7 days in Mongolia
- 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.
