Can’t quite believe we’ve been in Mongolia almost 4 months already, although it also seems like living in Kaiapoi was a lifetime ago – crazy how time can move two speeds at once. The temperatures here seem to have settled out for the moment at -20C give or take 10 degrees and now we find those -10C days suprisingly mild. You might not believe it but a sunny -17 here is better than a 7 degree Christchurch southerly by miles!
We have just had some other volunteers from out of town visiting for the weekend and it was so lovely to have lots of space to accommodate them. The apartment we have been given is huge! We are also looking forward to Belinda’s sister arriving on Saturday. While she is here we plan to do some more travelling in the countryside which we are looking forward to. We love living in Ulaanbaatar but there is definitely two sides to Mongolian life – city and country, as yet we haven’t spent a lot of time out in the countryside. We are continually meeting new faces here in UB both Mongolian and expat and it is fantastic the number of people who are working towards providing more opportunities and quality of life here in Mongolia.

Yesterday Belinda spent a couple of hours down at the local small animal clinic that is operated here by an NGO that provides much needed further training to both large and small animal veterinarians. The resident western vet is off home to the states for 3 months so I am going to hang ot at the clinic for a couple of hours each Monday and also offer back-up support as needed for difficult cases or hairy questions. It was really great to use the veterinary part of my brain again and it seems like a role that will fit in quite nicely with our family life and help to improve the capacity of local veterinarians.

One of the desires of many Mongolians here is to learn english. Before coming here I hadn’t considered how limiting it can be to further education if you have a language that is only spoken by a few million people out of the world’s 6.5 billion. Without english or another widely spoken language vets, engineers, doctors, teachers (insert any profession here) find it very difficult to broaden their knowledge, as the vast wealth of research and knowledge in the world is not generally reported in or translated into Mongolian. Most Mongolians learn english at school and in fact many of them probably have a reasonable grasp of correct english grammar, but when it comes to understanding complex issues their understanding is quite limited. Belinda has made friends with a couple of Mongolian english teachers here and it has been really interesting discussing with them the issues they face.

Christmas here isn’t a holiday (main religion is Buddhism) however, that hasn’t stopped the odd large christmas tree springing up around Ulaanbaatar. The 31st of December is a holiday and from what we gather Mongolians celebrate a christmassy type of new year’s at this time. Steve has booked to take a week off leading up to Christmas when we hope to do some travelling with Belinda’s sister. The main festival season here in Mongolia is Tsaagan Sar (White Moon) which rolls out over most of February. Families make many 100’s of buuz (meat dumplings) and store them on the veranda (a.k.a. freezer) then spend the month visiting relatives and friends and eating together and sharing gifts with others. We’re really looking forward to experiencing this. Often this is also a time when people dress in their more traditional clothing and we’re considering getting a del (traditional long robe/dress) made ourselves.

Loads of love to everyone - please soak up some summer warmth on our behalf.