Back from Thailand!

Just a quick post to let you all know we arrived back in Mongolia late last night after an amazing 2 weeks in Thailand. We travelled by plane, train, bus, subway, taxi, ferry and tuk-tuk and were able to visit 5 great locations. We got to hang out with Paul and Tia, visited ancient temple ruins, went snorkeling, got lots of bug bites, ate delicious food, made new friends and even got tans! We'll post photos sometime this week after settling in - we returned to our apartment last night to no running water (which means no showers and no flushing toilet) and it hasn't turned back on yet... ah, its good to be home... (?)

The Start of Our Summer

First of all, Congratualtions to Paul and Tia on their wedding, June 9th!!!!! We are happy for you, sorry that we couldn't be there, and excited to see you soon...

in Thailand! Saturday we head to Thailand for a 2 week vacation shared with Paul and Tia. We are so excited to see some familiar faces after 6 and a half months of living on the other side of the world. We'll be sure to post lots of photos after the trip.

Last week and this week Clayt and I have been teaching English enrichment lessons for the Turkish and Mongolian teachers that teach in our sister school for 4 hours a day. Then clayt heads off to his internship and I tutor 2 women for another 2 hours for TOEFL prep. We're putting in more hours now than we did during the school year! But, it will be worth it, as we don't have to be back to work again until August.

A few weeks ago clayt and decided to walk through one of the ger districts and climb a small mountain behind it. Here is a photo of one of the ever-expanding ger districts.

Here it is up close from within. People's territory is fanced off, usually gated. Once inside, its like a labrynth. The path twists and turns and sometimes just stops. It was interesting to wander around.

Sadly, this is the most common this we saw. There was garbage everywhere. Sometimes there would just be a long ditch on the side of the path filled with garbage. And then there was garbage everywhere outside the ditch too. No trach pickup out here, they just burn it.

On our way through, a woman spied us and literally came running down a hill at us. She tried to communicate through a mongolian and russian mix, and we tried with an English and Mongolian mix to comprehend. She wanted us to come visit her home. Why not? In mongolia, especially outside the city, this is typical. We followed her to her home, which was a concrete structure and a ger in the yard. The seemed to be doing alright, for ger district standards. She gave us sweets and juice, and showed us their family photo albums. She had 4 children, plus her sister's children were there as well as her eldest daughter's baby, seen below. The woman happily just plopped the baby on Clayt's lap, and the baby didn't seem to mind. He was very good-natured, 9 months old and happy to smile and show his sole 2 teeth to strangers. We had a nice visit, and then went on our way, after promising to visit again sometime. However, after leaving Clayt pointed out that even if we wanted to visit again, we would never find it - we had taken a very random path to end up where we were.

Here I am at the top of the hill, on possibly the windiest day we have experienced here so far. We saw grocery bags swirling in the air way above our heads, and got lots of dirt and who knows what else in our teeth. At the top was a decent view of the city one way, and in the other direction, lots and lots of nothing.


On a totally different and random note -- would you clean your appendectomy wound with something that came bottled in an old beer bottle??? Thankfully I found some real hydrogen peroxide about a week after I got this and could throw this smelly stuff away.

A nice view

Ulaanbaatar is surrounded by mountains. Clayt and I took a saturday a few weeks ago and climbed one of the taller mountains to see what UB looks like from above. Here are some photos from the day.


We started off early in the morning at this giant Buddha statue. Its the largest one here I believe.

After visiting Buddha, it was a trek up a small mountain to visit a Russian monument. Looking down, you can see how small the giant Buddha looks from up here.

And we continued upward...This is a view of UB from one of the mountain tops.

Here's Clayt looking victorious after our long climb. Up here it was so silent and peaceful.

and here is the short "easy" path down the backside of the mountain... a very steep descent over loose rocks - I fell at least 3 times (ouch!) and Clayt few a couple times too. By the time we got almost to the bottom, Clayt had to hang onto me because I had jello legs from the exertion of keeping balance on the loose rocks at such a crazy angle. These are the things you do in Mongolia for fun!

Under the Knife in a Third World Country

Thanks to all of you who called and kept me company while I was in the hospital, it was greatly appreciated!

