7 days in Mongolia

By Joei Villarama
INQUIRER.net

WE thought the captain was playing a joke on us but the sandstorm turned out to be real — the plane couldn’t land in Ulan Bator so we made a giant U-turn back to Beijing (not an unusual occurrence for a regular visitor to Mongolia). We waited for hours in an airport hotel, trading stories with fellow passengers on what brought us all here.

There was a lawyer for mining companies, a manager for a chain of clinics across Asia, a person on a UN environmental project to combat desertification, a smattering of businessmen and tourists. Then there was me on a mission to see how my volunteer friends were doing. Hopping to four different homes in a week wasn’t a typical relaxed vacation but a discovery of the spartan life they led.

“Sharing Skills, Changing Lives” is the motto of VSO — the Volunteer Services Organization which sends people from different parts of the globe to contribute their expertise to development programs in third world countries. My friends Chielo Sta. Maria, Rayso Natividad and Willie Mercado were only four months into their VSO contract, but had plunged right into their jobs in livelihood security after only a month of language training and country orientation.

Beautifully illustrated books sing paeans to the far-reaching expanses of Genghis Khan’s empire, Mongolia. There are no grand monuments surviving from that distant era — what you see is a socialist state coming out of its cocoon. The ubiquity of Genghis Khan’s face on many products, including several kinds of vodka and beer, has prompted the government to curtail the use of the famous conqueror’s bearded likeness. A teacher expressed a wish that his students, when asked to think of people they admired, would be more creative and come up with other names.
We stopped by Joe’s place to water his plants on the first day. Also a Filipino volunteer, Joe had been rushed to Korea for medical reasons — Rayso was looking after the plants left growing under a Sioux Indian dream catcher that filtered the rays of the afternoon sun. Rayso raved about the impact Joe was making in training accountants in Mongolia, helping to fill a huge gap created by the shift from communist rule to the free market system.

The next day we took a two-hour ride north of Ulan Bator to Darkhan (silent k) where Willie and Chielo were posted. Smooth rolling mountain ranges stretched before us as the driver sped down the road with the occasional yak crossing. We stopped by a diner where the drivers had the typical meat-laden dishes. Vegetarians won’t have many choices here.

Darkhan is a city so small you can easily master the taxi system loop, boarding coasters similar to our FX. In a moment of serendipity, a Mongolian student stopped to help me buy ice cream, fortuitously leading me next to the Filipino volunteer teacher Alain, about whom more later.
I gathered from Chielo’s interpreter, Galaa, that drinking is a major national problem. It’s not uncommon to see drunken men sprawled on building stairs during winter. Somebody said it was a habit inherited from the Russians but that’s like saying our mañana habit came from the Spaniards.

For breakfast the following day, Willie served me tuyo. I felt guilty eating it, knowing that the supply he generously shared with me was limited. Willie trained entrepreneurs for over a decade at the Department of Trade and Industry back home. Now a consultant in the Darkhan Business Incubator Center, I saw him in comic struggle to surmount the language barrier with his officemates when his computer failed to start. (Still, he took time to introduce me to a woman in the felt products business who wanted to expand her market.)

Along the school corridor, the French volunteer Christiane Merz spotted me looking somewhat lost so she invited me to sit in her class for Social Work students. While she had a Red Cross activity the going on, she led me to another class of students learning English and asked me to handle the discussion. The students and I exchanged stories about our own countries, giddy with excitement to communicate. They sang a Mongolian song, talked about their hobbies and the three important sports for men — horse riding, archery and wrestling.

Christiane’s class of Tourism students then walked us to two recently finished monuments. From the hilltop, one student pointed out the tallest building in Darkhan, all of 16 stories high. She proudly informed us that it was built by Russians, with people from two other nations contributing labor. Only later would I discover that there was something more to this building than its record-breaking height in this city. The strangest thing — it had no elevator.

Christiane had worked for a year training social workers in Sophia, Bulgaria, as a VSO volunteer. She expected that to be her role in Darkhan too but was instead initially given a job as an English teacher. But this turn of events does not deter this extremely pro-active person; she is now organizing a summer camping trip with her students.

The concentration of NGOs and international organizations was astounding. Chielo lived in a building with people from American, Japanese and South Korean aid agencies. Jim, a British volunteer who cracked us up with his wry sense of humor, was handling education methodologies, trying to create an impact on a macro level.

The next morning Chielo took me to a cooperative they were assisting. Here women make delicate angora scarves and other wool products. Angora fetches a steep price in high-end stores in the developed world; here women in a small room weave these beautiful fabrics with techniques not too different from that of their ancestors.

Next stop was the Darkhan Health Department where many accolades were heaped on the Pinoy volunteer Glenn Benablo, who’s been in Mongolia for almost two years now. His goal was to train the nurses, but soon realized that he couldn’t jump into it straightaway. So he conducted focus group discussions to get to the bottom of things, finding how over-burdened the nurses were.

That was the beginning of helping to improve the health management and delivery system. He even brought eight Mongolian health workers to Davao — they returned home excited to create their own puppet shows, the kind that enables people to open up about previously taboo topics like domestic violence and alcoholism.

On our last night in Darkhan we went to a typical, must-see yurt (”ger” to the Mongolians) and found our host hand-rolling a big piece of heavy brown felt in a basement. He drove us back to his home as though his tiny car were a fierce four-wheel drive that could ram its way through the desert sand in hyper speed.

His yurt was plain white on the outside; inside were orange floors, patterned carpets on the walls, reds contrasting with blues all around and ceiling spokes painted with swirling designs, all spelling simple joy. In the center, a stove warms the whole house during the harsh winters. I wondered if people living in multi-story residential flats felt cooped-up and detached from the land where they have been living in yurts for millennia.

Then we were in Alain’s home — a volunteer piece de resistance. An artist through and through, his bathroom was literally sheer poetry, with quotes and poems pasted all over. Because it was her own battle cry, Chielo asked me to look for the lines from the movie “Mona Lisa Smile”: “Not all who wander are aimless, especially not those who seek truth, beyond tradition, beyond definition, beyond the image.” Alain has been teaching English for more than a year. He told me about some of the challenges he encountered — one of them is the Mongolian sense of time which is actually not far from the Filipino.

British David Whitworth and Singaporean Gek Khong have been in Mongolia only since August last year but they’ve already held a joint painting and photography exhibit to raise funds for the Lotus Children’s Center — a shelter for orphans, abused kids and children with disabilities. David was a university lecturer in engineering design in England; after his wife died, he joined VSO to teach construction workers in Mongolia. Similarly, Gek was working in the IT industry in Singapore for 21 years when she decided to take the artist’s route. Now she divides her time between painting and working with children, drawing out and discovering their talents at the Lotus Center.

David and Gek chatted about how international aid agencies tend to operate in isolation, not knowing about other organization’s projects when they can easily avoid redundancies. A higher degree of synergy can be attained if the local government encouraged more communication among the agencies.

Going back to China, the difference in development levels became starker to me. There’s nothing like taking a holiday in a less developed country to make one appreciate home. For now, China is home to me — and the leap it’s made in the nano-blink of a decade seemed all the more incredible after Mongolia.

Asking me if I rode a horse, my Chinese friends seemed disappointed that I had only a picture of a yurt to show for the journey, capturing the Gobi Desert only through bars of pasalubong chocolate. I didn’t even get to taste authentic Mongolian barbecue, but I did encounter something more — a glimpse into the life of Filipinos and other foreigners bravely, tirelessly working to make a dent in the global fight against poverty. It doesn’t matter which continent they serve. They’re citizens of one world.

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