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.

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?" ....