Here's what happened: I started getting sick in the middle of the night Thursday night, throwing up and having really bad stomach pains. Amrah came in a taxi and took us to the hospital. The nurse looked at me, then they called a doctor from home to come in and look at me. He decided I needed to have my appendix out ASAP. Clayt called our the school director, and he and the school principal showed up soon after. We wanted to be sure this really had to happen, and if it did, was this the best place available. Turns out it was a yes for both.

I asked if they would put me to sleep, and he said they could, but it would involve putting a tube down my throat and the recovery would be longer and more painful. The alternative, however, was not much better. They wanted to put a needle in my spine to numb me from the chest down, and then operate while I was awake. Both parts of this plan really freaked me out.

30 minutes later I was undressed and in the operating room, hooked up to a monitor and waiting for the scary shot in my spine. The good thing was that I didn’t have much time to think about everything, it happened so fast. The woman came in to give me the shot. She told me “You don’t move, ok? Never move. If you move, then my needle will break inside your spine.” I asked, “will it hurt?” She said, “yes.” She was really making me nervous. So, there I was, naked, curled up on my side in the fetal position with two nurses holding me down to minimize my movements. The shot hurt, but it wasn’t so bad. the needle did not break.

2 minutes later I was lying on my back again and the shot was kicking in. They were rubbing iodine or something all over me, and I could feel it. I mean, everything was going numb, but I was aware that they were touching me. This made me really nervous as I thought I would be able to see and feel when he cut into me. That feeling went away though, and as they saw I was getting freaked out, they put up a little curtain so I couldn’t see anything that was happening.

Some time later the doctor told me that my appendix was really long and red. He asked if I wanted to see it. I figured, why not, I wouldn’t get another chance! He dangled the thing over my face with a pair of tweezers, and I was scared it would fall on me. But, it didn’t of course, and that’s the first and last time I ever saw my appendix.

After surgery they wheeled me out. I passed Clayt, Amrah and our school bosses, and was only able to say “I survived” before we were down another corridor. I was still very numb, and it was tough to get my dead weight into the bed even with the nurses helping. And there I lay, at 4:30 in the morning, staring out the window and shivering from nerves and way too uncomfortable to sleep. I had to wait until 10 a.m. before I could see clayt. They gave me nothing for pain, nothing to help me sleep.

So that was early Friday morning, and I wasn’t able to come home until Monday late morning. The days in between were filled with 2 shots and 2 IVs each day. Unfortunately for me, I have hard to find veins and this really confounded them. Each time they came in to give me an IV, they had to poke me at least twice before getting the right spot. One night the nurse poked me 4 painful times before giving up and not giving me an IV at all. Our boss brought me soups and crackers twice a day, which was helpful since the hospital didn’t feed me hardly at all.

I had the pain from the operation, pain from the IVs and shots, pain from where they ripped off the surgical tape and took some of my skin with it, and then they said I had a bladder infection too, and the treatment for that was also painful. At no time did anyone give me antibiotics (but I hope that was what was in the shots) and no painkillers. I asked one of the nurses on the second day “please, can I take medicine for the pain?” She said “No, pain is good.” I beg to differ.

I had two roommates, both Mongolian with almost no English. None of the nurses spoke English (except one, but she wasn’t ever around), and the doctor spoke funny English. It was a long and boring three days. Unfortunately, visitors weren’t allowed to come into the ward, so when clayt came to visit, I had to go stand out in the hallway to see him. It was a no-frills hospital. You had to bring your own food, your own toilet paper, and only 2 toilets for the whole wing to use. There was also an ashtray in the unisex bathroom, and a sign in Mongolian that said please don’t smoke around other people. Several times I had to turn back and wait a while since the bathroom was occupied by a man with a head injury smoking a cigarette. I could have gone into a stall, but I am still not cool with sharing a bathroom with strange men (especially when there is a lock on the door!).

They also burned incense in the mornings, which I don’t think would fly in the US, but it smelled pretty good. Also, one day the nurse wasn’t around and my IV was finished, so the girl in the bed across from me got up and took the needle out for me. See what I mean about no frills?

