12/11/2014
Yahoo messenger. Do you remember yahoo messenger or AOL
instant messenger back in the day? Well it is ever so prevalent here in
Mongolia. My coworkers use Yahoo Messenger to chat with one another from their
offices. I finally broke down and decided to download it, so that I too could
be involved in the chatter. We shall see how this goes. I may end up regretting
this move. I much rather just go to their offices to chat, since my Mongolian
typing skills are not great, and I usually mime out a lot of words I do not
know in Mongolian to get my point across. But, it sure is fun creating away
messages once again! Back to the middles school days, it fits well with the
Backstreet Boys and NSYNC being played all day long in the shops. We are still
back in the late 90’s early 2000’s here and I am not mad about it. Reliving the
boy band craze that I have never given up (shout out to 1Direction..I love
you!)
At work, I am collaborating with several doctors at the
Health Department to start a “Healthy Futures” club. Essentially, it is a
healthy lifestyle club, where the members create small mini groups inside the
club: walking groups, exercise classes, sports groups, hiking groups, Zumba,
Biggest Loser Competition; whatever interests they have that will keep them
active throughout the winter and spring. I think it is a great idea. There will
be a small membership fee for some of the groups, the money collected will go
towards a specific cause. This winter’s cause is poverty stricken children. The
money will be donated to buy winter jackets, boots and food for children whose
families are having money struggles. On Monday, we set out to all the local
organizations and schools to present the idea and sign people up. I am in
charge of teaching a Zumba class once a week.
The classes will start in January.
Also, starting in January will be my Health Club at School 4
with my site mate who works there. The school doctor and social worker reached
out to me, asking if I could help begin a health club for “chubby children”, I
told them I would be happy to do a club, but it would have to include all types
of children, but I would make exercise part of each club meeting, if they are
truly worried about some of the children. My idea is to each month pick a
different health topic, and have the club members design posters and activities
for the school children on that topic. There is this awesome international
movement going on now in developing countries called “Grassroots comics” that I
want to bring to the school. Taken from the website: “The Grassroots Comics
movement is a social venture aimed at empowering the rural populations by
providing them a medium of social awareness, which is both simple to create and
understand. We go to remote areas and educate the people on how they can
express their ideas and thoughts through comic drawings. These people then
create their own short comics portraying their issues, and we distribute their
works.” So each month the kids would work to create a comic that would deal
with one health issue plaguing their community. The comics would be hung up in
schools, the health department, hospital and stores around the town, to create
awareness in a creative, fun way. Two volunteers in another aimag have begun to
do this at their school and they said the results have been fantastic. The kids
really enjoy the project and community members are speaking about the new
comics hanging on the walls. If you type in Grassroots Comics into google
picture search, you can see all the awesome comics created by children around
the world. A lot of them are pretty impressive!
12/16/2014
This past weekend Arkhangai,
Mongolia held its first Special Olympics. My site mate Jen and I set it up with
the help of my Health Department, FLOM and her school. This year, Ulaanbaatar
(the capital) held the first ever Special Olympics in Mongolia. It was a momentous
occasion, Mongolia recognizing the talent young disabled athletes have in the
country. This is a huge strive for a country, where its disabled children and
adults are hidden away in homes, not able to attend schools or community events.
As Mongolia develops, so does its human rights and attitudes towards minority
groups. To be a part of this change is amazing.
On Friday, my Health Department
Nutritionist and Training Manager went to FLOM (Finnish NGO for disabled
people) to conduct a nutrition training to the athletes and their parents. 13
athletes and their parents learned about the food pyramid, healthy snacks,
correct portion sizes, the importance of vitamins and how to stretch properly
before exercising. The athletes and their parents were split up, the adults received
a more in depth nutrition training, while the athletes learned new stretches
and played a few games with us volunteers. Once the nutrition training was
done, the parents joined the athletes to learn about the food pyramid and
proper portions. Each athlete and his/her parents were given an envelope full
of food pictures they had to paste onto their own food pyramid poster that they
would bring home with them. The second activity after they learned about portions
was to draw meals on paper plates for breakfast, lunch, dinner and a snack
according to what they learned. The parents and children seemed to enjoy the
activities and left with a little more knowledge on how to eat healthier. I
wanted to make sure that the nutrition training provided information about how
to eat healthy with the foods available to the families in my aimag. I know we
are supposed to eat 4-5 servings of fruits a day, but when fruits are not
available or too expensive for most families to buy, this is an impossible
standard to meet (I barely eat one piece of fruit a week), so I wanted to just
focus on things that they could control, like salt and fats intake. I think my
nutritionist did a great job doing just that.
