Tsagaan Sar Market Days

Tsagaan Sar is the Mongolian Lunar New Year (more info about Tsagaan Sar) - it's kind of a big deal. Tsagaan Sar translates to "white moon." The mongolian culture lesson is over now.

So, I volunteer for MercyCorps Mongolia, and they organized a Tsagaan Sar Market in a famous marketplace in Ulaanbaatar (formerly called "The Black Market"). They produced radio and print advertisements, as well as banners hung around the city. The market was set up for their clients in various Aimags (kind of like districts) in Mongolia. These are herders, farmers, and others creating products in the countryside. MercyCorps helps link these people with training, business planning, and with obtaining credit to grow their businesses. MercyCorps also has a collateral fund to help the clients get larger loans. All and all it is quite interesting, and I'll talk more about this in a later post...

...But back to the market. I went on Friday to interview the organizers of the event, the vendors/clients (mostly selling meat, dairy, and textile products), and customers. The goal is to write a feature article for our website and, possibly, for other organizations that would like to use it.


This process of interviewing was new and interesting. I am not a journalist, as many of you know. But, as others of you know, NGO's don't have the biggest staffs or budgets to pay writers. So I am as good as it gets. I'll link the article later, if you are interested in specifics, but some highlights: one vendor was selling sheep "carcasses." His word, not mine. He had sold a lot of them. I guess they are a commodity. An old man customer complained about the prices, but still went to the vendors from the Aimag he was born in (Gobi Altai) and bought their products. Others sold Camel milk Airag, which is an alcoholic drink - basically fermented camel's milk. Not only did I drink some, but I was given a big jug to take home. Again, more on this later.

In the final analysis, the event was quite a success. The vendors appeared well on their way to selling all of their products, and had acheived some of the market linkages they had hoped would materialize. I have questioned the premise of helping these people become more "business-minded," but one of the directors put it to me in a very clear way. He said that if these people cannot make the lives they want in the countryside, they will just move to Ulaanbaatar, further crowding and polluting and dilluting the traditional ways of life. If they can make a good living in the country, they will stay there. In this era of the mega-city, this seems like progress.