Departure from Ulaanbaatar

 

 

Tess and I were walking across Sukhbaatar Square towards Central Tower on what we thought was our second last day in the country.  The walk was something that I had done literally hundreds if not thousands of times, but now it had a resonant significance.  We thought about our time in the country, already nostalgic for our year in North Asia.  In the days leading up to our departure, Tess put an embargo on naming anything "the last time we'd do (X) in UB" because there were too many last things to name.  But, here we were, crossing the square in the early afternoon surrounded by nomads hanging out, a wedding party organising itself on the steps of Parliament, kids riding their bikes in circles around the square (because it's the best paved spot in the city), young couples hugging on benches, artists selling second rate paintings to tourists and all the rest of the characters of the square.

 

Departing from Ulaanbaatar was much more complex than our arrival.  In real and practical terms, we had to pack up an apartment before we could leave.  Somehow, in a country that demands scrounging and has so little, we had accumulated piles and piles of the mementos and detritus of our life: cans of German soup that we bought but didn't have the courage to open, a fake Christmas tree, books, drawings of gers from students,  pirated DVDs from China, jars of spices smuggled in from abroad and so much more. 

 

Finding packing materials in UB is a reassuringly complex process, entirely appropriate if somehow still unexpected.  The first task was to find garbage bags (the large green or black garden size garbage bags) but, after scouring so many stores, they did not exist in Mongolia (or they had not found their way onto any trains from Germany/Russia for quite some time).  I found some substandard kitchen sized rubbish bags from Turkey and they would have to do the trick, though predictably they tore without fail.

 

The next step was finding boxes.  As you do in Mongolia, you ask around and Danny (from Millie's) suggested going to Naran Tuul (the Black Market), an impossibly large open air market that seems to have just about anything.  Amgaa, a taxi driver who does the driving for Tess' firm, though knew a better place and, upon hearing about our quest for boxes, took it upon himself to drive out to the box store (wherever it was) and pick up our boxes for us, presumably marking up the cost to make himself a tidy profit.  I was happy thought to pay in order to avoid a trip down the pockmarked, gravel and boulder strewn roads of UB which, without fail, always make me carsick. 

 

Before the packing got on in earnest, we had a going away lunch/party at our spy palace apartment.    We gave away lots of books, food, DVDs, random crap, and whatever else anyone wanted.  (The remaining books/DVDs found their way to the bookcase at Millie's, where some of them probably still reside a couple months later.)  Almost all of our friends came over: people from school, expats that Tess worked with, and, of course the mighty ODFW.  We ate lunch, listened to records, chatted, and said goodbye.  A week later, on the night before we were to leave, we went for dinner with a select few to have a more personal goodbye to our best friends.

 

After a week of packing, our lives had been packed into 3 huge suitcases, 5 sturdy Mongol Post boxes to be air freighted to Beijing, and an assortment of carry-on luggage.  On a clear Saturday morning, Amgaa picked us up and drove us to the airport.  It was a sad, quiet trip, perhaps the last time we'd make the trip to Chinggis Khan International, and a car trip that would ultimately take us away from this exciting, crazy, chaotic, emerging, hopeful, despairing country.

Or so we thought.

Despite the clear skies, the flight was delayed to midnight (some 15 hours or so later) because stormy weather may be on its way sort of kind of around the time that we might be taking off, and it's airport policy to not land or take off during any type of stormy weather at all.  Partially this is due to the strange wind patterns at the airport, which the Soviets built in their Soviet wisdom right next to a mountain.  Amgaa had already driven away so we negotiated with a driver to take us back to our empty apartment.  Later that day, we learnt that the flight was delayed until the morning, and so we had another full day in UB where we wandered around, had lunch out, watched some TV and generally did what you do in UB, but in a totally surreal, anti-climatic daze.  Inevitably, we ran into people we know, including Lena and Nick who we had said goodbye to the night before, explaining hastily about our delayed flight and saying goodbye again for the 2nd or 3rd time.

On Sunday morning, 24 hours after we were supposed to depart, we woke to find two identically numbered flights departing for Beijing at two different times that day.  Our calls to the airline and airport were fruitless, dogged by our lack of Mongolian oracy and resultant inability to keep people on the phone for more than a minute before they would hang up on us unceremoniously.  Eventually we called our friend Levi who then got his girlfriend to call the airport on our behalf to learn that, of course, we were on the later flight.  By the time we got to the airport, we were almost 30 hours late and the plane had not even landed yet, requiring another couple hours delayed at the airport, with nothing to do and with frayed (or worse) patience for non caring, openly hostile service from Air China. 

32 hours late, our plane finally took off, and we left Mongolia devoid of that last-day-nostalgia, thankful and happy to leave, even if we'd be arriving in the bureaucratic and liberty free morass of Beijing.  Our departure from Mongolia, ultimately, was a fitting (if depressing) end to our adventure, caught up as we were in a mess of negligence, annoyance, difficulties and painfully arrived upon solutions.  In other words, it was most of the bad of Mongolia without its charms.  As the plane climbed into the clouds, we didn't bother to look out the window, but instead collapsed into our seats exhausted.

Post script

ODFW told me once that he thought that places have a distinctive smell and China's was a fecund mix of cigarretes, decaying garbage and tea.  If Ulaanbaatar has an odour, I think it must be steaming mutton fat and coal smoke.  I imagine that anytime I smell either or both of those, I'll be transported to the crumbling streets of UB and the brief sniffs of buuz that drift out of restuarants onto the coal drenched street. A month or so after leaving UB, in preperation for moving back to Australia, I finally opened up a box of my clothes looking for my winter wear.  As soon as I cracked open the box, the familiar if now stale smell of UB wafted out and cloaked our living room.  The summer heat of Beijing even dovetailed the furnace like intensity of the central heating systems of UB.  A powerful nostalgic mood descended upon me for a flash before I held my nose and kept digging through the box for the sweaters at its bottom.

Lessons From Lessons

At times during the year, I wondered what I was doing teaching Geography in Ulaanbaatar.  The practical reasons were clear: my wife and I had moved to North Asia for her work and I took the best opportunity that I was offered.  But, on the larger picture / symbolic level, a year in Mongolia is something I'll always have to explain and something that makes my "teaching journey" (to use job interview parlance) unique.  After I left Mongolia, I started applying for jobs in earnest back in Australia and had to start thinking through the valences of my year in UB, from a career perspective rather than in the microlevels inherent in living and surviving in Absurdistan.

From one perspective, it was a frustrating and eye opening year where the value of an engaged and competent administration became truly apparent.  Without a consistently logical decision making process, a school becomes utterly rudderless, lacking direction and drive, and this drift impacts upon your professional self, mental health and, eventually, the classroom.  From a teaching perspective, the year was sometimes successful, which is better than unsuccessful.  The task I took on - teaching everyone in the school Geography from years 6 to 10, without appropriate resources or time - was difficult but not impossible.  I had some success but some failure, which is an OK strike rate in the teaching game.  Despite the very real limitations of the school, the positive work I did in the classroom made everything much more tolerable and rewarding.

Late in the year, I was asked to distribute a survey to students about the state of geography at the school.  I wasn't sure what I'd get back, as kids sometimes don't take these things very seriously or just give uniformly positive/bland answers.  Reading through the surveys, the tone was generally positive and some things that I did, such as the Country of the Week, struck a chord with the kids and they all seemed to look forward to learning about more aspects of the world.  When word went around the school that I was leaving at the start of the exam period (rather than the end), a healthy number of students asked me if I was coming back next year, and, when I answered no, they were genuinely disappointed and wished me well.  Those conversations were pleasant if heartbreaking, as part of me wanted to see how these kids would turn out in a year or two or 10.  

