Thursday, July 9, 2009

I've finally found some time to sit down and actually write an entry for this thing. Life on the whole is pretty good. Amazingly they are telling us that we are about half way done with PST. I guess that means that I need to be updating this more often, the good thing is is that we just got an internet connection at the house so it will make that a lot easier. Anyway here are lots of details on my life, im sure i'll have missed things so feel free to comment and i'll fill in the details

My host family has been really good so far. My host mother does legal work at the government building, my host father is an art professor at the college here and specializes in ceramics and pottery and from the two TV interviews/showcases we have seen he seems to be pretty well known for it. I have 3 host siblings, a brother and two sisters. The brother is 20 and works at the TV station as a graphics designer guy. The older sister is 18 and is home from the University of Education in UB and the little sister is 12 and is a typical 12 year old girl. We live in a smallish 2 bedroom apartment. I have my own room with bed, table and a small wardrobe. The only down side to the apartment is there is now hot running water. There is cold running water, but that doesn't make washing anything very pleasant. The result is washing yourself and your clothes in a tumpon (round plastic tub about 2 feet in diameter and 8in deep, mine is green). It works well enough; the only hard part is not splashing water everywhere in the process. I generally do my hair a couple times a week or so and then throw in a trip to the bathhouse for a hot shower occasionally. Tumpons are also used for washing clothing by hand, I've done it twice and I'm not a fan. It's not difficult it's just a long involved process that takes lots of time. The result is that it is amazing how many days you can wear a shirt before it actually starts to smell and you actually need to wash it.

The food has been decent as expected. There are really only so many things you can do with meat and noodles. It isn’t bad by any means it’s just repetitive. We do make our own noodles though. There are a couple really good dishes. Khuushuur is a kind of large fried ravioli with minced meat, onions, potatoes and such inside. Another is a variation on that idea are Byyz (boats) which are more of a stuffed dumpling which are then steamed. Tsuivan is a kind of noodle dish with meat peppers and potatoes. Everything is eaten with ketchup. The ketchup is here is a little spicy so it helps to add flavor to everything which is the only real issue with the food. But you'll all be glad to know that my host mom is feeding me lots and lots of food, I'm pretty sure I won't need to eat this winter after this summer (So much for this weight we are supposed to lose...).

The Training is going pretty well. We have 4 hour Mongolian sessions every morning and then the afternoon sessions are divided between Sector training (that’s the business development part) and Cross-Cultural training.

The cultural training so far hasn't been all that exciting, a lot of it has been pretty general and not very interesting, though we did visit a ger last week and were taught how to chop wood, build a fire and clean out the stove in the ger. There have been some useful bits of info, but just nothing ground breaking.

The sector training has been really cool. Once we got some of the requisite lectures about the general state of the economy etc out of the way we started visiting different businesses and NGOs to see what they do. A fair number of CED (community economic development) volunteers work at business development NGOs. We did a practicum work day at one of the more well known NGOs Development Solutions and we got to talk with small business owners and discuss their plans and then throw in our thoughts on what they were doing well and what they could improve on or things that they hadn't thought of. The two businesses we talked to were really excited after our discussion and hopefully they'll implement some of our ideas. We started a case study of a sewing shop in town that makes uniforms for construction and security workers etc. We'll be doing a formal evaluation of their business in a couple weeks. So it will be interesting to see what they do with our ideas over the summer.

We are having our site placement interviews this next week so I’ll get to throw in my opinions on what kind of site I’d like to be in. I'm thinking I don't want to be in UB so my other options are the aimeg centers, though not the one I’m in now. They are trying to put more PCVs in gers so there is a greater chance that I'll actually live in one, which I think would have its pluses and minuses. Pluses being that you are living in a ger and have a hashaa family (a hashaa is a fenced family compound and PCVs who live in gers have their own ger within a family’s hashaa) and can get into the community more easily as well as having generally more support versus an apartment where you are kind of on your own. The down side is no running water and those -30 degree mornings in the winter when everything resembling liquids have frozen don't really sound like fun at all (well the first few sound like fun but I’m going to bet that they stop being fun really quick). Generally I'm not really wedded to anything in particular so I'll just see what happens.

That's about all the news for now. I'm sure I'll think of something as soon as I leave the cafe here, so that will have to wait till the next post.

-a