Pig Cancer

Happy spring! It's just about upon us out here. In the afternoon, snow and ice are beginning to melt, though they freeze again the minute the sun goes down. Nature is a cruel zamboni.

As I mentioned before, we're in the thick of the holiday season. Last month was Valentine's Day back home, and that day is beginning to take hold here, but of course it was a week later that the mother of all Mongol holidays hit: Tsagaan Sar. Fortunately, we were only invited to a few homes. I say fortunately because of the amount of drinking and gorging that is expected of us everywhere we go during Tsagaan Sar. However, we managed to have a pretty nice time. In truth, Tsagaan Sar is a massive headache for most Mongolians. You can't control how big or small you want it to be, let alone opt out of it, as some Americans do at Christmas, which would be our most analogous holiday. Every home has to be ready for people, anyone really, to just show up. Ready means filled to the gills with food, vodka, and even a personal present for each person who visits you. It's tough not to feel a little bad, especially as foreigners, when we show up to an elaborate event that has taken more than a week to prepare (and often a bank loan to finance), eat and drink to a sinful degree, and then receive a little present on top of it all! Oh well, as the French would say, тэр амьдрал байна.


When we aren't celebrating holidays, we're preparing for exams. Just before Tsagaan Sar, the director and managers told me to stop my team-teaching and observations and focus 100% on preparing students and teachers for the Olympics and Concourse. I'm sure I've explained what both of these are before. If you've forgotten, just know that they're ridiculous and poorly made tests that are absolutely critical to the success of students, teachers, administration... well, just about every facet of the Mongolian education system. Which is a real shame.

Unfortunately, everything is so crazy that the students and teachers barely have time to meet with me, which wasn't such a bad thing, since last week my jugulodigrastic lymph nodes swelled up to a degree more disgusting than alarming. It all started when I shaved my beard for the first time since autumn. That afternoon, I was caressing my newly shorn neck when I noticed the little guys weren't so little anymore. I thought nothing of it, but the next morning, they were so big that swallowing was just a tad uncomfortable. On top of that, I looked like that sex offender from It's Always Sunny. Within an hour their size had reduced almost to that of the previous day, but all week this pattern was repeated. Super swollen in the morning, less so in the evening. I talked to Peace Corps Medical and my lovely/brilliant aunt and uncle. No one was very concerned. I was just to wait it out. So by the time we saw all our sitemates that weekend, we'd turned it into a big joke. That evening at dinner, we were trying to explain just what was going on to some Mongolians, and they started chattering away in their own language about it, trying to reach a diagnosis. I became alarmed when I heard the word "gakhai," which means pig. I asked them to confirm this is what they'd said, and they nodded, adding that the proper Mongolian name for swollen lymph nodes is "pig cancer." How quaint.

Anyway, they're nearly back to normal now. Must've been some kind of divine retribution for being too lazy to shave all winter.

That's about all for now. We're really enjoying the end of the season. Every day without long underwear is a happy day for me. We've already begun preparations for the most kickass St. Patty's Day party ever to hit Mongolia. We started corning our own beef a couple nights ago (Baagii helped by eating all the skin), and we're gonna go all out and buy some Jameson's and Bailey's. If you're in the neighborhood on March 17, stop by!

John the Red-Nosed Volunteer

...had a very frostbitten nose
and if you ever poked it
he'd swat your hand and whimper quietly...

Actually it's technically just frostnipped. And it's pretty much gone. I lost my scarf a month ago or so and decided it wasn't worth buying a new one. Last year, the coldest month was December, so I figured it was all downhill from there anyway. Well, this year January was a lot colder, and one day last week while walking to school, my face getting colder and colder, I felt an abrupt pain in my nose, like someone had just punched me with a very hot fist. By the time I got inside, I'd forgotten about it, but a day or two later, that spot had turned bright red. Fortunately things are warming up around here, and Merrie lent me a scarf just in case.


The school year has progressed out of the first semester, when it's possible to get some work done, and into the second, where there are holidays and concerts and standardized tests every two minutes which make it nearly impossible to do anything except get stressed and frustrated, or, as I prefer, just stay home and watch movies with the wife and cat. In the last two weeks, we've had six performances, five of which were on the same day. We're raising money for new chairs and audio equipment to put in our auditorium. I have to bite my tongue whenever they tell me this, as I feel there are many more obvious places any money we raise ought to go. For instance, it would be nice to have classrooms warm enough that students didn't need to wear their jackets inside, but I suppose it's hard to argue with a killer stereo system.

