Sunday, August 16, 2009

Hey all,
So the big news is that I now have a job and place to live for the next two years. I will be living in the Suhkbaatar aimag center of Baruun Urt. It's one of the eastern aimags so I will truely be living on the steppe. The city is 550km east of UB about 350 km of the road is paved and the remaining part is an "improved dirt road" they tell us it's an 8-10 hour ride by bus. Suhkbaatar is traditionally known for its silver work. The best jewelry etc all comes from this region. I'm told that the terrain is pretty flat with some rolling hills getting more deserty the farther south you go toward the Gobi and more forestly the father north you go. I'll be living in an 3rd floor one bedroom appartment that has running water and electiricity. There is one other M-20 (an english teacher) that will be moving out there with me and there are 3 other M-19s that are already out there, two other teachers and a health volunteer. Of course the only other Alex in Peace Corps Monglia will be in the same town with me :-p

I'll be working for the Mercy Corps office in Baruun Urt. Mercy Corps is an international non-profit development agency that does agro-business development, specifically working with herders here in Mongolia to develop sustainable herding practices and improve dairy production methods (so i might become an expert on milking yaks) . During training we met the MC country director, a British expat who was very capable and runs a great organiziation, so i'm looking forward to working with the organiziation. As far as i can tell i'll be working with small business development, the "specifics" on the info i have now are kind of vague, the plan for the first couple weeks is to come up with a work plan that everyone is happy with. Tomorrow we are meeting our supervisors before leaving for Suhkbaatar later in the week.

As for an update on how training went, it ended very well. I passed my language test with the Novice High rating required by PC. Our CED symposium project was a success. We have about 25 people come to our training seminar. Each of us talked about a different topic (marketing, branding, networking, accounting etc) and we worked in conjunction with a couple of the local development NGO's in town. They each talked a little about thier agency and we had a lady who successfully set up a bread making business talk about how she does the things that we talked about in our sessions as a way to show that people actually do keep accounting records and it does actually work and the audience seemed to like it.

That's about it so far, I'll post more in the coming weeks after I've settled in
-a