Get ready, cuz here I come!

I never met a country that makes me feel the way Mongolia do,
YOU'RE ALL RIGHT!
Whenever I'm asked who makes my dreams real, I say Mongolia do,
YOU'RE OUT OF SIGHT!
So fee, fi, fo fum,
Look out Mongolia, cuz here I come.

Alright so the song doesn't work perfectly, but whenever I'm getting ready for anything, I can't help but think of that Temptations tune. And that's pretty much all I've been doing in my spare moments the past few weeks. You may or may not have noticed the page I put up on this here blog about the things I need to get between now and departure, and I've been spending a lot of my time trying to figure out just how I'm gonna get them, and which ones I can do without. I received my sweet hiking backpack from Eagle Creek yesterday. As mentioned on that page, lots of places give us PCVs a discount, so I got that $230 bag for only $115! Awesome.

I've also been reading Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World by Jack Weatherford. It's really interesting and is only furthering my opinion that GK was fucking awesome and has been mistreated by the history books ever since. Highly recommended.

In other non-Mongolia news, I'm now in my last week of work in Central PA. I'm training my sister to replace me, so it's nice to be a little family for a while out here in Carlisle. This weekend I'm making one last trip to Baltimore and DC to say some goodbyes, and then I'll head up to Maine to work at Handy Boat! Very excited about that, even though I just got back from six days up there on Sunday. Aside from the run (for which I finally raised my $1000; thanks to everyone who donated!!!), I've also planned some camping and even a day of skydiving in the next month. May as well leave the US with a (hopefully non-literal) bang, amirite?

Mongolia on My Mind

Mongolia Mongolia Mongolia. Such is the litany which now comprises the majority of my thoughts. As you can see in the picture above, I couldn't even go to the Museum of Natural History in DC without pointing out Ulaanbaatar on every map I came across. I guess it'd probably be a little strange if I weren't thinking nonstop about the totally foreign land where I'll be spending the next two years of my life, but I'm a little surprised by just how infatuated I've become. I guess it makes more sense when coupled with the mundaneness of life in Central PA.

Needless to say, I've been reading everything about the Land of the Blue Sky that I can get my hands on. I tore through what documents the PC sent me. I've even watched a couple excellent Mongolian films (The Story of the Weeping Camel, a documentary about a nomadic family living in the Gobi Desert, and Mongol, the first part of an epic trilogy telling the story of Genghis Khan's life; both were nominated for Academy Awards and can be found on Netflix). It's been really fun, and I'm pumped that I'll soon be living in such an awesome place. Here's ten of my favorite facts I've recently learned, in no particular order:

• Mongolia has one of the highest average elevations (about 5100 ft) of any country!
• In Mongolia, if you accidentally step on someone or kick their feet, you must shake his hand immediately!
• John Wayne once starred as Genghis Khan in Howard Hughes' 1956 film, The Conqueror. It is considered one of the worst movies ever made, and because it was shot downwind from a nuclear test site in Nevada, nearly half of the cast and crew (including John Wayne and Agnes Moorehead) developed cancer!
• Peljidiin Genden, Mongolia's ninth Prime Minister, disagreed with Stalin over how to deal with the Buddhist monks in his nation (Stalin wanted to purge them; Genden didn't), and he even charged the Soviet leader with "Red Imperialism." In response, Stalin kicked Genden's walking stick! Right out from under him! What an asshole! So Genden slapped Stalin across the face, breaking his pipe and yelling "You bloody Georgian, you have become a virtual Russian czar!" Can you guess how Stalin reacted to that? If you guessed that Crazy Old Joe had Genden killed, you're correct!
• The common English term "hurray" originated as the Mongol battle cry. Doesn't seem to mean the same thing to us, does it? Personally, if I saw a whole bunch of people running at me with swords yelling "hurray!!!" I probably would think they were just being silly. But then they'd kill me. Just like every other chump in their path!
• Genghis Khan wasn't a total dick after all! Don't get me wrong, he wasn't a saint exactly, but he was no bloodthirsty mindless sociopath either. History textbooks fail again!
• For every one Mongolian, there are THIRTEEN HORSES! WTF!?!
• One delicacy of Mongolia's oh-so-unappetizing cuisine is known as boodog, which is really just a euphemism for blowtorched marmot. That's right. You heard me. Blowtorched. Marmot. I don't think anyone needs to hear more about this particular oddity, but it's just too bizarre not to go on. Anyway I'm the one who's potentially going to have to eat this stuff. Quoting from Lonely Planet's guide to Mongolia:

  This summer delight first involves pulling the innards out of the neck of a marmot. The carcass is then stuffed full of scalding rocks and the neck cinched up with wire. The bloated animal is then thrown upon a fire (or blowtorched) to burn the fur off the outside while the meat is cooked from within. The finished product vaguely resembles a balloon with paws.