Lucky for me, I have my lovely wife to come home to, as well as her inimitable cooking. Mongolia has made us both better chefs, but she's the true master around here. Our friend Pico was visiting from the countryside again, and on his birthday, Kaede made bacon and ricotta ravioli, squash soup, a fresh garden salad, garlic bread, and red velvet cake from real beets. I was supposed to help with all this, but his birthday happened to fall on the day we had to perform that same damned concert five times.

We're glad February is here. While things at school can be difficult, a lot of our other projects are going well. We launch a new group of Access students this week, we just gave a practice TOEFL exam, and the International Creative Writing Contest is only a few weeks away. Perhaps most exciting is Tsagaan Sar, the lunar new year and biggest holiday of the year, which will happen at the end of the month. Last year, we didn't get much of a chance to celebrate it, so we're looking forward to round two. Kaede and I are having some nice new Mongolian jackets tailored just for the occasion. Very exciting.

In other holiday news, last Friday was Teacher's Day. Every school has a huge party and every teacher gets hilariously wasted, and of course we offered the TOEFL exam the next morning, much to the groggy, hungover dismay of many of our particpants. At our celebration, I was unexpectedly given an award for using good methodology over the three to five years I've been working. Doesn't really make sense, but oh well. Can't complain about a nifty medal!

Birthdays for Baagii, Bullets for the Rest

Kaede was walking to school this week when she heard a bang. A moment later, a whimpering dog ran out from between two nearby buildings, slipped on the ice, and collapsed. Blood filled his mouth and flowed from a fresh bullet wound. Soon thereafter, I received a call from my very upset wife. I did my best to console her, but what can you really say in that sort of situation? On her way home a few hours later, the corpse was still there, as well as those of other dogs. I'm sure Kaede would not classify this as one of her better days in Peace Corps.

The dog shootings were among the first things veteran volunteers told us about when we arrived in Mongolia nineteen months ago. Once a year, the police walk around town and shoot all the stray dogs they find. In smaller communities with no real police force, teachers and other employees of the state are fined a nominal amount if they do not kill a dog, although I should add that I've only heard this latter anecdote secondhand. Either way, in a poor country where spaying and neutering are virtually unheard of and often, ironically, viewed as cruel, this is how you control the dog population.

And there's no doubt that the dog population needs controlling. Strays are everywhere in this country, and while most would not harm a human, rabies is also a problem. When they start roaming in packs, even the heartiest of volunteers can't help but get a little nervous. Most Mongolians are downright terrified of dogs, and considering how many stories I've heard of people, natives and foreigners alike, getting bitten, it's not surprising.

Still, it's easy to judge Mongolia for this, and it got even easier this week. What could be more cruel than shooting an innocent dog in broad daylight? Often with children or the elderly right there? Nonetheless, I never stay long in my ivory tower before I recall that at least as many pets are killed every day in America. A lot more, actually: one every eight seconds according to the Humane Society's website. We just have the luxury of shelters and needles so that this can be done behind closed doors in a manner we deem humane. I wonder, if it got to a point where our communities couldn't afford these sorts of services anymore, how long we'd let strays roam our streets before we started tolerating, or even calling for, their destruction, public or otherwise.

And of course, Mongolians don't relish these dog-killing days. Most find it very disturbing, but few would call it unnecessary. They wish it were carried out better, sure, but in general, these people are much more comfortable facing death than we are. Considering nearly half of the population still herds, most Mongolians begin witnessing animal slaughter from a young age. In a country where vegetables are still a bit of a novelty, eating meat is all but compulsory, and Mongolians have come to terms with that, in spite of the bloodshed it requires. Most of these people cannot afford to ignore this reality, and perhaps that's not such a bad thing.

In America, we eat meat and exterminate strays, but we never have to face it. We get clean cities with empty streets and restaurants that sell juicy hamburgers, and we never even have to think about what our lifestyle requires. Of course, nowadays many Americans are turning their attention to just that, and some of our practices are improving as a result, but I think we could learn a lot from Mongolia. Perhaps Michael Pollan should take a vacation here.

On a brighter subject, it was Baagii's birthday recently! Happy birthday Baagii! Well, it wasn't technically his birthday (that's probably sometime in the late summer), but it was a year from the day the little guy followed us into our apartment. For his special day, he got some extra delicious food (see below), a new toy, and continued status as one of the luckiest pets around, whether in Mongolia, the states, or anywhere else in this dog-fearing world.

