Month in Review

So I have been pretty bad about blogging this month. So I am doing a month in review to catch ya'll up.

The beginning of December was world AIDS day and jesse put together a cool program with his counterparts. About three hundred kids participated. There was a parade and cheers and competitions. It was pretty cool to see.

The weather is getting colder. Much colder. Did I mention it is cold? We don't have a thermometer at site but it is -33 in UB and it is colder at our site. The northern winds make things extra cold, think ice cream headache walking outside. I think I got frost nip on my ear after 5 min. outside. Jesse measures how cold it is by how quickly he gets icicles on his mustache. For a spell we only had really wet wood and it was taking a couple of hours for the fire to start so we just did stuff in our huge coats. Water would freeze in our ger at night and mornings weren't that fun. We got a little dry wood to limp us through this last week and threw the rest on top of the roof, we are told this helps. We shall see when we get back.

Currently we are in UB for a week long in-service training. The agenda looks to be long and rather painful. Hopefully however we will be better volunteers at the end of it. Our counterparts will be with us for part of it so that should be good too.

Work is slowly picking up speed. Jesse is working on some aids pamphlets and doing a men's health workshop on drinking and smoking and I put in a couple of proposals for things to do next year. One is a youth participation workshop, a mentoring program, and a collaboration with the health dept. on alcohol in the family and/or pre-post natal parent support group. So i am pretty excieted. Hopefully they turn out well.

Christmas is coming and it is wierd. Mongolia has adopted christmas things like santa and trees and not so christmasy things like fireworks, but they do it for the new year not christmas day. kinda a chinese new year meets america. dunno. I haven't figured out the gift situation yet. However we have brought a little christmas to the ger. I cut up our newsweeks and made paper chains and we brought our stockings so they are hanging. Byamba keeps trying to kill christmas and bring down the chains but so far she has not succeeded. Jesse cut a sort of charley brown christmas tree out of some firewood. Very cute. We are getting together with our site mates on christmas day for a potluck and general whatnot. I am making a camel stew. Nothing says christmas like camel (duh). **side note: we walked all around our meat market looking for nice meat and we hear camel was good. i asked a lady if there was some and she pointed me to this stack of meat. the cool part was they also had the hump all cut up. just solid pieces of fat. the hump and meat were the same price. funny huh?** Anyway lady sent me things to make fudge so that will be good. and i found a recipe for hasty pudding that we will make too. It should be fun. I tried to make marmalade last week but after 8 hours of back breaking work it didn't set. Can't say that I was pleased.

I think that is about all. Not a lot of excitement but this month has flown by. Crazy. Over and out cool kids.

s