Tidbits from Mongolia

zieak ♦ August 22, 2011 ♦ 4 Comments

Today was the first day of work. We met a number of new and veteran teachers during the day. In Petersburg there were some people I saw weekly for over a decade and I still had a hard time remembering their names… So I’m making a huge effort to get names right and remember them. So far, so okay.

We got word tonight that we can move into our apartment tomorrow. So Pepper was prancing around our temporary digs putting the few things wqe pulled out of bags back in place. We understand we’re on the 6th floor… and suddenly I’m glad that I wasn’t up to exercising tonight.

Our second day in town we hiked up Ziasan monument which is right next to the school. It is a Russian built monument to unknown heroes in a number of wars and is actually a fairly nice looking concrete monolith with a suspended halo illustrated with mosaic. we have watched the sun’s first rays hit it in the morning and the crowds of people taking photos of the sunset every evening. I may miss this view.

We also hiked into Bogd Khan national park, a fifteen minute walk from the school campus. The park was created in 1783 – the oldest national park in the world! (Almost 100 years before the first national park in the United States!) I ate red raspberries, saw lots of strawberry plants, and wished rose hips actually tasted good. It was quite forested and was a nice break from the hot sun we experienced all week.

My fifteen years in southeast Alaska helped me generate a list of things I missed from New York. Roadside fruit and vegetable stands, thunder and lightning, the smell of leaves in the fall, and dirt. I’m sure I’ll have a list of things I’ll miss – in fact I’m working on a list of ten for an upcoming blog post. So it has been nice to hear some thunder this week. I hope the spring has some powerful storms.

Pepper will have a 5th grade class and today she found out she’ll have one of Mongolia’s President’s kids in her class. That’s part of the attraction to this genus of teaching. I told a few people that thought it was so cool that I was going to a developing country to teach. This isn’t the Peace Corps. I’m not here on a mission to make the world a better place by helping those less fortunate. The more blunt assessment would be that I’m here to help westernize the next generation of Mongolians. The Mongolians that have found wealth since the release of communism at least.

There were rumors of a McDonald’s and Starbucks popping up here. I’ll be honest, I’m proud to be living and working in a country without American fast-food chain stores and homogenized coffee shops. I have lived without that “luxury” for 12 years and prefer to only experience it when I travel. So I’m here to help westernize the country a little bit.

All around the campus there are cranes. Not sandhill cranes. Cranes that occasionally spin and pass loads of brick, re-bar, boards and other building materials from the earth to workers a few stories in the air where they busily (and hopefully to some sort of seismic standards) build high end housing units. I think that from the school I could spot almost a dozen such sites. It is amazing to be in a place where the optimism can be seen by the construction projects even if it includes the investment planners schmoozing in the pubs. We’ve sometimes had a hart time sleeping because of the pulsating sound of rock being broken on the hillside above the school.

School enrollment is up. The school owners are planning constructing a new building to keep up with the demand. This is so refreshing to hear coming from a school district that seems to have only talked about attrition and declining enrollment. Sure, I wish I could have the basketballs that they throw away as too ratty in Petersburg at this moment. Complaints about the dead spots in the floor of the community gym would be silenced after one game on the court here. But the positiveness here is palpable. The “limited” resources we have access to eclipse the facilities and materials of the public schools here. Or so it sounds.

I feel my eyes growing heavy. I’m surprised how tiring a short and fairly easy day of work was – tomorrow will be exhausting with a half dozen trips to the sixth floor right after work.

We have some fun things on the schedule ahead including an overnight ger camp trip on Friday night so I’m sure to have lots more to post about soon!