On a personal level, getting debate up and running in earnest during the second semester was also a major motivational factor in my year.  It sounds ridiculous but, in a few months and with great help from my friend Levi, I organised and ran an interschool debating competition (over 3 levels) from scratch, managed and coached up to 5 teams, and then took one of those teams to an international competition in freaking Kyrgyzstan (where we made it to the quarterfinals).  The development and growth in all of our teams was truly amazing.  In the senior finals of the competition, two teams from our school debated about whether Mongolia should do more to increase the level of foreign investment in the country.  It was the most complex and nuanced debate I had ever heard in the country, and its topic is so close and important for the future of the country that it was heartening to hear two teams lay out completely reasonable, nuanced and persuasive arguments that avoided jingoism, nationalism and patriotism in favour of facts, arguments, and logic.  Affirmative won but negative's case made me almost believe that stepping away from foreign investment would be good for the country.  

Taking stock of my year of teaching in Mongolia, the lessons from lessons emerge:

• I made some positive connections with students and staff.
• I worked through a lot of stuff as best I could.
• I learnt so much, as you should every year.
• I will always cherish my time in Mongolia as a teacher.
• I'm glad to be moving on.

Mongolian Nazis Must Die

One of the strangest phenomena in the nation is that of the Mongolian Nazi.  In a land without Jews (at least since the end of the Mongol Empire), Nazism is rampant.  It's a particular type of Nazism, in that (a) it stands as a totem for hatred and/or national pride, (b) the main target seems to be Chinese and (c) it's relatively acceptable, or acceptable enough that you can slap it on your car and drive and in broad daylight without fear or shame.

I first became aware of Mongolian Nazis when I turned on a computer in a classroom that I didn't use that often and was confronted with the empty gaze of Hitler in sheer black-and-white as the desktop image.  It was a Chinese classroom but one that was usually left open during the day for kids to come in and use the computer and the space for studying.  I asked around and Lena said that she once asked the kids to bring in a picture of someone to learn how to do a portrait and a number of students asked immediately if they could bring in Adolf.  Lena also said that she saw a couple in full SS gear just hanging out and walking around during a summer festival.  A few times on the weekend, the Mongolian Nazis drove down a street near my apartment in a large convoy with their Nazi flags flying, clad in balaclavas, shouting loudly and looking mighty impressed with themselves.

When Germany was my Country of the Week, I made a rule that anyone who mentioned Hitler or Nazis would be kicked out immediately as it wasn't relevant to the Germany of 2013.  In the very first class, 2 kids yelled out "Hitler!" as soon as I announced the Country of the Week and, following through on the threat, I opened the door and told them to leave.  Later, I went outside and had a chat and asked them what they knew of Hitler, the Nazis or the Holocaust.  They knew basically nothing except that he was "a great military leader, and very patriotic to Germany" (both patently false, by the way).  Their ignorance of Hitler isn't surprising as they aren't taught anything about them and their information is likely filtered through television, the Internet, their families and what they hear on the street.  The kids weren't Nazis but they were shockingly open to what they thought it meant.

I've spoken with Mongolians and done a bit of research on the topic and Mongolian Nazis seem to be a relatively recent movement that has taken up the iconography of Nazis as a sign of national pride and patriotic fervour.  Mongolians often point out that the swastika itself was hijacked by the Nazis as it was a Buddhist symbol and the use of the swastika hearkens back to that usage.  Except, that many Buddhist countries, knowing the signified of the swastika nowadays, have backed away from its use.  As for national pride, there are of course many different ways of expressing your love of your country than resorting to the symbols of one of the most murderous regimes of the 20th century.  As in many things in Mongolia though, the spectre of China and what it stands for, both real and imagined, is at the heart of things.

 

I saw the above sign posted on a door of a hair salon about half a click from my apartment.  I quickly instagrammed it, just as a dude with a Mongolian Nazi jacket on entered the establishment for, one supposes, a quick trim.  It's a spectacular sign in many regards to have so brazenly on a shop.  Before this sign, I didn't know that there were that many Viet people in the country (there aren't but they do work mostly in semi skilled trades such as car repair).   The fact that Viet and Chinese were banned from a place so quotidian as a hair salon is striking.  What did this Nazi salon fear by cutting their hair? Making money?  Being "infected" by Chinese/Viet hair?  Decency?

There are a number of groups on Facebook called "Fuck China" (or some variant) started by Mongolian Nazis/Nationalists.  Generally, these groups just seem to exist for awhile to post banal gross photos and gossip in Mongolian (and sometimes English) about how China is evil before they get shut down.  Once, through an Expat Facebook group, I saw a link to a YouTube video on one of these groups of a veritable gang of Mongolian Nazis going to a garage somewhere in the countryside, beating the shit out of  the two or three Vietnamese and Chinese staff, playing for the camera and threatening to come back the next day and do the same.  The violence on the video was visceral: full of snot and blood and cruelty for no absolute reason.  It was a cowardly attack on a couple dudes just trying to make a living in a tough country.

I should be clear here to say that Mongolian Nazis are a minority of the population, but they exist in plain sight.  Many Mongolians hate the ignorance of these Nazi pricks.  But, you might not see something everyday but it's a regular thing to see Nazi swastikas on cars or Hitler statues at the Black Market or even just hear something racist about Chinese people.  The severity of these sightings differs wildly but it remains that this is part of the discourse of a country, which filters down to 12 or 13 year olds from privileged families (and, I'm assuming, much further down).  Much like their Surf brethren, Mongolian Nazis must die.

Rites of Spring

Ulaanbaatar is a city of divisions: between locals and expats, locals and repats, repats and expats, rich locals and poor locals, countryside locals and city locals, and on and on.  The expat community likewise breaks down into a few tightly enforced groups.  There are the mining types (on and off site), the UN/NGO types who have been here forever, young American and Australian do-gooders from the Peace Corps or AYAD, expats-by-love, the exiles and degenerates that I've written about previously, random European adventurers, diplomats, and the Chinese and North Koreans that are in Mongolia for work who are rarely seen in town.

These communities distrust, hate and often don't even know one another. As someone who doesn't slide into any of these categories very easily, I've been part of many a conversation where NGOs/mining companies are slagged by the other side, even though the slagger knows no one personally from their imagined foe.  There's an aura of distrust via ignorance that permeates UB on all sides.

With spring though comes the type of person that all can agree to hate: the tourist.  After not gracing UB for months due to the deep chill of winter, they start to bob up and about in early March.  Suddenly, the city feels much more crowded.  You might find them taking up tables at Millie's or Rosewood during lunch that you had a right to after planting your bum in those chairs at -45C for months.   They could be strolling in front of you, oblivious to the rhythms and protocol of the Mongolian street.  Or they might just be having drinks at an Irish bar, looking hopefully at the wait staff for service that, this being Mongolia, may never come.

You can spot them a mile away.  Clad invariably in what you might call "safari gear" (white or light coloured button up shirts, completely new hiking boots and, of course, a freaking safari vest) despite being in the middle of a postindustrial city, they walk around the streets aimlessly grasping their expensive camera, often wandering straight into the vicinity of pickpockets and thieves.  They move in large numbers in suspiciously new clothes as if they had all gone to some "adventuring" shop in whatever country they came from and chose the "Mongolia special."

