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.