Hot and Cold

All public buildings in town including the school, kindergarten, hospital, and school dormitories are heated by a forced hot water system which emanates from the town heating plant.  Traditionally the heat is turned on September 15th, but this year we are still in the cold. Apparently a new furnace is being installed but the work crew needed for the job has not arrived yet. Cool even when heat is going full blast, my classroom this past week has been down right frigid.  I have been incorporating a lot more exercising into my lesson plans than usual, but it is still very heard to teach/learn in 50 degree and dropping temperatures. Keep your fingers crossed that we will get heat this coming week before I have to start teaching with mittens on.

On a more positive note is that our ger is nice and warm. Brian spent the last two weekends winterizing our ger which involved placing a plastic skirt around the base of the ger and covering that with a thick berm of dirt to keep the wind out, nailing the blanket back on the door, and cleaning up and reorganizing our coal, dung, and wood piles. On Thursday 4 of our 6 tons of coal were delivered and now our coal bin is running over. Perhaps the most important job he performed was to make perhaps the world’s first and only ger cat door. Situated on the side of the ger near our bed it allows the cats to go in and out as they please but very little cold air gets in. It didn’t take the two furs long to figure out its use!

 Hair cutting ceremony

On Thursday our neighbor’s youngest son Tugso had his hair cutting ceremony. In Mongolia most children, boys and girls, don’t get their hair cut until between the ages of 2-5, depending on health and sex. On a day deemed to be auspicious, the family holds a hair cutting ceremony where friends, co-workers and family members visit, eat until they burst, cut off ceremonial chunks of hair, and shower the child with gifts. It is hard to tell in the picture below but Tugso had the cutest pony tail which is now all gone. I guess the weirdness of having semi-strangers cut your hair is tempered by the fact you get a new bicycle and a sack full of money.

Sadie at Work

This past week was exceptionally busy for me at work because on top of my regular class load I taught some classes for the other English teacher who is in Ulaabaatar for a training of some sort. I was left with no lesson plans or instructions, so I took that as the go ahead to do what we want. We have been dancing and singing, tracing bodies, making mini books, and playing charades. The tiny 5th graders may not know much English, but they sure are keen to learn which is a refreshing change.

I also continue to be busy with acting as library for the books we received from the Friends of Mongolia grant. I usually only have about 10 of the 70 books in my classroom at any given time since as soon as they come in they go back out. A few have already needed extensive repair with tape and one looks like it went swimming in a vat of milk, but I love the fact that they are so well used. The most popular are the Chingis Khan comic book series and the Super Friends comic books with Sumerman, Wonder woman, Green Lantern; etc, and I get requests for them all the time.  Through this project I have gotten to know a lot more kids, and conversing with them can be very funny at times. For example here is a conversation from a few days ago.

-7 year old in my classroom yesterday “Do you have any Supermeme (books)?”

-Me: “What?”

-7 year old ” Oh I mean Superman.”

Supermeme in Mongolian means Superboobs. Little kids say the darnedest things in every language.

And last but not least…Brian at Work

After months of research, planning, and hard work Brian’s newest venture is up and running. Best understood through exploring the site itself, The Mongolist is a wonderful resource for cutting edge and balanced commentary on current business and political happenings in Mongolia as well as an ever growing Mongolian language education site. I encourage you to check out the site, read the articles, and share them with those you think would be interested. Also please subscribe to the blog feed.

Awhile back I posted about our neighbor’s cat who had decided to move into our ger.

Well I am sure none of you will be surprised to learn that not only is he still here but he has been joined by a friend.

One morning at the end of September as Brian and Santi were walking me to school, we noticed that Monster was hanging out in our neighbor’s yard with a small, stripy, brown friend. We will never know what Monster told her that morning, but clearly it was enough to convince her that our ger was the place in town to live. I was not home when she decided to stage her invasion but Brian said it was like a sinking ship. He would plug one hole in the ger wall only to find her coming through another on the other side. He eventually gave up and we are now proud stewards of two cats.

Officially named George Hugo and Lucille Alice after couples from 2 of our favorite shows (Arrested Development and the Vicar of Dibley) they more affectionately go by L’il Monster and Little Lady Lulu. We are pretty sure they are from the same litter, but we speculate Monster was taken from his mother very early and then not fed and Lulu nursed for much longer. Monster has been playing catchup. Monster is the one to be found in ridiculous sleeping poses, suckling on your shirt for dear life, and in general doing stupid things that get him all riled up.

Lulu on the other hand, is the calm, cool, and collected hunter who likes to bring her kills inside as show and tell. She also is the more agile of the two and has gone on desert walks with us.

The best part of having two kittens though is that they have each other to wrestle with and sleep with. There is a lot of cuteness in our ger these days.

Back in the beginning of June after classes got out, Darkhuu, one of the school workers Tunga, her daughter Bolorerdene and I painted my classroom. Each teacher is in charge of keeping their classrooms looking nice, but my room had been used by a rotating list of short lived teachers and it had not been painted in a long time.

First we puttied over all the holes and scrapped off all the spit balls.

We then painted the walls light green and the trim white.

My tables and benches had been collected from the discard pile in an unused classroom and were a range of orange, blue and green, so we painted those as well.

Fortunately my room has new, fake wooden flooring, so we didn’t have to paint the floor like many other teachers. The room stayed pretty bare all summer since it takes forever for the scary Chinese lead based paint to dry.

At the end of August I put all the furniture back in my room, rearranged the desks in the hopes of cutting down on cheating (Ha!), duped Bayarsaikhan the school facilities manager into giving me an old rug, and hung up all my glorious new posters I ordered from America. It will still be unbearably cold in a month or two, but at least we have fun things to look at.

