A novel of the end
July 21
This is going to be a novel. There are several exciting things I need to blog about.
1. Cashmere
2. Going to Erdenet/UB/Darkhon/Orkhon
3. Nadaam
4. Going to the Taiga
5. Good bye to my town, my schools 70th anniversary
1. Cashmere:
Some of you may remember that I combed goats last year. Yes, combed.
And I ended up buying 700 grams of raw cashmere. When I say raw I mean fresh off the goat. Then I proceeded to process it. And discovered why cashmere is so expensive: its a lot of work to make raw cashmere into anything. First you pick out all the long hairs that make up the goats outer coat. Cashmere is the underlayer of a goats coat, but unfortunately when you comb many hairs from the outerlayer get mixed in.
They are long and course and not at all cashmere like. It took me months. And is the one good thing that came out of our month of quarantine for H1N1 in the fall. I was able to devote all my time to picking long black hairs out of my cashmere. Once most of the hairs were out I washed the cashmere. And boy was it dirty. Washing it was a delicate process because it was very easy to felt. I washed my cashmere by soaking it in several different containers of water. First I soaked it for 20 minutes in warm water with soap, and then I rinsed it in 5 or 6 other containers of water, making sure to move the cashmere as little as possible. At this time I discovered that some of my cashmere was white. I thought it was all the same grey color, but no some of it was pure white (my goat was black with a few white spots). After it was washed and dried it was time to spin it. 
Spinning is surprisingly relaxing. I had a little hand spindle (as stick with a round piece of wood on the end), but it went surprisingly fast. I spun all my cashmere in about 2 weeks, again during H1N1 vacation, so I didn’t have to worry about going to work. Then it was time to knit. I put off knitting. So it took me several months, or it sat for several months while I didn’t knit it. But this May I finished it. I am now the proud owner of the thickest warmest cashmere scarf I have ever seen! I hope I go to law school somewhere in the north, because it isn’t going to do me much good in Florida. In all the project took over a year, but finishing was extremely rewarding. I am very proud of my scarf.
MY SCARF!!
2. Going to Erdenet/UB/Darkhon/Orkhon After finishing my scarf I got bored. There was no one here, everyone was in the country side. So I decided to go to Erdenet. Erdenet is the second or third largest city in Mongolia (depending on where you look). It is also home to Mongolia’s largest and oldest mine. However they claim the new mine that Ivenho mines is opening in South Gobi Aimag is going to be 10 times the size of the Erdenet mine. The Erdenet mine was opened in 1976, at that time nearly all the technology and workers came from the Soviet Union, and nearly all the profits went to the Soviet Union; even now a Russian company owns 49% of the mine and the Mongolian government owns 51%. Before the mine was opened in 1975 the population of Erdenet was estimated to be about 4,000 people. About three years later a census was done and the population of Erdenet was nearly 40,000 people. If you are a student of Soviet architecture Erdenet would be a good place to study. It was built in 6 distinct phases, each with a different form of apartment block. During communism there was a huge population of Russians in the city, there is still a sizable population, but not as big as before. I would be quit certain that Russians hold most of the upper level manager jobs in the mine. We actually got to tour the mine. It was a very Mongolian process to get the tour. We went to the technical college, which is obviously funded by the mine because it has lots of stuff that no other school in Mongolia can afford including one of the most amazing computer labs I have seen in the country. We asked for a specific teacher, went to see him, he said come back at 1.
We did and took a purgun (Russian van) to the mine. We started by going into what appeared to be the office building, where we got hard hats, but no safety goggles or anything else. The office building is connected to where they separate the copper and other stuff (there are at least 6 different minerals they get out of the mine the most important 1 is copper). The first step is it coming in on a conveyer belt, slightly ground. The rocks are golf ball sized. Then they go into giant crushing machines, the mine has 9 of these machines and they are bus sized. They rotate and crush the rocks into smaller pieces. The same pieces of rock are then separated trash from important stuff using chemical washes. It looks really strange, like boiling gold, but it is not hot. I asked about 5 times if it was hot. The scariest part of the whole tour was when we walked over the vats of chemically rock stuff. I was death gripping the rails. After the inside tour we went up to see the actual mine. The mountain was 1600 meters tall, they have now dug down to 1200 meters and they estimate the copper goes to 1000 meters. They estimate the mine will function for a bout 30 more years. Then it will close and Erdenet will become a creepy Soviet ghost town. The mine itself is beautiful in a very strange way. It is huge and its pile of cast off rock is also huge. After looking at the mine we drove back to town, discovered that our guide’s wife is from my town (my town has a huge Diaspora).
