Christmas: Mongolian Style Part 1

Wow! It is hard to believe that Christmas has already come and gone. Some of you may be lamenting how quickly the festivities go by while others of you may be releaved that it is over. Whichever attitude you may have, allow us to share our Christmas time with you.

Our festivities began earlier in December when we purchased a small Christmas tree from one of the local stores. It is a great little tree about three feet tall! We bought a box of lights and a few ornaments to "spruce" it up a bit. It is amazing how much Christmas cheer a little tree can bring. Included in subsuquent packages were two stockings and a few more ornaments. All together, this little minagery helped us get more into the Christmas spirit.

However, as we all know, Christmas is about far more important things than just a few decorations. Christmas is about the time with family and friends. Unfortunately, since we are currently living on the other side of the planet we were unable to physically visit with our friends and family in the States. We were not able to attend any of the Christmas parties or drink any of the Egg Nog (not real upset about the Egg Not part), but we were able to spend some time with our new friends here. We actually did have a Christmas party at our home on the afternoon of Sunday December 20. We set this time as an opportunity to gather once again with our students from the two-week pracitcum course that we taught the end of November. Eight of our students were able to come! We were very excited to see them all again and to share a little more of our lives with them. Our teammates and one of our leaders were in attendance as well bringing our party total to 13 people and 1 cat. This is not bad at all when you consider how large our apartment is. This may not seem delightful to some of you (especially with those Christmas parties still fresh in you minds), but it was such a wonderful time! The close proximity aided in conversation. We ate homemade soup and stew (made with horse meat) for lunch and then had decorated Christmas cookies for desert. After several hours of visiting and showing pictures, we Americans shared some of our Christmas traditions, we all read a few portions of the Christmas story in both English and Mongolian, and sang two Christmas carols. Once we were all finished our students presented us with gifts. We were given a beautiful wolf picture painted onto leather as well as a leather pencil case and a leather key holder. No one really wanted to leave, but several of them had things they needed to do. Four of the students stayed to watch the Nativity Story movie on the big screen (we barrowed the company projector for the evening). Before everyone left, we set a time to get together with them again after the start of the new year. Several of them have continued to send us text messages and e-mails. We are very exctied to have these new friends and look forward to future opportunities to share with them!

Unfortunately, none of us thought to take pictures during the party. This is a really good picture of our students on the last day of our practicum session.

Following the Christmas party, we had our sights set on Christmas day and a three day weekend. We have been working very hard the past few months and were looking forward to a little time to rest and reflect. Our week was busy but went by without any problems. The anticipation continued to grow all week. Last year, Christmas was kind of a depressing time for us. This year, we got more giddy the closer it got. We may be far from home, but the joy this Christmas was overly abundant!

On Christmas Eve, we invited our teammates and Muhammad (one of our new friends) over to our apartment for dinner. We feasted on Italian Stallion (a dish of horse meat stewed with Italian seasonings and served on a piece of bread) and vegitables. We drank hot tea, played games, laughed, and shared the joy of the holiday together. This was also the first Christmas that Muhammad has ever celebrated before. What a treasure to be able to celebrate it with him for the first time!! We were all tired, so we parted around 8:30. We went to bed that night anticipating a good night's sleep and Christmas morning!

Christmas Cookie Time

Everybody loves cookies during Christmas time! Well, at least we do. Jennifer and I made a load of cookies this past weekend to have for a party with our former students. We will give more information about the party in a coming post. Not as many cookies were eaten during the party as we had expected. Don't get me wrong, the students enjoyed the cookies just as much as the next guy. Joshua enjoyed them even more if you can imagine that!

In the true spirit of Christmas (and because we didn't feel eating them all would be good for our health) we decided to share the remainder of the cookies with our Mongolian teachers and the men's group. These were all the leftover cookies. Unfortunately, a few of them did not last for long after the picture was taken.

We both took great joy in decorating the cookies. It is the small things that bring a lot of joy and bring back memories from our childhoods.

Cookies are fun and decorations are great, but we are reminded that the greatest part of the season is remembering whose birth we are celebrating. May we encourage you all to remember why you are celebrating. We wish you all a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Boxes, Oh How Exciting!

When we were living in TN, we almost dreaded going to the mailbox. It seemed all we ever got was junk mail or bills. Since we moved to Mongolia, our attitude has changed. We do not even have our own mailbox and physical mail is kind of scarce. We always love it when we find out that we have a card or a box! Yesterday afternoon we got a text message from one of the office ladies telling us that we had packages! Oh the joy! We dropped what we were doing and rushed off to our office to retrieve two boxes. We were thrilled! We had been given special instructions not to open one of the boxes until Christmas day, but the other box was fair game.

After a bit of effort (the box had been well sealed) Jennifer was able to open the package. It seemed like Christmas already! It is the little things from home that make life so enjoyable. We never knew how much sloppy joes and tacos would mean to us.

