Tsagaansar!

My apologies in advance for a terrible explanation of what the holiday Tsagaansar really is... but that is what I have been celebrating here in Mongolia for this past week! Tsagaansar is one of the big National Mongolian holidays. It began on February 14 and officially lasted for three days, though many people celebrate much longer than that. Tsagaansar celebrates the lunar calendar's new year and the name Tsagaansar means "White Month." During Tsagaansar Mongolian families make hundreds or sometimes even thousands of buuz. Buuz are a National Mongolian food that are comparable I would say to like a meat ball wrapped in a flour shell... wow that's a kind of horrible explanation but I think you get the point! So for Tsagaansar I traveled back to Erdene Soum, where I lived for 2 months this past summer, to visit my Mongolian host family. It was awesome to see them again, and my family was really happy to have me back for the holiday. Being in Erdene for Tsagaansar was awesome because Erdene is like the real Countryside, so I got the total experience celebrating there with my Mongolian family. We would wake up, put on our Mongolian Deels and start the day of buuz eating by like 10am, and didn't stop until at least 10 at night. During the days of Tsagaansar everyone goes around to each others houses and eats buuz, drinks fermented horse milk, milk tea, and vodka, then receives a gift from the hosting family. We would go to anywhere from 3-7 houses per day.... and you are supposed to eat a minumum of three buuz per house, as well as drinking all of those things.... so you can imagine how my body was feeling after a few days of this! It was a wonderful experience and I am very happy I went back to my host family to share it with them. By the third day though my other Peace Corps friends and I were ready to head back to UB! We say we are detoxing our bodies from all the meat and grease right now, and it feels oh so good!

This afternoon a few Peace Corps friends and I are going to meet with an NGO here in UB. We are all really interesting in different gender issues here in Mongolia and would like to work specifically on sexual harassment somehow. Us three Americans have met on our own, and we have an idea of what we would like to do in the future, but we are going to need a lot of help from Mongolians and hopefully some of these NGO's. I hope this meeting today can give us a better idea of the kind of things that have been done and are currently being worked on in Mongolia. I think we are going to find though that not much of anything has been done to date. I will update more on this topic as things hopefully get rolling, but as of now it's just all these ideas we have floating around.

Other news... Mongolia has an event called the English Olympics (actually not just English, every subject has an Olympics) every spring. Two students from each grade participate in the English Olympics as well as one teacher. I have been working with my Olympic students for months, so I am excited for the competition to see how they do (also a little nervous). As I understand it there are several preliminary type of rounds between Soums and then if the students make it they go onto the Olympics in the Aimag center (like a State Capital). I have definitely seen improvement in my students speaking because we have practiced so much, but I have no idea how they will do against other schools students. They have worked so hard and are such good kids though so I really hope they do well. Plus if they do well I feel like it will prove to them and everyone else in the school that you really can speak English if you work on it. A lot of times students are pretty good with grammar, and written English work, but when you ask them a question where they have to speak.... well that is much more difficult for them. Speaking is one of the skills I really want to focus on at my school and help both my teachers and students with their speaking skills. This is also one of the main reasons most schools want a volunteer like me in the first place; to have a native speaker around, for people to listen to and practice speaking with. It was nice to go back to Erdene Soum and hear people say (in Mongolian of course) that I have studied Mongolian well and my Mongolian is good. Now trust me, it's still not good, but it's a lot better than it was in the summer. Why....? Because I've practiced and studied. So besides the fact that knowing the language better will help me with everything I do here.... I also want to learn Mongolian to prove to my students that you can learn a language. I started off knowing nothing, and most of the time when I speak I sound silly and make so many mistakes. But that is ok, you just have to try and work at it, and it will gradually get better.