The Joys Leading Up To Reindeer Camp

Every summer, a group of PCVs from around Mongolia and a few Mongolian CPs from Huvsgul aimag take a trip up to the taiga in the far north of Huvsgul to visit and hold camps with the reindeer herders who live there. I will talk more about the reindeer herders–known as the Dukha, or the Tsaatan in Mongolian–in my next post.

Anyway, earlier this year, the PCVs in Huvsgul in charge of the Reindeer Camp sent out information and an application to those interested in going to this year’s camp. Reindeer Camp is very competitive. There are 2 “sides” of the taiga where the herders live: East and West. For each side, only 2 TEFL, 2 CYD, and 2 Health Volunteers are selected to go (plus a couple group leaders and Mongolian CPs), in order to prevent the tiny camps the herders live in from being completely overrun with a huge group of foreigners. And the M24s were given precedence since this is obviously their last chance to go before they leave Mongolia. But I applied anyway because I really wanted to see reindeer while I’m in Mongolia (which I’ve discovered is quite complicated) and since the Health sector is the smallest here in Mongolia, I figured I had a better chance of actually being selected.

And selected I was! I’ll be going to the East Taiga very soon! I’m super excited, but the days leading up to my departure have been…stressful, to say the least.

For one thing, Huvsgul aimag is just to the northeast of Zavkhan aimag, where I live:

So you’d think it would be fairly simple to get from Uliastai, the capital of one aimag, to Murun, the capital of a neighboring aimag. I mean, there’s even a road (unpaved, but still) connecting them!

As my brilliant Microsoft Paint skills highlight here

But of course, nothing is that simple in Mongolia–certainly not when you live in the “black hole.” There isn’t really public transportation from Zavkhan to most of its neighboring aimags, unless you want to pay to charter a car or mikr (microbus) to take you somewhere, but that’s not feasible for one person. Almost everyone told me I would just have to take the bus from Uliastai to UB, and then another bus from UB to Murun. For the record, that’s a 24-30 hour bus ride, followed by another 14 hour bus ride:

Yes, that makes much more sense…

I knew that bus trip across half the freakin’ country would not be fun, so I enlisted the help of some of my Mongolian friends to try to find a ride to Huvsgul around the time I would be leaving. The teachers from one of Ulaistai’s schools were taking a trip up to Huvsgul, but they were leaving a week before I needed to be up there, so I couldn’t justify being away from work for several days and having to crash at one of the Murun PCV’s homes for that long. Then there was a mikr that would be taking university students up to Huvsgul after their last exams (I assume they are actually from Huvsgul), but it turns out that they were already tying to fit 21 students in there, so there was definitely no room for me.

So I resigned myself to taking the super-long bus trip to UB, as I didn’t want to spend a bunch of money on a plane ticket (if there were flights straight from Uliastai to Murun, I probably would have done that, but pretty much all domestic flights in Mongolia are through UB)

So on Monday I bought my bus ticket to UB (my supervisor helped me get a window seat so I could rest my head against it to sleep, and she made sure they wouldn’t put a man in the seat next to me for safety reasons). Monday morning was also when I found out that my khashaa family wanted to take back the wooden floor that my ger is built on (the health department owns my ger but my khashaa family owns the wooden floor) because they want to sell it (I guess they really need money for something because it apparently couldn’t wait a couple weeks until I’m back from the Reindeer Camp).

So I was told I had to pack up all my things in my ger that day so that they could take it down while I’m gone. My supervisor and I went back to my ger to try to pack up all the stuff that actually belongs to me (as opposed to the furniture which is the health department’s) while at the same time trying to figure out what I need for the Reindeer Camp to make sure it didn’t get packed away. Then after lunch we went back with a coworker who has an SUV to take all the boxes to the health department. They put all the stuff I don’t need for the Reindeer Camp into the basement of the health department, and I stayed the night in one of the health department’s “hotel rooms.”

The health department doesn’t have a wooden floor to put my ger on yet, so they’re going to have me come back and stay in the hotel room between when I come back from the Reindeer Camp and when I leave for the second half of PST (which is thankfully only about 8 days), then they’ll hopefully have my ger set back up when I come back to Zavkhan for good at the end of August.

So yeah, that was my excitement the day before heading off to UB. Nothing like coming into work and being told you have to go back home and pack up all your possessions in just a few hours!

Also, when I went to get my bus ticket, I found out that the buses now leave at 2pm instead of 9am, so while that at least gave me time to pack for the trip on Tuesday since I obviously didn’t have time to do that on Monday, it will be cutting it close in terms of arriving in UB to catch the bus to Huvsgul, the last of which leaves at 6pm on Wednesday (and we’re supposed to all be in Murun by Thursday morning).

I will obviously have a nice, long post about the Reindeer Camp when I get back, though that won’t be for about 3 weeks! Wish me luck on my travels!

Training of Trainers

The last 2 weeks of May I spent in Darkhan for Peace Corps’ Training of Trainers (ToT). Earlier in the year, PC staff sent out the trainer application to all the current PCVs who wanted to work during the upcoming PST for our new group of PC/Mongolia Trainees (the M26s). Current Volunteers could apply for trainer positions (or what PC calls “Resource Volunteers”) for each of the 3 technical sectors here in Mongolia (TEFL, CYD, and Health), Cross-Culture, and/or Language. Always looking for a way to travel on Peace Corps’ dime, I applied to be either a Health or Cross-Culture Resource Volunteer for the second half of PST (they split PST into two halves so that the Resource Volunteers aren’t away from their sites for the whole summer).