The stitches come out this Thursday, and I’m out of work for this week it looks like. I saw the doctor again today, and said everything looks fine. He’s a good surgeon, and said he worked for the WHO at one point, and traveled to 23 countries in that time. He’s used to performing operations in a less than ideal setting.

So there it is, the story of my least favorite Mongolian experience so far. Lets hope it will stay that way!

For a Good Cause

jm- last friday i met with a man (Edward) from a volunteer organization here in ulaanbaatar called the Christina Noble Children's Foundation. They have projects going in several countries, and here they work hard to help abandoned and abused children who have nowhere else to go. Here is a link so you can read all about the different services they provide:
http://www.cncf.org/mongolia/projects.asp

So today i was able to go out the children's "ger village" and see how things are set up and meet some of the children. I had emailed saying I was interested in volunteering, and they are excited to have me start teaching English very soon.
The stories that Edward told me were so sad, and all so similar. He told me many of the children are abandoned. In mongolia there are alot of divorces and remarriages, in which the new husband does not want the old husband's kids around, so they are simply abandoned or forced to leave. Poverty is a serious and ugly situation here. girls are raped either by a family member and run away, or after they are left on their own (I was told of a girl in this situation that was only 9 years old) they are raped and left very injured. When they end up in the hospital as a result, the hospital calls CNCF, and they take them in.

We peeked in on the "kindergarten" class at snack time, and Edward pointed out a new little girl who was brought to the center recently. Her mother had been trying to kill her over time by forcing her to drink or eat chemical tablets of some sort. When the grandmother found out, she brought her to the center, and still visits. There was a little boy whose arm had been broken so many times (by his mother) and not fixed that it was very crooked, and Edward said they are going to pay the money to have it reset for him. The same boy also suffered from Rickets - the legs were not in good shape. But he was cute and smiled while we looked at his injuries, and then ran off, not appearing in the least bit self-conscious about his funny gait. One of the smallest boys had large scars going across his forehead at the scalp from repeat beatings from his parents.

What nice to know is that at the foundation they are safe, and looked after at all times. They can be kids! In their small fenced in community they have 2 playground areas, a school house, ger living quarters each with a "ger mother", a washroom, a cooking house and even a small new bakery. They also have a basketball court that turns into a skating rink in the winter and several gardens in which they hope potatoes and flowers will grow.

I can't wait to start teaching them english, and learn all about them and learn from them too. Sometimes the horror stories of bad things happening to innocent children can be discouraging and very depressing, but at least through organizations like this there can still be positive outcomes for these kids.

Things that make you say hmmmm......

Here are some random photos without explanation.
Use your imagination to think up witty captions!

Play Time in Apartment 29

Here are some photos of the kids from downstairs hanging out in our apartment. They came up last saturday evening, about half an hour before some folks were supposed to arrive for a "cinco de mayo" party. I had the music going, and they came in and it developed into a dance party, and then turned into a game of dress up, dancing and general bopping around and playing with random stuff they found in our apartment. Such as the camera. Between them I think they took about 30 photos in the hour they were visiting. Then they came back 2 days later and we did the same thing all over again, except this time Clayt and the boy went outside to play basketball while I let the girls raid my closet. They are sweet and goodnatured kids - often when they come up they help me tidy up -they fold the laundry on the drying rack, or wash dishes or sweep. I tried to make the stop before, but they seem to like it. They also like that now our patio door opens, and they can go out on the patio for a few seconds, before rushing back in after pretending to faint from looking down. Good clean fun.






That's StoveTop Stuffing she's eating in the photo above. They really liked it, but their favorite so far has been the wheat ritz crackers my mom sent - they mow them down in no time.

A Picnic with Little Monsters

Last weekend was our spring picnic with the elementary students, grade 1-5. The kids were super jazzed for the 2 weeks before the event, and counted down the days excitedly. I was excited to interact with my kids outside of the classroom for once, where I didn't have to lecture them to keep writing or sit in their seats correctly. By the end of the day, everyone was good and tired, and I think we should have gotten a personal thank you from all of their parents for exhausting them so thoroughly. Here are some photos of the g-rated action.

