Talent Show !!

The schools often have talent shows for the kids. These are taken REALLY seriously, with points awared and winners declared, even in the nursery schools .... On Friday we were at this kindergarten, and one wee girl was there in her own tribe's costume, and she did this huge long dance from her own tribe away on the west on the border with Kazakhstan .... Great. Another class' entry was a dance routine to the "I'm a Barbie girl, in a Barbie world ..." song, but all the movements and routines were traditional Mongolian.

This photo shows a dance one class performed, re-enacting "The Enormous Turnip" using traditional Mongolian dance steps.

Recently, at a different show, the judges were the Senior Methodologist and the Cook. The Cook, in fact, was a professional musician - she is Buryat, and had toured in Russia and Poland and probably other places too in communist times.

The Russian Cemetery

The Russian Cemetery is about an hour's walk from my house, behind the hill with the ovoo on it. For over 70 years there was a Russian military base a few miles to the west of Choibalsan. The Russians used Mongolia as a buffer between themselves and China, but in 1990 (I think) the order came from Moscow to pull out, and overnight, with literally no warning at all, the whole base, with a population of about 70,000 was evacuated. So sudden was their departure, that even children who were staying with Mongolian friends were left behind.

The town now has a large population of stray dogs who are quite friendly if wary of people. I have seen lots of people throwing scraps to the dogs. Many of them appear to be "almost" an actual breed - we often spot "almost a labrador", or "almost an alsatian". This, I now know, is because very recently in their genetic history they actually were pure breeds -these are offspring of the pets that the Russian people had to leave behind.

The cemetery is very small, for such a large population, but I am guessing that the population was relatively young, with troops stationed here for a few years and then went back home to live. When the ground is not covered in snow, you can see the graves - circles of white stones laid out very carefully in rows and columns. Presumably at one point there were grave markers with names and dates, but these have long since been recycled as firewood or building materials, though the actual graves are perfectly untouched. In fact, there is one grave half dug - presumably they had begun digging it one day, then that night the order for evacuation came ....

Yann and I went for a walk there last weekend, to take photographs of the winter sunset in the snow. It really was spectacular - perfect blue skies, all the pinks and oranges of the sunset reflected in the snow .... until the sun dipped below the horizon and the temperature absolutely plummeted. We were walking home as fast as we could in the short twilight, and I could feel my body getting colder : my head felt as if someone was pressing as hard as they could on either side of my skull. My hands were stinging. I couldn't feel my feet at all, and my legs were banging together as I walked. Just when I was about to start crying (I could really imagine dying of cold about half a mile from my house), a jeep stopped - a Mongolian friend of Yann's. He invited us back to his ger, and we thawed out round his stove, eating dried cheese and pickles and drinking warm milky tea. It was really lovely, really cosy. His three girls were watching cartoons on TV as his wife showed us their photo album - lots of snaps of the girls in dancing competitions at K#12, and a few of her husband in his army uniform. He had served in Iraq (he said it was not a bad place to be!), and also in Africa. I asked him where, and he thought for a moment before remembering "Siralone? Seralone?" ....

Winter is here

Last Sunday I had a great walk with Yann, one of the French volunteers, out to a salt lake to the north west of Choibalsan. It took us about 2 hours to reach it - it is very difficult to judge perspective here. From a distance it looked as if there was water in the lake - a strip of deep deep blue surrounded by blinding white. However, as we got closer, the water ... disappeared. It must have been some trick of the light. The white ground was as hard as cement, though. We were tempted to taste it to see if it really was salty, but there were lots of sheeps & goat poos everywhere, so we didn't.

On the way we passed a group of low, wooden houses, around which were heaped piles of dried horse & cow dung. This is then sold in the market for winter fuel, along with coal scavenged from mines and kindling. Though I've no idea where the kindling might come from - there are no trees for hundreds of miles ....