The Mine
The mine is a strange thing. Mining is Mongolia’s way out of poverty. Mongolia has tremendous natural resources. But at the same time it destroys Mongolia’s other amazing resource: its natural beauty. Also it has not been done so responsibly in Erdenet, remember all that chemically water? Well it is all pumped into a lake near the city, possibly slightly treated now. They say they will fill the lake with the trash rock when they finish but who knows how many of those horrible chemicals have leached into the ground water. Another problem is that most countries who are rich in natural resources don’t actually develop well. The generate some people who are extremely wealthy and corrupt, while most of the population remains poor and without access to basic services. We will see if Mongolia is able to escape the curse. So far it does not look promising. The former president’s wife, who never worked a day in her life, is a billionaire. And rather than spending mining resources in a responsible way to improve education or health or build roads, they gave the vodka industry a huge bonus this year by giving every citizen at least 70,000 tugrugs. Hopefully they are able to get a hand on corruption and develop. It is such an amazing country it is sad that most of the people are so poor.
From Erdenet I took the night train to UB. The train is much much more comfortable than a car, but it takes a long time. In UB I chilled and took the LSAT. I also went to my counterpart’s graduation. She got her masters degree in Linguistics with an emphasis on teaching English. The graduation was rather unorganized; it took them nearly an hour to give diplomas to 300 students. But it was a typical graduation, with speeches and so on. My counterpart was really proud as she should be.
From there I went to Darkhon, you will remember Darkhon from my first summer. It is the city we trained near. It is also the second or third largest city. It was good to be back for old time’s sake. Although all we did was watch tv shows on a computer. Darkhon is a much more spread out city than Erdenet. Erdenet feels planned, Darkhon just sprawled. From Darkhon I went to visit my host family in Orkhon, where I trained. They are always excited to see me. It is amazing how much the kids have grown. The baby, named Baby, is now 3 and talking a blue streak, only slightly understandable. The older boy is in 5th grade and is starting to study English. My host dad is back from Korea and they own a store in town. They also own the largest refrigerator I have seen in Mongolia. My host mom still works all the time. There were several other Americans in town when I was there (people I trained we). We spent a lot of time hanging out. It was very relaxing. It was our last time together; people have already started to go back to the States.
The first 30 people left last weekend, there are only about 15 people from my group left in country. It is very strange to think of leaving. From Orkhon I went back to UB and came back to Khuvsgul. There were about 20 people in my purgun on the way back. It was rather uncomfortable. I am grateful I won’t have to do that again for awhile. I got to my town on the first day of Nadaam.
3. Nadaam
I watched the first day of Nadaam in two places this year. I watched in my town, and in Tsaagan-Nuur soum, one of the northern most soums. In both places it was pretty typical, wrestling and horse racing. No archery. It seems that archery is a dying manly sport, at least in Khuvsgul. For both nadaams I watched I had just gotten off an over night car and was very tired. And I had to leave before the second day of Nadaam in both places. But this week my school is having a celebration with horse racing and wrestling for our 70th anniversary. It is a huge deal. In fact I should probably be at work now, but the last time I went to the school everyone was too busy to give me anything to do. They are beautifying the school (again), and it looks really nice. I am amazed they were able to pull off the anniversary again, they fund raised in the fall and our old school director took all the money, so they had to fund raise again. I am very surprised that people would give twice. I am not sure Americans would have. I wouldn’t have.
4. Going to the Taiga
The Taiga is the far north of Mongolia. It is a different eco-zone. I went to the Taiga to the north west of Khuvsugul Lake, in the soum of Tsaagan-Nuur. Tsaagan-Nuur is about 280 km from Murun, which takes about 12 hours (when nothing goes wrong). The road is VERY bad. On our trip up our car broke down. Something connecting an the rear wheels to the front of the car came off. Fortunately because it is a purgun, otherwise known as the words simplest car, it only required three bolts to reattach it. Unfortunately we couldn’t find the original three bolts, probably because they wiggled out over 100 km or more. So the driver dug out his box of bolts and set to work, he didn’t have the right bolts. So it took 2 hours at one place, then we drove a bit and it took 3 more hours at another place. That slowed our trip a bit, but made for some good sleeping time (the trip is over night and it is impossible to sleep on the road because the road is too bumpy). Did I mention this all started at 10 pm, other wise known as sunset. So our poor driver was under the car in the dark in the middle of the night and it was freezing cold.
