A Peace Corps Journey: Mongolia Edition

Just like Peace Corps Volunteers experiences being different, so is everyone’s schools. I’ll try not to generalize too much in this blog post, but I believe my school is similar to the majority of Mongolian schools, at least in cities.

The first day of school, September 1st, was a day of celebration. What were we celebrating? Going back to school. Learning. Teaching. Getting back together with friends. The energy rubbed off on me right away. I met my CP’s at school as they finished curling their hair and fixing their makeup in the morning, then we all went outside together to our large soccer/open green field behind the school where a large stage was set up and everyone had already began to gather. After many speeches (one of which was mine… all in the Mongolian language, yikes), performances (thankfully, I was not asked to dance or sing), and pictures (of which I was the tall redhead in the middle of my CP’s, always), we gathered for some airag, a traditional Mongolian drink made from fermented mares’ milk.

In the afternoon, we met for lunch at a local restaurant. Although many of the conversations were in Mongolian, the excitement and laughter was easy to join in on. I was nervous, but excited also. I had 11 English teachers (CP’s) to rely on this year. The training manager, my supervisor, also knows English. A language barrier was at the root of my nerves, so after today, I was more excited than nervous to take on the school year.

After one week of observing the five English teachers I would be working with for the first quarter, I had a solid grasp on how a typical school day works in Mongolia:

After the bell rings, the students all stand up to greet their teacher. The teacher says, “Good morning (or good afternoon) class,” and the students respond all together, “Good morning, Teacher!” Then the teacher asks, “How are you today?” The response all together varies depending on the class, but the students typically say, “I am fine, and you?” The teacher tells them how she is doing (all my English teachers are females), then they sit down and class begins. Sometimes they also have to recite their classroom rules which are typically something along the lines of be active and pay attention.

Classes typically have 20-30 students. Every classroom has tables as desks with a chalkboard or white board. Every lesson is 40 minutes long, but sometimes there are back to back or even back to back to back lessons, totaling two or three hours with one teacher. Most lessons are followed closely to the English book used countrywide for all Mongolian schools. I often learn during class also because these books are based off of British English. My students find it amusing when I make fun of the English in their books and teach them the differences in American English. Mainly, they just love having me in their classroom, and I appreciate that a lot.

I often lesson plan with my CP’s and have a speaking or listening section during the lesson because I’ve realized I am very good at knowing what the right answer is for grammar, but I don’t often know WHY. My CP’s are very good at teaching the WHY in grammar (the tough stuff) and I do the rest (the fun stuff).

Because I have five CP’s this quarter, I teach three lessons per week with each of them. That is 15 hours of team teaching on top of 6 hours of school clubs (English Speaking Club, Teacher Creative Writing, and Student Creative Writing), and about five hours of community clubs (I help my other PCV’s here with Student Speaking Club, Adult Speaking Club, TOEFL prep, and Movie Club) at the local library. This totals to roughly 26 hours every week of work, but if there’s anything I’ve improved on already since beginning this volunteering, it’s how to be flexible, even when there is a schedule in place. There are many days where I stay longer to help with a certain class or an individual student, and there are also days when there is a test in the class, so I am told that I don’t have to be there (once I’ve already walked into the class, usually).

Overall, yes, I stay pretty busy, but I love the atmosphere at my school. The students always say, “Hello, Teacher!” to me as we pass in the halls and the other teachers are kind to me as we sit in the teachers’ room waiting for our next class. They often like to practice their little English on me or push my limited Mongolian language knowledge. The teachers’ room also has WiFi, so this is usually my time to hang out on social media and stay connected with happenings at home.

Lastly, all the students and teachers wear uniforms. My CP’s wear a navy dress with red trim and the students wear some combination of a tie and navy jacket. In the beginning, I felt pretty odd in my own business clothes, but as weeks have gone by, teachers have began to wear their own business clothes as often as their uniforms.