1. Nap time is taken very seriously in our ger

2. I recently learned that one form of slang for anus in Mongolian is “tsagaan max” or “white meat”. Gives a whole new meaning to those “Pork, the other white meat” commercials we grew up with, doesn’t it?

3. Our town, courtesy of the large coal mine north of us, is getting a new well dug. It will be slightly closer to our house than the other main well in town which will be a nice change come this winter.

4. As with napping, moving is taken very seriously here, too.

5. When I was here 10 years ago it was very hard to find a ride to the aimag center for shopping because there was only one van in town and it didn’t go everyday. Now we have noted that it is still hard to find a ride because now that everyone has their own car and more cash they don’t bother driving around town anymore looking for paying passengers. You just can’t win out here.

6. We were offered a 4 day old baby two weeks ago for adoption. Obviously we don’t have a new baby in our house, but the crazy thing is that if we were Mongolian it would have been that easy. Now if only it worked that way in America….

7. And lastly, tis the season for goat family planning.

Yesterday to celebrate Santiago’s 5th birthday we went on a walk to the nearby hills. This summer was exceptionally rainy, and we have been amazed by the variety of flowers that are growing in the desert. The phallic mushroom we found a few weeks ago, but the rest we saw yesterday. Anyone have any ideas what any of them are called?

While teachers in Chicago are striking, teachers in Hanhongor are peeling. The school, like most schools in Mongolia, has its own garden in which food for the dormitory students is grown. Two weekends ago some of the teachers, school workers, and older students harvested the vegetables, and this last Thursday we all assembled in the cafeteria for an all out peeling and chopping war. We were divided into teams, and then each team was given a mound of carrots and turnips. Quick to organize, Shinsar set to cutting the tops and bottoms off,

a few 9th and 10th grade students and myself peeled,

and the rest of my group chopped the veggies into small sticks. Once we had produced a large mound, a 10th or 11th grade boy would come around and collect the veggies which he would then dump into these big plastic containers.

The boys would then take turns pounding the veggies and a mixture of spices into a sort of pulp. I was not sure of the reason for this but it must be for preservation sake.

It took us about 3 hours to complete the job and my fingers were bruised, but it was also a lot of fun. Better than going on strike.

About a month and a half ago our neighbors got a kitten. A teeny, tiny, probably should still be with his mother, kitten. We would see it from time to time out in the yard with Bilguun, age 10, or his sister Delgermaa, age four, but it didn’t seem to stray too far.  Then last week, a year and a day to when we lost Nigel, he turned up in our yard. Brian invited the tiny mite in, gave him some water and dog food, and introduced the concept of the comfy bed. Santiago was in seventh heaven.

Over the past week and a half the cat, aka foster kitten, has visited us almost everyday for a snack, a hack at the milk bowl, and most importantly a chance to relax without a child taking him on a bike ride, showing him how fun the monkey bars at school are, or building him a brick shed to live in.  Bilguun comes over as well now to reclaim or drop off his kitten, to watch Indian Jones with us, or to taste the weird Americans’ food.

These days foster kitten spends most of his time at our place including the past few nights. We don’t want our neighbors to think that we have stolen their cat so we put it back outside every chance we get or when we go away. The problem with that is the kitten is small, the wholes around the base of our ger walls are large, and he refuses to take no for an answer.  And honestly who could say no to this little guy?

In the middle of August our school hosted a group of elementary school teachers from Tokyo. The leader of the group, on the far left in the blue shirt, has come to Hanhongor three times now, and our teachers and students really look forward to his visits with his colleagues.

The teachers visited the school, met with teachers and kids, rode horses and camels, stayed in a ger, and on the last night partied down with us. We drank, ate cookies, played kendama,

danced,

and had a great time.

School has been in session for 2 weeks and things are going well. I have made these Marmot puppets, Monkzul and Mondol (which means baby marmot) to teach 3rd grade English with,

and thanks to a community grant from Friends of Mongolia our students now have close to 100 new books in Mongolian for fun reading.

Some of the titles are all the Twilight books, Hunger Games, Harry Potter, all 20 volumes  of the Chinggis Khan comic books, a bunch of classics like Treasure Island, Little Men, and Pippi Longstocking, as well as a wide variety of American, European, and Japanese graphic novels. We are still waiting on a final shipment of books but the ones we have have already seen heavy rotation with a waiting list for some of the more popular. Once I get FOM bookplates pasted into all the books they will be divided up and put in my classroom and the Mongolian language teacher’s classrooms where all the students can access them.

As with all school years in Mongolia, the first day of school is September 1st even it is falls on a Saturday, as was the case this year. The ceremony was the usual mix of readings,
singing,
and dancing.
At the end of the ceremony two of the first graders (out of 8 first graders) rang the school bell.
And, the students went inside for a meeting with their class teachers and to watch a televised class by the president of Mongolia.

One of the aspects of our school that I especially like is its small size. Unfortunately it is shrinking at such a pace that it will be empty in just a few years. This year we have 170 students in 11 classes. Compare this to the same school 10 years ago when it have 370 students or the school where my friend works which has 1000 students. The norm in other schools is classes with 30 to 40 students, multiple classes for each grade, and little teacher attention for students. In Khankhongor my biggest class has 18 students, the rest have 9-13 kids, and there is only one class for each grade. This picture on the first day of school gives you an idea as to the size of the school population.
The reasons for the shrinking school population here not entirely clear, but it is most likely due to people moving to over towns within Omnogobi where there are mines and mining jobs. I don’t know if there is much our town can do to boost enrollment, but I am certainly not complaining.