Hello Froberg Students!

Greetings from Mongolia!  Hello Sam and Mr. Price's class, and Hello Beckie and Mr. Miller's class!  My name is Marilyn, and I am a Peace Corps Volunteer.  I live in Mongolia, which is on the other side of the world!




Mongolia is a country about the size of Alaska that is located in Asia between China and Russia.  The population of Mongolia is about 3 million people.  I live in a small town in Eastern Mongolia named Chinggis City, where about 17,000 people live.  My town is named after the great Mongolian war hero, Chinggis Khaan (often called Genghis Khan in the US). There are about 10 foreigners in my town, and 2 other Peace Corps Volunteers.  I often go days without seeing another non-Mongolian person, so my Mongolian friends are really important to me!

I am a Peace Corps Volunteer, which means that I represent the U.S. while I work in Mongolia.  I get a small living stipend each month, and the agency I work for does not pay me.  I work at the Health Department for my province, which is named Khentii.  At work, I often talk with my Mongolian coworkers, teach English classes, and help with health training classes for children, teens, and adults.


Mongolia is a very interesting place to live! Mongolia has a nomadic culture, since the main way of life for hundreds of years was herding, and families would travel around the lands with their animals.  This is much less common now, although some people do still live a nomadic life.  Many people in my town live in a ger, which is a circular tent made with wooden poles and felted wool layers.



A Mongolian ger in the countryside--an entire family will live together in one ger!  For more beautiful pictures of gers, check out this website: http://www.ottsworld.com/blogs/mongolian-gers/






The inside of a ger. You can see the wooden poles that form the basis for the ceiling, and the criss-cross wooden pieces that form the sides.  Two wooden poles hold the ger up from the center, and there is a wood stove to heat the ger.




Here is a diagram of how a ger is constructed.  It is easy to set up, take down, and transport.  Mongolian people have been living in gers since before the time of Chinggis Khaan in the twelfth century!



Mongolian winters are very cold and long.  For the past few months, it has usually been below 0 degrees Fahrenheit, even during the middle of the day.  It can sometimes get as low as -40 degrees Fahrenheit!  I am sure you can understand how cold this weather is with the extreme cold in the United States this winter--now imagine if you lived in a tent in this cold weather!  Summers in Mongolia are hot during the day and cool at night.  In the spring, there are often large windstorms that blow sand and dirt in the air.  The weather is pretty extreme, but the beautiful blue Mongolian sky makes up for it!


A picture of the Mongolian sky and a Buddhist statue I took on a hike this past summer.  Almost every day is clear, bright, and sunny in Mongolia!


The next Mongolian holiday is this Friday, January 31st--the beginning of the lunar new year.  In Mongolian, this holiday is called Tsagaan Sar, or White Month.  It is a time to visit family, exchange gifts, eat traditional Mongolian foods, and celebrate the beginning of spring and a new year.  So, happy Tsagaan Sar and I hope you all have a wonderful Year of the Horse!

Trip to the Russian Border Park

Hello!  Сайна байна уу!  It is the last day in July, and I have been in Mongolia for over two months already!  The time has really flown by.  I have about a week and a half left of pre-service training and a language proficiency exam at the end of training.  Then, on August 12^th, I will leave my host family for the last time and return to Darkhan, where all of the incoming volunteers’ sites will be announced an we will have a week of site-specific training and preparation before all moving across the country.  This summer has been a wild ride of ups and downs, and I have made many great friends along the way.  It will be sad to say goodbye for now to Sukhbaatar and my host family, as well as my fellow Peace Corps trainees.  I will try to update you all when I learn my language proficiency score (we are supposed to reach a novice-high level, which is basically general introductory conversation skills and about a 100 word vocabulary) and my site placement.  I am so excited to find out where I will live and what organization I will work with for the next two years! 