Y2K12

Happy New Year! We had a wonderful time seeing it in here in Choibalsan. It's a humble little city with nowhere near the organization required to have an official fireworks display, but with China barely fifty miles away, there's plenty of supplies for amateurs to set them off. Our apartment has a pretty decent view of downtown, so all the sitemates plus Zoloo came over and we had quite an hors-d'oeuvre potluck/game night while waiting for the display. I actually think I prefer the haphazard, mostly premature show as opposed to the absurdly overblown and money-wasting jamborees they throw in pretty much every American city.

I wish I had a picture or two to show you (there's one from last year at the bottom of this post), buuuut, well, as the title of this post suggests, there's been a bit of a technological meltdown around here. It was hinted at around the time we got back to Mongolia after our leave when my camera stopped working. Sometimes I can get it to take pictures, but it was getting too frustrating, so I started using Kaede's. Then, last Wednesday, our friend Pico came in from the countryside demanding karaoke, and who was I to say no to a Hudoo Rat? I brought the camera and got a little drunk, and the next day I couldn't find it anywhere. I feel really bad, but luckily Kaede didn't care too much for it. It certainly affects me more, since, as you are probably aware, I'm rather fond of taking pictures. Furthermore, there were some photos from various Christmas festivities which I stupidly had not transferred onto my computer yet, so I guess they're gone (Krista took the one up top, which features Kaede and me having made allowances for some gastrointestinal expansion following our Xmas piglet roast).

Around the same time, this old Acer laptop, which has given me enough trouble already over the last three-and-a-half years, started randomly turning off or giving me the blue screen of death whenever it got jostled even a tad. It's not quite the end of the road yet, but, just to illustrate, I'm stretched out in an extremely uncomfortable position from the couch to reach the keyboard and type this entry so that I don't have to move it from the position in which it was situated on the couch when Kaede and I recently watched Scrooged, which was a major disappointment, incidentally. C'mon Bill Murray. You can do better than that.

I keep telling myself there are much bigger things to worry about in life than computers and cameras, but it's hard not to be bummed when you're living such an exciting chapter of your life, and entering 2012 only amplifies that sensation. Last year was the only full year of our lives during which we'll have been Peace Corps volunteers, and this year is the one in which we'll finish and figure out what's next. Unbelievable.

I hope you all had a wonderful holiday season and that you have high hopes for this next year. Шинэ жилийн баярын мэнд хүргэе!

Remembering Jagaa

It's particularly coincidental that we should be dogsitting right now, since it was almost exactly a year ago that we took Jagaa in. There's been no follow-up since she ran away. Although Sarah has seen a dog around town that looks like Jagaa, she's convinced it's not she, mostly on the basis of it being larger in size and having less wonky eyes. We of course continue to hope that she's found a nice new Mongolian family who are super impressed by her knowledge of many commands in their own language, but we're aware that it's far more likely she's, well, returned to the steppe. To be honest, I don't find myself thinking about her all that much anymore, though it is not exactly rare that something happens which makes me miss her. Taking care of Bambuul evoked a mixture of sentimental reminiscences and overwhelming relief that I no longer have to stand outside in the freezing weather waiting for a yipping puppy to defecate. Either way, she was a lovely dog in her own way, and I feel it's fitting to take this chance to remember her. So here's some highlights from her life, at least that part of it which was known to my friends, to Kaede, and to me.

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.

Pie's in the oven

It's pumpkin too. The billionth pie we've had in our few weeks back in the states. And I could eat a billion more. Also, this makes the second post in a row with dessert in the title. I think that warrants some sort of online blog prize.

So not too much to say. We've been in the states, with family, alternatively getting lots of work done and just relaxing. It's been nice. Between the smell of cloves and the snow gently falling outside, this is my idea of a good time. A week from Monday we head back to Mongolia. While we've been enjoying our time here, we look forward to getting back home. It's funny we refer to a place so foreign in that way.


Happy thanksgiving!

Having our кекс and eating it

These last few entries always seem to have me apologizing for how rarely I post nowadays. I'm gonna take this opportunity to stop saying sorry and instead admit that I don't have as much time for this blog as I used to. Which makes me kinda sad, cause I like marking all this stuff down and letting the interested parties back home keep up to date. I'll try to post more often, but we'll see.

