New Year's Tree

Well it's time for my monthly blog post. A bit sad to admit that's the interval between posts now, but what can ya do?

We're back in Mongolia. Our time at home was lovely. It was great to be with family, especially in light of the circumstances. We even got a real American Thanksgiving! It was delicious, though we were a bit sad to miss out on Peace Corps Thanksgiving, which, as you may remember from last year, is quite the shindig.


Coming back was, of course, bittersweet, but Peace Corps is continuing to be incredibly supportive, so we're fairly confident that they'll be there for us should events take a turn for the worst and we need to return home again. Just to reiterate, we're really lucky to be working for an organization that values us so highly. This is even more poignant for me in light of the government's increasingly disturbing lack of fiscal responsibility.

When we got back to Choibalsan, we were quick to put up the Christmas tree that former sitemate Bob left us. You might wonder how one would find such a lovely fake tree in a completely un-Christian country like Mongolia. Well, the truth is they don't call it a Christmas tree. Around here, a pine-like tree decorated with tassel and lights is a Shine Jil, or New Year's, tree. Shine Jil is celebrated in a manner fairly analogous to our own New Year's, except that they've lumped a decent share of Christmas traditions in as well. I figure this happened during communism, when the Russians wanted to celebrate Christmas but weren't allowed to due to its religious connotations. It can be slightly infuriating for volunteers to see these trees, such profoundly important symbols to us Americans, and hear them called New Year's trees, but then again, we're all probably way oversensitive and just a bit irritable because of the endless subzero temperatures. Which are quite unpleasant, might I add for the zillionth time.

Preparations for Shine Jil parties and the like have things beginning to fall apart at school. This marks the beginning of the holiday season, AKA the time when anything and everything take precedence over work. Like most volunteers, I found this rather frustrating last year. This time around, I think I'll just sit back and soak up the extra reading opportunities. Or maybe try to work on other projects, which is what I ought to be doing. We'll see.

To top all this madness off, teachers around the country are going on strike to protest their meager wages and demand better pay. Kaede's school is a go, while mine hasn't decided yet whether or not to join in, but as more and more teachers stop teaching, it seems to be only a matter of time.

In spite of all this, we've kept fairly busy the last week. Our M22 sitemates are in UB for IST, the same training we attended this time last year. Two of them have pets; Koty has a kitten named Pumpkin Spice Latte, or Spicy for short, and Krista has a puppy named Bambuul, or Bambi as I like to call her, since she looks like a miniature deer. They've both been living with us the past few days. It's been a mixture of exhausting, amusing, adorable, and terrifying, that last one primarily for Baagii. Although to be fair, he's actually taking it surprisingly well. Both of the cats are fairly weary around Bambi, though they're even warming up to her. But when the dog is away, the cats will play. And play they do. I think it's really good for our little Baagii. If only we had the time and resources and insanity to get him a full-time feline playmate.


We wish you all a Bayar Shine Jil, er... a Merry Christmas. Oo yanaa.