But back to my current adventures.  This past weekend my family took a trip to a park at the Russian border, a favorite picnic and sightseeing location in the area.  The park is mostly on the cliffs at the edge of a plateau, and offers astounding views of the lower river valley, where the Orkhon and Selenge rivers join together before flowing north to Lake Baikal in Russia.  I have seen the point of these rivers before from a different angle, but the view of the entire valley from the park was beautiful.  

Here is a distant view of a road that illustrates how it is easy for one path to split into several, where drivers decide which path will be the smoothest, least damaging option.

A few days before going to the Russian park, we drove to an Ovoo (Buddhist shrine) on the top of a small mountain by Sukhbaatar.

The main path to the Russian Border: fairly nice for an unpaved road!

For some reason, driving on this precarious frontage road was the driver's choice.  You can see the main road off to the left, so it definitely still existed for this stretch....Some things about Mongolian driving I may never understand.

We arrived at the park, and started our climb up to the plateau edge, where the main section of the park is located.

Up and up!

A cliff that sort of looks like a face! People were climbing to the top as well, you can see one person on the top in this photo.

Chinggis Khaan and his wife!

A re-creation of what Chinggis Khaan's cave home could have been like.

Me, with Sukhbaatar (a great war hero from the 1920s), a gun, and a buddy of his.  The 'gun' was extremely heavy, because it is made out of steel and concrete!

A naked baby statue, where many people were taking pictures of the statue with their naked babies.  Therefore, I did not touch this statue when I took a picture with it!

My Mongolian host mom putting an offering on a large Ovoo at the park.

My host sister posing with the amazing view behind her--this picture is an amazing thing in itself, because my sister never wants to take pictures!

My family (according to my mother, Lorre is my little sister) at the edge of the cliff--we had to jump over a little space in the rocks to get to this ledge.

The view of the rivers joining from the Russian Border Park!

A panoramic of the great view.

Lorre was wearing a dress, and my sister thought it was hilarious when the wind blew her dress up and Lorre attempted, Marilyn Monroe style, to keep it down.

The second Mongolian horse I have 'ridden' since arriving!

This girl is sitting on a reindeer statue. There is a community far north in Mongolia that raises reindeer, and it is apparently an amazing place to visit.  I hope I have the chance while I am here!

My host brother with an awesome eagle statue in the background.  Eagles are used for hunting in the far west region of Mongolia, where most of the ethnic Kazakh Mongolians live.

My brother and sister playing a game where you get hit in the head with a bottle if you are incorrect--I refuse to play with my sister because she gets too excited/violent after a few rounds.  They kept it all in good fun this time around!

Me and the view!

I have a lot of assignments and studying to do before my language exam next week, so I probably will not post again until next Thursday or Friday.  Until then, I hope everyone is doing well!

For the first year in as long as I can remember, I am going to miss my county fair.  To everyone working at the Boone County Fair in Illinois this year, good luck!  I know it will be a hard week for me, even thinking about the fair makes me really homesick.  The fair is always a time to see everyone that you don't normally see, and it finishes up the summer with a finality that even my big transition can barely equal.  But most of all, it is about the family and friends that I get to spend an entire week hanging out with and working with.  Of course, I could really go for a taco from the stand by the Livestock Show Arena, some mozzarella sticks, and several ice cream sundaes.  You all will just have to enjoy them for me!

Until then, see you later!  Дараа Улзье!

Top Ten Mongolia Landscape Pictures (so far...)

This is my unbiased opinion of my best ten photos from  Mongolia, some of which you have seen before: 

A pretty picture of the sunset on one of my first days in Mongolia, at a tourist-y ger camp.

Sunset at a Buddha shrine in Darkhan.

A shrine on the road between Darkhan and Sukhbaatar.

A Buddha shrine on the mountain range just north of Sukhbaatar.

Another mountain scene near Sukhbaatar.

And again!

....and another Sukhbaatar mountain post!

A rainbow in my backyard!

The top of a hill near the point where two rivers meet, close to Sukhbaatar.

