9/13/13
This week as been
pretty low key. I've been doing a lot of translating reports still
and looking for organizations to partner with and possible places to
get grants from to start some of the projects I have in mind. At work
on Wednesday we had a luncheon. We had potato salad and“ham”
which is really just processed meat that is the consistency of
bologna with fat chunks throughout it in a big sausage like shape.
There were also apples, candies and cakes for dessert. To drink, we
started out with my favorite Milk-Tea and then proceeded to have
vodka and wine. Mind you this is 11am. Luckily, we just passed out
the shot of vodka 3 times and everyone just had to sip it, not take
the whole shot. Then with our dessert we passed around glasses of
wine and did the same thing. Somewhere between taking the shots of
vodka and wine, they realized that my face did not scrunch up in
disgust after taking the sip of wine. They interpreted this as I must
really love wine and insisted I drink a tall glass of it. For the
rest of the luncheon I sat there sipping on my wine, by the time I
left there was still more than half of the glass left full of wine.
During the luncheon, I hear my name a couple times and they kept
staring over at me during their conversations, but unless someone is
directly speaking at me in a semi-slow pace, I can't understand a
word that is being said. So I just sat there smiling and trying to
make little comments to the people sitting next to me. All I remember
saying was when asked my drink preference, that I don't like beer, I
like vodka a little bit and I like wine. Also, they asked if my hair
color was real and if it was okay that I had yellow hair. I said yes
I was born with “yellow” hair and that a lot of people in the US
have my color hair and its okay. Not sure where they were going when
they asked if it was okay to have blonde hair. Haha
Last night, I played
volleyball again with the teachers at School 4, more like watched
them play. This weekend they have student sports day so they were all
practicing for it and took it very seriously. Ten minutes into the
game I was benched because I couldn't set the ball properly for the
volleyball coach to spike. I didn't see why he should always spike it
every time, so I would hit it over the net every now and then to ease
my boredom, well soon after I was benched for the rest of the game.
Luckily, my health department doesn't take our games so seriously and
lets me play the whole game whether I set well or not.
After volleyball Lori
and I planned on doing our 5th day of Insanity, but I got
a desperate call from my counterpart Aruika asking if I could meet
with him at 8pm he needed help writing and translating a proposal
that was do in the morning. Gotta love Mongolians time management
skills. I fully tend to have a training with my company on the
importance of time management this month. Anyways, he came to my
apartment at 9pm, not 8pm. Mongolian time is different then real life
time, 8pm really means 9/930pm, another training I'd like to do : The
Importance of being on time or just being truthful about what time
things will actually be taking place. So here I was at 9pm reading
through emails the health department has received from the Korean
government and various other Central Asia Region Countries' health
departments. The task: write a letter to the Korean NGO MediPeace
thanking them for our invitation and the opportunity to travel to
Korea for this conference in which our Health Department Director
will be representing all of Mongolia's Health Departments. A Pretty
Big Deal, yet we still wait till the last hour to send this email in
which all the other countries had sent a week ago. The format of the
letter was supposed to be this (according to the examples I read from
the other countries involved in the conference): 1) Thank MediPeace
for the invitation and opportunity 2) tell them about the history of
your health department and about the Public Health sector in your
country 3) How you think you can benefit from the conference and what
you hope to gain 4) How this will help you in the future and how you
will implement your new country relationships. Seems like an easy
task, but my counterpart did not understand what to do, since the
email was in English and he has had 1 beer to drink. 1 beer. So I try to break it down into smaller
sentences of bullet points to show him what he needs to write. He
still doesn't know, so I start to ask him questions in Monglish (a
mix of english and mongolian words) about the Public Health sector in
Mongolia (What are its goals? What are the major concerns? What are
some projects in place to combat these concerns?); I soon realize
that I will be the one writing this formal letter to Korea, me, who
has been here for less than a month, will be writing the letter to
the Korean Government about a conference I know nothing about.
Luckily, he has brought the conference agenda and schedule so I look
over some main points and come up with what I thought was a pretty
great letter explaining how thankful we are and how this opportunity
to discuss challenges that we face as a country with other Central
Asian Countries will help us overcome the challenges we face as third
world countries. The opportunity to gain knowledge and practices from
countries like Korea is invaluable and we hope to form lasting strong
relationships with the other countries involved..etc... Ariuka does
help out in the statistics area and provides me with some numbers
about morbidity and mortality of infectious and non infectious
diseases in the country.
At about 10pm the
letter was done and Lori and I finally got to do our workout and then
had dinner at 11pm. We made sure the dinner was only protein, so that
our bodies would still use it during sleep and now store it like it
would if we had eaten carbs. Our dinner consisted of eggs and milk.
This had been the first time I had drank straight milk, not almond or
soy milk, in years! It was whole goats milk and I still took my
precautionary Lactaid Pill before drinking it, but it was
surprisingly delicious. Since it was so late and it is dangerous to
walk at night (Ariuka made sure to point this out when he left and to
tell Lori about the story of how he saw me walking at midnight with a
man alone, the man was Will, my other site mate, and we were walking
back from dropping Lori off at her Ger, and then he was walking me
home; but Ariuka didn't understand that the man was walking me home
so I wouldn't be walking home alone, he still thinks that “the man”
walking me home was up to something haha), Lori stayed the night and
we watched the first episode of the first season of “Friends”, it
was hilarious and they were all so young.
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