"Imagine"

I had to run home in the dark in a torrential deluge complete with thunder and lightning. Dark (pitch black, rather) khasha alleys and the fear of being struck make for a terrifying combination and very good exercise at a mile’s altitude. The host family wondered at my John Lennon shirt. I played them a bunch of Beatles. They marveled at my laptop and loved the music. I think a goal of mine here is to get a classroom to sing “Imagine.”




Sushi & Eggs

My host family is ridiculously nice. They asked me what my favorite dinner and breakfast foods were. I told them sushi and egg/pepper scrambles (things that I imagined impossible to recreate here.) That night, they had procured seaweed wraps. Granted the “sushi” was just rice wrapped in seaweed, but it was positively heartwarming. “Unduk bas chin joo” (eggs with pepper) was served the next morning.




Mutton & Angel Wings

The plus side to having more mutton than you imagined you could eat shoved at you each day is that you can be working 16-18 hours a day (I get dinner here after midnight and have class at 9 each morning,) get pumped full of vaccines, and be living in conditions that we shall say fall well below American standards of hygiene (it doesn’t bother me at all any more) and you can still rebound with a 4 hour nap. The down side is the bathroom visits.

I heard the AOL login dial tone coming out of a ger today. I watched the Victoria’s Secret fashion show with the entire host family. I had to explain the angel wings. I’m not sure that I understand American culture myself. They all knew the words to that terrible “Yeah yeah yeah yeah” “Hookay!” song that was so popular a few years ago. I weep for them.




Vaccines

Being “sick” here, even just exhausted (in the literal sense) and feeling hung-over as hell from yesterday’s vaccines, Japanese encephalitis, rabies, Hepatitis A, and something else,) has a whole new level of reality. It’s not just acting sick for chicken soup and a day off. A day off would be fatal to my language learning. It’s feeling confused, disoriented, and lethargic. Forgetting where you are, but putting on a very healthy face for the “emmay.” Not at all painful though, not too bad. Raining again, which is considered a very good sign in this constantly dehydrated country. We “brought the rain” to Nalaikh the night we came, so we are considered lucky.

Napped, feeling a little better but life is still a little dreamish.




"Cook Dog"

The day after my tiptoeing adventure, they showed me a giant bowl of gross-looking broth with large bones sticking out of it. Irka, my host brother, clearly said “cook dog.” Disbelieving, I looked up both words in my dictionary, and he confirmed them. I pointed at each bone, and said “noghoy” (dog)? They affirmed. Finally, after just starting to believe, I realized that by cook dog he meant dog food. They were sheep bones from the mutton we’d had that night, and this was the slop that would be put out for both the vicious khasha dog and his mellow brother.

It’s one in the morning, window-breakingly windy outside (they keep extra glass that they cut and replace them with frequently,) and you’re bathing by flickering stovelight as close to the stove as you can safely get. By bathing, I mean kneeling, naked, over a liter of water in a small plastic “timpun” tub, washing body parts individually (always from the hair downwards to the feet!) For the bottom half, you squat over the tub to avoid spillage. The tub is wide and shallow enough that boiling the water is nearly pointless, as so much surface area and about a centimeter of depth cools it off almost at once. It’s at a time like this, as you catch your breath and prepare for each freezing-cold splash, that you think “wow, I’m really in Mongolia.”




Tiptoeing the planks

Met them at the school. Selenge, the “emmay” grandmother was in her dell, Ganbayar, “Ogie,” the 5 year-old in a bright silver suit complete with hat and tie. I’m packed in “Zaya’s” (Ogie’s mother, my host sister) taxi, and am off to the khasha-compound. The roads are unpaved, and we must swerve wildly to avoid potholes, dogs, cows, and rock-mounds. The fences, which part just enough to allow a car through, are made of hand-cut wood and bits of corrugated scrap metal. And yet, they are often beautifully decorated. It seems that the majority of yards contain only gers. We arrive, I’m shown into the 10-foot by 15-foot guest house/room in which I’ll be staying (its’ wonderful, kind of a Mongolian bachelor pad,) and I am immediately sat down to a feast. All the relatives, some visiting for the occasion of my arrival, crowd around and marvel at the vodka and wine that I brought them, as well as the photo-albums and picture-books. Vodka shots are distributed, and the socializing (purely gesticulative in my case) continues late into dinner. At last, I sleep around 11:00.

My dry sink was clogged. The grandfather, an honored man with a name so epic I will not begin trying to inscribe it, stuck a bicycle pump up the faucet and with great tribulation sent a filthy brown geyser erupting out of the tiny water tank and directly onto the head of Ogie, who, to be fair, had been warned not to observe so closely. We all dissolved into hysterical laughter. I think things will be all right.

There is a certain…contentment. The hearth is roaring, because it rained and snowed my first night in Nalaikh (June 19.) I haven’t bathed in many days (where would I? No running water,) I had my first adventures with the outhouse, essentially a wooden plank missing out of a platform over a hole, and I have had to ninja my way to the main house around the “noghoy” guard dog (a week later, as I type this out of my handwritten Mongologue, I still endure daily gesticulative iterations of my tiptoeing from all members of the family.) The scenery is beautiful. The people are very curious and generous. Even the thrice-hourly barging –in of Ogie are useful, as he never tires of “en-you-way” (what is this?) I’m exhausted every evening, but I know that my brain is working over-time digesting between 100 and 150 new words each day, and it appears that my body is thus-far keeping a phalanx of focally-inspired bacteria and viruses at bay. I know that things will get much rougher. I know that I will get spectacularly ill, and I do fear the difficulties and intricacies of what I’ve been told is among the most difficult languages in Peace Corps. And yet, somehow, the fear doesn’t come. The “morning paralysis” that used to bench me for an hour upon each waking is barely lethargy as I work my way out from under warm sheets into frigid air. I suppose that at last, having finally found an arena in which I can really prove my quality, much more to myself than to anyone else, I’ve discovered a whole new drive. A whole new… contentment.




(Dis)Orientation

Orientation passed in a blur. 5 days with new friends in a new country learning a new language seemed like an instant. Sad saying goodbye to so many going to other training soums, but I will see most of them once every three or four weeks during training. The “meeker” ride to Nalaikh was characterized by excitement mixed with anxious anticipation of meeting host families. I’m told that mine speaks no English.




We going straight to the Wild Wild... Mongolia

I ate lunch sitting across from the American ambassador, who was very laid back. Wild/semi-tamed cows roam the streets, enter yards, and are driven out. I watched them get up to the door of the Police Station. I’m definitely in Mongolia. All roads are dirt. Yards have cow and horse skulls, Wild West-style. They are shamanistically significant. Hiked way out to a tall mountaintop with a sizeable group, drank in the far horizons and endless, perfectly blue sky.