The two rivers joining together.

Mongolia is such a beautiful place, I hope to take many more pictures while I am here!

Tradition Edition: Mongol Travel

Besides recounting some of my activities in Mongolia, I want to have regular blog updates about different Mongolian traditions, superstitions, and cultural norms.  I am going to start with the travel traditions that I have experienced so far.

Let me backtrack a bit and share a little more about travel in Mongolia.  I have mainly spent my time in Selenge Aimag, or Selenge Province, which is where Darkhan and Sukhbaatar are located.  Darkhan is the second largest city in Mongolia, and Sukhbaatar is the provincial headquarters of Selenge Aimag, so the roads going to both were paved and pretty nice.  Darkhan is about a 4 hour drive from the capital, UB, and Sukhbaatar is about 6 hours away (so, about 2 hours from Darkhan). 

When we came to Sukhbaatar for the first time, we traveled in large Russian-style minivans, called meekers, from Darkhan to Sukhbaatar.  They can comfortably fit ten passengers, but are often filled beyond this capacity.  I have learned since this trip that there is a superstition in Mongolia where you need to stop at every shrine along the road, or otherwise you will have bad luck.  I was confused when we kept stopping along the way, but now I understand that the drivers were showing us the Mongolian cultural way to travel.  Some of the shrines were small Ovoo’s (this word translates as grandfather, but is also the word for the Buddhist shrines throughout the country.  I have lost count of how many I have seen, they are really common); other shrines were large structures.  When you are at a shrine, you are supposed to walk clockwise three times around the shrine.  If it is a rock mound shrine, you should throw 3 rocks onto the shrine as you are walking around. 

Visiting a shrine on the side of the road.

Walking three times around the shrine, plus some Buddhist prayer wheels.

An Ovoo close to the large shrine: the blue cloth wrapped around the shrine are pieces of cloth called a halbock, which is a Buddhist cloth used to honor shrines, give gifts, or place on a religious shrine in a ger.

There are also signs along the road marking the entrance into certain cities; this sign is for Darkhan, where we left to go to Sukhbaatar.

A larger picture of the shrine, Ovoo, and a nearby tree that is also adorned with more Halbocks.

A mixed herd of sheep and goats, these herds are very common around this area of Mongolia.

Driving through the Mongol countryside is extremely beautiful.  In this region of Mongolia, there are rolling hills, mountains, prairies, and the occasional river.  It is common to see herds of sheep, goats, cows, and horses grazing near the road, and you can often see one or two gers, or Mongol tents, in the distance, where the herders live during the summer. 

This past weekend, my mom told me to get ready; we were going to go somewhere.  This often happens, and I usually don’t have a clue where we are headed.  It makes every day exciting, because I never know what adventures I might get to have!  This particular day, we got into my mom’s friend’s big Land Cruiser, which I am convinced has no shocks.  We ended up going up to the Russian border (its about a 20-30 minute drive from Sukhbaatar), then continued east for a while to visit the summer camp that my brother has been at for a week.  It was my first experience driving through the countryside on unpaved “roads.”  The path was basically where multiple cars driving over have worn the grass away. In some parts the path would split into three or four different ways, depending on the quality of the available path. 

My mom's friend's Land Cruiser, the height of Mongolian car fashion!

The dirt road to my brother's summer camp, it was a pretty wild ride!

When in doubt, you can always saddle a horse and head to work that way!  This isn't too common but I see it pretty often. 

My Mongol House and Host Family Excursions

Here is a picture representation to catch up my life from the tales in my last post until this week in Darkhan!  I miss my host family, and I am excited to go back tomorrow after my mid-training language assessment.  Happy Fourth of July to all of my American friends and readers!

The 'garbage dumpster' by my house, and some of the dogs that hang out around it.  The dogs that I have met in Mongolia are almost always afraid of people, and will not approach you, but rather stay away.  The Peace Corps Mongolia Medical Office gave the trainees a round of preventative rabies vaccine, since most likely some of us will be bit by dogs at some point during our service.  I can't wait to get my own puppy at the end of the summer when I go to my final site!

