2/11/15
“Hello friend, what does it mean sexy? Bring your sexy. It
is tight suit?” – One of the many hilarious texts I receive from Mongolian
friends asking about the meaning of English words.
Last week I was given a 20 page project proposal to
translate from English to Mongolian. The Turkish Embassy okayed a project
proposal for my Health Department, in order to help maternal and infant
mortality rate, which is very high in my province. But since it was from the
Turkish Embassy, it was in English and my Health Department director could not
read it. The proposal was for 1.2 million USD and would give my Health
Department excellent resources and trainings from Turkish doctors. So my
director gave me 3 days to translate the 20 pages. She had to give a
presentation to the Mongolian Government on the grant in a week, so she needed
to be able to read it and create a presentation on the information in the
proposal. Translating English into Mongolian is so much harder than Mongolian
into English. I can read Mongolian and understand it really well, but thinking
in the reverse is difficult for me. My counterpart who is the only one at the
HD who knows English, was traveling around to the different soums conducting
health surveys, so he was not there to help. Luckily for me, I was able to get
my friend Gerlee to help me translate the 5 hardest pages, the rest I was able
to do in 5 days. Three days was extended to five when my HD director wanted me
to go with her to her friend’s house to make buuz (traditional Mongolian
dumplings). When she called me, I told her I could not go because I needed to
stay home and do the translation. 2 hours later she told me, she would give me
a 2 day extension and that I needed to meet her in 1 hour to go to her friend’s
house. In typical Mongolian fashion, making food for holidays comes before
work.
I met her at her apartment and we walked over with her
daughter to her friend’s house. The house was the nicest house I have seen in
Mongolia. It was 2 stories, 3 bedrooms, 2 baths, and had 5 ( I counted) massive
TVs. She also had a cook and housekeeper. After taking in the house, I met all
the lady friends who were invited to make buuz for the Mongolian holiday
Tsaagan Sar. They were all the top women in the town: my HD director, the
governor’s wife, the owner of most of the markets in town and the director of
the bank. As they ushered me to the table, I was met with Baileys Irish crème
and coffee from America. The woman who owned the house has three children, 2 of
which study in America and send her American products all the time. As I drank
my Baileys, spicy Korean chicken and potatoes were served for lunch. Delicious.
We then took time to chat and she poured endless glasses of white wine from San
Francisco. I was in heaven. Next, bowls of almonds and macadamia nuts were
places in front of me.. I could not stuffing my face with the almonds. Almonds
cost $30 dollars a kilo here. I cannot afford them on my Peace Corps “salary”.
I make about $150 USD each month, which has to pay for food, utilities, etc.
After we were finished eating, we went to the kitchen to
make buuz. The whole time we were eating, the housekeeper was busy cutting up
all the meat and cabbage in the kitchen, for us to use in the dumplings. We
walked in and everything was set out for us to use. I am the worst buuz make in
the world. I have no idea how they pinch the dough so beautifully. The
dumplings look like flowers when they are finished, mine resemble weird
raviolis. The women laughed at me and told me to stop making them, they would
not be able to serve those to guests at Tsagaan Sar which translates to the
White Holiday. It is February 18-20. For Tsagaan Sar, women make 1000-2000 buuz
for the celebration, it takes hours, so all of them get together with friends
to make them. I would have to eat the ones I made for dinner. I told them that
they were American buuz and people should be so happy to eat them. They laughed
and told me to go play with the kids. I was happy to do so; I needed a little
break from speaking and thinking in Mongolian. I tutor all their children in
English and they are all pretty good. Good enough to have simple conversation
and plus they are more likely to act out things at me if they don’t know the
English word and I don’t know the Mongolian one. We played several Mongolian
outdoor games, which involved pretending to be different countries and battling
one another. We also played hide and go seek and this game where you tie a
blindfold around one person and they have to find/tag another person in the
room. It was a lot of fun. At 8pm we took a break to eat dinner and watch a
Korean soap opera, which is dubbed over in Mongolian. It was nice to just sit
and not talk. My host mother used to watch the same soap opera, so I knew the
characters and the story line. As soon as the soap opera was over, I decided to
go home. My brain was exhausted. It had been such a fun day. I was so happy
that I was able to join them for the day.
