When I wake up here in the morning it is because the sun is blasting me in the eyes. On the mornings I don’t have to be up early I fight back the red of my eyelids by curling into myself or by shrouding my face in a blanket, but the sun seems to soak into these places, too, and I sit up. A morning shower is out of the question since the water in my apartment runs frigid. All I can muster at this point is a few splashes on the face and a bit through my hair. When this wretched task is through, I move on to preparing my cream of wheat, toast, and tea, a much warmer and more pleasant task. I waste no time getting dressed. The steam heat isn’t on yet and the cement walls pull in the already brisk morning air.
My work is a fifteen minute walk through the market from my house. Later it will be an eight minute, bone-rattling jog. I am working for a small branch of Orkhon University, which is based in Ulaanbaatar. Before you imagine me on campus of any university you’ve attended, let me tell you that the entire school is two classrooms full of wobbly desks and difficult chairs, and so far no electricity. On the first day I had ten students. A few days before work started, my boss told me that my main teaching counterpart wouldn’t be returning to work this year and that we would have to hire a new teacher in the two days before school started. This gave me the feeling that I would be teaching all of the English classes to start off the year, but in one afternoon, all interviews were complete and my supervisor had hired one full-time and one part-time English teacher. Both are excited to work with me and both seem to be motivated teachers.
This is a lucky placement and one I couldn’t be happier about. Orkhon University is largely a language school, and my students are working to become language teachers or translators in the best case. Though I will have few students, they will all be motivated learners. From what I’ve heard, this is not necessary true of students at non-language focused schools or secondary schools. I will be team teaching one or two classes each morning and will be spending the rest of the morning observing and advising the other teachers and giving private English lessons. For now, the afternoons are mine, but eventually I’ll use this time to develop community projects.
We got here a week before work started. We spent most of the week consulting our co-workers and the volunteers who were already here about where to go to outfit our homes. Everything is a wild-goose chase. Axes are in the hardware store, which is across from the electronics when you first enter the market. The boots you want are in the back of the second floor of the big clothes building. The second fruit stand has green peppers again today, but they will probably be gone tomorrow. If you like milk, it is cheapest at the vodka and beer store. The nature of this means that, for now, I buy only the things I am in search of, only the things I need. When I need a container of Korean raman, I don’t also buy five cans of Campbell’s Southwestern Chicken and Rice Soup. I come back home with a bag of items I will use fully and very soon.
Of the six volunteers here, I am the lone apartment dweller. Four people live in gers and one lives in a small duplex house. Living in an apartment affords me my usual standard of slobbishness. I’ve been home for over a week, but many of my things remain packed in the bags they arrived here in. For several days, despite the fact that I had guests often, my belt and jump-rope sat tangled together in the middle of my living room floor. Two piles of unfolded clothes lay on the extra bed, the clean distinguishable from the dirty only by leaning in and taking a sniff. It’s so cold in here that the food I accidentally leave out takes twice as long to rot and stink, and thus, is usually saved.
Though my inner surroundings are little to look at, they don’t reflect the beauty of the scenery just outside my door. The town sits in the bottom of a bowl of mountains. I can see no further than a few kilometers in any direction from within the city. The mountains are mostly rugged and dotted with large boulders. They are occasionally wooded and in a few places smooth, sheer faces drop from the mountain’s peak to the ground. The city teems with a population of lumbering dogs. The shady side of every building is occupied by at least one of these massive hounds. So far I’ve met the two-fold challenge of feigning confidence and not wetting myself when they approach.
Having grown up in Iowa, where the only things that obstruct your view of the plain are barns, grain bins, the corn when it’s high, and a rare, subtle hill, I find it confusing to have such a short sight of what’s around me. This is an indicative physical reminder of my situation at large. Just as living in Mongolia puts me in limited contact with my own culture and the events of the world and forces me to look closely at only the people and happenings that occur immediately near me, the mountains that cloister me in force me to look at and examine only them. And for now, that’s best for me and comforting. Future hikes up the mountains will afford me the longview I will eventually need. For now, there’s plenty to take in in the valley.