Tsagaan Sar (Цааган Сар), Spring, and Reflections

In the end of February, Mongolia celebrated the Lunar New Year (Tsagaan Sar). This holiday is one of the biggest traditional holidays in Mongolia. During this time, families celebrate by greeting each other in the New Year and eating a lot of dumplings (buuz). The holiday is like a week-long Thanksgiving and Christmas celebration thrown together. To an outsider who doesn’t have to prepare the buuz or host guests, this holiday is awesome! Sally and I were invited to a number of our coworkers’ and friends’ homes where we were fed, toasted with vodka, and given gifts. For more information regarding the traditions of Tsagaan Sar and what they mean consult last year’s post titled Цагаан Сар, for now let me give you the week’s tally. Sally and I visited 8 homes over the course of four days. We drank between 3-5 shots of vodka at each home. (This is actually more moderate than last year.) My grand total was 70 buuz with one particular painful day of 28 buuz.

When we asked people if Tsagaan Sar was their favorite holiday the answer was almost always no if they were a woman, and only sometimes yes for men. The reason is because, like Thanksgiving, Tsagaan Sar is a lot of work. Families spend weeks preparing for the holiday. Sometimes families pre-make as many as two thousand buuz.  During the holiday when guests come to a home, men usually are responsible for entertaining the guests while women prepare the food.

At the heart of this celebration is respect for elders. Older couples are visited by their children and are constantly paid respect. Reverence toward age is valued.

Tsagaan Sar is also exceedingly expensive. Families can sometimes spend as much as a quarter of their yearly income on this holiday. In addition to buuz, families will have a large rack of meat that is left on the table during the celebrations. Older families use the chest plate of a cow. Younger families use the back of a sheep. As I sampled the meat at each house, I found myself sympathetic for the sheer number of livestock that went into this national celebration, but thankfully none of the meat goes to waste.

Tsagaan Sar directly translates into white moon or month, but this year’s Tsagaan Sar also ushered in Mongolian Spring. Temperatures throughout the month of March have risen to the thirties, and all of the snow has melted in the city. With the slight rise of temperatures, I decided to take up running on a dirt track behind Sally’s school. When I started I was still dealing with temperatures around zero degrees Fahrenheit, but it is not so bad now.

Spring also brings plenty of daydreams about returning to the states. Sally and I are constantly imagining what it will be like to return to America: the warmth, the food, the political climate. I was recently buying a loaf of bread at a small store near our home. As I selected a loaf of hardened bread off of the rack, I suddenly found myself picturing the bread aisle of a supermarket in America. For a moment the vast number of choices I might have overwhelmed me and I imagined myself just freezing in an American store unable to handle the shock. This of course is a dramatization of the mind, but it illustrates just one small change Sally and I have will face. For two years, I have had one choice of un-sliced bread. Earlier in our service I purchased a bread knife, because I figured it would pay for itself eventually by allowing me to get just a few more slices out of each loaf. I can’t be sure, but I’m almost positive it has.

Spring  brings a variety of new vegetables to Mongolia. Sally and I have been able to reliably have spinach and cilantro. Salads have become a bit of a norm for us, so food life is good. I recently even found small stocks of celery in the market. Celery is a vegetable that I have not had since America. It was amazing! Naturally this influx of food has led to new recipes and experiments. Here’s a pic of last night’s spinach and cream cheese stuffed chicken wrapped in bacon. Амар Амттай байнаа!

Spring is also the time for gender holidays in Mongolia. Last weekend, Mongolia celebrated International Women’s Day. Men throughout Mongolia were supposed to take on the household responsibilities and cook their wives meals so they could have a day to relax. Since most of the social life revolves around family or work, the various workplaces in the city did special things for their female employees. My school sent the female teachers to a lecture, followed by dinner, and a small party.

Tomorrow Saturday the 18^th is Soldier’s day in Mongolia, but the day has become simply Men’s day. Today my school will be sending the men to a nice meal at our new Sky Lounge, followed by a party, the details of which have remained secret to my sex.

Soldier’s day is a hard one for me. I don’t believe that just because I am a man I should be lumped 

together with the men and women who fight to protect their country. I don’t think Mongolians have the same reverence towards their armed forces that Americans have. This is simply because we have had to use ours a lot more in recent times. To them, this holiday is less about armed forces and more about celebrating men, almost like father’s day. Mongolia completes its cycle of social role holidays with International Children’s day which is celebrated in the end of May. Last year Sally and I were in UB during this event, and a number of squares and parks were dedicated to fun activities and amusement rides for children.

