The Posh Corps

Aagii, one of my counterparts, the one whom I helped get the job as a matter of fact, came over to my place tonight to watch Toy Story (I forgot how awesome that movie is). A couple of us teachers were preparing a list of vocab words to go with it when we show it in our new English Language Film Club this weekend. Last week we watched Grease, which was much more sexual than I'd remembered, although it was a hit nevertheless. But film isn't the point of this story. The point is, Aagii got here early, and he brought along a photo album. Honestly, after eating mutton and drinking vodka, showing people family photos is your average Mongolian's favorite pastime. A lot of Aagii's photos were of his college friends. As I mentioned in my last post, he graduated quite recently. I asked him where they were living now. "Most of them are in UB," he said. "So why did you decide to come back to Choibalsan?" I said. This is the story he told me:

"Well this friend," he said, pointing at one of the men in the photos, "one night we were very drunk, and he..." Aagii didn't know the word, so he made a fist and abruptly shoved it toward his knee, where I noticed a sizable scar for the first time. "With a knife," he said, smiling. "He stabbed you?!?" I was incredulous. I'd heard that Mongolian friends will rough-house when drinking, but I'd thought it was limited to (relatively) harmless wrestling. "What is word? 'Stab'?" "Yes." "Ah yes, he stab me." Shocked, I asked if they were still friends. "Yes of course," Aagii replied, as if I'd been crazy to ask. Anyway, he concluded by saying that, since he did not have health insurance that was good in UB, he was forced to return to Choibalsan to have his wound treated. Fortunately he doesn't seem too unhappy about it. I said to him, "Aagii, if we ever get drunk together, you aren't allowed to stab me in the leg." He laughed, and I added, "although I do have insurance." "Ah yes, I have insurance too!" "Does that mean I can stab you if we're drunk?" He chuckled and told me I could, but I doubt I'll take him up on it.

The last week here has been okay. The highlight was definitely this weekend, when I went with most of the teachers from my school to the countryside for a retreat. We talked and ate and drank and played cards. Saturday afternoon was beautiful and hot, so we went down to the river and swam around. Well I swam. As I may have mentioned before, very few Mongolians know how to swim, and most fear water that rises above their waist. On the other side of the river, however, there was a mountain. Not a big one, but the first one I'd seen since coming to Choibalsan. Obviously I wanted to swim across and hike it. I was not alone in this desire. Aagii was also interested, and he even suggested that we strip our clothes off on the far bank and climb the thing naked! I would've done it, but a few of my female counterparts got up the nerve to join us. We waded across the river, which is very shallow, and in spite of the terrible mosquitoes and rocky ground, hiked barefoot all the way to the top. It was majestic and primal and awesome. The picture above is from the summit.

School is going okay. I realize it's only been a week, but I've been getting a little frustrated by how little work I have and how expendable I feel. But in the last few days I've taught a few classes and my schedule is beginning to fill out, so I'm doing better in that regard. And it's hard to get too annoyed with so many wonderful people to work with, as well as such attentive and motivated students (especially compared to some of the brats I had during training this summer!). One interesting cultural difference I found in my workplace: today I went to the primary school for the first time to observe the fourth and fifth grade English classes. I was sitting in the fourth grade English classroom when I noticed something conspicuous sitting in the bookshelf. I went to have a closer look and was shocked to find... a Mongolian nudie magazine! Many pictures had been cut out, but I'm pretty sure they were all of people who were dressed, probably to teach clothing vocab. There were naked women everywhere, including one softcore picture of two couples copulating on the same mattress under an overpass. Could you imagine the parental backlash if something like that popped up in an American classroom, fourth grade or otherwise??? The magazine's greatest transgression, however, was a picture of some random woman who was labeled as Pierce Brosnan. How dare they!

As I mentioned in my last post, I've been struggling recently with the realization that I'm living a pretty damned easy life here in the Peace Corps. I've got lots of sitemates to keep me company, I've got a nice job with motivated students and teachers who speak excellent English, I've got running hot water and a refrigerator and access to peanut butter and brown sugar and Bailey's Irish Cream and all sorts of fruits. And now I have internet too! My life is so cushy, some people deem this type of service as "the Posh Corps," and I think that's pretty fair. Especially when I remember that some of the people I trained with are living hours from the nearest native-English speaker in gers in tiny towns with no running water and difficult jobs and the knowledge that in a few months they'll be chopping wood every day to keep from freezing to death and waking up every morning to frozen toothpaste! What enormously different experiences we'll have. I just finished washing my clothes in the bathtub, an activity I relish because it is the one remnant I have of how difficult some chores were this summer. But even that is a hell of a lot easier now that I have a big tub to do it in rather than a little bucket, with hot water at the twist of a wrist and a sink for rinsing. Oh well, as I said last time, I'm not taking it too much to heart. It's just kind of... funny.

You'll notice I've made a few changes to the blog. Mostly the picture above (it's finally one I took), some of the colors, and a new tab, geared toward people who are interested in visiting me out here. Which if you like awesome, totally unique places, should include you.

So there's one major detail that I've been omitting in this blog for the last couple months, at first because it wasn't quite so major and I was uncertain about which way things would go, and more recently because I just felt it was private I suppose. But now it's become such an enormous force in my life, probably the most enormous in fact, that this blog just seems like a big lie without including it. And that detail is... I have a girlfriend! If you remember from that long post a while back, I mentioned a girl named Kaede with whom I was playing a lot of cribbage and who was with me when we were nearly dismembered by that goddamned dog. Well, somewhere between card games and animal attacks, we got to really liking each other. It was kind of an unfortunate time for that to happen since we only had a month left at our training site. Kaede is also a teacher trainer, so we knew that there was zero chance we'd be placed together, and in a country this enormous and poorly connected, very little probability that we'd be anywhere reasonably close. As a result of those and other variables, we originally planned to play things by ear once we went to our new sites. But as that date drew closer, we fell more and more for each other, and the whole idea began to seem absolutely ridiculous. I really did not come to Mongolia to be in a long distance relationship, but in the end it just felt right.

It's been rough since we got to site. Kaede is ten hours west of Ulaanbaatar, which makes her about twenty-four hours away from me (which believe it or not, is not even half as far as she could be). Additionally, we're forbidden from leaving our sites except on work-related business for the first three months of service, making any chance of seeing her all but impossible. We talk every day, but the minutes for our phones are kind of pricey. We both got internet at our places so we could Skype, though it only works some of the time.

Anyway, point is, in spite of all that, she's totally worth it. Kaede is smart and funny and gorgeous and talented and interesting and adventurous and good at cribbage and I haven't felt this way about someone in a really long time, if ever. Maybe it's the altitude or all the fermented mare's milk, but I'm pretty sure it's her. Alright I've probably said way more than I need to about this, but the point is, I really like her, and I miss her like crazy, and for some ridiculous reason, she seems to feel the same way about me. It's nice. Really nice. If you've got any long distance pointers, holler at me, cause I'm pretty inexperienced with this sort of thing.

And because I know everyone's gonna beg me, here's a picture of Kaede, the only way I've seen her for the last few weeks... over a webcam. Oh, and by the way, her name is pronounced KAH-eh-deh.