Worker Bees

Hi all,
sorry I have been so bad lately. We got poor the last couple of weeks due to some major purchases and have not had money for internet. My time away from you has bought however, a new suit and dress slacks, a new winter deel for jesse, an 8 pound zuchinne (sp?), and some candy to feed jesse whose sweet tooth has gotten out of control.

We have been super busy the last couple of weeks. Translating documents, creating learning games for parents and their kindergardeners, producing a tv show on child rights, doing an english call in show on the radio called "Speak Up!" (very funny), editing a research report for publication, developing a training for youth leaders on how to make their clubs better and teaching english. Whew! That is just me. Jesse has been doing stuff too but not as much. : ) He is working on developing a teamwork workshop for the health workers and got his first survey out this week as well as helping me do translation on a couple of documents, and we have teamed up to create some great activities for kindergardeners around washing hands and brushing teeth. Yesterday he left for the southern most soum in Ovorkhangai with his counterpart to watch her present on HIV/AIDS. They say there are only 9 cases of AIDS in the country but part of that is lack of diagnostic equipment and part is people don't want to get tested. However we have very open boarders with china and russia and both of those countries are in AIDS epidemic mode. So it should be an interesting presentation to watch. He is gone Wed night, thursday, friday and should be home Sat mid day. It has been quite lonely without him, so I have taken to talking with myself. It works out ok. : )

It is lunch time now so i should go. They are locking up.

ps. we got winterized (mostly) last weekend. It was very funny. We had to take our whole ger down and remove all the furniture so that we could fix the floor. the extra felt was supposed to be there at two but didn't arrive so at two when we were ready to put the felt back on and put everything together the rains came. Once everything was back on the extra felt came so we had to take everything back down again. This weekend we should finish up the project. Very mongolian. It is supposed to get really cold this weekend but the weather man is not that good so we shall see....

: )

Mongolia PCV's Unite!

So we have had a very crazy friday here. First of all let me say that yesterday it was fall and today it is winter. Last night we had freezing rain and then snow and this morning the wind was blowing something fierce. Our ger was sooooo cold. I could see my breath all morning. Our ger is not winterized yet (to do this they add another layer of felt to the outside of the ger, add a vestabule to the door, and bury the bottom of the ger in earth) right now the bottom of our ger is just a tarp all along the outside so the wind and cold came through just fine. It is about 40 degrees but with wind chill I am guessing around 25. Coming to work this morning I got a brain freeze because the wind was blowing so hard and so cold. Yawna!!! (means: oh no, how sad, how difficult....good word).

After I got to work I got a call that said we are doing our consolidation drill. This means that everyone has to go to our sub-warden's house and await further instructions from peace corps (usually you would consolidate right before evacuation). It is a very good drill to do but very dumb for us because it is only the people from our town. So we walked over to their house this morning and sat around for a couple of hours and then went back to work. Further exposure to the cold cold day.

Everyone is worried about us because we are foreigners and don't know anything. Yesterday everyone was worried about me because Jesse was in the country on business. FYI: he had a really great time, went to a mineral shower, drank araig, and listened to a 70 slide presentation on TB. So every one was worried that I was home all alone and today they are all worried that I might freeze to death. Frankly I am worried about this too so have done nothing to assuage their fears. Actual text message from my boss: Hi. Good day. I am worried for you and your ger. I wrote back: I am worried too. I am very cold. Hopefully we will get winterized soon. : )

Other than that not a lot to report for the week. I had my first radio show and it went ok. I think I kinda sound like mickey mouse. Why doesn't anyone tell me these things? This weekend hopefully we are getting warm things for the house. But other than that no real plans. We are however, throwing our first dinner party in our ger. We invited our hashaa family over for pizza (6 people). So that should be fun.

Ok I am off. FYI to the next person to send a care package: please send hot chocolate and hot apple cider. Want to be warm on the inside too. : )

Working for a Living

Sorry it has been so long since our last post. We are very busy and important people. I don't even remember where we last left off.... work has been good. I started on Monday last week. My co-workers are super nice and my boss is great. She and I share an office. She says things to me like, "I am always on your side." Which makes for a nice atmosphere. The first week was mainly tromping through town learning where other organizations are, what they do, and setting up meetings with them. I met with the governor and he told me to have babies here. Ha! My work week is divided between two organizations. M-W I am at the Children's Center and Th-F I am at Mercy Corps. There are three officers at the Children's center and I work with a different one each day. One focuses on Child Rights, one on Youth Participation, and one on Youth and Families. So I have many different programs to work on. I even have 3 monthly radio shows and a TV show. I am very popular. Today I had a meeting with youth leaders and we have decided to do monthly trainings with them to improve their org. capacity. I am pretty excited and think this will be a good project for me. Hey this is a shout out to teachers (I'm talking to you Doc) about getting some pen pal stuff going on with High School youth organizations. The kids here are interested how Americans do things and I think just want to talk with Americans. If you know of anyone who might be interested (Abby) let me know. : ) I also teach english three mornings a week to my coworkers. It is good, pretty informal but they like it. I have only been to Mercy Corps twice, go again tomorrow, and it looks to be pretty good. My first project is editing a report on local government involvement for our area. It should be good and it will be publish so that is cool.

Jesse's work is also going well. His first week was similar going around and meeting people and visiting hospitals. He was interested to discover that while the quantity and probably quality of health care in Mongolia is much less than in the states the basic structure of the health care system is vary similar. Basically it is divided into "Family Hospitals", the equivalent of family practices in the states. (They focus of pre- and post-natal care, delever vaccinations, perform minor procedures, and otherwise work to promote health living) More serious procedure and problems are taken care of at one of three regional hospitals in the area. We are fortunate enough to have our regions hospital here in town and he is excited about doing some collaborative work with them, he is not sure in what capacity yet but is sure he will figure something out. We also have a couple of diagnostic and infectious disease laboratories, his nerdy self loves to see the pipettes and biochemical whatnot. This week he has been busy working on a no smoking campaign for 13-14 year olds. He has worked very hard on translating English to Mongolian and will be running a life skills portion of the program on Friday. He is happy and manages to keep himself busy.

Ger life is going good still. We got a refridgerator the other day and that is nice. But our town has been cheese-less for the last week so there is not much in it now. Jesse, with swallowed pride asked how to build really good fires (rather than the puny ones he knew how to build) and now we have been very toasty most days. Sometimes we run out of wood but I am promised that will be fixed very soon. We went to the hodoo (country) last weekend and just kinda crashed this families ger. They were very nice and made jesse drink a lot of fermented mares milk (arag) which he likes and they made me dinner that didn't have meat in it (but really it just had tiny pieces of mutton and was rice cooked in mutton broth, definitions of meat free are really open to interpretation). We actually saw a horse being milked, so yes Matt, it is possible. Wierd but possible.

Monday was our anniversary and I have taken to calling jesse my one year and X number of days husband. I think he likes it. We had a very quiet night. Made fajitas (it took three hours) and apple crisp. Jesse was belly up on the couch for some time after the meal moaning. I think that means he liked it....On Tuesday we both got sick, some crummy cold. I stayed home yesterday morning and this morning but jesse toughed it out. Slowly on the mends.

Now we are off to harass the cheese lady and get measured for winter clothes. Take care.