~Caleb 

Serving in Mongolia as a (Married) Couple

Quick Tips

Benefits:

1.       Share the adventure of a lifetime with someone you love

2.       PC challenges are often easier with two people

3.       Never feel lonely or isolated

4.       Time together away from demands of American life

5.       Long winter of living in close quarters together

Challenges:

1.       Isolation from Mongolians because you are a family

2.       Language can be more challenging to learn

3.       Couples are separated during PST

4.       Long winter of living in close quarters together

I think we've gotten accustomed to not smiling at the camera like Mongolians.

I was recently perusing a number of PCV married couple blogs and realized that almost all of them had a post dedicated to serving as a married couple. So while that has been the unofficial theme of our entire blog, this post is meant to be helpful for prospective volunteers and to provide a look into the challenges and benefits married couples face in Mongolia.

Sally and I went to a PC informational event in our freshmen year of college. We listened to a return PCV’s experience and adventures in the country of Georgia and were completely captivated about doing PC together. At the time the policy in place was that couples could serve if they had been married for one year prior to departure.

Sally and I set out to make our dream a reality. We finished college, took a few years to work in Birmingham, got married, and eventually after years of working toward a goal, departed for Mongolia in 2015. Since our departure to Mongolia, PC has changed its policy toward couples. Now any couple is allowed to apply to participate in PC; it doesn’t matter how long they have been together, their sexuality, or if they are married or not. This change of policy is an attempt by PC to be more open minded; however non-traditional couples are still limited as to which countries they can apply for because many developing nations, including Mongolia, have not yet accepted modern interpretations on relationships.

For Sally and I, PC service is the accumulation of mutual dreams and hard work.  We love the opportunity to share this journey and adventure with each other. In many ways our service has been easier than other volunteers because of this. We do not deal with isolation and loneliness because we have each other. Sally and I have also been together for a long time. Our past experience and the reliable fixture we have become in each other’s lives makes smaller challenges of service easy for us. 

Our mutual desire to accomplish PC is a huge factor for us in combating the challenges and disappointments of PC.  Often couples in PC end up terminating their service because one person really wanted to do PC and the other was only partially invested. In these cases PC service can put enormous strain on a relationship.  If there is any advice I can offer to future couples, it is that it is vital to your relationship that the choice to do PC be a mutual desire and dream.  This is not to say that the reluctant partner will forever or always remain reluctant. Many couples that are riding on one person’s dream end up growing together and sharing the experience, but to embark on two years of isolation from your country and family is really something that both people should be invested in. To do it on one person’s dream means that the relationship must face an incredible challenge, one that could make the couple stronger or could lead to resentment and fracture.

Setting aside that spiel, Sally and I have found that there is a cultural difference in the way a PCV is treated by Mongolians when they are single verses when they are married. Mongolians are extremely family oriented. This meant that during the transition period of being new at sight at the beginning of our service, Sally and I were often left alone because Mongolians saw us as a family and figured we did not need anything else. This isolation was nice after the rigors of Pre-Service Training, but it also meant that it was hard for us to reach a point of integration into our sites.  A volunteer who arrives at a new sight by themselves in Mongolia is often overwhelmed by helpful neighbors and coworkers who are amazed that someone would be living alone and take pity on the lonely American. This of course varies from site to site, but there is a clear cultural difference between single volunteers and couples.

A second challenge to PC service in Mongolia is overcoming the language barrier. As a couple, this can be even more difficult because you are rarely completely isolated from other Americans. This of course varies from site to site, but there is usually a clear difference between a single volunteer who is isolated in a small village vs volunteers who are always around other Americans. Mongolian can be especially challenging as a language because it is so removed form English in sounds, words, and characters.

 PC Mongolia still separates couples into separate host families during Pre-Service Training. (Check out post from the summer of 2015) The reason they do this is because it is believed that this allows couples to integrate better and to learn the language better. The practice of separation during the first few months of service is common in a number of PC countries around the world. During PST in Mongolia, couples are allowed three weekend visits to spend time with each other. This means that a strategic couple never goes more than 3 or 4 weeks without seeing each other. Another factor that makes this separation easier is that all volunteers are issued cell phones with unlimited calling among similar carriers. So couples are still able to communicate via phone and text during PST.  Even with all of this PST was the single most difficult time of our service. The separation was mostly frustrating. 

For us, the benefits of doing PC together far outweigh the challenges.  This experience has been an incredible growing experience and it is wonderful to share it together.

