My First Week in Sukhbaatar

I met my host family last Friday.  They are really great!  My mother, Ganchimeg, tries to feed me lots of food and makes me take medicine when I had a cold.  Bilgunyam, my sister, is 15.  She is really great, and she holds my hand and leads me wherever I am going.  She also quizzes me all the time on Mongolian vocabulary, so I have learned tons of new words from her (I forget most of them, but she drills me on them so I eventually pick up on them).  Bilgunyam knows a little English, which has really come in handy.  My brother, who is 13, is Ranchipurev.  He is pretty shy, but he loves watching NBA games and cartoons, and he understands a little bit of English, just enough to get some of my silly jokes.

This past weekend, I spent a lot of time getting to know my host family better, walking around Sukhbaatar, and being taken to play-dates with other Peace Corps volunteers.  I think my family thought that if I was looking bored or depressed (I wasn't bored or depressed, but my mom kept pointing to the translation, 'do not worry, everything will be ok' in our little phrase book PC gave us), the best way to cheer me up was to give me time with other Americans.  Another volunteer, Lorre, lives pretty close to my house, so we see each other almost every day.

I haven't taken many pictures in Sukhbaatar yet, but I will describe my house and the city and upload pictures with the next post.  Sukhbaatar is a smaller town than Darkhan, but it is the provincial center, which means that it holds the main provincial hospital, along with other government run entities.  Wikipedia says that Sukhbaatar has about 20,000 residents, but it feels like a smaller city than that.  My family doesn't have a car, so we walk to get to wherever we are going.  My walk from home to school takes about 15 minutes, winding along dirt roads in between fenced in yards.  The placement of housing seems sort of haphazard, and I don't know what sort of building codes there are.  The houses themselves are well built, sturdy one or two story buildings that have large windows to let in the bright Mongolian sun.  They weather is mostly dry, sunny, and a little windy, so the dirt paths get pretty dusty when a car zooms by.  There are many dogs wandering around, and lots of little puppies.  Some families have guard dogs in their fenced-in yards (this area is called a hashaa), but they are not pets like American dogs.  They are meant to keep people from entering the hashaa, and so for the most part they are not safe to walk up to until they have become familiar with you.  My family doesn't have a dog, but there is a dog that lives near the dumpster and eats our trash when we throw it in!

My house is a one-story, two room house with a bright red metal roof.  Almost all of the houses and buildings that I have seen in Mongolia have brightly colored roofs, so it makes the town look very pretty from far away!  When you enter my house, you enter the kitchen.  My family mostly cooks in two big electric pots, and they do not have a stove (some other families do).  We eat lots of meat, potatoes, onions, cabbage, noodles, rice, and bread in different forms.  I have an older brother (or uncle? I haven't quite figured out how he is related to me or what his name is) that is a great cook, and my mom is also very good.  I like the noodle soup that we eat a lot, which has all of the above ingredients except for rice and bread.  My favorite dish is syytai bodaa (rice milk soup would be a rough translation), which is rice in a boiled milk soup, with sugar and maybe some butter in it.  It is great!  There is also a TV in the kitchen, so I often will watch TV with my brother in the afternoons after my school.

The next area of my house is basically one big area that has my bedroom separated by a thin wall, another sleeping area of about the same size, and a small entry space with a little dresser and a mirror.  There is also a refrigerator in this section of the house.  My room is nice, and my bed is pretty comfortable.  I don't spend too much time in my room unless I have some extra time to read.  My family has done a great job of making me feel at home with them, even though we can't communicate very much.

I found out a few days ago that my school has internet (shhh, its supposed to only be for staff!), and so I am at school writing this post.  We got out of class early today, so I figured I would use the free time to write an update.

On a last note, I hope that everyone who has running water and a real toilet takes a few moments to really value them.  I have a squat outhouse (an outhouse with holes in the floor) and no running water in my house, and it made me realize how much I take running water for granted.  I have adjusted pretty well and I actually don't smell too bad (at least no one has told me I do), but it is definitely an adjustment!