This bird was a real party spoiler. We had just gotten into a rousing game of duck-duck-goose when this rather large bird started circling our circle, flying low enough to catch our interest and raise shrieks from the kids. I never saw a circle of duck-duck-goose broken up so quickly - the kids started screaming and running around, huddled together or trying to shoo it away, but in general just flailing about without reason. There was no resurrecting the game after that.

Here are some of the girls finding ultimate skipping stones for Clayton. He was deemed the best stone skipper, so the kids pooled their efforts and just gathered stones for him to skip. Some were as tiny as a fingernail, others so big clayt had to use two hands to try to skip them.

Here are two of the first graders - the biggest and the smallest. Enguun (the boy, who Clayt and I have named Goon) looks so sweet, but he is the bane of my existence in the grade one class. Degi (Delgerchimeg) is a mousy little thing and for some reason she is always smelling my arm when she comes up to my desk for help. First graders are interesting.

Here's Clayt, showing his brute strength wieghtlifting a first grader.

This is Aya, a six year old space cadet. She marches to the beat of her own drum, and here she is proudly waving her garbage flag, freshly pulled from the river. I took it and put it under a rock, so it wouldn't end up in the river. She proceded to pull out about six more, waving each around, getting people wet with river garbage spray, until I buried them one by one under rocks with the first one.

Clayt, the see-saw bully, terrorizing the girls in his class, making them shriek, until the one on the back actually pitched off sideways.

Here's a last shot of the whole gang.

THE ABANDONED AMUSEMENT PARK OF TERROR!!!™

CM – In honor of the recent UN Global Road Safety Week, Ulaanbaatar banned automobiles on a stretch of its two most-traveled roads Sunday. These roads travel right through the center of town and one is pretty close to us, so Jessica and I decided to take the opportunity to walk down the middle of the road. We were joined by a gaggle of people who looked like they were up to nothing much, some kids playing soccer, and a surprising number of roller bladers. The lack of any well paved roads and sidewalks would lead one to believe that all potential roller bladers would already have met their demise. Not so.

So, after watching a less-than-interesting bicycle race begin (which chased us from the road), we left the beaten path for a while, lured by a Buddhist monastery we had often passed, but never approached. We looked at the monastery and took some pictures, but were too shy to go in. Oh well. This shyness led us to the real find…

THE ABANDONED AMUSEMENT PARK OF TERROR!!!™ Well, more like the abandoned amusement park of feces and dumb graffiti. After talking with our friend, we found that the amusement park is not so much abandoned as off-season. Could have fooled me. They apparently open the park up in the summer, which is surprising from the looks of it. Also, why can people just walk through it during the off-season if they intend to use it again? They are just begging people to poop in it! (There are as many public toilets as public trash cans – meaning none. This doesn’t mix well with the population of homeless folks).

Anyway, here are some of our pictures from The ABANDONED AMUSEMENT PARK OF TERROR!!!™ Enjoy:

As we walked into the park grounds, we saw this building proclaiming the park’s misleading name (more aptly, “Tetanus Land” or “World of Critical Injuries”).



Across the beautifully kept grounds you can see the three-headed slide of horror. This slide features some beautiful urban artwork, as well as a lot of rust, and watch those sharp edges! You can ask Jessica about the experience of sliding down it. She tangled with the beast, and lives to tell the tale…



And be sure to try the rides when you visit. While Jessica likes the caveman gravitron (sorry, picture not included), I personally prefer the disappoint-o-coaster (I almost made this thing fall off of its pedestal, with me in it).



Maybe catch a performance by your favorite band, possibly Foreigner or Molly Hatchet (a side note: don’t go backstage – there is a serious amount of human waste back there. Don’t ask me how I know).



Unfortunately, our trip to the amusement park was left incomplete. Due to the temperature, we missed our chance to catch the beaver fever in the water park/waste treatment plant for kids. Darn. Maybe next time.

Our Friendly Neighbors

JM- In our apartment building there is a small room right where you enter the front door. In that small room lives a family of a man, woman, sister and 3 children. There is no running water, no toilet. There is just enough room for a single bed on which most of them sleep, a cupboard thing with a tv on top, and not much else. At first I thought they were the landlords, and just stayed in that room when it was their turn to keep an eye on the building. But no, they all live there.

