9/13/2014
I have
been so busy the past month and the internet has been very spotty. So I will
try to sum up the past month in the next couple posts. This post will be about
recent events over the last couple weeks and the next one will sum up last
month.
It is now winter here! Cold and snow on the
ground, seems like we skipped right over fall and went straight into winter.
Everyone keeps saying this winter is going to be significantly colder than last
year, I hope not, but bring on the next 8 months of winter. Now that I am in a
nice new apartment I think I will handle the cold weather better. Just being in
a nicer home environment puts me in a better mood, I am so lucky and owe so
much thanks to my counterpart for scouring the town for apartments for almost a
month and to my Peace Corps regional manager who was in constant contact with
me, sometime four times a day making sure that everything was moving along. My
new apartment is about a ten minute walk from my Health Department; I am on the
top floor, which was tricky moving in, but my HD staff are troopers and helped
move all my stuff to the new flat and then hike it up the stairs to the fifth
floor. The apartment is a flat with a small bathroom attached (hot water to
shower with). It has a nice little kitchenette with a refrigerator, a queen
size bed and TV! It is by far one of the nicest peace corps apartments I have
been in. I have now entered the group Posh Corps. The term Posh Corps is used
worldwide and pertains to volunteers who live in nice homes in nice towns with
electricity, running hot water and internet. I definitely think my experience
now would constitute that name, although the hardest part about Peace Corps is
not the living situations, the hardest part by far is being away from friends, family
and familiarity for two years.
As I enter
my second year, I am longing to get back to US but I am excited for the new
projects that I hope will happen and be successful. There was a 3 day period
where I was seriously considering extending for a third year, but as quickly
and intensely that feeling came, it went. The thought to extend came after I
had had this amazing trip and training in UB and a really exciting interview
with the country director. We had MST (mid-service training) at this beautiful tourist
ger camp called Mandal Resort outside of UB in the countryside. We stayed in
modern gers and had “training” for three days. It wasn’t actual trainings, it
was more of sharing our experiences and talking about what we want to happen in
the next year, getting advice and sharing our ideas with other volunteers. It
was a lot of fun and it was so exciting to see everyone again! It was the last
time we were going to be together before COS (close of service), so we really
took advantage of everything the resort offered. A bunch of us girls took
horses out and went train riding through the countryside. It was so amazing and
so much fun! We were allowed to just hop on the horses and take off wherever we
wanted to go. We galloped along the straight paths and took a slow pace up the
hills. We had a guide with us, whose job was to just make sure we didn’t get
lost, but other than that we had free rein to go wherever we wanted at any pace
we wanted. All three evenings we had volleyball tournaments in the sand
volleyball court. The resort on the last night, through us a dance party in one
of the giant gers they use for parties. They brought in a DJ and had strobe
lights and fog machines. The food was amazing, although most of us did get food
poisoning, but it was worth it. We were given ice cream sundaes after lunch and
dinner. It was heaven and the sun sets were the most beautiful sunsets I have
ever seen. The dining room walls were just floor to ceiling windows so each
night we sat there eating our sundaes watching the sunset and enjoying all the
time together. One night we went for a sunset hike. We also went on a day trip
to a giant statue called Equestrian Chinggis. It is a huge Chinggis Khan riding
a horse. It is 131 feet tall, you get to walk up the stairs and stand on top of
the horses head. The view was beautiful and it was so cool to see the shadow of
the statue taking over the fields below. Inside the statue was also a humongous
Mongolian Boot, which won the Guinness world record for being the largest shoe
in the world and a museum. The last day we ate breakfast and piled back into
the buses to go back to the city for three more days for physicals, shots, dental
exams and language tests. The last day, in the volunteer lounge at the Peace
Corps office, they filled the table with food from America and we were all
allowed to pick items over and over until they were all gone to bring back to
site with us. I got a huge tub of couscous, a bunch of soups and spices. It was
like Christmas. We all sat there watching everyone pick an item hoping they
wouldn’t pick what we had our eye on and then run to the table the next round. We
were free to run around the city when we didn’t have our appointments, so of
course we took advantage of that and went out to eat and to clubs. We went to
our favorite place, “Basement”, which is a hip hop club that is a favorite of a
lot of expats and Mongolians. Always a good time. Another night, I went out my
two of my friends to dinner at Namaste, an Indian restaurant and then Blue Sky
Hotel for drinks on the rooftop terrace. Another night we went for Cuban food.
