My Existence Does Have a Purpose!!

This second week in Tsetserleg has been much better than my first week here. Last week I suffered some serious bouts of homesickness and feelings of purposelessness, and those added to my continuing frustration with Khan Bank made me a bit miserable. I wasn’t able to buy any of the things I needed for my apartment until this Wednesday, because there were continuous screw ups at the bank. The PC uses the Trade and Development bank in UB, but since there isn’t one in Arkhangai, I had to have my money transferred to Khan Bank, which was supposed to have happened by the middle of the first week I was here, but last Saturday, after standing in “line” at the bank for nearly an hour, I was told my money was not there. So Monday I called the PC office, and was told that the bank had sent my money to some soum or other, and that it should be there by Monday afternoon. So Tuesday I took the afternoon off work so that I could go to the bank and then go to the market and do some shopping. But, of course, when I went to the bank; still no money. After three calls to the PC and as many trips to the bank, my money was finally there at about 5 pm.
Going to the bank in Mongolia is kind of a stressful experience. Mongolians do not know how to stand in a line, or maybe they do, they just don’t feel like it. So you have to stand there squashed up against the person in front of you, with someone breathing down your neck behind you. And it never fails that as soon as I am the next person to go, Mongolians come out of the woodwork and start trying to shove their papers at the teller from either side of me. I guess it’s because I’m a foreigner, and they think they can get away with it. But it is really annoying! Occasionally a bank worker will come and point out the red line on the floor about three feet back and insist that everyone standing in line wait BEHIND the red line. That usually lasts about 5 minutes. Because of the language barrier, as soon as the teller tells me “no money” I can’t ask questions or try to figure out what is going on, I just get shoved aside and my turn is up.
Luckily my frustration was somewhat mitigated by the fact that Jeff and Greg (two of the TEFL volunteers who live in soums close to Tsetserleg) were in town. Their directors had brought them in for a conference (so they thought) but it turned out they didn’t have to go to the conference, they just had time to do some shopping and “play with their American friend.” So, even though I didn’t have money on Tuesday, I went to the market with them and got a better idea of where things were. Every time I go to the market I see new things. Everything is pretty disorganized and just kind of piled on top of other things, so unless you look really closely, it’s hard to find anything. But by now I have been there several times, and am starting to get a feel of it. And also the fact that I was unable to do any shopping on Tuesday (the market closes at 6), meant that I was able to take Wednesday morning off work as well. I had to go back to work at 6 on Tuesday to teach my daily English lesson to my coworkers, so I told my counterpart what had happened and she said it was OK if I came in at 3 the next day. We also drank some Aireg during the lesson, which made it a little more interesting.
Wednesday morning Jeff, Greg and I went to Fairfield’s for breakfast. Fairfield’s is such an amazing place. The owners are super nice, and it’s kind of an ExPat/Tourist hangout, so I got to meet a woman who works at the German NGO here, and you get to see all the tourists when you go there. Also, they have breakfast! And good coffee. I had some delicious scrambled eggs on toast with fresh tomatoes. It pretty much made my day. And I had money so I was able to go to the market and buy a bunch of stuff for my apartment afterwards.
Shopping at the market in Mongolia is an experience. You can bargain for things, which is nice, but also kind of tiring. I bought my electric wok (an amazing and necessary device in which you can cook ANYTHING) and my electric water boiler from a lady who Greg had bought some stuff from the day before. When Greg was buying stuff he was bargaining with her, and she loved it. Mongolians seem to really appreciate it when they can’t pull a fast one on you. I’m sure they like the extra income when they can, but they respect you a lot more when you know enough Mongolian to be able to bargain with them. Profit margins here are extremely low, so you can’t really bargain much, but you can usually save a dollar or two on larger purchases (2,000 Tugriks is enough to buy a good meal, so it pays to bargain for them!). I bargained the woman down by 1,500 Tugriks, and she acted very put-out, but then gave me a huge smile and told me to please come again. It was most gratifying! I also made my first Mongolian friend at the market that day. I was looking at a blanket, and a girl came up to me and asked me, in English, what I was looking for. So we started talking and I told her I was a Peace Corps Volunteer, working with businesses and that I was going to be living in Tsetserleg for two years. She is a business administration student in UB, and studies English in her free time, and was there helping her Mom out that day. Her English is fantastic, and unfortunately she left for UB on Thursday for school, but I got her email address and she took mine. It was so exciting to make a friend here, it made me feel like I really will be able to integrate into this community.