We were told that the government created these jobs for very poor people, usually unmarried women with children and no job. They manage the upkeep of the building in return for a very small salary and a place for their family to live. This upkeep includes everything from scrubbing the floors of the elevator and hallways on each floor with a rag and bucket of soapy water to picking up rocks from the "yard" (dirtpile) and road in front of the building.

Sadly, the people in our apartment building are far better off than most with the same job. When I have gone into other buildings, the room they have is - how to describe it? You can't stand up straight. It only the space where some people put a storage closet - the space behind a staircase in your home. Literally. There is a small window so they can see who is coming and going, and through that window I see a space about the size of the bathroom in my father's home (or clayt's parent's home) and this is where they cook, eat, bathe, relax and sleep. I have many times seen the kids from our building sharing the load of a big bucket full of water.

The caretaker's children in our building are very sweet. There are 2 girls and one boy. The boy is 13, the girls are 11 and 9 years old. They always say hello and good bye to us, with big smiles and waves. They in fact are quite dilligent about it, and often say each more than once. In return for their neighborly friendliness, we are always bringing them treats from the store, or coloring pages from school. I gave them a set of markers and some coloring sheets and they brought them up proudly colored in the very next day. Sometimes now that the weather is warmer we will see them sitting at the pavillion on the playground trying to color despite the wind blowing the pages around.

Just last weekend I invited them in to decorate easter eggs, as sheridan had gotten an easter egg kit from the states and split it with me. They loved it! They were so impressed to hear the color dye tablets fizz in the vinegar, and then when they saw the egg when it came out of the dye - they giggled alot. They gladly decorated their own, and even drew clayton's face on one! I also showed them how to make the hollowed out ones, and we made three like that, but only one survived the afternoon - they were fun while they lasted. We made a snack of scrambled eggs out of the hollowed out yolk stuff, and they gobbled it up. They even ate some of the hard-boiled ones before we could decorate them! They bit right into the egg shell and all, and I was horrified. So I peeled a few for them after that. :)

The father came up about 3 weeks ago with one of the girls and asked to borrow 20,000 tugriks ($20) because his sister-in-law (who lives with them) was really sick and they wanted to send her to relatives in the countryside to get better. We had previously loaned them $5 when the mother was sick and they paid it back after a few weeks. So, we of course gave it to them. The next day the sister was gone. We haven't seen her since, so we hope she's doing ok.

Yesterday the kids came up to visit. Recently they have been coming more often, and enjoy sitting and trying to talk with us. So yesterday we colored pictures and ate popcorn. The boy enjoys playing the one game we have on our computer. They had all just had a bath or at least a hair washing, and the girls let me french braid their (beautiful, very thick) hair. Then they tried to do mine. Clayt says we're "Those" people now - you know, the ones you visited when you were young and gave you all the cookies you wanted and thought everything you did was wonderful - and I suppose we are. But I always thought of those people as old - maybe these kids think of us as old too... :) That's ok. They are sweet and it makes clayt and i happy to be "those" people for such nice kids.

Here are some photos clayt took yesterday while we were hard at work drawing mountains, goats and gers.

What's that smell?

JM - Twice in the last week the answer to that question has been unpleasant, if not toxic. Last Thursday I came into the 10th grade room and they had the window open to let in some air. But it wasn't smelling too great. I went to look outside. On the other side of the driving course which is behind our school is some kind of factory building. It emits yellow smoke sometimes, and black other times. But this wasn't the problem that day. It was a group of men on top of the roof, doing some repair or sealing work. They had shovels, hard hats, and a giant pile of buring car tires. They were melting the tires for rubber to patch/seal/? the roof. The unlucky guy was the one that had to maintain the fire, adding tires and shifting them around, sometimes the black smoke blowing so you couldn't even see him at all. That can't be healthy. Here's a pic of the action.

Now the crane which has blocked the view out our living room window for 4 months finally started moving about 3 weeks ago. It looks like they're going to build a building behind us. This afternoon I was checking out the action when I got a lesson on how to effectively deal with unwanted trash on the construction site.

