Things are normal. I team teach 15 classes a week and teach 10 hours a week on my own. When I say hour I really mean 40 minutes, but I guess it is the same thing. I also teach four hours to teachers at my school (sometimes with another teacher and sometimes without). The kids are getting better, some classes are really good, some are not so good. After middle school, I said I wanted nothing to do with middle school again, and I hold to that, unfortunately I don’t have a choice. I guess they will get better too. Life is getting more normal. I still can’t speak Mongolian, so that is sometimes a problem, mostly when people think I do speak Mongolian so they talk to me really fast. Most people that know me speak at a rate I can mostly understand (or try to understand).
Its snowing again! If you just read my blog you might think it snows a lot here, but it in fact does not. I just happen to write blog posts on days that it is snowing. It really doesn’t precipitate here much (of any sort). But I guess that is why much of Mongolia is a desert. Here it is not desert, but we still don’t get a lot of precipitation.
I have now been in Mongolia for four and a half months and at site for two months. The time has flown by; I can’t believe I have been here this long. Unfortunately, I feel really out of touch, but I guess that is part of what I signed up for. Living here, in some ways forces you to revaluate what you need in life, but in other ways not. I have a cell phone, I have internet (it is dial up and I would rather not have it in actuality – if you want to know why you can send me an e-mail to ask), I have electricity twenty-four hours a day, I have access to a washing machine, I have a wonderful counterpart, my students are not really all that different than students at home, they are motivated or not motivated by the same things. Probably the biggest thing I am missing is running water. But even that has not been a major problem, my water has been delivered regularly I have not had to haul it, and we have not run out. More of a problem has been my heating. Where I live we heat only with wood; and wood does not produce heat as long as coal does, in fact most PCVs I have talked to about heating with wood, talk about their ger freezing most nights in January. Fortunately I have the advantage of having a house which should hold heat better than a ger (but it takes more fire to make it really hot, because it is bigger), but I am still afraid of it freezing. I have heard that LCD screens do not do well if they freeze, if this is inaccurate please let me know. I guess I will probably start sleeping with my computer and ipod when it starts getting really cold. My more immediate concern is that it is really cold in the mornings. This makes getting out of bed a major problem. The idea of staying in my warm bed is much better than getting out of it into my cold house and its only going to get colder. Fortunately they turned the heat on at school, this means that one of my counterparts classrooms is now comfortably warm (it is south facing), and if I put my hands on the radiator in the other counterparts class room I can make them warm.
The next day.
I am reveling in not having class on Saturday. The class was one of my best but unfortunately only like four students (of 40) came, and never the same four students, I had only one student who had been to all the lessons. Class on Saturday was a novel thing to me, I didn’t know why it was happening but it doesn’t anymore! Maybe I will do something productive like write lesson plans today. And some weekend in the near future I will go to the capital for the whole weekend!
Some things here have gotten much easier, others have not. Things that I have gotten much better at: chopping wood, making a fire, sweeping carpet, cooking on a wood stove, cooking with things that only have a high heat option, making tortillas and teaching. Some things I have not gotten better at, doing laundry (maybe it is just that I still really don’t like doing laundry and not it requires more work than at home), teaching (despite progress I still have along way to go), speaking Mongolian, patience (I have made progress again but I still need to work on understanding that cultural differences make situations very different than what I am expecting), flexibility (again I have made progress but I still have a way to go, the complete lack of scheduling in many cases still bothers me) and cooking rice I somehow always have to much or to little water and usually too much.
One of the best parts of my life is our family dog. She is still just a puppy (I would guess her age to be about 1 year old), and she is really sweet. If you pet her she will automatically roll over so you can rub her belly. I think we may be giving her too much attention; Mongolians generally are not very friendly to dogs. It seems to be a viscous cycle most Mongolians have had a bad experience with a dog (ie they got bitten), so they don’t like dogs and are mean to dogs, so the dogs bite people. Also dogs are primarily guards of the haashaa/sheep. In the country side they alert herders to wolves’ presence, and at home they keep random people from coming into the haashaa at night. I don’t think Sunny and Biffer would do well here. But Simba seems to be thriving.
One of the things that really surprises me on a regular basis is how deeply engrained some things are in me. For example Mongolians do not say “Nice to meet you.” It does not exist in the language (which is not completely true because they have a phrase that they use when dubbing western movies, but people don’t actually say it they just use it in translation). I always feel like there is an awkward pause when meeting new people after “hello, my name is . . .” But I guess they probably don’t feel as awkward as I do. This goes the other way to, I am sure people who have come to my house are surprised (and maybe angry) at me not having tea (and when I do have tea it is not milk tea), or at other things I do that I might not even know I am doing wrong.
I really appreciate all the e-mails, letters and packages people have sent me. Getting mail makes me really happy, though it also sometime baffles me. This week I got three letters, the first was sent on August 28, from Maine, it arrived in Mongolian on September 8th, so it spent over a month bumming around Mongolia before getting to me. The second letter I got was sent from Washington DC on October 3. Now I know Maine is farther from a population center than Washington, but not THAT much father, I also got a letter from Korea that took longer than the letter from DC, but only by a few days. So if you send me something and you don’t hear that I have gotten it for awhile don’t panic it will probably come. I have a friend whose dad sent two packages on the same day and one got here 3 weeks before the other. As I said I am working on my patience.
Also one reason for the long periods of time between posts is that my computer here does not like my blog site (and many others) as it turns out most websites require a lot of stuff to be downloaded and dail up does not really do that well.