Saturday morning, was the day of
the Special Olympics competition. A couple days before the event, we were told
that the original place we booked for the event was no longer available. They
decided to give up our space to a paying group and therefor left us without a
venue. Luckily, my site mate was able to talk to her school and they let us
have the gym Saturday for the competition; so when we showed up Saturday morning
to find a community volleyball competition going on in the gym, we were
shocked. We went over to talk to the leader of the volleyball competition, and
he said they paid for the gym and would be using it all day. We tried
explaining that we had also booked the gym for Special Olympics, but he would
not budge, his competition would go on, we would have to find another spot. We
were shocked, why would he not give us the gym for an hour, it was for Special
Olympics!..but knowing the general population’s opinion on disable people, it
was really not that shocking. Why would they give up their gym time for a group
of people they believed did something wrong in a past life to deserve their
disability. We did not know what to do, the athletes and their parents would be
so disappointed, we were so disappointed, but then two of our friends from
Fairfield Café waked in the door. They were a part of the volleyball competition;
we ran up to them and told them the problem. They said they would talk to the
leader again; this was a competition for all the Christian churches and
organizations in the aimag. We were stunned when we learned the churches were
telling us no, they were churches after all! Finally, 30 minutes later, the
church leader agreed to give us the gym for one hour. We began setting up the
gym and lightning speed. An hour after it was supposed to start, the Olympics
began. One of the private schools preformed dances for the opening ceremony and
we had a mini torch ceremony, where all the athletes paraded around the gym.
The athletes competed in Track and Field events. The smiles on their faces as
they ran their laps around the gym were so special. What was even more special was
the parents and community members who came to watch the events. They were all
on their feet cheering for the athletes. For most of the athletes this was the
first time they have ever received praise for their athletic abilities. The
entire hour my face was plastered with a smile and at many points, tears in my
eyes. The love the parents had for their children was obvious, in the cheering
and hugs after every event. It was beautiful to see the athletes and their
parents interact with one another. For that hour, I think everyone forgot that
these children had disabilities, it was just a regular sports competition,
which more and more community members piled in the gym to watch. Once all the
events were over, we walked to Fairfield Café for lunch. After lunch, it was
the awards ceremony. While all the medals were being labeled, a volunteer who
came to help form another aimag and I played with the athletes. We taught them
how to play ring around the Rosie, a hand clapping game and then did a bunch of
races (each race you had to run like a certain animal). It was so much fun. Each
child was awarded medals for the events won, 1st, 2nd and
3rd place. Once again, a first was happening for many of the
children, they were receiving medals. Every time their name was called, they
would run up to receive their medals and then run back into the arms of their
parents. So even though the morning started off a bit iffy, the day turned out
to be successful. I feel so privileged to have been a part of it all.
Last night, I went to the market to
buy foam and plastic to try to seal my windows. The apartment has been
freezing, when I go to bed and wake up, I can see my breath inside it. So I looked
up online how to seal windows and set out for the supplies. I had no idea how
to ask for window sealers, so I went into the black market and went up to one
of the stands and said in Mongolian to the worker “I have bad windows. I am so
cold in my apartment. Help me”. The nice woman brought me to an auto supplies
stand (I would have never looked there myself) and told me what to buy. I got
back to my apartment armed with a bag of foam to be shoved into the cracks and
plastic to be taped up to help with the draft as well. It seemed to have worked
somewhat. I am going to try to put up another layer of plastic this afternoon.
I no longer feel the draft and it is no longer snowing inside of my apartment.
So those are two major pluses. I hope that when I go back for lunch this
afternoon, my apartment will be noticeably warmer!
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