  As a bonus, apparently handling the dead animals is the number one cause of Bubonic Plague in Mongolia. Hurray!
• Khövsgöl Nuur, while not the largest lake in Mongolia, is the second oldest lake in the world and contains sixty-five percent of the nation's fresh water, and two percent of the world's!
• It is estimated that about one in every twelve men living in the former Mongolian empire (one-fifth of the world's land area) is descended from Genghis Khan, for a total of about sixteen million great-great-great-great-etc. grandsons! And that's just the men! The moral of the story? GK was a ho. Fo sho.

In a recent comment, the lovely Anna Santo requested more details about what exactly I'll be doing in Mongolia. I don't know how much anyone else cares, but I'd do anything for Anna, so here goes.

I don't know that many specifics, but my job description is English teacher trainer. For the first ten weeks, however, I'll be in intensive pre-service training with all the other PCVs in my cohort. I'm not positive where it will be, but I think I read somewhere that it'll be in the town of Darkhan, Mongolia's third largest city, which is in the north, not far from the Russian border. While there, I'll be living with a host family, which ought to expedite learning of the language and culture. After PST ends, we'll all be sent to our permanent sites, the places where we'll live for the next two years. These will have been determined a few weeks prior. I have no idea where I'll be sent, but it will most likely be a city of moderate size, which for Mongolia means fifteen to forty thousand people. There are three kinds of sites at which I could be placed:

1. Foreign Language Institutes (FLI)—These are basically colleges. Should I get sent to an FLI, I'd be leading classes of fifteen to twenty prospective teachers aged seventeen to twenty-two.
2. Provincial Education Departments—There is an Education Department in every aimag which oversees the administration of education for the whole province. If I were placed at one of these, I'd be aiding the officials in improving the quality of English instruction in that aimag. Apparently this job includes some traveling into the countryside, which makes it sound like the best possibility to me!
3. Secondary school complexes—In a secondary school complex, which is a fancy term for a high school, I'd be working with current English teachers to help them improve their own skills. I'd also be doing some private tutoring on the side. Judging from the description alone, I'm least excited about this one.

As in my initial country placement, I will have some say on where in Mongolia I get to go, but it's not their first concern. Based on what I've read so far, I'd like to be placed somewhere in the central to western part of the country. That way I could be in the mountains, which I so love, and yet not too far from Ulaanbaatar. But I guess we'll just have to wait and see!

Two Months!!!

That pic would probably be more appropriate if I weren't holding the fish skeletons, but it was the closest thing I could find to a photo of me looking excited and terrified... which are the two emotions I'm feeling right now since, two months from today, I'LL BE ON MY WAY TO MONGOLIA!!! Well, more or less... I'll be on my way to stateside staging. I technically won't leave for Mongolia until two months from tomorrow.

Anyway, this isn't much of a real post; I just wanted to mention that. And also this: ever since I began considering the Peace Corps in earnest, which was right around the beginning of my frosh year at Oberlin, I've tried to get a grasp on just how long twenty-seven months is. My main strategy has been to consider what I was doing twenty-seven months prior, and what had happened in the meantime. Back at the beginning of my college career, that interval seemed absolutely, unbelievably, nigh-on-insurmountably enormous. In the two and a quarter years that passed between July 2003 and September 2005, I'd gotten my first job, learned to drive a car, traveled to France and Spain for a two-week exchange program, gotten my first girlfriend, applied to college, graduated from high school, said good-bye to old friends, and made new ones at Oberlin, where I was now a student. I couldn't imagine spending that much time in a place about which I knew nothing. If such a huge amount had changed about me in that time, all while basically living at home, would I even be able to survive the same interval in a foreign country, living a life without many of the comforts and conveniences, not to mention people, I take for granted back home?

Those questions are still valid, but at least now the amount of time seems less daunting. In the twenty-seven months between January 2007 and now, I spent a semester living in Egypt and studying at the American University in Cairo, made some new friends there, saw a lot of awesome new places in the Middle East, lived in Boston for a summer, finished out my time at Oberlin, had a six-month relationship begin and end... and then there was graduation. Since then, besides the road trip, not all that much has happened in my life (as the previous post will tell you). Plus, there's that whole phenomenon where, as you age, the same amount of time (one year, two years, twenty-seven months...) comprises a lesser portion of your life as a whole. As a child, a year seems like a whole lifetime. Nowadays, it feels like it was just yesterday I was leaving for Cairo.