The other thing I've been tending to do is give the excuse that we've been so super busy, and I'm gonna keep right on doing that one, as the last month has been no exception. Of course there's been all the craziness of work and secondary activities (there we are with our ACCESS students above) and what-have-you, but then, starting a couple weeks ago, it went to a new level when we realized there was a family medical situation back home that needed our immediate attention. We'd known about it for a while and had always viewed it quite seriously, but we were sticking it out until the last minute, since we thought we would have to quit Peace Corps in order to be there for the people we love. So we called PC and told them we were going to have to head home, but Ellen, our country director, recommended that we apply for emergency leave instead. If granted, this would allow us two to four weeks to be home with family in this time of need, as well as give us the option to return to our service if we felt comfortable doing so, and all on PC's bill! We decided to go for it. Unfortunately we were denied, so we started packing up and transferring our projects and saying goodbyes (see our aimagmates rocking out at our going-away karaoke sing-off below). Then, the day before we were to leave Choibalsan, Ellen called us back. At the behest of our ill family member, PC had reconsidered the case and changed their minds! We're not 100% sure that we'll return, but we're incredibly happy to be able to have the chance to do so, and so is everyone else, both here and at home.


So now we're in Ulaanbaatar. We got here yesterday. It's the middle of the night, but, in an attempt to get a head start on the jet lag, I'm not sleeping. In five hours, we fly out. It's crazy to be headed back to the states so soon, especially without having to fork out any dough for the trip, but we feel very blessed. We're lucky to be part of an organization that values its volunteers so highly. Sure, we've had our issues with Peace Corps, but I think this experience has once and for all affirmed that they do indeed care about us. Quite a lot. We were in the office today signing paperwork and tying up other loose ends, and everyone we saw was overwhelmingly supportive. Our friends, Mongolian and American alike, have been wonderful as well. Back when we thought we were leaving for good, many volunteers went out of their way to let us know how sad they were we were going and how much they would miss us. The people we work with, while very upset to be losing us, were completely understanding and wished us the best of luck, even going so far as to take up collections for our family back stateside. If there's one thing that can be said for these people, it's that they care an enormous amount for their loved ones, and they understand that nothing under the Great Blue Sky is more important.

I'll try to keep posting from America, but hopefully we'll be back in Choibalsan before long to finish our service (barely half a year left!). If not, well that's how it goes, and we won't regret that decision for a minute. You gotta admit, the Mongolians are right about this one.

Married Life

Howdy ho. How's life back home? Life in Mongolia has been a mix of nice and frustrating. Nice at home. Frustrating at work. Though the latter is getting better. The Gordian knot that is the September schedule is slowly giving way to the... well, the slightly less Gordian knot that is the rest of the year's schedule. I'll finally begin team-teaching tomorrow, inshallah. Secondary projects have been slowly taking form as well. ACCESS got off to a shaky start last week, and we also taught our first TOEFL course to teachers from all around Choibalsan. I get to work on that with Kaede and Zoloo, and I can see it turning into my favorite project this year. Kaede got the ball rolling on the Creative Writing Olympics, and quite well too. We've already found an M22 willing to take over next year. Last Monday we headed downtown to see off our sitemate Deb, a VSO volunteer who is now on a three-week horse trek to UB to raise awareness for the problems disabled children face in Mongolia. It's an incredible project, and I'm proud to be helping out with the blog while she's en route. You can see it here. The week before that we took a ride out to Diviz to check in and see how we can keep helping out this year. While we were there, I snapped the picture below of Tsogtsolmaa, one of the unofficial community leaders using the well Marg and Bob helped them build.