There are of course tribes, to get old school anthropology on you, within the tourist community.  The major categories here are the backpacker, the professional backpacker, the Eurotrash adventurer and the Aussie bogan tourist (not many but they find their way up here).  We hate all of them, and, in this hate, we find an ultra rare feeling of what we might call a communion of life in UB: that we (all expats, locals, repats, whatever) share the experience of living and surviving in Mongolia in the medium to long term.  There is a palpable sense that in order to enjoy Mongolia in the spring and summer then you must endure its winter, and skipping the difficult part is a galling defiance of that communion.  Plus, they are, for the most part, fucking annoying.

A Nation of Fitzy Solutions

As the ice and snow recedes, the streetscapes of Ulaanbaatar begin to reveal their true selves, unadorned and unconcealed by the cover of extreme weather, or its waste products.  The potholes magically return as if newly created (instead of just filled in with ice), the sidewalks' deep crevices open up like the varicose veins of an old man and the inner structure of buildings reveals themselves as usually just poorly laid bricks and mortar slapped up and covered by a thin veneer of concrete to hide the shoddiness of the work.

It's also the time of the year when improvement projects are started (though not always finished).  Coming home after a month of travel, the front door of our apartment building had been replaced, the stairway repainted with green and gold racing stripes and the landings were newly tiled.  All of these changes were unexpected as our landlord, in his typical mix of neglect and laziness, hadn't told us any of these changes would be happening or what the code was to get into the building.  It took the work of our intrepid cleaner to find the code and inform us via other intermediaries.

In any case, after dinner one night, I came home to find 3 dudes wielding gigantic, gas fuelled soldering torches straight out of the Soviet era, blasting something onto the top of the apartment's doorway, which coincidentally was just outside my window.  They worked without safety gear (of course) and without care for whatever they were trying to achieve.  As the sun set, they finished their soldering job - or whatever the hell they were doing - and turned to painting the entrance way in the dark.  The next morning revealed a half done, all shitty job done.  They came back and added more layers of paint, and then went to work on laying bricks and concrete down to fix the stoop (it didn't need fixing).  Basically, they poured some concrete in front of the existing stairs, placed bricks in a line on top of the concrete and called it a day.

A friend of ours in UB worked in construction as a day job while in university in Australia and often says that Mongolians just don't really know how to do anything.  There are no trades, and most men don't have the skills to do the jobs needed to run a country (or just pour concrete properly).  This gap in skills may be traced back to either the Soviet era, a Nomadic-herding recent past or just plain incompetence.  But, I've recently began to think of it as something else entirely: Mongolia is a nation built as a series of "Fitzy Solutions."

Let me explain a bit here.  A "Fitzy Solution" is something that I've become increasingly familiar with over the years as I've become more and more aware of the workings and rhythms of my wife's family.  Usually devised by Tess' dad, a Fitzy Solution is born out of a creative mind that desires a frugal yet effective fix for a problem, despite not really knowing how to fix the thing in question for real.  Thus, all sorts of implements might be used to find a way for the thing in question to function normally (or as close to normally as possible).  I've seen plastic knives, crayons, metal rods, screwdrivers, used gum, old rags and more used to fix mechanical devices, shoes, sink plugs, dishwashers, and more.  The Fitzy Solution may work (it usually does) but it's a slapdash, temporary fix that usually entrenches itself as a permanent solution, before needing another Fitzy Solution to take over.

Similarly, Ulaanbaatar's infrastructure, housing, and general joie-de-vivre seems to be built as a series of Fitzy Solutions.  Roads are repaired by throwing some asphalt and concrete into the potholes (instead of repaved fully).  Paint is splashed on an entrance way in the middle of the night.  Bricks are haphazardly slapped into uneven mortar and then covered over by a building's casing not to be seen for a few years until the casing crumbles or the building just falls over.  Sidewalks are paved over with a random assortment of building materials which all seem to be liable to becoming extraordinarily slippery in winter (which of course lasts for most of the year).  In the end, Fitzy Solutions do the job but only just.  They lead to more issues, which are in turn addressed by another Fitzy Solution.  The cycle is self replicating and cascading.

Part of this slipshod approach to addressing the problems of the city are from the lack of building materials produced in the country and a lack of local knowledge of how to effectively and purposefully improve a city that was built for 250,000 people but have perhaps 5 or 6 times that number in it.  The genius of a Fitzy Solution is that it works but only just.  But, if an entire city (or even country) is built on them, the whole thing continually reproduces issues without a true solution in sight.   Development is development except when it's not.

Returns

Here begins the Final Chapter of ICantBelieveItsNotBaatar.  We left UB a couple days ago but I was so exhausted with the business of leaving that I didn't have the time or inclination to write about it at the time.  I will though have a series of 5 or 6 final posts to conclude the blog, before it seeps into the ether of the dead blogs that so populate the Internet.

April was a month of travel for me.  I spent little time in UB or even Mongolia and instead I found myself far from the exhilarating chaos of this country.  My travel itinerary reads and feels a bit ridiculous: From UB to Bishkek to Lake Issyk Kul to Manas Airport, Bishkek to UB (for 6 hours) to Beijing to Hong Kong airport to Melbourne to Hong Kong (in what turned out to be a visa run) to Beijing and finally back to UB on May 2nd.  All told, I think I spent over 30 hours in the air and perhaps up to 60 if you include all the time getting to and from airports, waiting, driving through the Kyrgyz landscape, and so on.

After all this time away, returning to UB generates a unique feeling that mixes anticipation, dread, hope, relief, depression and buoyancy.  You may start to feel it when you first hear someone speaking Mongolian in the airport, after going without its whispered, squelching and spittle-infused timbre for the time you've been out of the country.  Or, it might start when you're on the plane and you spot the endless brown of the steppe out of the window.  Or, alternately, it could hit you as you pass through the impossibly quaint airport and emerge into the arrivals "hall" (it's more of a small lounge at Chinggis Khan International).

Tess recently said that Mongolia's good nicely balances out its negative aspects.  While it has its difficulties (weather, supply chains, occasional whispers of expats being robbed/kidnapped/raped), we have found UB to be an easier place to actually live in than say Beijing.   There's so few interesting, non-degenerate expats that once you meet someone that may be sane (or at least not insane) you make efforts to include them in your circle.  This isn't to say that UB isn't cliquey, because it is, but that there just aren't that many cliques and generally people slide into a crew with relative ease, as compared to more usual expat spots like Beijing where making friends is an alienating experience, for the most part.

What I guess that I'm getting at is that returning to UB feels like coming home.  You're glad to be able to use your stuff and to sleep in a familiar bed and to see your friends, but somewhat disappointed by what you call home.  I first came to UB in January 2012, unsure of what we were getting into and unsure of what to expect, but somehow over the past 18 months or so, I've been there more and more (moving there full time in August) and it's become home.

As I flew in on the morning of May 2nd, I experienced an acute form of this feeling.  This would be the last time that this return would be a return home.  Ostensibly, I was returning to gather our shit and get out of there (and eventually return back to Australia).  So, although we might go back to Mongolia in a few years to check out the development (or lack there of), it wouldn't be a return home.  As the plane touched down, I thought to myself, "So begins the end."

Returns are always linked to departures.

You have to be hard in Central Asia, Part 2

Upon arrival at the tournament site, we were assigned our rooms, which were scattered throughout the compound.  My students were taken away to their rooms, and I was spirited off to an obscure corner of the resort.  I entered the townhouse that I was assigned to find that it was full.  One of the residents helpfully suggested that I could share a bed with a boy, but of course I declined and went searching for the tournament organisers who eventually told me that I was assigned to the wrong townhouse and then showed me to my coaches only house.  I choose a bed at random and went off to find my students.