On Saturday, January 31, the Peace Corps Volunteers in my
city held a creative writing competition. The students who participated were
given a choice between two writing prompts and had one hour to write an essay
in English. After they were done writing, we all got together for lunch and to
read the essays. Some of them were hilarious. In schools Mongolians do not
practice free writing, the only writing they do is when they practice their
letters. So for many of the students, it was the first time they just sat down
and wrote a story. This meant that many of the essays made no sense; many of
the students just wrote facts about themselves or any words that they knew in
English. The problem with schools here is that English teachers teach English
in Mongolian. There is no practice speaking. It is all reading and copying
words from books, no speaking or free writing. Most of the teachers themselves
cannot speak Mongolian. Also, critical thinking is not taught here, everything
rote memorization. Students will say things, but have no idea what they are
saying. They do not know simple commands or greetings in English. A few of them
that work really hard and ask us for tutoring do know more, and it showed in
their essays. This Monday, we had the awards ceremony. The TV station came and
recorded the ceremony.
After the competition, the new Chinese volunteers in our
town invited us over for Chinese dumplings and soup. The food was delicious and
they two girls are so sweet. They both majored in English, so speaking to them
is easy and fun. It is so nice to have more English speakers to hang out with.
We stayed for hours chatting with them about their experience in Mongolia and
saw how similar it is to ours. Whenever we hang out with the Koreans, Japanese
or Chinese volunteers it is always so amazing how similar our day to day activities
and experiences are.
I have a new project I am working on. It is by far my
favorite one yet. I am working with my site mate Rebecca at her school. We made
a Health Club at her school. We have two clubs on Wednesdays, the two groups
are broken up by age. Each club contains about 20 students. The school social
worker had the idea, after she noticed a lot of overweight students. At first
she proposed the idea to us as a “chubby kids club”, I quickly shot that down
and said I would do a health club, but for all students, no matter what their
weight is.
Every Wednesday at 11am and 3pm, the children come to us to
do 40 minutes of exercise and 30 minutes of a health lesson and craft. It is so
much fun. We start each session with warm up exercises and stretching and then
do 20 minutes of dance/zumba. The kids wanted to learn dances, so each week we
pick a new dance and practice it over and over until they have it memorized.
Then that dance becomes part of the warm up for the next week. After the
dancing we do the health lesson. The first week we did nutrition. We then
decided February would be designated to Mental Health. We talked about
self-confidence and ways to feel better about ourselves no matter what we look
like. We then end with a little yoga and meditation for stress relief.
Mongolian students, like many Asian cultures, are under high stress in school.
Everything is a competition and they are all striving to be number one. Our
first club session, some of the students did not want to try the dance because
they did not practice it themselves yet and did not want people to see them
mess up. So Rebecca and I are really trying to work on just teaching them to
have fun and when it comes to dancing and exercises it does not matter how you
look. The 1.5 we are together, there is no competition, and we are just having
fun. We try to pick songs that are really upbeat and add in goofy moves to get
the kids to loosen up and forget about school for the time they are with us.
Today, we had our 4th session and the change in the kids is amazing.
Every single one of them was dancing around the room and some even through in
their own dance moves to the songs. Today we taught them the Cha Cha slide and
made Valentines for each other. They loved it. Wednesdays are now my favorite
days and being with the kids is so energizing. It is a great way to break up
the week at the Health Department.
This past weekend was Rebecca’s 25th birthday,
the theme was college frat party. We played drinking games and drank jungle
juice out of my water filter. We ended the night going to a karaoke bar and
singing early 2000 songs (yes, they had English songs). It was a great night!
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