Friday July 16

Well I have officially been in Mongolia for over a month! We are now about half way through PST, which I cannot believe because the time is really flying by! I am using more and more of the Mongolian language I am learning everyday (my host family gets soooo excited with each new word I use). Though it is slightly scary to think that in about a month I will be at site and on my own. This makes me very motivated to keep studying as hard as I can so I feel more competent with the language by that time. Our Micro-teaching sessions are over and now we are in the process of planning out our next set of teaching, which is called Practice Teaching. Practice Teaching will be much like our Micro-teaching was, now we will just teach for 40 minutes at a time to a larger class of Mongolian students. We will start off team teaching (so I will teach with a partner, my friend Maggie), and then move on to just teaching by ourselves. The organizing of this is basically up to the 12 of us trainees in Erdene. We had our language teacher translate the information for us so we could write out a bunch of signs to post around town (no copying machine obviously) advertising a sign up date for these language classes. The signs read: “Free English Language classes taught by native speakers!!” We are hoping to get a lot of people to come to our information session tomorrow. At this session we will ask each person a few questions in English to get a feel for what level they are at so we can divide everyone out into classes by level. Then Monday we start! Apparently it is kind of a chaotic deal… we are just trying our best to make sure it is organized chaos! Then much like Micro-teaching, we will be assessed by the TEFL trainers on our practice teaching. The point of that is mainly to give us constructive feedback and to just get practice, though another part of this is so they can see our skills, which will then have an impact on our site placements that we find out about on August 15 before swearing in. On July 9 the Peace Corps staff conducted their first of two TAP Interviews. With these they had us fill out a packet on where we think we are at with the different skills and areas we have been working on thus far. Then they filled out the same packet about us and we discussed. It was a good time, nice to touch base with the higher ups and discuss everything. The same day we had short interviews with our LCF’s this interview was just on language. This interview was to check up on where we are at, as they say they would like us to be at the level of Novice High by the end of PST. I believe everyone in Erdene is pretty much right on track, and we actually have a few trainees that are far beyond where we “should” be at this point. I think I am just about where we need to be at the half-way point; my teachers say they like how hard I work and try in class, so that counts for something!!

The other big event that happened was NAADAM!! Naadam is the second biggest holiday of the year in Mongolia. National Naadam is July 11-13, and then we had a local Naadam in Erdene the days before that as well. Naadam celebrates the 1921 independence of Mongolia from Chinese control. At Naadam there is horse racing, wrestling, archery, and tons of other activities going on. All of my host family’s relatives came over so the house was just busy as can be; it was wonderful. Always when relatives come they are so excited to see me and bring me treats, and then I of course can say about two Mongolian sentences to them so I feel a little silly! My little host sister rides horses, so I always love seeing her ride. Some of these kids that ride are teeny tiny, like smaller than some of the first graders I had this fall. Then the wrestling was very neat. These men that wrestle are ripped! A few of our American PCT’s wrestled… they did not win, but it was cool that they did it! Besides that I drank the fermented milk, which was surprisingly pretty good. I at a lot of hoshure, basically deep fried goodness, and of course had a little bit of vodka. I am looking forward to hopefully going to Naadam in UB next year.