This was a harder process than it should be.  I patiently explained that I needed to know where they were, since I was responsible for their safety as their teacher.  (Before leaving Mongolia, I had signed three notarised documents that effectively said that I was their guardian for the duration.)  Eventually, someone told me the answer and I found them getting settled into their rooms, and busy meeting other kids from around Asia. 

As an Asian championships of a sort, this debate tournament featured teams from all around Asia, but with a concentration of teams from Central Asia (Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan were especially well represented) and South East Asia.  No teams from East Asia (unless you counted us, which you might as well do) or South Asia.  Pakistan had a couple teams apparently but they backed out after the funding was less than expected, and Nepal's visas were denied absurdly by Kyrgyzstan for unknown reasons.  (Kyrgyzstan immigration procedures were the most lax ones I've ever experienced: no forms, no fees, no questions, just a stamp and you're in if you're from the developed world or the CIS.)  

Debate tournaments are strange beasts, and our expectations going in wavered between modest goals (let's not come last) and delusions of grandeur (we should be able to easily win this thing).  Perhaps I should have done some more research and watched some debates from Central Asia on YouTube beforehand, but we had little idea about the quality of competition, expectations of adjudicators or style of teams.  I also didn't know that I was going to be a judge in the tournament until the day I arrived expecting to just coach my team to respectability.  Instead, I was to judge at least 6 debates in 3 days in a format I was relatively unfamiliar, and with no real experience judging debates.  

Our team survived the first debate with a clear win, but the adjudications were strange, obsessed with things like "clashes," devoid of mention of method (structure) or manner (way of speaking), and looking for refutation instead of rebuttal.  Indeed, in the debate that I judged, the adjudication of another judge was from another world: in a debate where the negative team offered no rebuttal and did not engage with affirmative's team, she gave it to negative.  As a team, we hunkered down and decided to ditch our thematic rebuttal, and instead renamed it "clashic rebuttal" and decided to play up "clashes" as judges (aside from me and a few others) did not seem to like a debate that weighed up competing arguments and models, instead preferring to see arguments taken down and refuted, as if it was a professional wrestling match with words.  

With our adjustments, we ran the table to 4 and 0, before losing the final two debates of the round robin in close decisions against the top 2 teams.  Basically, after each round teams were reseeded based on their results and so you constantly went up against teams that were at or above your level.  This made for a bit of a wonky tournament that sacrificed the certainty of a draw, and allowed other teams to roll through to finals debating against other mediocre teams.

Regardless, we came into finals feeling as if we had a real shot at winning everything,  Our team had a strong reputation for its precision in its arguments, closeness and ability to win at secret topics.  We won the first final in a close one against a rapidly improving Malaysia and went into the quarter finals with dreams of victory in our heads.  Unfortunately, the decision went against us unfairly, which happens in the randomness of debating and the style of adjudication which boggles my mind to this day.

One of the strangest features of the tournament was how we debated the same topic 3 times (!!) and only in the end did 3 secret topics, when we had extensively prepared for secret topics and won them all.  The repetition of the same topic made for inaccurate judging, from my experience as a coach or judge, because by the time you've seen 2 of these debates, your mind wanders from the debate at hand and to the realm of what you've seen or heard before, especially when you have judged 7 or 8 debates total.  I myself judged past the round robin and into the octofinals round, though thankfully I was finally taken off the roster for quarter finals.  You can't help but have your mind not focus completely after debate #7 in 3 or 4 days.

In any case, coming 5th overall and having 2 speakers in the top 10 of the individual best speaker award (#3 and #8) was a very good achievement, especially for a team that had only really come together and gotten serious a couple months before the tournament.  After a night where we tended to our psychical wounds and grievances, we breakfasted together and spoke to each other about how well we did, and how debate's a random game at the best of times.  It was a cathartic and important moment and allowed us to look into the tournament and take from it what we had achieved.

In the days following the tournament, the labs started and these days rounded off our trip on a positive and educational note.  The kids moved into their debating labs, and I went into the coaches/judges stream where we discussed strategy, organisation of tournaments, breaking down topics, educational possibilities, and more.  I wished these sessions came earlier because Central Asian approaches to debate differed substantially from the Australian tradition that my knowledge comes from and which, strangely enough, Mongolian debating now revolves around (especially taking into account the debate tournament we've organised in UB that uses almost exclusively Australian rules, scoring methods and expectations).

We left the tournament before it was over.  We had planned this for months, since our students had to get back for exams and the school was rightly reticent to have students away for almost half a month.  In the planning stages, leaving early always seemed a prudent decision, both in terms of costs and sanity.  Like, how could you talk and live and breathe debating for more than 10 days at a time and not go crazy?  But, as the date of our departure approached, our thoughts all turned to how we wish we could have stayed for longer and for the second part of the tournament, a mixed teams challenge.

There was more than a hint of sadness on our final day at the tournament.  It was also the excursion and games day.  We left the resort for a crazy religious tourist attraction on the lake, which featured mini temples to all the major world religions (except hinduism), as well as extensive art galleries and a monument and building dedicated to a great Kyrgyz poet.  We walked around the park in a bit of a daze, feeling wistful and already nostalgic for the time we had spent here.  Returning to the resort, we packed our bags, the kids played games on the beach, and I read a book quietly in my room.

Our ride picked us up at 9:30 PM.  We had a flight at 4 AM the next morning and I decided to go directly from the lake to the airport, instead of spending an evening with our bags in Bishkek and leaving earlier in the day.  As we left, a large group of Tajik and Kyrgyz debaters showered us with songs and handshakes and, for our kids, wrote their email addresses and facebook profiles on whatever they could find, whether it be a scrap of paper, or a hand or a forearm, so that one of my students left with sharpie markings all over her arms from the boys and girls of Central Asia.

In retrospect, my night time escape from Lake Issyk Kul was not the best plan that I've ever devised.  We left in pitch blackness and the road around the lake was perfectly acceptable.  On the way in, I found out that the road through the mountains though was being repaved and widened.  In the middle of the day, the road was passable but not great, but in dark it was shockingly and scarily unsafe especially as cars in both directions shared a one lane highway that snaked its way up and down the Tien Shan mountains.  To make matters worse, a slight drizzle started, which soon developed into an outright torrential downpour.

Our Kyrgyz driver did his best to pilot us safely, and he turned out to be a safe, cautious and excellent driver.  (Other cars seemed to hurtle themselves through the road at ridiculous velocities.  We later passed them as their vans' engines billowed out smoke.)  That didn't though stop me from picturing in lurid detail our death in the Tien Shan.  At times, to make matters even worse, the driver would stop the car, pull over, kick the tires, tighten the nuts on the tires and tinker with the engine in the pouring rain.  There were perhaps 4 of these stops, each becoming more and more frightening than the last, especially as I coudn't communicate with him as he didn't speak English and I can't speak Russian or Kyrgyz.

After an hour and a half, we made it through the mountains and found ourselves in the plains of Northern Kyrgyztsan.  By the time, we made it to the airport at 2 AM, I had finally fallen asleep.  Awakened by the bright lights of the airport, I silently said a prayer and woke up the kids, who had slept the entire trip (as I had advised them to).  As we got out of the van at the departures level of Manas airport, I thrust 2000 som (about $40) into our driver's fist, thanking him in my worse than elementary Russian for his efforts in getting us safely to the airport.

We walked into the airport, which is an even more dreary and horrible spot at 2 AM than Chinggis Khan International in UB, and breathed a sigh of relief.  Eventually we went through to the gates and then tried our best to spend the rest of our money, before boarding the plane back to Mongolia in the dead of the Kyrgyz night as it continued to pour down endless sheets of rain.