Thursday was the first day I actually felt good about work. The past two weeks I have pretty much just spent the whole day playing on the internet and reading stuff from the UB Mercy Corps office. It’s getting old really fast, and I haven’t really felt like there is any point in me being here. But Thursday afternoon I got to visit two clients. First Uunee and I went to one of our newer clients, who dries meat. Dried meat is a big thing here. I don’t particularly care for it, my host sister made a soup with it once over the summer, and it was kind of gross. But it travels well and it’s a good way to have meat in the winter when they don’t really slaughter animals as much. Uunee and I visited the client’s apartment, where they had a giant pile of dried meat sitting on sheets in one of the rooms. It was a little gross. But he has contracts with several super markets in UB, and the profit margin is pretty good.
After the meat drier, we drove out to Bulgan soum, which is 36 km (or an hour and a half) away. We visited a client there who has a carpentry business in the winter, and a tourist Ger camp in the summer. The wife, Gerlee, is an English teacher at the soum school, and is pretty much fluent. So I talked to her, and she told me about her Ger camp. They are partners with an American couple who live in Nepal. The American couple brings groups of tourists every summer, and they stay for 10 days to 2 weeks. The Ger camp sounds really cool. They have horse trekking, and they organize a mini Nadaam and do all kinds of other stuff. They are also organizing a Polo team this summer. There is a French guy who owns a really big Ger camp in another Aimeg who is really big on Polo. He apparently sponsors Polo matches in Mongolia and brings in Polo players from Argentina and France. Gerlee was really nice, and when she found out that I ride horses, invited me to come out to their Ger camp next summer and help out. I can’t really think of anything I would rather do! And I will definitely take my family there when they come next summer. I think my sister will be really excited about the Polo playing. Polo would be a really great sport to start in Mongolia. The horses are small and hardy and everyone here is a superb rider, so once they learn Polo there will be no stopping them! And, currently, they don’t really have any organized horse sports. Racing at Nadaams is big, but it’s not an industry and there really isn’t any money to be made from it.
The jeep ride to and from Bulgan soum was also great. Uunee was absolutely thrilled to learn that I can, in fact, speak some Mongolian. She would say a simple sentence in English, and I would translate it into Mongolian (what is a simple sentence in English is always much more complex in Mongolian, the grammar is hard!) and she would giggle and clap her hands and just be SO excited. It was great! So we went back and forth with English and Mongolian. I taught her some new words and grammar, and she taught me some. And we talked about the education systems in Mongolia and America and healthcare. She also invited me over to her house this Sunday, which I’m excited about. I started to feel like I am a part of things here. Sitting in the office behind my computer doing nothing all day definitely does not make me feel like my existence has a point. I’m really excited to start visiting clients and getting involved in things.
I also pitched my idea for a secondary project, which Uunee was really excited about. I want to make a website for all the Arkhangai tourist camps (there are 13 in this Aimeg). I have been searching the internet, and I couldn’t find any websites for Ger camps. The only things I found were organized tours put together by tourist companies. And reading through the itineraries pretty much horrified me. One that I read through was a 15 day tour, and it went from UB up to Selenge Aimeg, to Hovsgul, down to Arkhangai, and then I think to the Gobi before going back to UB for 3 days for Nadaam. That sounds like fun, you get to see a lot of the country, but any one who has done any traveling in Mongolia knows that it would be absolutely miserable. You would spend your whole trip in a mikr, and probably a good portion of it on the side of the road with a broken down mikr. No fun at all. The tour had you spending one night pretty much everywhere you go, which pretty much means you will arrive somewhere exhausted and pissed off, and then leave the next morning. I think that if tourists could find their own Ger camps and plan their own route, they would enjoy themselves a lot more.
Now that I have some ideas and have experienced doing something productive, I am feeling a lot better about the next two years. I had planned to make my first buuz (steamed dumplings) on Thursday night for dinner (now that I have my magical Wok!!!), but I was fed at the client’s house in Bulgan soum, and we didn’t get back until 8:30 pm. So I guess it will have to be a Friday night project, it’s not like I have a whole lot else to do with my Friday night. :)