You might be in Mongolia when you…
- Watch a goat be picked out for your weekly meals, watch it get slaughtered, and learn and see how every part of it would be used for something.
- Pray over your little sister as she feels nervous and anxious over her visa application to the US!
- Stand in line 15 minutes to wait to fill up your water jugs, that look like gasoline jugs much like you fill up your car with gas. You get this water from water stations around the neighborhood so that you can take it home and boil it before using it for tea, cooking, dishes, or drinking water.
- Watch in fascination as the church security guard “dances” on wood dust to heat up your room for the night. It makes the heat linger longer than regular firewood!
- Experience something akin to a roller coaster when Boldo drives a 4 runner off road for about 2 hours into the countryside! What did we do— laugh hysterically and with the conviction that this was going to be an epic month since this was our first full day on Mongolian soil!
- Drink raisin water out of what looks like a beer mug!
- Shovel goat poo for 10 hours alongside your 5 teammates, 4 Mongolian kids ages 3-9, and 6 adult Mongolians. At one point a fort of baas (poo) might have been built and used as protection against flying poo clods.
- Take out a kid with a giant slab of poo when he runs into you while carrying a giant slab of poo!
- Are given gifts of food, hot showers, bracelets, earrings, bedsheets, tea, and scarves by the women and families we connected with most… oh how they give everything and more! I can’t wait to replicate the love and thoughtfulness of these people in my own home!
- Stay up until the wee hours of the morning on your last night in the countryside, listening to the testimonies of your hosts and sharing how they have blessed us!
- Watch your Mongolian mama from the countryside, Gana, choose clods of poo from the piles we were excavating to take to her ger to use as fuel for her fire!
- Ride a Mongolian camel, and laugh hysterically at one another’s initial reaction as the camel went from sitting to standing!
- Have a picture perfect moment with your favorite three year old, Abek, when trying to say goodbye he thinks I’m chasing him, but then stopping to squat down and open my arms, to which he responds by turning and running full speed ahead into my arms. This kid has made me want to be a mom to boys! (PS… he looks like a little marshmallow man with all his puffy clothes on!)
Abek.
- After a really long day, choosing to still climb the hill behind your house, and being rewarded with stunning views of the snow-capped mountains in the distance, and beautiful colors of the lichens covering the rocks! Plus we had a photo session with our sheepdog!
- Be pants-ed by a 5 year old Mongolian boy who finds butt slapping and pants pulling to be the best forms of “tag—you’re it” when your Mongolian, and his English, language skills fail you!
- Split wood with an ax and become successful after trying numerous times!
- Start a day of poo shoveling with having been unable to get the shovel an inch into the ground though your entire body weight is on it. But by days end, (seriously) 12 hours later, you didn’t want to stop because of the fun you have found in the challenge and the exertion after figuring out through trial and error how to remove giant slabs of poo in a single move!
- Come up with a theme song to our time in the countryside: “it’s all about that baas, ‘bout that baas! It’s trouble” (to the tune of “it’s all about that bass”) and then having them talk about it in church the Sunday after! Haha!
- Have breakfast in a ger with our Mongolian mama, Gana.
- Get awesome hugs from our dear Gamba, who gives great dad hugs. A man’s man through and through, but never too guy enough to hug and love on us and his family, and to share ALL of his life story late into the night.
- Have tickle fests with Abek and Janu
- Make new friends, Hishka and Ochma, who help serve as translators.
- Go to a shower house for the first time, when your hosts decide to bless you after you had shoveled poo for 10 hours the day before. With the temperature outside being about 25 and no central heat in buildings, hot water is kinda essential for this to be an enjoyable experience! Screaming in delight over very hot showers, and then mourning that failure to shower fast enough meant you got a cold shower, and suddenly the need to wash your body seems not so great. Clean hair will do, and baby wipe baths keep you warmer!
- Drop your iPod touch into the outhouse hole (meaning it fell onto human poo) and having to fish it out with a shovel, all the while feeling frustrated and at the same time having hysterical giggles about the situation. Thankfully it got little on it, and is no worse for wear— nothing alcohol wipes and baby wipes can’t fix!
- Meet awesome, Spirit-filled, generous with everything people who aren’t just contacts and connections, but true friends. You laugh, play games, go out to eat, have sleepovers, and have one another over, though our “having people over” looked like us inviting them out to dinner!
- Wear 5 layers on top (t shirt, flannel shirt, microfleece, puff jacket, and raincoat) and 3 layers on bottom (leggings, jeans, and sweat pants), wool socks, and fleece lined boots!
- Lose your Ray Bans of about 3 years in an epic fashion: down the first (AND COME TO FIND OUT ONLY) automatic, motion-sensored flush toilet you’ve encountered in Mongolia!
(wish I could get more pictures to upload… perhaps over the next few days I can add more)
