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.