You have to be hard in Central Asia.

You have to be hard in Central Asia, Part 1

There are moments in life when you think, "How have I ended up here?"  And then there are moments when you ask yourself, "What sort of choice did I make to set off this crazy chain of events that has led to me facing immense, imminent danger (or worse) in this exact setting?"  The latter thought occurred to me as we were travelling through the Tien Shan mountain range in Kyrgyzstan, hurtling our Russian minivan straight down a mountain on unfinished roads in the middle of a torrential downpour at midnight.  A newspaper headline danced in my head: 5 Dead in Kyrgyzstan Car Accident: 1 Canadian Teacher, 1 Singaporean Student, 2 Mongolian Students, 1 Kyrgyz Driver Crash in a Remote Region of the Tien Shan.

Let's take a step back.  So, I was in Kyrgyzstan for basically the first half of April, acting as a coach and judge at the IDEA Asia Youth Forum, with a very small school group (there were 4 of us, me included).  We came to represent Mongolia, and to get a glimpse of post-Soviet central Asia, as opposed to the "Central Asia" that also encompasses Mongolia, despite its geographic isolation from the heart of the region.  And, by heart, I mean the "Stans" - Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, probably Afghanistan and, of course, Kyrgyzstan.  Our itinerary took us to Bishkek, the Kyrgyz capital, for 3 days of exploration and pre-debate tournament prep, before our hired van would drive us through the mountains to Lake Issyk Kul, a large salt water lake nestled in a mountain range that was the favoured holiday spot of Soviet cadres back in the day, as well as a nuclear sub test site.  All of us expected to find a slightly different, probably less developed (and, frankly, crappier) version of Mongolia.

We arrived in Bishkek in the early afternoon and were met at the airport by the office manager of the national office of the packaged food company that the father of one of our students heads up in Mongolia.  It was an obscure connection, but we appreciated the inside knowledge and hospitality shown by the Food Empire team, as well as how we managed to avoid the haggling and scheming that is inherent in developing world airport lounges.  The first thing we noticed as we drove into the city was the order, and the infrastructure of this part of Kyrgyzstan.  In UB, the road to the airport is an obstacle course of potholes, gravel pits and random ass holes in the pavement, but Bishkek's road was well paved, signed in Cyrillic and Latin alphabets, and even had proper exits and entrances like a real road.  

Bishkek itself was a beautiful city, the archetype of a Soviet capital.  Radiating out from Ala Too Square (see above), the central bit of the city was a seamless blend of beautiful parks, tree lined majestic boulevards, a surprising range of styles of Soviet apartment blocks, an enormous museum, and seemingly thousands of statutes and sculptures (devoted mostly to Communist themes and people) dropped here and there throughout the city.  One striking feature of the city was in its relative absence of new developments and in its lack of height, with barely any buildings exceeding the 7 stories of the White House (the main government building).   

It's when you leave Bishkek that you see why Kyrgyzstan was the 2nd poorest nation in the USSR, and why it still struggles economically.  The closest towns to Bishkek are relatively ordered, with small Soviet apartment blocks nestled into decent sized and maintained houses.  But, as you travel further away from the capital, the towns turned increasingly dusty with mud brick huts dotting the landscape, livestock hanging out in the yards of a lot of homes (some crossing the highway to eat more grass, from time to time) and either (a) the shuttered hulls of once functioning Soviet factories or (b) a complete lack of industry.  Each town though has a gleaming new mosque, though moderately sized, usually by the side of the road (see below for Kosh Kol's version).  Some towns, as they are, are more depressing than others and Balkychy (a large town on eastern edge of Lake Issyk Kul) was especially disheartening in its post Soviet crumble and destitution.

Islam in Kyrgyzstan is fascinating, and seems roughly equivalent to the place of Buddhism in Mongolia in that the Soviets (and their local henchmen) tried to stamp out the influence of religion in the country, and now people are starting to rediscover their religious heritage.  86% of Kyrgyz people are Muslim, but the way the practise their religion seems to vary wildly, with urban Kyrgyz as more likely to treat Islam as more of an ethnic marker, and less directly of a religious practise.  The rural areas are much more Muslim, but, still, I have never seen as much vodka and beer in a Muslim country as I did in Kyrgyztsan.

After nearly 5 hours in the van, we arrived at the Kapriz Rest Centre for the debate tournament.  Unlike basically everyone else, we had made our own way to the lake (mostly because I was organising the trip and I needed to lock down our transport more than a day or two in advance).  This had the advantage of actually having time in Bishkek as well as driving through the beautiful countryside at the time we wanted to go, but had the utter disadvantage of arriving to the surprise of the organising committee.  Regardless, we had arrived and we were anxious to start debating.

To be continued.....

The Debate Tournament

We were standing in the library after the first round of the debate tournament and Pat, who works for the US Treasury and coaches the debate team of an international school in town on a voluntary basis, turned to Our Dear Friend Will and I and mused, "why are any of us here?  We were all high school debaters."  ODFW agreed, but I got into debate because I lied in a job interview about the depth of my experience in debate and my enthusiasm for getting involved in extra curricular activities.  I got the job but then I had to figure out how to coach (and coordinate) a school's debating program.  So, I turned to Tess, a real high school debating champion, learnt what I needed to know and found myself with a thousand dollar budget on my first day as a graduate teacher.

In Victoria, we were part of the DAV competition, which is perhaps the largest high school debating competition in the world.  Hundreds of schools both state and private, thousands of kids, vying for debating supremacy across 4 levels.  I took my team, the VUSC Debate Mighty Ducks, to 4th place (their best result ever) and fell in love with debate.  At its best, basically, you have kids passionately arguing for (or against) solutions for the world, while thinking through the moral, political, economic and ethical considerations of their ideas.  Since most debaters are nerdburgers, it generally doesn't devolve into megalomania but is instead warmly earnest in its intent, and savagely competitive: a sport for those with brains and no athleticism whatsoever.

Mongolia doesn't have anything close to the DAV.  In fact, the national championships were hijacked by a certain school who didn't invite any other school, then declared themselves the National champions in an internal "competition."  After a month of tentative planning with Pat, the administration at school declared that the school would be hosting a tournament and that my friend Levi and I would be organizing it.  It would start in 10 days, there would be competitions for every grade, and, despite being the only school we had been working with at that point, Pat's school was not to be invited because they didn't use the same Cambridge curriculum as us.  We didn't have any kids involved below grade 9 yet, as debate had often been placed on the shelf in favour of talent shows, dysentery pandemics and other unfortunate interruptions.

And, so, Levi and I went off and did the best we could (a truly Mongolian refrain).  We pushed back the first debate by a week, invited 3 other schools including Pat's, established the format (based on DAV rules) with 3 levels, hastily put together junior and intermediate teams, put out the word for adjudicators and hoped for the best when Round 1 rolled around.  For the most part, it went well with the standard of debate varying wildly from barely coherent juniors to intensely dramatic and confrontational seniors.

Since that first debate, we have had another 2 rounds (in one day) and are now preparing for playoffs.  At our school, the kids are engaged and have worked exceedingly hard to raise their game for the pride of the school.  We've found that the best way to organize it has been to listen to the administration and then just do what we want, which is usually the more logical approach.  After Round 1, there were complaints that it was too chaotic to just put up schedules around the school and expect teams to find their way to the right classroom.  Instead, we should have had a meeting with everyone to tell them where to go.  The next time around, we put up schedules and ran it as before.  As expected, things went even better this time.