My brother, in the middle of this picture, loves to jump rope and play volleyball.  Almost every day, he asks me if I want to go visit Lorre and play with her and her two little host sisters.  I have gotten better at jump rope since I have been in Mongolia, but I am still at a pretty mediocre level!

Lorre, on the other hand, is a great jump-roper.  Way to go Lorre!  Also, the man on the right of this picture randomly stopped by with Lorre's neighbor (on the left).  He spoke a little English and a little Russian, and with my little Mongolian I found out that he is a large animal veterinarian.  He told me that Sukhbaatar has around 6 or 7 vets for the entire area, and that the only place where there are any small animal vets are in the capital.  

I snapped this picture of my brother taking a nap--this wasn't difficult, since I am convinced he spends about 15 hours a day sleeping.  I am pretty jealous!  This usually means that when I get home after a full day of language and technical training, he is pumped and ready to play games, walk around town, or just talk a whole bunch.  He is a lot of fun, and keeps me busy!

This is a great picture describing my sister's personality.  Bilgunyam loves talking on the phone with her friends, straightening her hair and fixing up other people's hair, and she loves being a jokester and sticks her tongue out at me all the time!  She quizzes me all the time on mongolian vocabulary, which has really helped me to learn new words.  She is spending this week in Erdenet, the third largest city in Mongolia.  I hope she is having fun and has a safe trip back to Sukhbaatar this weekend.

This is a shot of my room from the doorway, although since I took this picture, my family got a whole bunch of furniture that fills up most of the wall space.  It is a big room, and it is nice when the sunlight comes in the windows and lights up the space.

The kitchen/den-type area of the house.  My mom is making milk tea, a very popular Mongolian drink. It is a savory tea with milk, special tea from Huvsgol aimag in the northwest region of Mongolia, salt, and possibly other things I don't know about.  It is customary to make milk tea when people come to visit your home.  My family mostly uses two large electric pots and a rice cooker (not pictured) to make all of our food, and it works surprisingly well for everything we have made!  

One of my favorite Mongolian foods besides Suutai Bodaa (this sweet rice and milk soup that is kind of like an Asian version of oatmeal) is this fried bread call Gamber.  My mother makes it every few days, so we almost always have some to eat with our meals and for snacks.  My mom makes some with onions and some without because my brother hates onions.  I love the onion gamber though, it is sort of like a savory elephant ear.  I have seen my mother make gamber several times, and I hope to photo document it and try myself so I can make it after this summer!

This is my house from the outside.  It is a one story wooden frame house, very common in Mongolia.  The main part of the house, where everyone sleeps, is very well insulated and it does a good job of staying cool even when it gets hot outside.  I am sure this house is warm in the winter as well.  Our outhouse is around the corner behind the house.  It is a squat outhouse, so there are no seat but rather a hole in the floor.  Once you get used to it, it is not bad at all!  I accidentally dropped my sandal down the hole a few weeks ago, and that was sad, but I practiced my Mongolian language skills by buying a new pair at the market!

My brother took a picture of me in front of the house, it shows my fashion choices to de-emphasize how much I really need to wash my hair!  We have no running water in our house, and use tubs like the yellow one by my leg to carry water from a nearby water supply building, which we do about twice a week.  Each time, we probably fetch about 80 or 90 gallons by my rough estimation.  

My family invites Lorre over a lot, and then they give her lots of food.  I like this, because then I usually get slightly smaller portions, which is good because my family always gives me lots and lots of food.  She is eating my favorite Mongolian food, Suutai bodaa, or a sweet milk-rice soup.  My family knows I like it, and we eat it often.  Yumm!

A view of some of the neighborhood near my house.  Lots of wooden houses with dirt roads.  Might not look like much, but it has grown on me.  

