I have been a horrible blogger this year. But the reality is that my life is pretty standard. I don’t really have much blog worthy to say. I work and I rest. The only difference from most other people is that I do that in Mongolia. The amazing thing is how quickly you become acclimated to things that seemed so horrible before moving. For example: imagine life with no running water. Before I came to Mongolia it seemed like a horrible impossibility to live with out running water. Now it is everyday life, and it is actually not all that difficult (though I do miss washing machines and showers). So really my life is quite boring.
The school year is over now. The students that just graduated take their college entrance exams on June 10th. Unlike the SAT say, college entrance exams in Mongolia are subject based (think very difficult SAT 2s), and the only way to go to the best schools is to get a high score, it is not a system where good grades or achievements can make up for bad entrance exam scores. However, my students are not too concerned; in fact they did not come to their review session. Hopefully they will do Ok, but the English test is difficult to the point that native speakers struggle with it. We shall see.
We had graduation the first week of May. It snowed again; though this year, fortunately, it did not snow during the ceremony. The students all were very excited and happy, as graduates should be. Graduation in Mongolia is slight different, for one it is held before school is over, this year we still had a week and a half of classes and two weeks of exams. Since school is not over there is not even a symbolic awarding of diplomas. Despite the differences what the students and their parents are feeling is largely the same. They are all apprehensive and excited about the future, but yet sad to have to leave their school. This is especially true because the students have studied with the same group of classmates for 11 years, or less but all of their educational career they have had the same classmates.
After graduation I went to UB for a conference on how to close my service (Peace Corps speak for ending my PC job). It was everyone from the group that I came with who had not left early. We have had a very high attrition rate; of the 62 assigned to my group in Mongolia there are now 40. This is very unusual for Mongolia which usually has one of the lowest attrition rates, so they say. However it was nice to see everyone who had stayed. We spent lots of time sharing stories. One part of Peace Corps that I did not fully understand until I had been here from quite a while is how different everyone’s experiences are. There is no other PC volunteer who has had the same experiences that I have, and my experiences are unique to me. When I came to Mongolia I assumed that most people would have similar experiences, at least if you looked at comparable places (like all English teachers in small towns). But the truth if the matter is we don’t. This of course makes training really difficult, because the new trainees do not understand that when the trainers say “Every site is different and you may encounter all or none of this,” they think the trainers are intentionally trying to be vague. But that is the truth of PC.
The new group of trainees arrived last night in UB. So pre service training starts again today. Our two year anniversary of arriving in Mongolia was June 2nd. It is a strange feeling to have been here for two years. It seems like such a long time, and when I think back to graduation it feels like it has been a long time, but it also feels so short. I will be leaving Mongolia in a little bit less than 2 months, which is an amazing thought. However I have recently realized that I am ready for the next step, whatever that may be.
