I'd like. Going to UB tomorrow for a big Mercy Corps meeting. I'll do a post from peace corps and let you know how it went.

**Editor's note - fixed the link to the wishlist

Your comments are welcome

In case there is still confusion about how the comment system on blogger works, here's a better explanation.

• You do not need my email address to comment on a blog post only to send me a private email.
• To comment just click on the word comment(s) after the post regardless of how many comments have already been made.
• You have three options after leaving your comment. If you have a blogger account, enter your username and password. If not, click other and enter your name and website if you have one. It would be a good idea to enter your email address here, but use the words "at" and "dot" instead of the @ symbol and "." in .com. This will make it harder for someone to add your address to a spam email list. Finally, you can select anonymous and not leave any information other than your comment.
• The word verification feature makes it harder for people to send me spam posing as a comment, because a computer (so far) can't figure out that the picture contains letters and/or numbers. Prove that you're smarter than a machine. Make it happen people.