Life as a Volunteer

Here are some of the lovely people I work with. Sophie and Zuhura are UB volunteers. Sophie is an occupational therapist, working with the Mongolian Association of Parents of Disabled Children. She trains parents and staff in strategies to enable children to have more independent lives. Zuhura works with the Mongolian Education Alliance as a fundraiser. This photo was taken at my 43rd birthday party.

Sophie came to Choibalsan last week to take part in workshops for teachers on inclusion. Andie (the other kindergarten teacher trainer) and I were also involved, doing half-day practical sessions on differentiation. The workshops went really well. After Wednesday's session, I was interviewed on TV. I was out in the evening when the interview was shown, but Sophie said that they dubbed my voice with that of the interpreter, so that when I gave my answers, I was still talking even though my mouth had stopped moving. Wish I'd seen it ....

"Tsagaan hol"

Mongolia has really good dairy products, or "white food". There are milk sellers at different places around town. A litre of milk, straight from the cow, is 800 tugruks - about 30p. You have to boil it before you drink it as it's not pasteurised, but it's still really really tasty. The kiddies at school regularly have rice cooked in milk, and babies get dried curds as rusks. I've bought really good hard cheese in the market in Ulaanbaatar, though I've not seen it in the market here in Choibalsan - maybe because it's all taken to UB for to be sold at a better price, or maybe because the grazing around here is so poor that you can't really make much cheese. The dinner lady at K#12 makes fabulous cheese and yoghurt - it's the highlight of my week.

I read a report last week that talked about poverty and malnutrition among school-age children. Now, with people migrating to UB, many families no longer have access to fresh milk and so there is a growing incidence of calcium-deficiency. Around 30% of the children under 6 go to kindergartens. There is no fee, but the families have to pay for food, paper, pens, clothes for special presentations etc ... so many can't afford it. Also, you have to be registered as a resident in the district, and many nomadic or migrating families are not registered (there used to be a hefty registration fee and it has only recently been lifted).

On top of this, it is the teacher's job to collect "dinner money" from the families of her pupils, and if a family does not pay the monthly food charge, then the teacher's salary is docked. Yet another reason why children from less well-off families come to school.

Inside a kindergarten II

The children attend from about 8.30am until about 4.30pm. When they come in, first they do exercises, and then have "ogloni hol" - breakfast, maybe rice in milk, maybe with dried curds. Then they have a lesson with the teacher which will last about 40 mins, though it can be longer. One day it might be Maths, the next Language, the next Art, the next P.E., the next Nature, and so on. Then, after their lesson, they will be variously occupied - action songs led by the teacher, watching cartoons, playing with some toys, or just waiting ... until around 11.30 when the tables are set out for lunchtime and the children get their hands washed etc.

Lunch is a soup of meat and rice / vegetables / noodles - big platefuls, with seconds for anyone who wants it. Then after lunch, the children sleep for a couple of hours, usually on mats rolled out on the floor, but one kindergarten has wee dormitories adjoining each class. When the children wake up at around 3.30pm, they are all washed, get their teeth brushed and hair done, and then they have a review of the morning's lesson with their teacher, and some more soup, before hometime.

Inside a kindergarten

I work at two kindergartens, K#14 for 3 days and K#12 for 2 days. All the kindergartens I've visited have been scupulously clean, and very very tidy, with a lot of attention given to the beauty of the surrounding - plants, ornaments etc. It makes me wonder what the impact on children is - whether they then too absorb a sense of aesthetic appreciation of their surroundings. Even where there is very little in the way of equipment etc, the building is still very attractive.

Winter is coming ....

It's now about -10 degrees outside - very sunny, very bright but definitely very very nippy. I go out with my scarf wrapped round my face as my nose and cheeks really hurt after about 20 mins.

This week I went up to Darkhan, which is about 3 hours drive north of UB. The road is really well paved - probably because there are some mines up there. Darkhan itself is a really nice town - or two towns, Old Darkhan and New Darkhan - and its power station and factories are behind a hill, so that you don't see them from the town.

