The Most Wonderful Time of the Year

           Mongolia is a cold, cold place.  In the last three weeks, the temperature never rose above 0º Fahrenheit, and I would say that the average temperature was about -20ºF with a low of -40ºF.  And I left before it got bad.  January and February are already infamous cold months in which the temperature is no longer really taken into account except by the number of layers of long underwear you wear under your clothes.  These months sometimes come with a weather disaster called zuud which along with frigid temperatures brings too much snow that keeps millions of Mongolia’s animals from feeding on the grass.  During a zuud, these animals will starve and eventually be frozen in their tracks, and there is little a herder can do to save his or her herd.  It takes years to rebuild a herd after a zuud, and many herders who lose everything to the winter, will migrate to UB.

When the herders (and anyone else) come to UB, they will typically move into the ger district. Not everyone in the ger district lives in a ger—many live in houses—but what sets the ger district apart from the rest of UB is that it is not connected to central water, sewage, or heating.  Heating is the key service in Mongolia, and Mongolians living in the ger district will spend more on fuel to heat their homes than they will on food.  In UB, over 64% of people live in these ger districts, meaning that over half the population spends more on coal than meat.  Also, families which do live in gers must always have someone around the ger keeping the fire stoked; I met one lady who moved from a ger to a house because she and her husband weren't able to keep the ger warm for their son when they were away at work.  Undoubtedly, life is hard for people living in the ger districts in the winter, especially for the poor, who might not be able to afford fuel.

This emphasis on heating has serious implications for the rest of UB.  The fuel used to heat gers and houses is predominately coal and wood which are burned in inefficient stoves which warm insufficiently insulated homes requiring more fuel.  Fuel which, when burned, send copious amounts of black smoke into the air.  The change in air quality was noticeable the day the temperatures began to drop; as I walked to school, I noticed a pressure in my chest and that I was winded.  As the weather became colder, I could taste the pollution in the air, dusty and sweet.  Sitting in a taxi, I would watch the street lights and buildings disappear into a brown fog a half mile down the road.  And I left before it got bad.  In January and February, you can’t see the buildings across the street from you on a bad day, and just by breathing, you will have inhaled the equivalent of two packs of cigarettes.                                

There are rumors in milling around Mongolia that this winter will be particularly cold, and while I heard temperatures like -70º Celsius circulating the rumor mill, eventually cold is cold and the number doesn't matter.  But these low temperatures have the potential to create a zuud, and the entire country will suffer.  Herders will lose their most valuable assets, ger district residents will have to spend more money on heating fuel, and everyone living in UB will have to continue to breathe its poisonous air.

Foreign Perspectives

One of the best ways to make European friends is to go to a non-European country and find a hostel. Europeans will be everywhere. And if you happen to be in Ulaanbaatar around Thanksgiving, you will discover a multitude of Peace Corps volunteers, drawn from the crooks and crannies of the steppe, deserts, and forests. Coincidentally, I happen to be staying at a hostel in UB, and coincidentally, I happen to have met lots of Europeans and Peace Corps volunteers in the past few weeks. Coincidentally, this has been a lot of fun. Unfortunately, I have a 30 to 50 page research project to write, but in between trips to the library, I have met some very interesting people.  Everyone here has an interesting story; I think it takes a very special type of person who would choose to take the Trans-Siberian Railway during the winter or agree to spend two years living in a ger.
Peace Corps volunteers offer an interesting perspective on living in foreign countries and serving foreign communities.  Some are disillusioned, some are frustrated, some are invigorated, and some feel like they are making a real difference in the lives of the Mongolians they work with.  Most are weary with experience; Mongolia is real life to them.  Mongolia is most definitely not real life to the travelers passing through.  Everything is awesome or horrible, inspiring or unbelievable.  Everything is an adventure.  They relish the few nights they spent in a ger with a Mongolian family, the few hours they spent trying to control their Mongolian horse on a horseback ride through the steppe.  They live on a different scale than the Peace Corps. They are sprinters and marathon runners.
I think I must be running a 10 kilometer course that has little information stops at particular points of interest along the course, and I think these little educational detours are what have set my experience apart from other Westerners I’ve met in Mongolia.  I do not live here as long as Peace Corps volunteers so I lack the very personal insight of local communities, but I have gained an overarching knowledge and framework about the issues influencing those communities.  I haven’t gone to all of the tourist sites in UB, but I have learned about the history which have erected those walls and monuments.  Every day is an adventure, but I have also adjusted to aspects of the Mongolian culture.  I can read most of a menu and take a taxi.  I can eat relatively large pieces of fat.
This convergence of three Mongolian perspectives makes day to day life fun.  The travelers contribute a sense of adventure and wonder, the Peace Corps contribute cultural understanding, and I act perhaps as the bridge in between.  I eat breakfast sandwiched between Danes and Finns, I go out with Canadians and Irishmen, I stay in with Englishmen and Americans.   Occasionally I even talk with Mongolians. Life is one multicultural party sandwiched between some large helpings of knowledge over here in Mongolia, and it’s not even tourist season.