With Fall break already approaching at the end of this month, I feel very confident talking and reading in front of all the grades I teach (6th, 7th, 8th, and high school). I especially have a soft spot for my 12th graders since they are focusing on doing well in class and preparing to take tests to try to get into universities and/or travel to other countries. One of my biggest goals during my service is to help these students travel and get into the university of their choosing. It’s definitely not an easy task as a Mongolian student, but I have many smart and talented students who I have a lot of confidence in.

So, that’s been my week to week life. On weekend, I often hang out with my sitemates or other friends I have met along the way. We have family dinners, watch movies, and explore our city. I am looking forward to getting the chance to explore more of Mongolia within these couple years.

On a side note, winter has already began. It’s been freezing every night and we’ve already had a couple small snows. I am staying plenty warm with my heated apartment and winter jacket that I brought from home. We’ll see how this jacket fares against the dead of winter, coming soon, I fear.

Emilie

When I got accepted to Peace Corps Mongolia, I was convinced it was because I mentioned in my interview that I have a wood furnace at home… that I am used to making a fire and keeping it going to maintain a warm house. I thought that my ability to live in the country and grow foods, harvest foods, and be without the city’s resources was what made me a good candidate for Peace Corps Mongolia. I could picture myself thriving in an isolated ger… I thought Peace Corps Mongolia could, too. I envisioned myself going on this list titled, “Fit for a Ger.” All throughout training, I paid attention to how my host family cooked all of their food on a wood stove. I remembered to bring toilet paper everywhere for using outhouses. I looked forward to gathering enough water for my ger to get me through snow storms and long periods of cold.

Then, Peace Corps placed me in one of the largest cities in Mongolia with heat, running water, a stove, oven, refrigerator, and even a king-sized bed.

There is no way you will ever catch me complaining about this. I am so excited to have these resources throughout my service, but at the same time, it presented quite the personal conflict.

Before I left home, I told everyone I was going to Mongolia, a place that could rarely be correctly identified on a map, where I could live with limited resources and be just fine. Everyone told me how brave I was to choose a lifestyle like this for myself and it made me feel both nervous and excited for my journey. Now, I’m telling everyone about my beautiful apartment with a grocery store closer to me than ever before in the United States.

To put it simply, I felt like a fake Peace Corps Volunteer. We sign up to live at the level of the locals, teach English and American culture, and bring the experience home two years later to teach about the Mongolian culture. It took a few days for me to remember that I am still doing all of those things in my city apartment, the same as other volunteers are from their small soums and gers.

Living with less resources does not make you a better or “realer” Peace Corps Volunteer.

Many many Mongolians live in apartments in the cities. Nomadic life does not encompass all Mongolian life, not even the majority of Mongolian life anymore, although it remains central to their culture.

We were told repeatedly to have zero expectations about where we will be placed. Foolishly, I just didn’t even entertain the thought of an apartment, even though that is where many of us PCVs were placed.

So, here’s to my new life. I am neighbors with one of my CPs, a 30 second walk to the nearest store, a two minute walk from my school, and within a 20 minute walk from three other PCVs. The school that I am teaching at has a very high level of English. This city in general has many residents who speak English very well.

I talked to one of my Regional Managers about my placement after finding out. She never mentioned my interview or even my home life. She spoke solely of my resume. My school has a psychologist who I can run Psychology Club with–I was a psychology major. My school has a great foundation in speaking English, but they would like to increase their writing abilities–I was a writing minor. The fact that I played volleyball was just the icing on the cake for my placement. Many Mongolian schools enjoy participating in volleyball competitions, especially the teachers at my school.

I guess wood furnaces aren’t that big of a deal.

This is why we were told so often not to have expectations when it came to site placement. There is so much more going on behind the scenes that is meant to not only give us the best experience possible, but to enable us to make the largest impact possible for our communities, too.

September 1st always marks the first day of school in Mongolia. A ceremony is held, even on the weekend, to celebrate the beginning of learning for the year. I cannot wait to not only teach, but continue to learn, too.