This next week will also see the first class of the non-English teachers' English course which Kaede and I are teaching at my school. Apparently, Khan-Uul was selected as Dornod's guinea pig in attaining the "Cambridge Standard," as everyone's calling it. I have yet to see any official document explaining what exactly the Cambridge Standard is, but, from what I've gathered, it's an international standard which, if reached, yields its school equal footing on the world academic stage. That is, a student who graduates from a school that has met the Cambridge Standard has, for all intents and purposes, received the same level of education he would have received in a developed nation. This program has just been introduced to Mongolia, so the Ministry of Education has chosen one school in every aimag to blaze the trail. One of the requirements is that all fifth and tenth grade classes have to be taught entirely in English. That's where I come in. I'm now expected to get all of those teachers to a level where they're competent enough to teach their subject in English. By next year. Even if they weren't working at least forty hours a week and were devoting all of their time to studying the language, this would be a stretch. But of course, they're all expected to maintain their normal schedule and only take two classes a week. And on top of that, most of them don't speak a word of English to begin with. Some of them can't even read the Roman alphabet. Thankfully, Kaede has volunteered to help me out, since she isn't getting a ton of work at her school, and she thinks this program sounds interesting, unattainable though it may be, especially in the given time frame. The most ridiculous part has to be that, even if we somehow managed to teach these teachers enough English, the overwhelming majority of their students, tenth and fifth graders alike, would be completely lost in a class taught entirely in English. Nevertheless, everyone's super excited about it, and they all seem quite surprised that I find it to be such an incredible task.

Sorry for the rant. A nice counterpoint to the craziness of work is the pleasantness of home. Kaede and I, thanks to the advice of some famous food critic on a podcast of NPR's Fresh Air, have begun planning out the week's meals and taking turns cooking, which has only made our delicious home life all the more delicious. Besides cooking, we watch lots of movies and plan lots of lessons and make lots of chit chat. It's a lot nicer than last year, when almost all of our interaction was via a crappy internet connection. All those fun activities aside, it's just nice to have someone to come home to, someone who always looks nice and gives me hugs and kisses and asks me how my day is. And it really is amazing to have her helping me with all these projects. She's a much better, more motivated volunteer than I am, and by golly it spurs me on!

Oh, it was also Zoloo's birthday a few weeks ago! Happy birthday! Here's a pic of her and Krista looking silly playing the air accordion (at my behest).


Hope the foliage is nice wherever you are. It's pretty here, but it ain't Maine.

15 Dead Bats

And we didn't take a picture of any of them! Biggest photofail of my time in Mongolia.

To explain, we arrived back in Choibalsan a few weeks ago, walked into the apartment, and found fifteen dead, dehydrated bats strewn about the place. One of them lay right on our pillow. It was if Dracula had been taking a nap and forgot to pull the shades before sunrise. Fortunately, they were so dehydrated that there wasn't any real odor. Just batdust. Lots and lots of batdust.

To add insult to injury, shortly thereafter we found out that our landlady wanted her apartment back and we had to pack up all our batdust and move. The next three days were a frenzy of apartment-searching, packing, cleaning, and preparing for/attending the first day of school. It was very unpleasant, but I'm relieved to say that we're now all moved into a new place. It's a bit farther away from downtown, but it's bigger, nicer, and just as close to school. We even have a TV that gets BBC World News, which means I get to listen to my favorite apocalyptic rave whenever I want! God I love that booping noise.

Baagii seems happy here, and if Baagii's happy, we're happy. We were so stoked to get him back. The summer seems to have done nothing to stop his progression into the best goddamned cat that ever lived. He's such a sweet little guy. You can see him below getting ready to pounce on me from the bathtub. Strategic genius.


Before coming home to bats, we of course arrived back in Ulaanbaatar safely from America. We spent a week in and around the big city, getting medical and dental check-ups and attending Mid Service Training. It was ostensibly a time to reflect on our first year of service and prepare for our second, but it was actually a chance to see all our friends again, which was really nice. It was held in Terelj, a gorgeous national park northeast of UB. Always nice to see another part of Mongolia.


The last few weeks have seen a lot of cooking, cleaning, movie-watching, etc. School has been... unreliable to say the least. The first month or so is crazy with schedule changes and the like, so it's tough to get any real work done. We've also met the new sitemates! Krista, Koty, and John arrived in Choibalsan a week before we did after training for the summer outside of Darkhan. We don't know them all that well yet, but they seem nice and hard-working, and all three of them joined us for the long walk out to the Pilot's Monument, as pictured below. Tomorrow, John is coming with Kaede and me on the year's first trip out to Division 5. Hopefully he'll fall so in love with those adorable little kindergartners that he'll be begging to take over after we leave.


It's definitely a different atmosphere around here this year. I'd be lying if I said I don't miss all my buds who've moved on from Choibalsan, but it's tough to complain when I have my lovely wife here with me (below you can see the adorable effects of the squid ink pasta Kaede's mom sent us for her birthday... thanks Kayoko!). Between Kaede and Baagii, I've gotta have one of the bestest homes in all of Central Asia!