August 2009 Archives
I can't believe it. After nearly 2 months of silence, I am back blogging about life in Mongolia. Thanks, Nancy.
I have been in Mongolia now since May 17, so that means that I've been here for 2 months and 3 weeks. One more week will be 3 months. I arrived in Arvaikheer, the capital of Uvurkhangai, on June 18, I think, that means I'll be celebrating 2 months here pretty soon.
I guess the most important thing for me to say is that I am incredibly happy here. Seriously. Ecstatic. I smile and laugh everyday and feel really content. Despite the harshness of the life here and the challenges I face everyday with the language, food, and lack of most comforts, I feel so much happier here than I have in years past. Every few days I get this thought in my head that my heart is expanding. It's so interesting. I feel that more and more that my capacity to trust and to truly feel full emotions is growing. At the inception workshop for my project at the end of June, right after I arrived in Arvaikheer, the Mongolian project officer from the World Bank who's overseeing my project said to me: "Trust Mongolians. Trust them to do the right thing." I keep reminding myself of what he said, and whenever I have doubts, I hear his voice in my head. Everytime I let go of my need to control and just think that they want to do the right thing, I find out that they are very committed, involved, intelligent, and trustworthy. It's a wonderful feeling.
A foreign guy told me a little while back that women are too emotional, so you have to be careful about having a casual relationship without emotions. (It was a generalization. He wasn't talking about me!) I thought that that was the worst thing I'd ever heard. Too emotional? How can anyone be too emotional. Without emotions we wouldn't be human. Why would I want to live or have a relationship without emotion? So my motto is to feel great emotion all the time. No more supression. The great thing is that Mongolians are very warm, friendly, hospitable people so I always feel such positive energy coming my way.
My brain, as well, is working overtime, processing so much and learning new things so I'm sure I'm using more than the 10% people normally use, as I've heard. For example:
About 2 weeks ago I returned by bus from a busy 5 days in Ulaanbaatar. The bus ride was the worst ever, very bumpy and dusty and super hot. Half the guys on the bus ended up removing their shirts. Then the second half was cold and rainy. The bus driver had to stop the bus twice to wait out some violent hail storms. So I arrived home around 10:30 pm, sicker than a dog. I had caught a cold in UB, was wearing my glasses because my eyes had and still are very dry and infected from allergies, and I was really tired and hungover from all the partying I'd done in UB. Then the next morning I had to leave for a two-day field visit to Bat-Olzii province at 6 am. Then I had to suffer through the bumpiest 3.5 hours of backpain-inflicting road in Mongolia. All that day I had to rack my brain to speak Japanese with a local government worker who speaks Japanese too. She kept saying "Poor Barbara, you have a terrible cold, your eyes are all red, and you just travelled from UB, and you have to work." I didn't tell her about the cold or eye problems: they were evident. I was happy to speak to someone directly, without an interpreter, so I withstood the pain of having to dredge up my long forgotten Japanese. For a few years I've felt that somehow my fluent Japanese got auto-archived by my internal computer and that I can't find the program where I can easily search for those words and grammar. I've felt that they're hidden and only accessible by some outside administrator who didn't give me a username or password. Fortunately, the more I come into contact with Japanese-speakers, and there are a few around, my memory gets jogged and I regain more of the language.
So all those non-tangibles are expanding in a positive way. Fortunately, the tangible, my body, is shrinking quickly as well. Last year, from December 2007 to May 2009 was my Year of Fatness. I gained so much weight so quickly; it was shocking not just to me but to those who saw it happen. I couldn't stop the process and I felt terrible about it. Thank goodness things have turned around. I think that I will dub this new year, from May onward, my Year of Renewed Fitness (body and mind).
I have been in Mongolia now since May 17, so that means that I've been here for 2 months and 3 weeks. One more week will be 3 months. I arrived in Arvaikheer, the capital of Uvurkhangai, on June 18, I think, that means I'll be celebrating 2 months here pretty soon.
I guess the most important thing for me to say is that I am incredibly happy here. Seriously. Ecstatic. I smile and laugh everyday and feel really content. Despite the harshness of the life here and the challenges I face everyday with the language, food, and lack of most comforts, I feel so much happier here than I have in years past. Every few days I get this thought in my head that my heart is expanding. It's so interesting. I feel that more and more that my capacity to trust and to truly feel full emotions is growing. At the inception workshop for my project at the end of June, right after I arrived in Arvaikheer, the Mongolian project officer from the World Bank who's overseeing my project said to me: "Trust Mongolians. Trust them to do the right thing." I keep reminding myself of what he said, and whenever I have doubts, I hear his voice in my head. Everytime I let go of my need to control and just think that they want to do the right thing, I find out that they are very committed, involved, intelligent, and trustworthy. It's a wonderful feeling.
A foreign guy told me a little while back that women are too emotional, so you have to be careful about having a casual relationship without emotions. (It was a generalization. He wasn't talking about me!) I thought that that was the worst thing I'd ever heard. Too emotional? How can anyone be too emotional. Without emotions we wouldn't be human. Why would I want to live or have a relationship without emotion? So my motto is to feel great emotion all the time. No more supression. The great thing is that Mongolians are very warm, friendly, hospitable people so I always feel such positive energy coming my way.
My brain, as well, is working overtime, processing so much and learning new things so I'm sure I'm using more than the 10% people normally use, as I've heard. For example:
About 2 weeks ago I returned by bus from a busy 5 days in Ulaanbaatar. The bus ride was the worst ever, very bumpy and dusty and super hot. Half the guys on the bus ended up removing their shirts. Then the second half was cold and rainy. The bus driver had to stop the bus twice to wait out some violent hail storms. So I arrived home around 10:30 pm, sicker than a dog. I had caught a cold in UB, was wearing my glasses because my eyes had and still are very dry and infected from allergies, and I was really tired and hungover from all the partying I'd done in UB. Then the next morning I had to leave for a two-day field visit to Bat-Olzii province at 6 am. Then I had to suffer through the bumpiest 3.5 hours of backpain-inflicting road in Mongolia. All that day I had to rack my brain to speak Japanese with a local government worker who speaks Japanese too. She kept saying "Poor Barbara, you have a terrible cold, your eyes are all red, and you just travelled from UB, and you have to work." I didn't tell her about the cold or eye problems: they were evident. I was happy to speak to someone directly, without an interpreter, so I withstood the pain of having to dredge up my long forgotten Japanese. For a few years I've felt that somehow my fluent Japanese got auto-archived by my internal computer and that I can't find the program where I can easily search for those words and grammar. I've felt that they're hidden and only accessible by some outside administrator who didn't give me a username or password. Fortunately, the more I come into contact with Japanese-speakers, and there are a few around, my memory gets jogged and I regain more of the language.
So all those non-tangibles are expanding in a positive way. Fortunately, the tangible, my body, is shrinking quickly as well. Last year, from December 2007 to May 2009 was my Year of Fatness. I gained so much weight so quickly; it was shocking not just to me but to those who saw it happen. I couldn't stop the process and I felt terrible about it. Thank goodness things have turned around. I think that I will dub this new year, from May onward, my Year of Renewed Fitness (body and mind).
