12/17/14
Great news in the life of Brittany…..The plastic and
foam worked! My apartment is exponentially warmer than it was before! I now can
properly seal windows and doors. Another skill gained in Mongolia.
Yesterday was a Mongolian holiday, the name and
meaning does not really translate into English, the best answer I could get
about the meaning of the holiday was that one of the gods set aside one day for
his mother to be celebrated and yesterday was that day. Meat is not to be eaten
on this day and everyone in the community visits Bulgan Mountain (the sacred
Buddhist Mountain in my town) to light candles to pay respect to the god and
his mother. Last night, Will and I joined my Mongolian friend and her family at
the mountain. At the bottom of the mountain we purchased floating lanterns to
let off at the top and her mother brought many candles for us to light. Once we
reached the monastery on the mountain, we had to grab a rock and circle this
large bell three times, hitting the bell with the rock as we walked. This rid
us of evil spirits. We hiked up the snow covered side of the mountain in the
dark with hundreds of other people, to light a candle and put it down on one of
the many rocks. As you light the candle, you are supposed to make a wish. The
mountain was covered in hundreds of flickering candles, it was gorgeous.
Looking up at the mountain from the street you could just see lights flickering
on the mountain and floating lanterns filling the sky. It is so hard to
properly describe the beauty of the candles scattered across the mountain at
night. Once we lit our candles, we made our way back down to the midpoint of
the mountain and it was time to let off our floating lanterns. A group of young
boys ran over to help us light the lanterns. It took an army of children and a
box of matches to get them lit, but how amazing it was to watch them float away
into the black night. After our lanterns disappeared in the sky, we hiked back
down the mountain and I went with my friend to her grandmother’s ger to take
part in her family’s celebration. I was
welcomed by her entire family and a table full of vegetarian food. One of her cousins had just had a baby, and I
got to hold her for most of the night. She was so precious, swaddled in a
million blankets, rope tying the blankets around her tiny body. The young children all had ashes drawn in a
line down the bridges of their noses and on their fore heads. I explained to my
friend that in the Catholic religion, we also wear ashes on our foreheads on a
special day and that we do not eat meat on certain days as well. It is really
interesting to see the similarities between the two religions.
At 10:30pm, we all filed out of the ger to light the
1008 candles that her grandmother had made out of sheeps’ fat. The candles were
in a circular formation, and had to be lit from the inside out. Once all the
candles were lit, we all walked in a circle, holding prayer books, chanting the
Budhhist mantra “Oṃ maṇi padme hūṃ“
over and over until all the candles burnt out. The mantra Om Mani Pädme Hum is
easy to say yet quite powerful, because it contains the essence of the entire
Buddhist teaching. When you say the first syllable Om it is blessed to help you
achieve perfection in the practice of generosity, Ma helps perfect the practice
of pure ethics, and Ni helps achieve perfection in the practice of tolerance
and patience. Pä, the fourth syllable, helps to achieve perfection of
perseverance, Me helps achieve perfection in the practice of concentration, and
the final sixth syllable Hum helps achieve perfection in the practice of
wisdom. I was given one of her grandmother’s prayer books to carry on my
wrists, while my hands were in prayer position. The 1008 candles created a
bonfire of sorts, which kept us warm as we circled and circled the candles
until they burnt out. When the last candle burnt out, we went back inside the
ger to eat more and sing out of the prayer book. Luckily, most of the song was
just repeating the same lines over and over, but changing the number in the
line. So for the song we sang 100,200,300…all the way up to 3 million. It was
hypnotizing hearing them sing the lines over and over. I kept shaking my head
to stay awake. After the song was over, the grandmother handed out gifts to
everyone, including me. When I first arrived at the ger, I had given her lemon
poppy seed bread I had made (thanks mom for the bread mixes!) which everyone
loved and kept calling it “America’s Bread”.
While we sat chatting in the ger, one of the little
girls came over and sat on my lap and began playing with my hair, studying it
and then finally asked “Why is your hair yellow? Are you from Korea?” All the
adults began laughing and I told her no, I am from America. She looked shocked
and said she really thought I was from Korea and did not believe I was
American. The whole night she referred to me as the Korean. This brought me
back to the time when I received my Mongolian ID card and it said I was a citizen
of China....Do I really look Asian? Haha.