We got to Tsaagan-Nuur at about 10:30 am (we left our house in Murun at 11 am the previous day, but didn’t actually finish packing until 3:15 – in fact we were supposed to leave the previous night, but its Mongolia and drivers are the worst at saying we are leaving now and never leaving – something I will NOT miss). We napped and watched Nadaam that day. The next day we went to visit the border guard, and get our permit stamped. Then we left for a 40 km car ride to the place where we would get our horses to go to the Taiga. On the car ride we crossed a big river it is 9 m deep, and has a hand propelled ferry. Putting the purgun on a ferry was kind of scary, but they had done it before and it was ok. It must be a bad job to take the cars across the river by pulling on a metal chain for about 10 meters. Once we got the purgun off the ferry, a challenge because there was a step of about 1 foot. We drove for 30 km and got to a place in the middle of nowhere that is where we got our horses. We had 4 horses. Our guides, 2 for us, I went with one friend, and a pack horse. We were joined by four Mongolian guys that were supposed to be students, more on them later, and their guide. So began our trip to the taiga.
My horse didn’t like to go faster than a walk, which was ok with me, but he was holding up the line so after about 3 hours I switched horses. The next horse really liked to go, but had been the guides horse and so had a not very well padded saddle. According to what we read on line and in the welcome book, the guides have you walk most of the horse trip, but apparently no one told our guide. So we walked through the mud (horse knee deep in places), and trotted everywhere the horses could (over half of the way). We went up and down three rather large mountains, and crossed 20 rivers (actually it was the same river several times, but we counted we crossed it 20 times, not exaggerating), and then there was the mud, lots of wet lands (or mud lands). We got to camp 7 hours and 40 minutes after we picked up our horses, and just as it started to rain. We hurt. But as we came over the last hill and saw the camp laid out in the beautiful valley next to a crystal clear stream with big snowy mountains in the back ground it was worth it.
You might be wondering now why we went 8 hours on a horse. Thinking certainly there are lots of beautiful places in Mongolia that don’t require sitting on a horse that long, after all I keep saying what a gorgeous place Mongolia is (or if I don’t say it here I mean to). We were going to see the reindeer people (Tsaatan – which means with reindeer in Mongolian). The Tsaatan are one of the smallest of Mongolia’s ethnic groups. And they live in one of the most remote parts of Mongolia and they herd reindeer (as you may have guessed already). They are closely related to Siberian reindeer herders from Tuva, in fact they were the same culture, though as with most minority ethnicities in communist countries their culture was eroded and they assimilated many customs of the majority culture, for example they speak Mongolian natively, their own language is dying. However there are some major distinctions, aside from the lack of sheep and cows. They live in tepees, not gers. They use their dogs for hunting and treat them much better. Their principle religion is shamanism not Buddhism. And they have reindeer, and they use all parts of the reindeer, much like Mongolians use all the parts of the sheep.
The camp we visited was the smaller camp in the east taiga (there are two taigas east and west). It had 6 families, one grandmother, her 4 children and their spouses and children, and one other family, possibly the grandmother’s sister and her husband. There were a lot of children, 12 to 15, depending on the day, ranging in age from 20 to 1. There were 8 dogs, many horses and about 120 reindeer. According to Wikipedia, reindeer are only semi-domesticated because they herd themselves, as in they wander around on their own grazing until someone goes and gets them. The same can be said for Mongolian horses. However this time of year the reindeer are quite close, or at least the female reindeer are, because they get milked twice a day. And their babies are tied up a lot of the time so that they can’t nurse and their mothers can make milk. The bull reindeer were not in camp when we got there. We spent the first night in our guides tepee (ortz). We were so exhausted we didn’t notice much. The second day was a beautiful day, but we were too sore to do much. We watched them milk. And then we kinda helped build our ortz. Mostly we took pictures. Then we rested, tried some yoga (poorly – VERY stiff) . After lunch we walked to see a water fall. It was spectacular. I have never seen water that clean, there was still a huge chunk of ice connected to the waterfall. Let me reiterate that the place we were was so beautiful it is impossible to describe with words, or to see in pictures. It was completely worth the 16 back breaking hours in a car and the 8 on horse back. 