~Caleb 

Air Pollution in Mongolia

             Chinggis has relatively clean air during the winter. We live in a large valley near a river, so if the winter air is moving even a little, then most of the small city’s pollution is blown away. Still there are nights when the temperature drops drastically, and the air just doesn’t move. The hot air doesn’t really rise because it is quickly cooled.  During these nights, to walk through town is to navigate a smoggy haze of coal dust and particulate. Every breath is a taste of coal and your clothes become saturated with the scent. During certain cold nights of the winter, Chinggis City has air pollution levels that are worse than anywhere in the US.  The air next to a bonfire is probably healthier, but Chinggis has nothing compared to Ulaanbaatar.

           UB is a city that was designed to support a quarter million, but now houses 1.5 million people. Winter in Mongolia is deadly, so to escape the cold in the coldest capital in the world, many inhabitants use coal or wood burning fires. The smoke from these ger fires, coupled with cars and power plant emissions, has led to an environment where the particulate level during the winter can be as high as 80 times the World Health Organizations recommended levels.  In December, an article from Bloomberg said that UB’s air pollution was 5 times higher than Beijing.

            The effects of this environment on personal health can be devastating. Children are especially at risk of developing pneumonia and chronic respiratory diseases.  Walking through the capital during the winter is sometimes like walking through a Hollywood depiction of a war zone. Smoke is everywhere. It doesn’t rise or leave, it just hovers in the air seeping into lungs, clothing, hair, and even under fingernails. The scent of the city never is entirely gone, even in the most ventilated apartments.

            Mongolians living in UB recognize this seasonal pollution issue, and this winter, there were a number of demonstrations and protests by the people of UB for cleaner air. The government in Mongolia is trying to start a number of initiatives to curb the pollution.  A 2014 study on air pollution in UB listed over 20 different ways that regulation of power plant emissions and ger fires could lower the pollution levels. For years the country has been pushing people in cities to live in apartment buildings rather than gers, but the country has a long way to go before this problem is eradicated. For now the harsh reality of winter in Mongolia is not just the cold, but also the pollution.

Photo Credit: http://theubpost.mn/2016/10/03/pollution-and-viable-solutions/

Photo Credit: https://rising.globalvoices.org/blog/2010/03/26/nomad-green-air-pollution-in-winter-in-mongolia/

            It’s about to get real y’all. As a PCV living in Mongolia, I cannot for the life of me understand why my own country has trouble recognizing the importance of environmental protection and initiatives. We, Americans, live in a country that owes our clean air to laws like the Clean Air Act of 1970. For almost 50 years, we have lived with clean air and the expectation is that we will continue to do so, but I don’t think most of us fully understand what these laws do to improve our way of life. I certainly didn’t. Until I lived in Mongolia, I took clean air as a given, but now I realize that with rises in the world population any pollution free environment is no longer a natural state. Rather, it is a state brought about by hard work on the part of the people living in that area to improve the environment.  If we don’t make an effort to curb pollution in everything we do, then our natural environment will shift to its new natural state: a state of hazy air, polluted waters, and littered grounds. What we consider “natural” is not something that can be achieved without combined efforts to make it so.

I am optimistic for our environment. I am optimistic about Mongolia’s pollution. The people of Mongolia recognize this is a problem and are working to fix it. In 10 or 20 years the pollution of UB may be a thing of the past, but taking care of something you can see and walk through is easy. My hope is that, as developing nations clean up the pollution that is affecting their populations, countries like the US can pave the way in tackling problems of pollution that are not so obvious in areas of clean energy, waste disposal, and environmental protection. I recognize that to many my hopes may seem naïve, but what is life without optimism. 

            So I hope that you will join me in this effort to think about an environmental consciousness. I encourage you, the next time you step outside and take a deep breath of fresh air, to recognize that this natural state is the accumulation of a lot of hard work, that the air you breathe is clean because people a half century ago didn’t like the haze that was settling over our cities and dreamed of something better.

~Caleb   

Sources:

Amarsaikhan, D. et al. (2014). A Study on Air Pollution in Ulaanbaatar City, Mongolia. Journal of Geoscience and Environment Protection, 2, 123-128. http://dx.doi.org/10.4236/gep.2014.22017 Retrieved From: http://file.scirp.org/pdf/GEP_2014042109521953.pdf

Kohn, Micheal. World’s Worst Air Has Mongolians Seeing Red, Planning Action. (2016, December 23) Retrieved from:  https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-12-22/world-s-worst-air-has-mongolians-seeing-red-planning-protest