The hills round the town are really nice for walking in. I had a great walk on my last day, round a low ridge to the east and south of the town, watching the sun set. At one point a car left the road and drove up the dirt track towards me - it parked right next to me at the top of the hill, and 4 policemen got out, not looking very happy to see me. However it transpired that they had come to pray at the "ovoo", the big cairn at the top of the hill. I moved away to give them privacy; they walked round the cairn 3 times, murming prayers, and then scattered vodka on the stones. These cairns were originally built by shamans, as a big pile of stones holding a bare wooden mast that points to the sky. This signalled to the gods that the shamen were there, that this was a place where earth and sky could meet. However the ovoos have now been incorporated into Buddhist rituals, and are often now covered in prayer flags and offerings - rice and sweet food, empty vodka bottles, ornaments, scribbled messages ....

Sunny Choibalsan

Choibalsan looks like most other Soviet-built towns - lots of apartment blocks from the 1970s, all of which haven't really been renovated since they were built, so all are falling apart slowly .... But there is also the ger district, on the north side of town away from the river, where people from the countryside have moved to be next to the town, and put up their gers and built a wooden fence round them to create a yard, or "hasha".

The market, on the east side of town, is where you buy all the things the people from the countryside come in to sell - meat (of all animals, all bits) (including I'm told horses' heads with they eyeballs still in ...); "white food" - cheeses, milk, butter, curds; tools and scrap metal; fuel - firewood, scavenged coal, dried dung; apples, cranberries, pine nuts, tomatoes .... Also lots of stalls where women sell dried goods they bought wholesale - pasta, rice, biscuits etc, and beautifully arranged fruit and vegetables from China.

Volunteering in Choibalsan

And here are some of my fellow Choibalsanites!

(Back row standing)
Andie - Kindergarten methodologist (UK & Africa)
Yoke - English language treacher trainer (Netherlands)
Me - Kindergarten Methodoligist (Dundee)
Marteen - Hospital Manager (Netherlands)

(Front row)
Angus - Hospital Manager (Lewis)
Yann - Horticulture trainer & French language teacher (France)
Sarah - English language teacher (U.S.A.)

This photo was taken on one of our Sunday walks. Here we are at the big "ovoo" above Choibalsan. Joke's dog is probably taking the photo.

In the 20th century, the town was also the site of a major Russian military base, built to help Russia protect its territories from China. Around 1000,000 troops were stationed there; they pulled out, with no warning, literally overnight in 1991. One kindergarten teacher reports arranging to go to a Russian friend's birthday party the following day; but when next morning she arrived at the house, it was deserted. The site where the barracks were is now a wasteland of rubble, with a very dilapitaded statue of Lenin gazing out over it all. If you rake around, you can find Russian army buttons, mugs, shoes .... However the site has been well and truly plundered for anything re-usable by local people. At the cemetery, the railings have gone, and the wooden grave markers have been taken for firewood, though the circles of stones marking the graves remain inviolate.

Choibalsan

There has been a settlemet on the site of what is now Choibalsan for hundreds of years. The Kherlen River appears on any map of Mongolia, even though it is very shallow, and only a few meters wide. The settlement was a trading post on one of the many routes between the Far East and the Middle East & Russia; Chinggis Khan was elected king of all Mongol tribes on its banks.

Now it has around 30,000 people, including many Buriats, Chinese & other tribes who come to trade. The market is on the east side of town, past the Russian-built blocks of flats. There are many kindergartens. I am working in Kindergarten #14, which was the last gift of the Russian army to the town.

The road east ....

At dawn on 24th September, I left UB in the VSO jeep, heading east. Chukka, the VSO driver, was also taking Tsolmon and Urnaa, VSO programme officers who were researching placements and giving workshops.