Our cat was even able to take part in all of the fun!

Thanks Mom and Dad!

Meat Market

Since we haven't blogged much in the past few weeks there is much that we need to catch up on. Therefore, it only makes sense to write two when we have time.

A couple of weeks ago we decided to go with one of our Mongolian friends out to the primary meat market in Ulaanbaatar. Unfortunately, we did not think to take the camera with us, so I will attempt to paint a mental picture for you.

Warning: This may be more vivid than you desire especially if you don't eat meat!

Odka, our Mongolian friend, picked us up early on Saturday morning. He was going to the market for his family anyway, so we had asked if we could go along too. He was happy to have us along. We left our house at about 7:30 am. The first rays of the sun had barely begun to lighten the sky. The air was cold and crisp. A thick haze of smoke, caused by the vast number of coal burning Gers and plants, lingered over the city. The smoke captured each ray and shattered its light across the sky. The colors of the sky ranged from a pale orange on the horizon to a deep grayish blue directly above us. The streets were fairly empty, so we made good time in getting to the market which is located at the northern edge of the city in the middle of a Ger district. The early light illuminated the numerous Gers on the surrounding hills belching forth their contribution to the haze. The market had already been open for a few hours by the time we arrived, so there was a considerable number of cars and people. Odka was able to find a spot large enough for his car. We were not far from the action. Upon exciting the car our breath became as thick as the smoke hung over our heads. The sounds and smells of our immediate environment were now quite clear. Massive trucks loaded down with the dead carcases of thousands of animals were clanking into the market every few minutes. The bellowing voices of the meat merchants boomed over the din of the surrounding crowd. The cold was evidenced by the large clouds of condensation that escaped their mouths. People, all bundled up in thick coats and hats, wondered around the trucks looking at the endless supply of meat. Some with handcarts made their way through the crowd with a yell or a push. I felt like we had just stepped into a picture out of a National Geographic magazine. We entered one of the buildings and purchased the quantity of meat that we wanted. While making our way back to the vehicle, we were not only threatened by an on-coming truck but we also saw an animal carcase that was still steaming. It was quite evident that this particular creature had been alive only a few moments before.

We purchased ten kilos of meat (about 22 pounds) while we were there. Five kilos were beef while the other five were horse. All together we spent about $20 for the lot. Not too bad for that much meat.

We Made It!

After two hectic weeks, we are finished with our teaching practicum. It is hard to believe that it has already come and gone, but we are relieved. It was one of the most challenging experiences that we have had since we arrived in Mongolia, but it was also a great time of learning and growth. We came to teach English. Now we feel more prepared to do that.

We started our class two weeks ago with twelve Mongolian English language teachers. When we finished on Friday we had thirteen students graduate. It was quite exciting to not only have everyone come the entire time but to also have more finish than started. That is very unusual for many of the programs here.

Our students had a wide range of experience. Several had been or were currently Russian language teachers. Some had been teaching for many years while others had only been teaching for one year. Regardless of what they had done and where they came from, all of them were equally enthusiastic about bettering their English abilities. They were such a joy to teach and work with! We saw everyone improve during the two weeks that we were with them. They taught us so many things about teaching. Having been with them has helped us be more prepared for our real classroom next semester.

During our time together we not only shared a lot about ourselves and our culture, but we were able to learn a lot more about Mongolia and its customs and traditions. During two of the activities in our second week we learned a lot about two Mongolian festivals, Наадам and Цагаан Сар. For those of you who can't read Cyrillic, the festivals are Naadam and Tsagaan Sar. We were very excited to learn more about Mongolian traditions and celebrations. It was even better that we were learning about them from people who celebrate them every year. It is one thing to read about something in a book or magazine and another to hear about it from someone who really cares. We could see in their eyes what each celebration meant to them.

Overall, we had a lot of fun together. The curriculum in our organization is focused on making the students talk a lot in English. In order to do this, the program has many activities and games that get the students up and talking to each other. Many of the activities are so fun that the students forget that they are in a class. Such was the case in the picture above. We actually had to create the activities for the last three days of our class. To emphasize three past verb tenses that we had been teaching, we had each student wear a stylish vest with a verb on it. One student stood in the middle with a paper "bopper." One student in the circle had to yell their verb in the appropriate tense and someone else's verb in the same tense before the "bopper" had a chance to smack them. All of us took part and had a lot of fun. We practiced and reinforced what had been taught without the students even realizing it.

We were able to be an influence on our students and to be a part of their lives for two weeks. Many of them opened up and shared some very deep things with us, and we were able to respond with an open heart and a smile. In turn, we were able to share much of our lives with them. On the final day of class, after the party and certificate presentation, our students refused to leave. They all sat down and told us how much they had enjoyed the class and that they were not ready for it to be over. We have invited them all to our house for a Christmas party later in the month. The class may be over, but, with luck, we can still be a part of their lives.