Point is, the mix of excitement and nervous terror has changed quite a bit in the last five years. I still feel both knowing that I'll be leaving in two months, but (thankfully), I feel a lot more of the former.

Where are you going? Where have you been?

So how bout a little summary of what my recent life has been like as well as a rundown of what's in store for me between now and my departure for Mongolia? Mmm, that sounds good. I'll have that.

Where to start? Well the picture above is of my family (plus Peter) and me just after my graduation from Oberlin. Following that bizarre ritual, I spent the summer living it up in a sweet apartment right on the Eastern Promenade in Portland, Maine. I was working at my favorite job, driving the launch boat for Handy Boat Services in Falmouth, only a few miles down the road. Besides working, drinking too much, and eating Buffalo wings (which, if you know me at all, you'll know that wings are perhaps my greatest passion), I did little of substance all summer long. I was living with my good pal, the aforementioned Peter Lord (once again, if you know me at all, you know Peter), and it was with him that I did the one real thing of note: we formed an all-male Indigo Girls cover band. We called ourselves the Indigo Guys. Somehow we went on to win the annual Yarmouth Clam Festival Battle of the Cover Bands, as well as five hundred bucks. Not too shabby for a couple guys making total asses of themselves. If you didn't make it to the performance, you can watch the videos on YouTube. Just search for "Indigo Guys." Actually I'll just embed the best one here. I mean, we're gonna go viral soon anyway.


At the end of the summer, Peter went back to Boston for his last year of college at Northeastern, and I moved in with my wonderful Aunt Claire and my equally wonderful Uncle Ron for a month to finish out the season at Handy Boat. It was a somewhat boring beginning to the fall, though I did get some good hiking in. Anyway, I could deal with a little ennui, since as soon as my job finished in early October, my sister Becky and I went on an epic road trip all around the country which lasted until Christmas. Although I've traveled quite a bit for a guy my age, I'd been very few places in America prior to that, so it was nice to make it out to the West Coast at last, and to see lots of national parks, as well as meet up with a ton of my more far-flung friends before leaving for the Peace Corps. Here is a map of the route we took.


Although the road trip basically ended when Becky and I made it to my mom's place in Pennsylvania for the holidays, I continued to live out of my car for the next month, traveling back up to Maine and meandering down via Boston and NYC, y'know, until the money ran out. Once that happened, I did what so many hip young college grads are doing nowadays and moved in with mom. Fortunately she got me a job right away working with her at Safe Harbour, a homeless shelter only a couple blocks away. So I've been in Carlisle, PA, for more than two months now, and while I wish I knew more people around here, it hasn't been so bad. I've appreciated the opportunity to chill out a little, especially after the frenzy of that road trip. And now that the Peace Corps has become a tangible, imminent reality, I'm enjoying it all the more. And while my job is really boring (I'm a file clerk... *shudder*), having some money has been nice. I've managed to make it to NYC a couple times, as well as down to DC and Baltimore, and even back to Ohio to see my old school. Wicked fun.

So what's next? Well I'll be in Carlisle until early May. I hope to squeeze a couple more trips in before I head out, one to Charlottesville, VA, to see some pals and check out Shenandoah National Park, one to Kentucky to check out Mammoth Cave and see that state for once (never really been before), and one more down to DC and Baltimore to see some buds before I head back up to Maine, which is where I'll be until I leave for the PC. I'm gonna help them start up the season at Handy Boat, but the biggest reason I'm returning is to soak in my home state as much as possible before I leave it for more than two years. I really love Maine, and being away even for a few months is obnoxiously tough for me, so twenty-seven should be... interesting.

Besides working and doing my favorite Mainey things, the only other event I've planned for May is the charity 9K which is described in the sidebar. I've been fortunate to get a lot of time to work out while living in PA, and I figured I could use that for good, so I've decided to attempt this 5.4 mile run. The farthest I've ever run before is about 3.5 miles, so I've got some training to do, but I think I ought to be able to pull it off. I'm trying to raise $2500 for the cause, so any donations would be greatly appreciated. For more information on the event and how to donate, check out the blurb on the right.

Anyway, that's my pre-Peace Corps life. More later!

San ban oh!