For the first hour or so, the road was paved and the journey very smooth - we passed beautiful mountains with clusters of gers on their slopes, villages surrounded by wooden pallisades, and occasional mines, but the landscape was clearly becoming more and more empty. After a couple of hours, the tarmac ran out and we were driving on worn tracks across the ground, with Chukka our driver weaving right and left to find the most even ground. The land really is very very dry - our vehicle created a tremendous dust, and when (very very occasionally) a vehicle came close to us going in the other direction, we were blinded by the dust from their tyres. However it was amazing watching the landscape slowly change: the mountains became lower and further away, the rivers dwindled, the predominant colours shades of brown ....

At lunchtime we stopped at Ondorkhaan in a cafe. It is a collection of buildings and huts, with a population of (I'm guessing) around 2000, but with at least one school. Mongolia is a very "young country" - half of the people are below 25 years old. Anyway, we stopped just long enough to eat, and then got back in the car.

I really enjoyed the journey - it gave me a real sense of where I was, and how the climate really affects how the land looks and how people live. Also, we saw steppe eagles, a vulture, wild camels, and as the sun fell, gazelles. It was Tsolmon who spotted them first - they seemed to just rise out of the ground in front of us, probably around a thousand of them. Amazing.

We reached Choibalsan around 9pm, after 15 hours driving.

Chinggis Khaan

Possibly the most famous Mongolian ever. He was born around a thousand years ago, into a nomadic tribe which lived around north and central Mongolia. As a young man he became leader of his tribe, and then leader of the clan of tribes that his own tribe traded and fought alongside. There were several of these clans moving around the flat lands east of the Himalyas and the Altai Mountains, on the high flat lands of the steppe. However they were all being attacked by tribes from the east, towards China, and so they combined together under one leader, Chinggis Khaan, who so became the first king of Mongolia. ("Khaan" means "king".)

Under Chinggis' rule, the Mongolian people came to rule of the land all the way from the Black Sea in the west to the Pacific coast in the east, a much much bigger empire than any other in history. Chinggis died at the age of 45, but his sons continued to rule. It is his grandson, Kublai Khaan, that Marco Polo met when he travelled overland from Venice.

This statue is being built to mark the site where Chinggis was elected chief of all the Mongolian clans. It is absolutely massive, and truly breathtaking, especially when you stand close to it. We passed it on a trip out to the countryside on Friday. To mark the end of our language lessons, one of the teachers invited us to her ger, about an hour's drive from the city. We had a fabulous day - climinging hills, riding horses, singing songs .... Her husband cooked us "hoshoor", which is joints of mutton cooked in a big metal container - they roast stones in the fire, and then put layers of stone and mutton in the container, then seal the lid and sit it in the embers for another hour. Everyone wolfed it down. I had cheese sandwiches. Felt a bit left out ....