Two views of Selenge Aimag

Mother Tree

Eej Mod, Mother Tree

    The people of Sukhbaatar City in Selenge Aimag care about their forests, recognizing the trees as important factors in air, water, and soil quality.  In fact, most people recognize natural spirits as the inherent owners of the forest and its trees.  While beliefs in Shamanism are low here, almost everyone I have talked to acknowledged the presence of nature’s system and spirits, which have their own rules and their own penalties.  People speak matter-of-factly about families who cut down the trees near springs or cut down young, green trees.  Most of them died.  People believe that cutting down a tree is like cutting down your own life; your life becomes like the stump you just made.

Old Eej Mod

    One tree of particular importance here is called Eej Mod, or Mother Tree.  There are actually two Mother Trees. One was burned during Socialist Times.  It lays on the ground, charred and completely covered by scarves.  Some of the scarves are stiff and sour from milk offerings given to the tree, and as you walk around you have to duck under stiff scarf draped branches.  In some other trees, people have hung tires and other car parts, offerings made with the hope of safe travels.  The other tree was named after Socialist Times.  Mother Tree is a stirring sight; a tall tree, barren of leaves (because of the season), with colorful scarves wrapping around her trunk, hanging from her branches, and laying near her roots.  Ravens, magpies, sparrows, and black birds perch amongst her branches, representatives of spirits revealing themselves to men.  At Mother Tree we offer vodka, milk, rice, millet, candy covered peanuts, and juniper incense, and we pray not for ourselves, but for others, walking clockwise around Mother Tree three times.

Offerings at Eej Mod

    In Sukhbaatar, I heard two stories about Mother Tree.  This is the first, told to me in an interview by a kind, old lady who has lived in Sukhbaatar for 40 years.
    In the 1920’s a woman was in love with a man, but her father promised her to a rich, old Chinese man.  The woman did not want to marry the old man, and so she ran away.  The old man sent his soldiers after her, and as they were chasing her, she turned into a tree and was able to escape.  Later, she came into the area of the Eej Mod, and she was deep in the trees so those Chinese soldiers couldn’t catch her.  There, she stayed a tree, the most kind, most special tree, and so the locals named her Eej Mod and began pray and make offerings to her.

Eej Mod

    The second story as told to me in an interview by a woman who owns a farm with her husband, growing sea buckthorn bushes, trees, and other vegetables.
    Once, a female shaman from Khovsgol area lived in the area of Eej Mod, and when she died her spirit connected with this tree and also a tree in Khovsgol Province.  There is another special tree close to UB, and also in Arkhangai province there is an Eej Mod. People say that these trees have a very strong, very close connection between each other, and maybe the same spirit between the three of them.

Tree Time

These photos are of larch trees in Northern Mongolia, near Lake Hovsgol.

  SIT, the program through which I am studying here, is unique amongst study abroad programs for a few reasons, most notably for the final month of the program.  In this last month (which I have just started), SIT students embark on a month long research project of their choosing.  Students have the choice to study all over the country, to reach out to different community members, and to pursue what really interests them.  Within my class, students are studying railroads, maternal health, artisan miners, environmental policy, hydropower, and Mongolian students’ motivations in learning English.  I have decided to study trees.  And much more than that.

My research will take the form of three questions.  First, what is nature’s role in national Mongolian identity? Second, how does this identity influence Mongolian people’s relationship with the pine tree forests near Russia? And finally, what are the environmental impacts of that relationship?  My hypothesis is that Mongolian people’s traditional connection with nature is changing as a result of globalization and capitalism, and I think that this changing connection is having negative impacts on Mongolia’s forests.  (Illegal logging, fuelled by Chinese and domestic demand, is a particular challenge here.)  So, for the next month, I will be chasing down interviews here in Ulaanbaatar and in Selenge Aimag, Sukhbaatar City, the border town closest to the forest I am interested in.