One reason to sit 8 hours on a horse
On the third day our guide when to get the bull reindeer. They were grazing up on a hill. He drove them down. They were impressive. The Tsaatan castrate most of their male reindeer so that they don’t kill each other during the rut. And you can tell which reindeer and castrated and which are not by the size of their antlers. The bulls have antlers that will grow to over 1 meter long by autumn. The others are smaller. Their oldest bull was pure white. His antlers had 18 points each. They were huge, so huge he had a difficult time lifting them up. During the pause between the bulls arriving and us doing anything I got to milk a reindeer. It is shockingly similar to milking a cow, though smaller . They get about 1 liter a day from a reindeer, so at most the families were getting about 6 liters of milk a day. Which is much less than herders with cows. My haashaa family got 20 liters a day of milk, they only milked 11 cows, many families would milk 20 or so. After reindeer milking it was time to round up three bull reindeer. That was the job of the kids, they are very good at catching the reindeer. And reindeer are much easier to catch than say horses. The 8 year old got three reindeer quite quickly. We had a photo op and then went for a small ride. Riding a reindeer really cool. They are very sure footed and smooth, though they never go as fast a horse. Though Mongolian reindeer are quite large, they are much shorter than a horse and MUCH much shorter than a camel. My only problem was that I rode the stallion, with his huge antlers. When ever he moved his head I found myself doing back bends to avoid getting knocked off. We rode up next to these pristine little lakes that had baby ducks in them. The dog tried to catch the baby ducks which was funny because he was hopelessly out swam. Later we went for another reindeer ride, and attempted to herd horses with reindeer. Not effective.
The fourth day, we watched someone rebuild their ortz because it got dusty, as in they killed all the grass. The ortz go up much more quickly than gers. We also watched them rope horses and these guys were good. Really good. I was super impressed. Then we rode (horses) into this gorgeous valley with lots and lots of flowers. It was really beautiful. The next day we rode back to town. And we drove back to Murun the following day.
We visited east tiaga, there is also a west taiga. In west taiga they found gold. And now there is a big Ninja mining camp, that some people say has a population of 10,000. Ninja mining is illegal mining so named because they wear their gold pans on their backs like Teenage mutant ninja turtles. They have driven some of the Tsaatan from their normal herding grounds. I had a long conversation with our guide about it because the guys we came up with, who we thought were students were actually looking for gold. He was upset, and because he knew that if they found gold he would be driven from his home. Fortunately they haven’t found gold, yet. I can’t imagine people despoiling such a beautiful place for a yellow metal. But there is no question in my mind they would. Money is a powerful motivator, despite the fact that the only people who really make money are the shop keepers. Which gets us back to the double edged sword of mining in Mongolia, at least the big mines are better for the environment than the impromptu ninja mining camps.
5.
Now I am at home. I have 5 days until I leave. YANAA.
Later July 31
(But continuing theme 5) My first big project at home was getting rid of my stuff. It is truly shocking the amount of stuff I acquired in a town where I could not buy anything of substance, and in a country where I made about 160 USD a month. Where did it all come from? So I had a big give away. At first my teachers were concerned that my stuff was not free. But then they got into taking it. It went really well and I got rid of everything but one sweater. Which is pretty good. The magazines were a huge hit.
Then the anniversary began. It was good though a huge waste of resources. We had horse racing, which is a funny story, dancing, wrestling, volleyball, running and a big concert. It started with a big welcome ceremony and lots of kids dancing.
The little wrestlers were the most adorable things on the planet!
Really.
Then we had a horse race, but all the judges missed the end of the horse race so no one knew who won (woops). I was with the judges they were very angry. Then it turned out that one of the riders (a child) turned his horse around too early and so they only ran 1/3 of the race. They were supposed to re-run the race but I don’t think they did. There was wrestling. The most important part of the wrestling was that the olciin (national) nalchin (eagle) came. He is very important in my town because last year he got almost to the end of the Nadaam in UB, and was considered one of the top 6 wrestlers in the country. We had a big Nadaam for him last year, which I don’t think I wrote about (sorry). But he is a big deal and considered a member of my town even though he hasn’t lived there since 1st grade. My counterpart’s sister was operating a Huushuur stand (traditional food of Nadaam), so I spent a big of time with them.
There was a meeting in the evening that was supposed to take half and hour and took and hour and a half with everyone getting awards and giving the school money. Alumni donated 4 million tugrugs to the school, the school had a loan for 2 million tugugs to pay for the anniversary thing, so the school made 2 million tugurgs. Hopefully they will get the internet. But I think my counterpart said they are buying a car. I was given a gold medal. I am excited, it is a big deal.
The day after the anniversary I left for UB it was really sad. I was sad to say good bye to my puppy. Which I did at home, then we drove to the Aimag center and I said good bye to my counterpart, her sister and my three closest duus at the airport. I was doing ok until they started crying. Then it was bad. My little duus didn’t understand but were really excited about seeing the airplane. I miss them. It is really sad.
Me winning my medal with my director (its a pin)
I have been in UB for nearly a week now. I finished all my stuff at PC and will start my new job on Monday. There are only 2 other people left to COS from my groups so most of my friends are already in America. It is very strange. So I guess the rest of this blog I will not be in Mongolia – unless i write in between now and September when I leave.
If you don’t understand the name (a bit late I know), it comes from the island my family spends our summers on Squirrel Island.