Then about a month later I found out that I had been selected to be one of two Health Resource Volunteers for the second half! Yay! In previous years the Health and CYD sectors only had one Resource Volunteer each per half of PST, but there are slightly more incoming M26s in both of those sectors (and it’s just a lot of work in general for one person), so this summer they’re having two trainers for each half.

So all the Resource Volunteers (first and second half), along with the LCFs (who teach the daily Mongolian language classes to the Trainees) and the Technical Coordinators (Mongolian professionals who work with the respective Resource Volunteers to facilitate the technical sessions that Trainees attend in the afternoons) gathered in Darkhan for the two-week ToT. Many of the LCFs and Technical Coordinators (TCs) had worked with PC in the past: our Health TC has been a counterpart to two PCVs in the past at the hospital and health department she’s worked at, and one of our LCFs from last summer’s PST is also an LCF for this new group of Health Trainees. Our other LCF from last summer is back again as well, but she’s working with one of the CYD groups this year instead of the Healthies.

The first week of ToT consisted mainly of long, information-packed sessions, standard at most PC trainings. We discussed PST logistics, policies, trainer facilitation skills and team teaching, lesson planning, etc. while sitting in our groups (based on the site where the new PCTs we would be training would be living throughout the summer). Many things about this year’s PST are different from previous years, including the fact that all the the training sites are either in or close to Darkhan. In past years trainee groups have been sent to Sukhbaatar city up by the Russian border, but this year there are 3 trainee groups in ger districts on the outskirts of Darkhan, and the remaining groups are in soums within about 60km of Darkhan. All the TEFL groups are in the soums, while the 2 CYD groups and the 1 Health group are in the Darkhan ger districts (they need to be closer to the city where there are more places for them to have their summer practicums). My training site from last summer, Dereven, is where one of the CYD groups is staying this summer, along with another ger district next to it. The Healthies this summer will be in Mangirt, a ger district on the opposite side of Darkhan.

The Saturday of our first week of ToT, we had Host Family Orientation to prepare the Mongolian families that would be housing the new Trainees this summer. We Resource Volunteers helped out by answering questions the host families had about American people and culture and by performing skits illustrating some common “issues” that can arise when fresh new American Trainees are suddenly thrown into a new culture and family without being able to speak the language. Some of the families had hosted PCTs before, but many of them were new (as there were new training sites this summer, including our Health training site). There are only going to be 5 Trainees in Dereven this time around (as opposed to the 10 of us last year), so my host family didn’t get another Trainee, but those that did remembered me and Kathy (the other M25 Health Resource Volunteer) and came to chat with us afterwards. Hopefully I’ll be able to visit my host family at some point when I come back for the second half of PST.

We finally had a day off, but then it was back to work on Monday to begin the second week of ToT. We spent each day of the second week working with our training teams to update old session outlines from last year’s PST, create new session outlines for things that have been added to the curriculum, and other sector-specific tasks.

The Health trainers hard at work

Our Health training team consists of Doogie (pronounced “daw-gee”), our Technical Coordinator and team lead, and us 4 Resource Volunteers (2 first half, 2 second half). The Health Program Manager for Peace Corps/Mongolia was also there to guide us through the preparations but won’t be working with us on a regular basis during actual PST since she’s also in charge of all the current Health PCVs and those PCVs who live in the central region of Mongolia. And we have our 2 LCFs who will be teaching the Health Trainees, but they were mostly in a separate room doing practice teaching with the other LCFs.

In addition to going through all the session outlines, we had to create a budget for PST, do practice facilitations, find and assign practicum sites (clinics, the hospital, the health department) for the Trainees to work at throughout the summer, arrange locations for joint sessions (where the Trainees and their practicum counterparts attend sessions together), and organize a new peer education program where Trainees will be partnered with peer educators (secondary school students and first-year nursing students) to help them facilitate sexual education lessons. There was a lot to do and it got stressful at times, but we at least got out of the office several times to visit the Darkhan Health Department, several clinics, the Darkhan governor (who remembered us from last year), and our training site, Mangirt. Since it’s a new training site, none of us knew where the Mangirt school was, which is an important place to be able to find since that’s where all the Healthies’ PST sessions would be held.

So after our hard week of getting everything finalized for the newbies, some of us also came into the polytechnic college on Saturday to organize the rooms where Orientation sessions would be taking place and to decorate for their arrival to Darkhan (like our group did last year, the M26s spent a couple days outside of UB before coming to Darkhan for Orientation).

Oh, and we got to stay in sweet apartments during ToT!

Granted they shoved 4 people into each apartment, but only for ToT: each apartment had 2 first-half trainers who would stay until Naadam in July, when the 2 second-half trainers would return to the apartment once more. So even though the one-bedroom apartment I shared with 3 other girls only had two small pull-out sofas–meaning we had to take turns sleeping on the floor–the apartment had a hot shower, fancy washing machine, and wifi! The building is also at a prime location right between the Nomin Department Store and the “Orange Market,” a large shopping center where you can get all your groceries and other necessities and also houses a Good Price, a store that offers many foreign goods such as…

This may be all I eat when I come back to Darkhan

Then I went down to UB for a couple days before my flight back to Uliastai. The Monday after ToT was International Children’s Day, which is a big deal here in Mongolia. And since I was in UB that day, some fellow PCVs and I walked around the city to see all the festivities:

Tomorrow I will fly back to site, where things will return to normal (or as normal as my life can be in Mongolia) for a short time, before my next adventure!