I have already spent one week researching in UB, reading lots of information on identity, Mongolia, and Mongolian identity.  Today (Sunday), I am taking the night train up to Sukhbaatar, where I will remain for a week.  I chose to study Sukhbaatar’s forests because in Mongolia, they are unique.  Most of Mongolia is covered in larch forests; the forest I will study is pine.  I hope that my project will incorporate aspects of Mongolia’s past and quickly changing present cultures, the environment and environmental policy, and social and environmental impacts of people’s relationship with nature (particularly the forests).  In the past week, I’ve realized that one month is not enough time to do this topic justice, but I guess that means I have an excuse to come back!

Two weeks ago, we went to Sainshand, a town in the South East Gobi which Mongolia hopes to develop into an industrial park.  Besides its industrial potential, the area is also rich in spiritual sites.

Sainshand's ger district

Stupas leading the way to an energy site

Wish Mountain

Bon Appetit!

Ahhh, Mongolia, where fat drips freely and the vegetable soup is mostly meat.  Mongolia’s five vegetables are carrots, cabbage, white radishes, onions, and potatoes, and the average Mongolian gets about two servings of these fancy foods per day.  My class is convinced that this statistic is only possible because of the potato’s veggie designation.  Usually, when my host family wants to include vegetables in our food, we peel one carrot, slice it, and put it in our meat and noodle soup to share between the four of us.  So, at the rate of a quarter of a carrot every day or so, I get about two servings of vegetables a week from my  UB host family.  However, if I include potatoes in my calculations, the number probably jumps to one serving of vegetables every day.  In the countryside, one serving of vegetables every day would be a godsend and an unlikely miracle (even counting potatoes).
The lack of vegetables is offset by a huge amount of rice, bread, meat, and of course fat. Although it has been an arduously long personal journey, I am proud to say that I can pretty casually pop a quarter-sized helping of fat (specific sizes depend on the type of fat and how much it has been cooked) into my mouth and even consider it delicious.  Unfortunately, I have not been as successful at actually reading the menus the fat comes from. In the past two months, I have grown able to recognize some key words: meat, fried, soup, dumpling soup, meat, rice, potato, buuz, khoshuur, tsuivan, and kimchi (Mongolians eat a lot of Korean food).  Thus, my already restricted diet is further limited by Mongolian Cyrillic and occasionally salvaged by random pointing, whether to the menu or other people’s food.
When I am feeling risk adverse, I eat buuz and khoshuur, slightly different versions of fatty meat encased in dough. Buuz are steamed dumplings and khoshuur, (traditionally made with horse meat) are like fried hot pockets, and both are filled only with meat.  Both require either some aggressive slurping or clandestine draining of the fat trapped inside, and both are delicious. Tsuivan is a less delicious traditional Mongolian fall-back made with fried noodles, a few small pieces of vegetable (for color mostly), meat, and fat.  In the countryside, my family would eat tsuivan for dinner and then heat it up the next morning with some suu te tse, or milk tea, for breakfast.
City and country eating differ slightly; mostly, the countryside diet has less variety, less vegetables, more organs, and more dairy products.  I ate the freshest goat stomach lining of my life in the countryside, and I ate more than I ever thought possible.  I also ate the freshest yogurt of my life in the countryside, and again, I ate more than I ever thought possible.  The yogurt is quite tart and tangy, but Mongolians whip in at least two heaping tablespoons of sugar to sweeten the snack.  While the Mongolian diet places little emphasis on sweets, both city and countryside people are quick to add sugar to anything with dairy.  Additionally, both areas have a ready supply of highly processed, bland pastries (a welcome tea-time addition) which all taste the same but come in different shapes (to offset the lack of vegetable variety).
Mongolian people, in general, do not suffer from hunger, but nutrition is (unsurprisingly) a large issue.  As Mongolians abandon their traditional nomadic way of life in favor of sedentary city living, the Mongolian diet will become an even greater problem.  But for now, Mongolians will continue to chow down on their meat, fat, and breads, and I will continue to dream of spinach, extra-sharp cheddar cheese, and American breakfast foods.

Rivers and Roads

Rivers and Roads :

a year from now we'll all be gone

all our friends will move away

and they're going to better places

but our friends will be gone away

nothing is as it has been

and i miss your face like hell

and i guess it's just as well

but i miss your face like hell

been talking bout the way things change

and my family lives in a different state

and if you don't know what to make of this

then we will not relate

so if you don't know what to make of this

then we will not relate

rivers and roads

rivers and roads

rivers 'til i reach you

And look! A river, a road, and a river-road!