It was so nice to live a “normal” life for a week, just pretending to be a
tourist in Mongolia. We also had our fantasy football league draft at one of
the UB volunteers apartments, which was a lot of fun. I decided to not really
take it seriously and just picked based on looks and guess what my team is actually
not bad. My theory that good looking players are also good players was proven
true. My reason for this, good looking people have more confidence, therefore
play better. The more confident you are the better of a player you are.
Everyone laughed at my reasoning, but I am not in last place, so who is
laughing now.
I also found out I scored a level
higher on my language test, that added to the high I was on and then I had the
most amazing interview with the country director. At the end of the interview
she suggested I think about staying for a third year, I would move to the capital and work on a
national project with WHO or the Mongolian National Health Department. The projects
I have been working on regarding Health curriculums in schools at my site in
Arkhangai, are what those two organizations are looking to do on a national level
and she could see me being very successful in those organizations. At this
point I has riding a high and when she said this I was though “Wow. I would
love to live in the city and work for one of those places. WHO is an
organization that I would absolutely love to work for in the future and this
could be a great way to get in and gain experience in their company. Also, I
would be in the capital with all the amenities and a possibility of a real
social life with all the expats that live in UB. This would be awesome.” So I
left the meeting feeling so happy with where I was and wanting to extend
another year. But as soon as I returned to Arkhangai and reality came back, I
realized I loved UB so much because I
had just spent the week with my closest friends from my health group, who I
hardly see and had saved money so that I could behave like someone who had a
real job and made real money. If I extended I would be living there without my
health group and still making the Peace Corps salary. It would not be the
glorious life I just lived for the past week. So as much as it flattered me
that the Peace Corps director thinks my work is worthy of a national campaign, I
will not being staying a third year, I will be going home and hopefully going
for my Masters in Public Health with a concentration in community outreach and
helping Americans. I love Mongolia, but I miss home terribly and need to get my
real life started. Who knows, maybe I will find my way back to Mongolia working
for WHO, or some other international health organization, but after this next
year, I need to go home.
This
past week, I helped conduct trainings on 5 of the 21 health topics that the
Health Ministry assigned for this year. Each school and the university sent
between 10-15 students to be trained as Peer Educators in these five topics. I
made the curriculum for Recycling/Littering and Safe Water, so I trained (with
Ariuk as translator) on those two topics and then wrapped up the training by
talking about Peer Education and how it is used in the US. I then had them all
pick a topic they learned about in the trainings, get in a group and make up a
training that they could use when they get back to their schools. They came up
with some great ideas and it was exciting to see the project moving along to
the next stage, where the peer educators are being trained and will be able to
train students in their schools in the next couple months. They went over well
and I even saw some of the other trainers use games and activities that I had
used in previous trainings in their own, which made me so happy! Now I am
working on making a Jeopardy game with Ariuk that will be used in a health
competition among the peer education groups from each school. It will be used
as a sort of post test evaluation to see what information they learned and
retained from the trainings 25 days after they occurred. My counterpart thought
of the idea, which is a great way to evaluate our trainings in a more fun way
than just handing out questionnaires. I had used Jeopardy in one of my
trainings previously at the end to see what they remembered and Ariuk and the
Public Health Director loved it and decided to use it this way. I cannot tell
you the feeling I get when I see them improving their trainings and taking time
to come up with innovative ideas to teach and test the community. This is exactly
what I am here to do, and I can now see it happening, which makes me so much
more motivated to come up with more and more ways to teach and evaluate. I have
finally found something that I love doing and look forward to doing and I can
not wait to do it in the US. I love conducting research and designing training
curriculums for communities. I absolutely love it!
Another
wonderful thing that has happened is that I got two awesome new volunteers in
my town. They are so much fun and we hang out a lot. It is such a nice change
from being alone all summer. Also, Will and Jen are back and we got two new
volunteers in two of the soums that have visited. It is so great to have them
here, with their exciting energy; it is like experiencing moving to Mongolia
for the first time all over again. So great!
September
is turning out to be an amazing month and in 10 days I will be leaving for a 3
day survey methods training with all my fellow health volunteers and our
counterparts at the same resort we had MST at. Then I fly to Athens to meet up
with my best friend from home for an amazing vacation traveling around Greece
and Turkey. It is a much needed vacation and I am SO excited to see her, I
could burst!! It is the first time I am seeing someone from home and just
thinking about it makes me want to cry with happiness!