12/22/2014
This weekend we had a sleepover at Jen’s. We made
dinner and watched movies. Then woke up and cooked breakfast together. It was
nice to hang out with the original crew again, Jen, Will and I. After, we ate
breakfast, Jen and I bundled up to go on a walk to the river. It’s a 6 mile
round trip, which we never dared to do last winter, but it was such a beautiful
day out we decided to just do it. Half way through the walk there we were
ripping off our gloves and hats, enjoying the sunshine on our faces. When we
arrived at the river, most of it was completely frozen, so we decided to do a
little boot skating. It was so much fun. We were enjoying the Mongolian winter
for once, instead of cursing it.
In 2012, the country suffered a dzud. A dzud describes a
series of natural disasters, an extremely harsh winter that follows a very dry
summer. Mongolians thought that this winter would bring another dzud, since the
summer was so dry here; most of the summer we were in a water emergency, a lot
of the wells had dried up, as well as the rivers and streams. Luckily, I do not
think it is going to happen this winter, the temperatures have not been dipping
that low. The 2012 winter was spent hovering in the -40s with heavy snow fall.
It is a combination of a summer drought and a severe winter that has hardened
the ground, making it into an impenetrable layer, making it impossible for
livestock to feed. About 5 million livestock, about 20% of life stock in the
country, were killed, in turn impoverishing their herders. The herding families
in the countryside had no food and no way to make money. Livestock herding,
accounts for 40% of all employment in Mongolia. More than half of the 21
provinces in Mongolia were declared disaster status. The harsh winter made it
impossible to travel, find food or seek medical attention. Infant mortality in
the 12 hardest-hit provinces jumped up to 60% in January of that year. One of
the families affected by the dzud, was my best friend Gerlee’s family. Her
family lost more than half of their livestock, animals they depended on for
food and money. She told me that when the dzud happened, her family was forced
to borrow money from people in order to survive. There were piles of frozen
animals in their fields that could not be eaten or sold. Disease is common
during a dzud, because of all the animal carcasses in the fields. Four years
later her family is still suffering from the effects of the dzud. Her family no
longer has herds of horses or cows, like they once did. The horses and cows
need more food than other smaller live stocks, so for now they are just herding
goats and sheep because if a dzud should occur, these animals need less food,
so are more likely to survive on less food. There is so much more money in beef
and horse meat, but at this point they have not recovered all their losses,
they had to take out loans from the government in order to buy more sheep and
goats. The problems with dzuds are that they are unpredictable; many summers
here are spent in draughts, so it is not uncommon to have a dry summer. So they
can’t use draughts as a predictor for a dzud that winter.
I
recently wrote this email to my country director, the training director and country
deputy officer after reading an article with the following quote. My email is
now being put in the weekly newsletter, the new volunteers next year will receive
it and being sent to Washington DC. In my director’s words “Wow! Nice! The message you share is always most powerful
and meaningful when coming from a PCV for whom the light bulb has gone
off! Thank you very much for this. Your insight and willingness to
share it exemplifies the strength of any PCV’s service.” Pretty
cool!
Here’s part of the email where I addressed the article I
read:
Hello All,
I recently read an article with this quote in it
and thought I would share it. It really resonated with me. Especially after
being a resource volunteer at the Health IST and listening to some of the
volunteers talk about their experiences at site. A lot of them were feeling
like “failures”, only 3 months into being at site. I think it is really
important to keep this statement in mind and I wanted to share it with you,
maybe it would be a good idea to be in an email sent out to the volunteers.
Maybe it could inspire some of them or change their attitude towards their
purpose in their aimags and soums.
“Service is ... different
from fixing. ... Seeing yourself as a fixer may cause you to see brokenness everywhere, to sit in
judgment on life itself. When we fix others, we may not see their hidden
wholeness or trust the integrity of the life in them. ... When we serve, we see
the unborn wholeness in others; we collaborate with it and strengthen it.
Others may then be able to see their wholeness themselves for the first time.
..." - Rachel Naomi Remen
I think that it is important for Peace Corps
volunteers as well as people aspiring to have a career in international
development to remember this. Serving others, is not fixing them; it is helping
them grow and reach their real potential. A lot of the time, in Peace Corps,
you see things that you want to fix in your country, whether it is a
counterpart you wish to fix or a large health concern. Realistically, we are
not going to be able solve those “problems”. We are not Mongolia’s saviors. We
are here to help our counterparts and community members grow and to teach them
skills that could possibly improve their work and in turn improve their
country. We are not here to fix, we here to serve; whether it be a school full
of children, a hospital full of doctors or just one disabled woman in the
community. Sometimes that one person is the only success you may see in the two
years of service, but to keep in mind that it only takes one community member
to start a change.
It is the second thing I have had published in the newsletter!
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