Emilie

P.S. Here’s a few pictures I took of my apartment a day or two after settling in. 🙂

It’s pretty common for all of us Peace Corps trainees to question why we’re doing this after we’ve already decided to do it. It’s a question that comes up still a lot even after a significant time in country, I’m told. It’s a question many of us were asked by family, friends, and professors before we left for service. It presented quite a challenge sometimes because what answer is good enough? “I want to change the world.” –too cliché. “I want to become a better person.” –there’s plenty of ways to do that without committing to over two years of service in a country you hadn’t even heard of before you got an email from Peace Corps. “I don’t know” is a HORRIBLE answer for the question, although it often seemed to be the most truthful one. The questions make you doubt. Are my reasons not strong enough to survive a commitment like this? Are there better ways to spend the next chapter of my life? Is it too late to change my mind? The period before leaving can be pretty scary.

Staging in Philadelphia, where all future M30s met for the first time, is when all of these questions, doubts, and negative feelings completely vanished. Finally, I was surrounded by people who didn’t want to know why the hell I’m doing something like this. We all ended up in the same city in the same hotel with the same agenda—get on a plane to Mongolia. It’s not that people at home weren’t supportive of my decision—they completely were! However, there was just no need for validation at this point with this particular group of people. We were all here, we were all possibly crazy, but we’re all going to do it. Instantly, these strangers became everything to me: The people I could last minute rearrange baggage with, the people who may possibly understand every emotion I feel every step of the way, and the people who will become my support system—my family.

I can’t say for certainty when the moment was, but when a complete stranger reads off your name and tells you that the people standing in front of you are your new family now for the next three months, they don’t instantly feel like family. Even though they introduce you to a home that you will be residing in and a dinner table where you will now eat your meals… the familial feel doesn’t just fabricate in your heart. For me, it took some time, but I recognized the moments when they came. My 6-year-old host sister giving me half her pile of ankle bones (literally, sheep ankle bones… look it up) while playing the game so that I could continue to play with her, even though I was just about to lose. Giving me two ankle bones would have sufficed to allow me to stay in the game. Her generosity was so so sweet, that I didn’t want to just use the Mongolian word for “thank you.” I knew how much she loves to win. (Competition, especially winning competitions, is very important in the younger Mongolian culture.) So, I instead made a heart shape with my hands at her. She made it back. This is now our thing. Anytime I am leaving for language lessons, coming home from TEFL training, or going to sleep at night, we make hearts at each other with our hands. No verbal language. It is such a small and simple action, but it means everything to me, especially because there’s no verbal language barrier involved.

There was a time when my host grandma took my laundry off the clothes line while I was at school and not only folded it nicely and left it near the door to my room, but she hid two apples under a few folded shirts in the pile as a snack (the bruises were even cut off, guys). Or another time when my host aunt (who is 14-years-old), sat on the floor of my room for hours on various nights (often way past my bedtime) drawing various pictures of food, plants, and objects so that we both could label it for each other—I share the English word, she shares the Mongolian. Tonight, she sat in my room for hours again, but this time we graduated to having conversations. Often, a dictionary, Google translate, class notes, and even my planner/calendar were necessary to understand each other, but we did it. These tiny moments are so rewarding.

It’s tough to be on the same page with a family from a different culture, but it happens all the time for me. I was thinking about how volleyball is such an important sport to Mongolians (I know, I got really lucky with where I was placed), and I thought it was weird that my family didn’t own a volleyball. The next day, they came home from a shopping trip with one. One night after dinner, I thought about how beautiful the sky looked and how I’d like to go for a walk to the river to watch the sunset. My host aunt came into my room minutes after dinner to ask me to go to the river (this is something we should do often, but rarely do). On a hot afternoon, I was thinking how great it would be if I could at least dip my hair in the river water to cool down. The movie my family and I were watching ended shortly after this thought, and my host mom announced we were going to the river to swim.