For round 2, because of the need to conduct 2 debates in a day, we said we were going to offer pizza or a snack for the debaters (and the adjudicators, who are all expats in town with jobs and obligations who had volunteered their time for the sake of debate).  We proposed a budget, waited a week, and then were turned down seemingly on a financial basis.  I ordered and paid for the pizzas myself (a not unsubstantial cost), because we had promised them and they were plainly necessary for kids to have enough energy to debate for up to 2 hours after a full day of school.  Needless to say, the pizzas were a hit and contributed a festive spirit to the day.

Unknown to anyone though, apparently it's school policy that there should be no outside food due to the dysentery pandemic ... which was caused by the school's own cafeteria months ago.  This policy had never been circulated nor mentioned to any foreign teacher nor posted anywhere.  It seems basic, but if no one knows the rules, how are we supposed to follow them.  Of course, despite the general success of the tournament so far, no thanks have been forthcoming from most figures in administration (except notably our dean of foreign teachers) for the dozens of extra hours we have put into it.

Pat was right: we are all high school debaters, if in spirit only.

Exiles and Degenerates

There are many types of expats, but there is a class that has landed where ever they are because they cannot succeed (or even plainly exist) anywhere else.  Some of this class is basically harmless, exiled by circumstances outside their control, such as in the legions of Americans in China (and elsewhere) who couldn't find employment after graduating into post GFC America.  I'm also not talking about those who have found themselves here in Mongolia due to love or family or young adventurers here for a year or two in their twenties.  In UB, however, this exiled class runs more towards the end of the expat spectrum populated by degenerates and desperates who must have made such an epic sequence of terrible decisions and ill considered choices to end up in Ulaanbaatar.  They're usually relatively unconnected to the mineral resources boom that brings in the other class of more successful, temporary expats.

It's a small town so these are well known figures in UB.  Most of them seem to congregate at Millie's, to eat sandwiches and fries at alarmingly regular times, plot their company's next futile manoeuvre, and usually bullshit with other customers, Millie's impresario Danny and anyone who might look like they would listen.  One time, a particularly crazy one named K. sat down at my table, asked if I was from Ohio, and, upon finding out about that I was actually from Edmonton, waxed nostalgically and loudly about the merits of Wayne Gretzky.  Our Dear Friend Will was once cornered by K. (they're both from Ohio) and suffered through an aimless conversation about home, the sexual exploits of K.'s boss (who later fled the country under less than savoury terms) and why K. ended up in Mongolia.  (Why any of us are here is a topic that seems to be a mandatory conversation topic, regardless of your sanity and degeneracy.)

This is not to say that all of this class of expats are bad people.  Of course, they're here because they have to support their kids, or pay their alimony, or try to make it rich so they can return home one day in the distant future.  But, for me, the more I stay away reinforces my desire to return to the developed world sooner rather than later.  The fact that I have an end date to this sojourn is infinitely comforting.

Journey to Iceland

One of the pleasures of Mongolia is escaping the post soviet crumble of Ulaanbaatar for the endless steppe of the countryside.  Mongolians hold "going to the countryside" as a national passion, and I often find students scribbling its imagos (gers, horses, rolling hills) into the sides of their notebooks as one would scribble the logo of the favourite boyhood professional sports franchise.  The countryside itself is concurrently stark, beautiful and dismal with its never ending hills, empty expanses and the pure whiteness of its landscape during winter.  You can drive for hours after leaving Ulaanbaatar and see very little signs of habitation.  The country's vast size and tiny population mean that there isn't that much in whole swaths of the country.

I haven't gone to the countryside enough during my time in Mongolia due to Tess' fly in fly out schedule (she usually flies to Beijing on the weekend), winter weather and my need to lay low on weekends and recover for another week at school.  But every time that I have left UB, I have come back refreshed, full of clean air and good spirits, and wishing to get out more.  Many expats say that Mongolia's only tolerable when you leave UB: I don't completely agree but the countryside definitely adds to the experience here.

There are many things to do but most countryside visits from UB seem to combine a trip to "Mr. Chinggis" and to Terelj National Park.  "Mr. Chinggis" is an enormous, stainless steel statue of Chinggis (Genghis) Khan mounted on a horse.  It's huge (30 metres or so tall) and it stands basically in the middle of nowhere.  On the drive in, which always lasts longer than you think it will, you don't really see that statue at all until you're just outside its gates.  It just emerges out of the ether as if it's a mirage.  Chinggis is also positioned in direct opposition to the Chinese border, as a provocation to invade at Chinese peril.  Inside the statue is a gigantic boot, 2 very good museums with a private collection on Mongol artefacts, and, best of all, a staircase and elevator up to an observation platform on top of the head of Chinggis' horse.  After making your way up the small and dangerously dark staircase, you emerge out of Chinggis' crotch onto the viewing platform.  Aspiring Freudians can make of that whatever you will.  Terelj is a gorgeous national park, largely untouched by poorly thought out development (there's some of course, it's Mongolia), where we've typically had lunch at a ger camp and walked around a large rock that it vaguely shaped like a turtle, before heading back to the smog and chaos of UB.

A couple weekends ago, my friend Lena asked if I'd like to go out on a day trip to the countryside.  Tess had been in Australia and Beijing for work for a while, and I was tiring of the city, so I said yes.  We gathered on a Sunday morning in front of the State Department Store and headed off in 2 cars.  I shared car space with an enterprising and energetic boy named Buya (see above), a Greek banker who worked for the Mongolian Stock Exchange, and a couple Mongolian friends of Lena's.  As you leave UB, you drive from a central area of crumbling but basically functional neighbourhoods to the unfinished/never finished outer areas to the ger districts that are the relatively unplanned, chaotic areas of mostly gers (yurts), temporary structures, and some completed houses.  Ger districts house perhaps half of the city's population (maybe 600,000 people), most of whom have emigrated into the capital city looking for opportunities promised but rarely delivered for the ger district residents by the mining and resources boom.  Eventually, you emerge out of the smoke cloud that hangs in UB and find yourself if the clear, clean air and emptiness of the countryside.

Because it's Mongolia, when you see a nomad family with a huge vulture, an eagle and a couple camels hanging out by the side of the highway, you must stop.  You can pay to ride the camels (4000 tugs or $2.50) or to have an eagle perch on your shoulder (3000 tugs) or just to take pictures of them (maybe a thousand).  We took the pictures, Buya rode a camel, Steve took a photo with an eagle on his shoulder, and we paid our money as a platoon from the Mongolian military absurdly jogged past. After Chinggis, we found a spot in Terelj for our "picnic" which mostly entailed standing in snow and eating cold pizza, bread, and, again this being Mongolia, so many sweets.  We played a bit of a volleyball related game, before heading back to see Turtle Rock and eventually back to UB.

You see the smoke before you see the city.  After driving through the clear, and blazing blue skies of the countryside, about half an hour before you hit UB,  the smokey haze of the city hangs in the air ahead of you, as if suspended in a solution.  In the city itself, you run into Sunday afternoon traffic jams , which are basically the same as any other day's traffic chaos.  Dropped off near the State Department Store, the city seems dirtier, more underdeveloped, and haphazardly thrown together than in the morning. 

Prolonged time in UB has a way of numbing your expectations of a city.

On Turning 30

Note: I've been a bit slack with the frequency of posts here and I'm going to try to get back on the one a week pace I was at before Christmas.  Look out for future entries on organising debate tournaments, the coming of spring and journeys to the countryside.

