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.