Step 1: Pile all the trash you don't want into the middle of the site and then light it on fire.

Step 2: Add a bunch of metal wiring that is coated in thick plastic on the top.

Step 3: Collect more garbage (especially plastic!) to add while the fire grows.

Step 4: Walk directly in the path of the nasty black smoke to add more to the burning pile.

Step 5: Let it burn until it turns the sky grey and gives everyone in the building next door a headache (and maybe black lung). Those black specks in the picture are pieces of ash floating by.

We look forward to seeing what other innovative approaches are used while this building is constructed!

More Published Works of Clayton Maring!

JM - Clayt isn't one to brag, but I am! He's such a good writer, and its nice to see his talent put to good use. Here are some links to his latest articles written for the Mercy Corps.

Here is a link to a brochure Clayt created from scratch - downloadable in Mongolian or English.
http://www.mercycorps.org.mn/index.php?coid=117&cid=150

NEW RASP CLIENTS IN SUKHBAATAR AIMAG BRING BUSINESS PLANNING HOME
http://www.mercycorps.org.mn/index.php?coid=116&cid=151

BAYANHONGOR'S GAN BOGD MILK MARKET: A LOCAL SOLUTION TO SAFER MILK
http://www.mercycorps.org.mn/index.php?coid=119&cid=151

A Second Trip to Terelj

This past weekend we took a short overnight trip back to Terelj, just about an hour outside of the city. We went with Sheridan and Amrah, in the comfort of their car. We were going to stay in a summer house owned by Amrah's father, a house none of us had been to before. Somehow we found the camp where it was supposed to be located, and tried the set of keys we had in several doors before finding one that opened. It was like a little abandoned ghost town. Some of the small buildings were kept up, while others were only shells, no doors or windows and lots of trash inside.

The little house had the bare necessities, and lacked a few too, depending on what you consider necessary. It was 2 rooms - a bedroom with 5 single beds in it lining the walls, and a living room/kitchen which had a woodburning concrete stove, a small table and some office chairs. The beds here, in case we've never mentioned, are not like beds at home. They don't use mattresses. They use the box spring, and thats it! In our apartment we've loaded it up with blankets to help cushion, but camping we had only our sleeping bags with us. We drank enough to make it comfy regardless. :) No toilets, no running water, etc.

Got a fire started right away, and settled in to cooking dinner - fried hotdogs and junk food. A mother dog and her three puppies showed up and made instand friends with us. The pups were still nursing and so friendly. Here the dogs usually all cower and run away from humans, because they are used to being chased away with stones or etc. But these dogs were so friendly and happy to play. I think they ate more of our food than we did, and everyone found excuses to take them out something to eat again and again.

Terelj is by far my favorite place here so far. Its not too far out of the city, but once you're there it feels like your worlds away from everyone and everything. The mountains and scenery are so beautiful. The silence that surrounds you is overwhelming sometimes! You hear NOTHING except for a bird now and then. No need for earplugs - its like the silence just stuffs into your ears and fills them up. And the view at night -- we went out to look at the stars at least twice - with nothing giving off light for miles around us, the stars were amazing. We layed on our backs in the grass (freezing, but it was worth it!) and just stared up and wished we could somehow capture what we were seeing to show you. And I'm not a good enough writer to do it justice! I've never ever seen so many stars in my whole life. Even with all the stars and some of a moon, the dark was also supressing a little. The minute you stepped outside it surrounded you and you couldn't see more than a foot or two in front of you! Here is a great photo of Clayt, Sheridan and I in the dark - none of us could see each other at all and we just stuck poses in the pitch black.

Sheridan and Amrah loaned us their Dels for this photo. They are really warm!

Having a little fun in our hooded sweatshirts - we had no tv, books or board games - what did you expect us to resort to?

Clayt took this photo during sunrise - 5 am. He woke up because the fire had gone out and we were all freezing. Nowadays it gets light at 5 am and stays light until about 8pm.

This is one of the birds we see everywhere here. They are the size of a crow, but their call sounds like a squeaky sneaker.

Some goats and sheep and their babies out grazing. Some were only a few days old.

You know who this is. We took advantage of the opportunity to have our photo taken together in such a nice setting.