The truth is, the mere fact that we are all humans already gives us so much in common. Everyone needs food. Everyone needs to cool down on hot days. Everyone enjoys beautiful things. Everyone likes to have fun. It’s not always that simple, but the moments when it is… they’re enlightening. Rejuvenating for every moment of frustration and confusion. Many Peace Corps blogs that I read before leaving mentioned the need to celebrate the little things because they’re what you will cling to when things get difficult. I get it now. There are nights when I am sitting at the dinner table as my host family has a conversation, and I don’t understand a word of it. There are times when I want to simply ask, “What did you do today?” or “What time is dinner?” and I can’t sift through the hours of language lessons in my head to come up with the right words. It’s frustrating and isolating, but every little positive moment makes up for these negatives, and then some. The extra ankle bones, the hidden apples in laundry, and the impromptu river walks… they remind me of the moments when my dad would purposely make perch for dinner when he knew I was coming home from Lakeland that night, or the old fashioned waiting for me on the counter (garnished with two cherries, of course). It’s about the extra peach cobbler waiting in the fridge, non-verbally reserved for me, or the jar of salsa tucked into a jacket I asked for after a volleyball game at Lakeland (accompanied by a bag of multigrain Scoops chips, of course).

These beats of unasked-for kind gestures are universal in families. They’re apart of what makes loving your family so easy. They’re apart of what already has made this experience worth the leap.

So, why did I decide to join the Peace Corps?

To find apples in my laundry.

Emilie

I have been at my Pre Service Training site for about 20 days now. A pleasant surprise that came with our Peace Corps SIM card was a 3 GB of data per month deal. Unfortunately, I have used up nearly 60% of my data with Google Translate. Another 20% went towards daily updates to my family nearly every day for the first couple weeks, and the last 20% goes to Facebook Messenger where my fellow PCTs and coordinators talk before and after classes about plans, homework, etc. My host family and I were pretty good at flipping through the English-Mongolian Phrase Book we were given by Peace Corps at first, but there are certain specific things I wanted to ask my host mom or aunt like, “How was your day in the countryside?” or “Where is my dad?” that Google Translate was amazingly helpful for. The point of that is I wrote this about 20 days into PST, but I am not sure when it will actually be posted because I do not have Wi-Fi and my data is nearly dried up for this month.

Let’s go back for a second. My first week in Mongolia with the 44 PCTs was at a touristy ger campsite type thing near the capital of Mongolia, Ulaanbaatar (or UB for short), home to the vast majority of Mongolia’s population. We ate well, took hot showers, and even had the fires in our ger made for us. It wasn’t an overly accurate depiction to us on how we would be living once we got to our PST sites. After a long, hot, and slightly cramped van ride to our site, the eight of us were tired and dehydrated. I had a mad headache that I was eager to get rid of with a little nap and water. But first, it was time to meet our host families.

It was exhilarating. Nerve-wracking. Okay, maybe even scary. But excitement nearly out-weighted those other emotions. We lined up in front of the host families dressed in their beautiful traditional Mongolian clothing. We were not instructed to wear overly nice clothing, but I was grateful that I put on a nicer dress (actually stolen from my teammate, Erin… sorry, Erin and thank you!) We were called one by one to be claimed by our family and then went into the school we would have training at for the next three months to have a reception with some juice, water, and snacks. Everything was a little awkward with the language barrier, but you could feel the families’ excitement to take care of another child for a few months. My grandmother, mother, and little sister (6-years-old) were there to greet me and take me home. We packed my host family’s car with my belongings (they seemed a little stunned at all the bags that came out of the van with my name on them). I didn’t mention to them that there was actually one more large bag that I left with Peace Corps as a winter bag that I would be picking up later after PST (mainly because I had no idea how to say that in Mongolian, but also because my new family was stuffed in our little white car with all my luggage as it was).

Because this is an accurate recount of my experience, and that usually means there were exceptionally awkward and embarrassing happenings, I’ll continue with the details of my first hours at PST site. We pulled into the quaint yard of my new house, and there were a few pressing matters I needed to take care of before I could begin making good impressions with my family: 1) My headache had gotten worse, and I was actually suppressing nightmare-like cognitions of vomiting in my new room within minutes of being introduced to it. 2) I really needed to pee. I tried to stay hydrated on the ride here, but evidently what I didn’t sweat out on this warm day went right through me. I was mentally prepared for a hole in the ground, but I needed to be shown the location of said hole… soon. 3) I didn’t have anywhere near the necessary language skills to express these dire needs as my family scrambled to help bring my bags in and set the table for dinner. On top of all this, when we got home to greet my host aunt and 2-year-old host brother, he had just woken up from a nap, obviously suffering from an allergic reaction and needed to be rushed to the hospital. Only my host mom went because everyone wanted to make sure I settled in well. Add guilty to the many emotions I was feeling at this given moment, and you’ve got a delicious cocktail of borderline panic stirring.