My sister, brother, Lorre, and I went for a walk one evening.  We do this often, and my sister always links arms or holds hands with us.  It is very common for young women in Mongolia to hold hands while walking, and young men will also throw their arms over each others' shoulders while walking as well.  Mongolians have a very communal culture, and it shows in how close they are comfortable being with each other.  

My brother and sister decided to walk Lorre and I to a big shrine on the other side of Sukhbaatar.  There is a large statue of Borte, Chinggis Khaan's first and main wife, who was an important advisor during his rise to power.  

There were lots and lots of people that came to the shrine at night, and it was very pretty with all of the lamps lighting the way.

Lorre and I with our tourist picture with Borte!

Borte again, looking very stoic.  After my family got a bunch of new furniture and put a lot of it in my room, they started joking that I was getting married.  I asked who my husband was, and after a lot of laughs we decided I am married to Chinggis Khaan.  So, I guess it is just a matter of time before Borte is my new nickname! (just kidding, please don't start calling me Borte.)

A view of Sukhbaatar at night!  Not the greatest picture, but it sort of gives an idea of the size of town Sukhbaatar is.

About a week later, Lorre and I went on another adventure.  My mom and my aunt (at least I think that is how she is related to me, I am really not sure about some of my extended relatives) told us to get ready, that we were going to go to the market.  Then we got a taxi, walked around a few houses, and eventually found my mom's friend who has a big SUV.  We got in, and then Lorre and I realized that we weren't going to the market, but we had no idea where we were headed.  After basically driving straight up a small mountain, we arrived at this beautiful place.  It kind of reminded me a little of Pittsburgh, since it is where two of the rivers in my aimag (or province) join to form another river that flows into Russia, and I am assuming pours into Lake Baikal, a large lake in Siberia that holds about 1/7 of the world's fresh water.  

My mom brought binoculars, and when she lent them to me, I could see houses and gers, or Mongolian tents, that were probably several miles away.  I don't think pictures can really do justice for how beautiful the landscape is here, and how far visibility can be on a clear day (which is basically 6 days out of the week)!

A view of the river valley.  

My mom and I enjoying the scenery!  This was another day where I was in need of a good hair washing, which happened that evening.  Every opportunity to wash is sacred to all of the Peace Corps trainees, and we talked about how excited we were to come to Darkhan to have showers for at least two weeks.  Now that we are here, we have running water....but not hot water.  Still, washing every day and not needing to prioritize body parts or hair washing is still amazing, even in freezing cold water!

My mom and I had walked down the slope a ways.  My aunt and my mom's friend stayed near the top, where there was a 'grandfather' shrine, called an Ohvoh.  They are all over the land, and you are supposed to respectfully walk clockwise three times around the shrine, tossing three stones onto the shrine whenever you come near one.   

Such a beautiful landscape!  

A very Mongol picture with my very Mongol family.  Mongolians (for some reason, I don't know yet), try to remain stoic and not smile for any pictures.  My aunt, a very bubble and kind person, can't quite stay serious, which is one think I love about her.  She often comes to our house and eats with us, takes naps, and sits and talks with my mom.  They both love to have fun and laugh, and she is very inquisitive about me and my american habits.  She doesn't speak any English, so hopefully I will be able to communicate more with her over the next few months as my language skills improve!

After a great afternoon with amazing sights, we headed back to Sukhbaatar.  This happened on Sunday, so I am basically caught up to my current activities.  This week, I have been at Mid-Center Days, which is basically a workshop that Peace Corps Mongolia holds for trainees about halfway through our pre-service training.  We have had many sessions on different topics to prepare us for our service, and we have assessments tomorrow to give us a chance to better understand our language level to prepare for our final language exam at the end of training, and reflect about our technical training and preparedness for volunteer service with the service coordinators.  I am nervous, but also excited to learn more about how I am doing after about a month of intensive language, cultural, and health volunteer training!

Сайхан Амраарай, or Goodnight!