Shaggai

This boy is playing with shaggai, which are the ankle bones of sheep.

School dinners are a fabulous source of shaggai - the cooks have whole carcasses delivered, and produce all the different joints and cuts "in-house", boiling down the bones for soup etc.

There are many many many different games that children and adults play with shaggai. Also, you can use them to tell your future. There are 4 sides to each ankle bone, on which they can fall. Each side is said to represent a different animal - camel, sheep, goat and dog. If you throw the bones (all at the same time, like poker dice) and each falls on a different face, it will be a very good day.

Language and translators

This is Tsetsegmaa, my very helpful and necessary translator. I am trying hard to learn the language, but it is coming on veeeeeeeeeery slowly ... and we all, even the very proficient volunteers, have need of translators.

Being a translator is a tricky job. You have to make sure you only translate what the person has said, taking care NOT to add your own opinion. This is often easier said than done.

Dogs

It is now bitterly cold - minus 27 and falling - but still beautifully sunny, with wonderful blue skie and fabulous "arctic sunsets". However, 20 mins outside is about all I can stand at the moment, even wearing my thermal vest and body warmer, woolly tights and jeans, arran jumper, fleece, big windproof jacket, hat with hood up, huge boots and gloves and a scarf wrapped round my face ....

Of coure it is very very hard for the stray dogs who roam the streets. They are left over from the Russian population who departed in 1990, so suddenly that they left behind their pets (and also a few children who were staying with local families when the order came through). The descendants of these dogs (and occasional cats) are now roaming the streets of the town, scavenging. People often throw them scraps, and so the dogs are generally very tame and good-natured. But once it gets cold, they start to get thinner and thinner as their bodies need much more calories to stay warm, and competition for food grows ....

So once the coldest days start, somebody (the council? the police? I don't know) gets the job of driving round town and culling the dogs. The policy seems to be to just shoot as many as possible, rather than taking out the oldest & weakest. There are so many strays that the few you don't get will soon reproduce and there will be dozens of them roaming around by the summer again. It makes sense, but it is truly horrible to hear the gunshots, with occasional howls of distress. I used to feed this old dog who slept behind my building - every morning I would put a slice of bread on the veranda for the birds, and give him one too. Then, on Saturday, 5 minutes after he'd been fed, a car drove up and somebody rolled down the window and leaned out and shot him. It took 2 bullets, and he still took about 10 minutes to die. Horrible.

Learning through play

This kindergarten had quite a pile of toys which had been purchased at some point in the past, but which were locked in a "playroom" and only brought out for photos. There was a timetable on the door stating when teachers could bring their class to the playroom to play with the toys, but teachers were reluctant because if any were broken, the cost was deducted from the teacher's salary.

So we got the key of the playroom, took out the relatively indestructable ones which were made of solid materials like wood or thicker plastic, put them in clasrooms, and then locked the door again.

These children are in one of the kindergartens which is better off financially than many others. In Mongolia, tuition at kindergartens and schools is free, but there are LOADS of add-on charges made directly to parents from the school, and it is these add-ons that often parents cannot afford, and so they do not send their children to kindergarten/school. Parents are charged for food, printer paper, costumes for displays and shows, play equipment ....

In accordance with a government objective, VSO aims to promote the introduction of child-centred learning methodology in schools, especially kindergartens. This is one of the "areas" or "contexts" in one of the classrooms. I go round the classes, setting up play areas for the children to explore, so demonstrating to teachers that the children can and do learn through play.