Visiting a ger

We went out on a trip last weekend with a Mongolian ethnologist, who arranged for us to visit a family in a ger. Ulaanbaatar is a big,sprawling city, but it is surrounded by hills and very quickly you are out in the countryside. The valleys are flat-bottomed and very dry - long ago, this was part of an inland sea, so I'm guessing that's why between the mountains it is so flat.
Gers are round, white tents, which are designed to be solid and stable enough to withstand the constant winds, warm enough to withstand temperatures of -30 degrees Celsius, but also easy to take apart and transport so that, when your animals have used up all the grazing locally, you can move on to fress grass. A "journey" in old Mongolian writing is about 10 miles, the distance you could go with your carts and animals in a day. Everyone refers to their house as a "ger", even if they live in a flat in the city.
We trundled over the grassland through the mountains for a good hour before our ethnoligist decided that the family he was looking for had packed up and moved on .... so we just stopped at the next ger we came to and the lady invited us to spend the day. It was really fascinating - how everything is stored, how everything is laid out and arranged, the rituals of who sits where .... The door of the ger is always to the south, and inside there is always a Buddhist alter, which is always at the north side. The husband sits beside the altar; the wife sits on the east side, which is also where all the kitchen stuff is. The children or guests sit on the west. She was really chatty, and sang us some Mongolian folk songs while she made us tea. She was making dried cheese when we got there, and gave us some to eat with our picnic. Her children had all left home and gone to Ulaanbaatar or Australia, and husband was away racing a horse. We had a great day going for walks and talking to her (through the ethnologist, who interpreted).
At about 4pm, her husband reappeared. The horse was an orphan and so was a favourite - apparently orphans in Mongolian families are always favourite children - and it had come in the top 5, so he was well pleased. We offered him some of the cake we'd brought for a picnic, and he took it outside and fed it to the horse, and then brought the horse to the ger door so we could admire it. It was amazing to see the telepathy between them. The horse just looked embarrassed at all the attention and tried to hide behind him.
There are gers everywhere - in the city, there are huge "ger districts" where people who have migrated from the countryside have set up their ger on the outskirts of town. I think now half the population of Mongolia lives in the valley of Ulaanbaatar. You can climb up a hill and see the whole city at once - and then imagine a massive country, the size of western Europe, with that many people scattered across it ........

Ulaanbaatar

I'm here for 5 weeks to learn as much of the language as I can, and to attend various meetings and workshops about education and related issues. Every morning we are up at 6.30am to catch the bus to college, where we have 3 1/2 hours of language lessons. Then we get the bus to a restaurant for lunch. In the afternoon we have presentations from people such as the Mongolian police about the crimes that foreigners commit or are victims of, and how to avoid this; or from someone from the Ministry of Education about school attendance and school drop-out; or from other volunteers about the kinds of projects they've been involved in, and problems and successes they've had. It's a bit intense, but inbetween times it is great to get out and explore Ulaanbaatar.

The city is large (about the size of Dunfermline, or maybe slightly larger?). There is a grid of streets and concrete buildings, mostly built in the Soviet style (Mongolia was a Soviet-governed country from the 1920s until 1991, when there was a peaceful revolution). There is still plenty evidence of the Russian influence - we drive past a statue of Lenin every day. However these days it is very congested, with constant traffic jams, dust and fumes. Despite this, there is lots to explore. Yesterday I walked out to the foot of the mountains - Ulaanbaatar is on a flat plain, surrounded by low hills. There is a giant Buddha statue, about 100 feet high, all painted gold. It is beautiful, and yesterday evening the room that is at the base of the statue, underneath the Buddha, was open.

Inside was a tiny museum of treasures - golden statues of different gods, ancient vases, books wrapped in silk embroidered scarves. There were offerings of sugar and incense in front of some of them. People were coming in to bow at the altar and touch the glass in front of the statues. A young monk was watching over the place. I'd been to the statue before, as it is at the beginning of tracks that lead up to the hills. I've seen lots of birds of prey up there - I thought they were eagles as they were huge, but local people say no. I wonder what size the eagles are ....

Introduction

Hello. This blog will describe my work and experiences as a teacher with Voluntary Service Overseas (V.S.O.) in Choibalsan, Mongolia. I am here to work with teachers at a Kindergarten, to help develop interactive teaching methods. I am also here to learn about a very different part of the world, to see how people cope with very extreme weather conditions, and to make new friends. I will try to update this blog once or twice a month, but internet connections are also affected by weather and interruptions in the power supply ....

If you would like to post questions, my colleagues and I will answer them as quickly as possible. You many need to wait a few days or a couple of weeks, but please be patient! I'm sure there will be many similarities as well as many differences in life for Scottish and Mongolian pupils. The first thing I've discovered is that the summer holidays are 3 months long, as it is very difficult to carry on working in the intense heat - for days on end it is over 40 degrees Celsius .... But we don't have a Christmas holiday, as this is a Buddhist country. Och well!!

Best regards for now from Ulaanbaatar,
Lesley Harrison.