A few weeks ago I turned 30.  It wasn't much of an event.  On the day in question, I was sick in bed with a mild case of food poisoning and then Tess and I went out to dinner at Millie's, a diner, where we were joined by Our Dear Friend Will, who just happened to be there too.  (ODFW basically lives there when in UB.)  Some nice conversation and a few iced teas later, Tess and I went home and watched some TV and fell asleep by the stately hour of 10 o clock.

Perhaps it's this lack of event that's emblematic of the event in question.  10 years ago, I'm not sure what I did when I turned 20 (I lived in residence in 2nd year university) but I'm pretty sure it didn't involve quiet chats about the state of Mongolia, and an episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, before turning in at 10. And if it actually did, I'm so overly romanticising my early 20s in my memory that I've blocked out those memories.

We went out for dinner the next night with a bunch of friends at Hazara, a north Indian restaurant that is probably the best restaurant in town.  Near the end of the night, ODFW asked whether I had any insights into turning 30, or even just turning 30 in UB.  No, not really, I answered, except that I never thought I'd end up celebrating the milestone in Mongolia.

Nobody does, replied ODFW.

A Night at the Movies

One of the most frequent questions we get asked about life in UB when not in UB is "What do you do there?"  It's a strange question to try to answer wherever you live, and it's also a question that I don't think our friends who live in Chicago or Hong Kong or Berlin or NYC or London have to deal with that often.  What I think that the question is really getting at is to just describe life in a spot that they've probably never heard of at all.   (For example, many people in Indonesia thought that Mongolia was in Africa.)

The reality though is that life in Ulaanbaatar can be as banal and inconsequential as life anywhere.  You do your thing.  You go to work.  You hang out at your local spots with your friends. You watch TV and DVDs at home.  You make a life.  The details of that life (the cold, the scrounging, the alternity of it all at times) are different of course, and it's in the margins of these difference that I've been writing about (however infrequently) on this blog.

In any case, if I had to put an answer to the question that I opened with, it would be "we go to the movies."  The cinema experience in UB is one of the true highlights of life here.  We go almost every Saturday and we watch everything that gets here, which are mostly middle grade, low brow action flicks.  The movie distribution system in Mongolia is a mystery, as it seems that the cinemas never seem to know the exact release dates of any forthcoming movies.  Instead, they play whatever they have until a new movie is delivered.  A hasty announcement that they're playing something new goes out on their website and then you go see the new Tom Cruise vehicle that bombed in markets that actually matter.

The thing that really sets the movie going experience here apart from elsewhere is the omnipresence of young kids in the theatre, whatever movie is playing and whatever the time.  Last Saturday night, we saw the terrible new Arnold Schwarzenegger film, The Last Stand.  Saturday was the eve of Tsagan Sar, which is the Mongolian version of Lunar New Year, so the cinema was empty aside from ourselves and perhaps 3 other couples, as well as 2 or 3 toddlers who spent most of the time running up and down the aisle, occasionally pausing to look at the screen as Arnie shoot a bad guy in the face or blow up a building or strike a heroic pose as he's doing either of those acts.  The kids act like kids so they make noise and talk loudly to each other and generally hold free reign over the theatre.

The thing is, once you accept their presence, the kids are actually an integral part of the Mongolian cinema experience, if not the experience of the country as a whole.  Children are everywhere: from the movies to the streets to restaurants.  In the movies though, whether they're running the aisles or getting into the Bond movie with their parents or transfixed by the latest Pixar movie, their presence isn't ever galling but instead just part of the local flavour of the things that we do.

Walking in the City

Without a bike or car and mistrusting public transit, walking is my primary way of getting around town, or at least the 4 km radius that I operate in.  Walking in UB is a peculiar experience.  On my way to school, for example, the quality of the path ranges from pristine (beside the parliament building) to tolerable if sometimes lacking (near the university) to nonexistent (near school).  And, by non existent, I mean just that: the pavement disappears, or it's been covered over by (take your pick) dirt, debris, broken bricks, garbage, ice and snow.  In the spring and fall, workers randomly excavate parts of footpaths for reasons unknown and then just move on or stop their explorations due to winter, so that walking in the city involves a lot of walking over crevices, open sewers filled with garbage and electrical wire and just plain old holes in the ground.

Recently, I've been considering whether UB is in ruins or if was never finished in the first place.  The number of odd, misplaced, useless, and absurd structures you come across in a brisk walk around town is striking and unmissable.  Last week, as I was leaving the supermarket/department store near school, I  spied a bridge across the river (see above) that, since it was more generally in the direction that I was going than my usual route home from that spot, I reasoned was going to be a bit of short cut and that it would surely link up with Peace Avenue, the main street in town.  As I approached the bridge, I noticed it had no railings of any kind, and the usual crumbling concrete that is endemic of Mongolian infrastructure.  When I reached the bridge, I found that to get on the bridge, involved climbing up an icy embankment to reach an improvised "staircase" (i.e. a couple bricks stacked up next to a short concrete wall of the bridge).  The bridge itself was wider than expected, much bigger than a pedestrian bridge, at perhaps 4 metres across.  When I reached the other side, I slid down an icy hill and followed the river to Peace Avenue, passing by a number of unfinished/ruined structures including one circular building with a tiled floor but only half of circle completed, although it had a staircase to its roof which featured a tangle of wires that could be mistaken for either (a) modern sculpture, (b) antennae or (c) a Hill's Hoist.

Back to the bridge though, what was this structure supposed to be?  Due to its width, was it actually meant for cars?  Or was it always a pedestrian bridge?  If either option, why was there a metre high drop off from the bridge itself to the land surrounding it?  If it was for cars, why aren't there any streets it could theoretically connect with?  Is this ruins or was it just never finished, a Soviet era project that languished after the fall of Communism and was repurposed by people who just needed a way to cross the river at that point?  Or did it once serve a purpose and has crumbled into its ruined yet still useful state?

In light of recent news, perhaps this is an apt metaphor for the country as a whole.

Teaching Mongolians About Mongolia

At its best, teaching is an essentially open source pursuit.  As a teacher, you should steal/borrow as many ideas as you can, mould them to your students' (and your own) strengths, and pass them along to anyone who asks.  It's many things but teaching is not an art, in which your individual creativity trumps your commitment to making everyone around you better.  Half of the struggle as a young teacher is learning enough activities that might work (and when to use them) in various classroom situations, so that your teaching is varied enough to keep the kids engaged in your lesson and on board with your goals.

I share, borrow and steal at will from any and everyone, whether from supervising teachers during my pre-service days or from friends at schools or from my teachers whose lessons or activities or even just their classroom persona have stuck with me for a long time afterwards.  I had a couple English teachers in Grades 11 and 12 who had a "Words of the Day" exercise.  One word would be a "serious" word that we might be able to use in essays and the other would be "silly" one, usually ridiculously long, complex or completely made up.  At Brimbank, I lifted the concept and added a "Words of the Day" wall to try to improve the concept by making the words literally part of our classroom landscape.  I'd refer to the words posted during lessons and implore the kids to use the serious ones when they were working on essays or questions or debates we'd do in class.

In Mongolia, though, I've been mostly teaching Geography (and one lone class of World History), which has meant that the bank of learning activities I'd been building up has been mostly useless.  One activity though that has carried over after a slight tweak are the Words of the Day, which has been recast as the "Country of the Week."  Basically, I choose a country and, for the first 10 minutes of class, we talk about its location, its size, its literacy rate, its population, its major products and 3 or 4 issues that it has to deal with.

