One week to site announcment

For those of you keeping track of our progession through the summer we are almost done at host site. I really am unbelieving of just how quickly this summer has flown by. It seems like just yesterday we were stepping of the plane onto Mongolian soil for the first time and now we are about ready to leave the saftey of our host communities for the unknown adventure of site placement.

I can very easily say that Sierra and I have had a very successful summer. We should both have no problems achieving the necessary level with our language (something we were both a little wary of coming into our service). We have also both completed several community projects now and can consider all of them a massive success.

We both taught the same English lesson, a bit of a coincidence, to respective groups in our communities. She taught body parts (heads, shoulders knees and toes) to a group of school children, and I taught similar external body parts to a group of about 12 hospital workers in my community. We have both been told to expect to teach some English even though we are not TEFL volunteers so the experience was certainly a good one for us. Teaching English to non-English speakers also gave me a fresh and very interesting perspective on my own language learning ability. I am now hoping to start some English classes shortly after arriving at site in hopes that they will inspire my coworkers/students to give me a little more leeway in my attempts to communicate in broken Mongolian.

We both have also completed community develpment projects. I am not sure of all of the details surrounding Sierra's project, but I will do my best. Basically she and her site mates invited community members to submit either works of art or essays around the theme of "Mongolia's Future". They then invited some prominant local figures to serve as judges and themselves provided certificates and prizes to the winning submissions. After talking to her yesterday it sounded like they had some 20 enteries and had great attendence for the event. She declared it a huge success and was very excited about it.

My group identified two needs in our community that we worked to address in our project. First we spent about an hour and half on saturday morning teaching some of the local children to swim in our river. The river is one of the best places in town and heavily trafficed during hot days but a huge portion of the community can't swim. At the end of our hour and a half session the 10 kids that showed up for the event had learned a basic front crawl and the "dead man's" float. All in all I was very pleased by the results and wish we had started teaching earlier so we could follow up the session. The second project involved teaching about 10 local women the basic techniques for pickling so that they can save some of the harvest that is begining to occur. The diet here is so seasonal that often people eat almost no vegetables during the winter. We are hoping that pickling will provide them with at least some dietary variety and perhaps a bit of extra nutrition during the winter. This session was such a success that I am now in Darkhan to help buy supplies for an encore class on preserves tomorrow. On a personal note I am also enjoying learning these techniques so that Sierra and I can stock our pantry when we arrive at site.

I think that is all the new news for now. We are both realizing that we are about to say good bye to our families and so are spending lots of time with them now. We will be in town starting next monday for site announcments and then a week long conference with our counterparts. We will write more then.

Jesse