Thankfully, I was somewhat prepared and had a little sheet with common words and phrases helpful for the beginning of this transition. I found the word for “outhouse” and said a pronunciation probably 60% right to my host aunt maybe six times before she thankfully understood what I needed and walked me across the yard, past the garden to our outhouse. My intense need for this little red house at the corner of our property probably made first impressions a little more forgiving, but, guys, it was totally fine and has been fine ever since. Lack of plumbing has been a frequent question I’ve been asked about and honestly, it’s been very easy. Different and an adjustment like everything during the first couple days, but easy.  

Once one of my urgent needs was taken care of, my second seemed to get worse. Dinner was already ready and sitting on the table. I began stuffing an already pretty stuffed stomach (my host grandmother made sure I ate plenty of chips and peanuts after getting out of the van), so that I wouldn’t be rude. This seemed to be making my head even worse. Visions of vomit were getting dangerously close to becoming my reality. My aunt and grandma stepped into the kitchen for something, allowing me to run to my room to grab my Mongolian language cheat-sheet. I found a phrase close to what I wanted to say: “I would like to rest.” As soon as they got back in the room, I fumbled my way through the pronunciation, but my host grandma seemed to get it right away. She motioned for me to go to my room. I said thank you (in Mongolian—one of the few words I mastered before leaving the states), and headed to my room. What I wasn’t expecting was each family member grabbing every single food and drink item off the dinner table and stacking them on the table in my room. I had no idea how to say ‘That is not necessary” or “Please, continue to eat; I’ll be rested soon.” Instead, all I could say was “Thank you, thank you, oh, thank you!” as the food poured into my tiny tidy room. The moment my door closed, I popped some Advil, took off my glasses, and closed my eyes for an hour (after chugging the whole liter of water from the dinner table that conveniently got carried into my room, also). Sleep wouldn’t come because my mind was going in all different directions, but the short rest was helpful. I couldn’t stop wondering what they were eating for dinner if all the food was sitting in my room.

Okay, so the first couple hours were rough. However, when I emerged from my room later, my little brother was back home and giggling, and my host aunt and mother were eager to have a couple broken conversations in English/Mongolian about ages, family members, likes and dislikes, etc. I showed my family book my mom and I made with Shutterfly before I left home, and they shared what English they knew. Thankfully, my host mom had taken a few English classes and it is better than my Mongolian, but that doesn’t really say much. Basically, I was able to figure out names, ages, and relationship to each other, which was a good start.

As you can imagine, I am in a nice routine at this point, as is my host family. We get along really well. I am best pals with my 6-year-old sister, my 2-year-old brother is the same as any other toddler in the Terrible Twos stage (occasionally adorable, always sassy), and my aunt (who is only 14) likes to learn English in my room nearly every night as she teaches me Mongolian simultaneously. My host dad has a job at the mine and is gone for days at a time. I actually didn’t meet him until around day eight. Both of my parents are 25, so I don’t call them “mom and dad” like some other PCTs call their host parents. I call them by their names, just as I do my aunt and siblings. I think the youthfulness in the house has helped with the transition. There’s a lot of joking, laughing, playing volleyball, and learning. As much as I am learning to live in Mongolia, they are learning to live with an American. I think my comfort level with carbs, countryside activities like riding horses and milking cows, and my shared love for volleyball has helped make their new experience easier, in addition to making my transition easier. They treat me as one of their own and have made me feel right at home.

No worries, everyone. I am doing just fine. I already know more Mongolian than just “thank you,” although there is still a long language acquisition road ahead of me. I am looking forward to sharing more stories, mainly because I have better ones to share that don’t involve bodily functions. J

Emilie