Apparently that's Mongolian for "hello" or "welcome" or "how are you?" or something like that. I'm sure I'll be able to tell you more definitively after a few months. If you're reading this blog, you probably already know who I am and why I'm writing it, but just in case you don't, my name is John, I'm from Maine, I'm a recent graduate of Oberlin College (B.A. in Comp Lit and CRWR), and I've just accepted an invitation from the Peace Corps to serve in Mongolia for twenty-seven long, cold months, from June 2010 until August 2012.

So why Peace Corps? I don't entirely know the answer to that. Of course, I hope to be able to use what skills I have to help others, and I'm eager to learn about other people, to see the ways in which we're similar as well as those in which we're different. I'd be lying if I said that much of my motivation isn't somewhat selfish: I love to travel, I love to experience that which is totally different from what I know, I crave culture shock. I seek what these things show me about myself, to see which aspects of my character are strengthened and which are abandoned after wrestling with who I am and what my place is in the world.

I've known I wanted to do the Peace Corps almost as long as I've known what the program is. Paul Theroux deserves a great part of the credit for that. Theroux is, in my (somewhat unpopular) opinion, one of America's absolute greatest living writers. He hails from Medford, Massachusetts, and was a volunteer with one of one the first ever Peace Corps delegations, serving in Malawi back in the 60s. Amusingly enough he did not complete his Peace Corps service in the normal manner. He was discharged, or "separated," as the PC euphemistically calls it, for supposed involvement in an attempted coup. As I recall, a professor friend of his fled Malawi (then called Nyasaland) when he could no longer take that government's increasing violations of liberty. Theroux agreed to drive his friend's car to Uganda, the professor's new home. This greatly irritated the government of Nyasaland, which viewed the professor as an enemy of the state, and they subsequently declared Theroux persona non grata. Hopefully my experience will go a little more smoothly than did that of my idol.

It's been a long wait. I applied at the end of January 2009. Normally it doesn't take this long, but there was some substantial bureaucratic SNAFU which slowed everything down. No need to get into that. I'd wanted to go to sub-Saharan Africa (just like Paul), but that's a pretty coveted region, and PC doesn't send as many people there as they used to. In terms of places outside of Africa that interest me, Mongolia is, believe it or not, at the top of the list. I have a tendency to develop fascinations with somewhat random regions of the world (they often share the attribute of frigid isolation). Newfoundland, Iceland, Svalbard, Mongolia. Additionally, a large part of my attraction to Mongolia can be attributed to the way in which, eight hundred years ago, this culture managed to conquer an area so enormous that it remains the largest contiguous empire in all of history, yet then somehow proceeded to all but vanish from the world stage. Craziness.

Things I'm less excited about include but are not limited to:

• the weather: temperatures regularly drop below freezing seven months out of the year
• the remoteness: I could be placed as much as a thirty-hour bus ride away from Ulan Bator (the capital and largest city... by a long shot), and even if I'm not so far away from that one real urban area, Mongolia is still one of the most isolated nations in the world
• the housing: I'm likely to live in a ger (more commonly known as a yurt), which is basically a souped-up tent, usually having mediocre heat and no running water... forget about internet!
• the language: I've heard it's incredibly difficult to learn, to say nothing of pronouncing it... needless to say, English speakers tend to be few and far between outside of the capital (and even inside of it), so I'm gonna be struggling for a while
• the ocean: I love it, aaaaand even the part of Mongolia that's closest is still four hundred miles away, and that's only to the Yellow Sea!!! WHATAMIGONNADOOOOO

Of course, I'm excited about dealing with each and every one of these challenges, and if I hadn't considered them before I applied, well, I suppose I wouldn't be a very good Peace Corps volunteer, now would I?

As you can see, already I'm not doing so well with the whole brevity thing. I'll try to keep these posts concise and readable (something which, if you recall the days of Pete and John in Cairo, can be a bit difficult for me), but even if internet isn't tough to come by, I'm sure I'll have lots to write about. Please don't be afraid to comment on them! Or to contact me in some other way. I tend to get very homesick, so any form of correspondence with all you lovely people is going to be much appreciated. I'll post info on how to send me snail mail closer to my departure.

So yeah, I hope you all enjoy the blog! Through it you'll be able to monitor my gradual transformation into this guy:

P.S. If you want more info about Theroux and his experience in the Corps, check out "The Killing of Hastings Banda." It's an article he wrote about the whole ordeal in 1971, eight years after his service. Not only is it interesting for its discussion of the deportation debacle, but it's also an excellent portrayal of the struggles a volunteer encounters while serving, albeit in a very different region from where I'm headed.