The idea is to expand the kids' knowledge of the world, especially in regions like the Middle East or Africa or South America that they have have no direct experience in or have ever been taught.  So, even if they've struggled through say the concept of the linear model of rural settlement, they've taken on some cool facts about Argentina's massive production of soybeans and its detrimental effects on the country's environment.  When it works, the kids will be offering their guesses about the country's literacy rate or its major products, and I'll either confirm their guesses or, more usually, offer the real facts and tell some stories about the country.  Sometimes, I spin off activities off of it to connect with the concepts we're working on in class (mapping, population density, agriculture, tourism, etc.) and, other times, we move on and talk about something else.  I'm still refining what I do and what its exact purpose might be but my general idea is that the students are so deficient in world awareness and geographic skills that any activity that sticks with them is a plus.

During the last week of term, with a 3 week holiday approaching and midterms on during the mornings, I had a series of classes with all of my Geography classes which were generally useless for starting new topics.  Some of these classes took place before the Geography exams, so we did some revision for the test, which was, to be honest, half hearted since they were mentally exhausted after 4 or so hours of exams.  In the middle of the week, I decided to do a special Country of the Week instead of studying.  After considering something tiny like the Holy See or something famous like the United States, I decided on Mongolia since, basically since the start of the year, the kids had been calling out for it to be anointed as my CotW.  As soon as I announced the week's CotW, a cheer rose up from the class.

As we went through the usual facts and stories, what was most striking wasn't that the kids knew their own country but they had no idea about its facts, its challenges, its strengths, or its fuck-ups.  When I asked if anyone knew the number one product of the country, no one knew it was copper, or of the importance of copper at Oyu Tolgoi to the country's present and its future.  They didn't know about corruption or how widespread it is in Mongolia or why it might be even a problem to pay bribes from time to time.  When I asked about the country's problems, the answer I got back was universally China, which in some respects is completely true.  When I asked why China was a problem, they answered that the Chinese were inferior, weak, racist against Mongolians, and plotting to take over the country.  Their views, I have little doubt, are just parroted versions of what they hear from their parents, on TV, in the school yard and in the streets of UB.  Their personal experiences with Chinese (in Beijing, in UB) were, for the most part, "OK" in their own words.  The nationalism of youth is a purer form, untarnished by cynicism and buttressed by a type of unshakable confidence that we usually lose when we become adults or else become sociopaths with southern cross tattoos (or your own county's equivalent).

In the end of the activity, I led a discussion of what Mongolia needs to do to lead to the future that it desires.  We talked about the need to improve the relationship with China and that discrimination is a two way street and that both sides must improve their approaches to one another.  We talked about how they could be the ones who start that process, and that the ideas that we hold and the way we practise them will influence the future.  We talked about why corruption was a bad thing for the country as a whole. We talked about how Mongolia needs to diversify its industries, to move away from mining to avoid the dreaded resource curse that has befallen so many other nations (and a few previous Countries of the Week).  In this discussion, I found myself in a position that I never thought I was at all going to ever end up in: teaching Mongolians about Mongolia.

As the class ended, I asked if they had thought they had learnt anything about their country.  A quiet murmur ringed around the room as they thought about it.  And then a student put up her hand and said, simply, "Yes."

An Educational Essential

At the school I taught at in Australia, there was a vice principal named Jim, who was a thoroughly decent fellow.  A technocrat by comportment, one of Jim's major tasks was compiling the school's term calender.  On an almost weekly basis during the regular morning meetings, Jim would offer updates about minor changes to the existing calender ("The English meeting will now be in B205, not B210!"), as well as the ongoing progress of the next term or two ("We're working on it.  I'll have a draft copy in a few days.") or if he was going to send said draft out to the entire school ("Version 3 of Term 3 will be in your inboxes by 11 AM today").  Jim's calender status reports were unrelenting in their frequency and detail.  At times, as he spoke, I would zone out, or, if I was really a jerk, I'd check any number of social networks.

I now know that's Jim's task was absolutely essential to a normal, functioning school.  I should have been riveted by his speeches and thankful of all the hard work he put into it.  My current school has a calender but it's vague, poorly thought out and constantly changing.  There are no updates from our Jim.  (There is no Jim, come to think of it.)  There is no apparent process behind the changes that come through.  Some of the changes are unavoidable:  the Mongolian government declares a holiday in a week's time or to prolong winter break because of the cold or perhaps half the school comes down with self inflicted dysentery.  Other changes are due to the prioritisation of educationally deficient activities such as the talent show or a prom that cancelled an entire day's school for all grades although the prom was only for kids in grades 9 to 11.  Jim though did his thankless job and kept a chaotic school (in many ways) basically on track.

A few weeks ago, I took some time to take stock of how each class was going and whether my plans were on track, despite the constant days off for made up holidays and intramural competitive dance and singing competitions.  After that audit, I planned out the last few weeks of term, to try to force some shape (the reflection stage of the 5 step learning cycle) on the term.  Unlike first term's dysentery imposed hurried conclusion, I wanted to give some logic to the end of my sequence.  I set up some enquiry projects for the kids to do, and planned out some mandated monthly tests to wrap everything up neatly.

Unfortunately Christmas (I took 2 days off) and New Years (everyone got another 2 days off) tripped up many of the enquiry projects, which turned out to be more formulaic and teacher directed than I would have liked.  We're supposed to give tests every month (I do one every unit, which takes 8 to 10 weeks) which are more hassle than they're worth due to rampant cheating and low written skills in English.

In any case, last Thursday, I wrote 2 versions of the grade 6 test and I went to get them copied.  At our school, there's a person whose entire job is to make copies for teachers (and sometimes take payments for notebooks and stationary from students).  She's slow and inefficient in that Mongolian kind of way, which makes the process of getting a few photocopies into a laborious, frustrating and useless process to be only undertaken if absolutely necessary.  This time was even more of a endurance test: she asked me to get written permission from a person in the administration for these copies.

I said sure, but cursed under my breath and ran to the opposite side of the school to get approval, which was instantly given.  As I left the administration's office, the high school coordinator asked me if these were the midterms for Grade 6.  Midterms?  I hadn't heard of any midterm week.  It wasn't on the calender.  It hadn't been mentioned to any foreign teacher.  Bullshitting and thinking quickly, I told her that they were, and she then informed me that I also needed to write midterms for grades 7, 8, 9 and 10 geography, as well as grade 8 history.  And these tests needed to be done on Friday, i.e. tomorrow, a day in which I taught 6 straight lessons (from 10:30 to 3 basically) without a break, as well as had to go to the Chinese Embassy to apply for a visa.

I wrote the tests, I got the visa, I taught the classes, and then we had a dinner party that night.  It was an exhausting day but I got through it.  The real test has been this week, where the midterms have happened in the mornings and then a new, extremely random schedule was drawn up for grades 6 to 8 in the afternoon.  The schedule, naturally, didn't have any times attached to it and the bells were turned off so the transition between classes has been random guesswork.

In the past 3 days, I've marked about 250 or so exams and then written reports for each of these students.  Reports here doesn't mean the same thing as in Australia where typical reports are immensely detailed exercises, but instead an old school 1 or 2 line brief statement per kid, which is fine except when you have 20 kids named Munkh across all the classes, most of whom do not excel or fail enough to make themselves conspicuous.  I know most of the names and I know all the faces now, but it's hard to find enough to say about each kid, especially when I have so damn many to think about.

It's all done now and tomorrow, which is supposed to be a "normal" school day though I have nothing prepared because of all the grading and writing, I jump on a flight out of UB.  We're going to Indonesia for 2 weeks and, in typical Aussie fashion, we'll be making a side trip to Bali, and then back to Beijing for a week before we touch back down at the familiar, unfriendly confines of Chinggis Khan International Airport in early February.  I might not be able to write for a few weeks, but I'll try my best.