Mongolian Wrestling - video

by Mark

I wanted to get these up on the blog because they are just too entertaining.  We're right in the middle of the 3 day Naadam Festival in Arkhangai, and we've recently witnessed two Americans take on the Mongolian men in wrestling.  Both of these men were named Tim.  One is our sitemate, the other is a visitor from the States who is writing a book on wrestling traditions in other cultures.  This first video is of our sitemate Tim getting thrown down by a rather large Mongolian man.  Needless to say, he lost his match in the 1st round.  (Sorry the quality is so poor!)

The second video is of the other Tim...he manages to take down one of the largest Mongolians on the field.  After a few minutes of holding each other, we managed to capture video of the takedown.  It's quite impressive. And really just a great move.  Enjoy.

We'll try to post more pictures and video in the coming days.  Hopefully...

Tourism Marketing Trainings

by Mark

It's obviously been much too long since I last wrote (about 2 months!)...however, I have an excuse.  I've actually been working!  Well, traveling for work is a more appropriate description.  A few months back when I realized that my grant funded unique business competition was going to be completed by May, I thought to myself "you should plan some sort of work for June so that you're not 'bored' at work during your last few weeks in Mongolia".  I decided to push myself to do two more trainings for the tourism industry of Arkhangai - this time focusing on marketing.

So I told my staff that I wanted to travel to Tariat and Tsenker soums (if you remember from previous posts these are two of the tourist hot-spots of Arkhangai) to meet with some of the managers/staff of the ger camps.  I also decided that I wanted to bring along two additional local trainers - preferably one that has been working with me for awhile as well as another "newbie" who might like to see how I lead/facilitate trainings for these groups.  You know "capacity building" and all that good stuff!  My goal was to lead a 3-4 hour session on the 4P's of marketing as it pertains to the Arkhangai tourism industry, gather some feedback, do some pre- and post-testing, and pass out some materials (brochures/posters) we'd created for the businesses involved in the www.travelarkhangai.com project.

I'll let the pictures do most of the talking, but I did want to mention that we learned a lot from the first training that we implemented in the second training.  The results were much better.  In fact, our first stop (Tariat) had the pre- and post- test results both equal exactly 61%.  There are multiple factors for this that I won't go into, but we pinpointed them and a few days later when we were in Tsenker we had pre-tests at 67% and post-test results at 86%!!  We had 23 participants from 14 different companies attend in total.  Overall I'd say it was a success, and if nothing else, it was a really fun time for me and my staff as these were my final soum trainings.

We had our training in Tariat inside one of the gers - we split the group into two teams.  Here I'm getting feedback from one team on how the tourism industry has been utilizing marketing techniques.

Here the other team is presenting after our "activity".  I had the two teams initially write at the top of the paper a fake company name.  Then my two assistants grabbed the paper and swapped them with the other team's paper.  Now taking what the other team wrote, the new team had to write what product that company sold.  We swapped after each topic was written about - pricing, target markets, ways to promote the products, etc.  The final presentation of the "company" that your team was left with was quite entertaining.  It was all done to show how marketing plans need to evolve as more information comes to light.

The training group in Tariat.  Here we had 1 representative from 10 different ger camps.

Afterward we decided to go fishing in White Lake (that's my driver Tsogoo) - a mere 100 meters from the training site.

Do you like our band's album cover?

These were my two local trainers, Khorlo and Nowroo

A trip out to Tariat isn't complete without the "gorge" photo - I believe I now have one of these during every season in Mongolia.

The same training at Tsenker soums' Duut Resort.  Different feel being inside a gigantic log cabin resort instead of a ger.

Here I have the one group drawing a price/quality matrix for a company/product of their choosing.  I learned some valuable insight - for one, this group believes that Mercedes Benz makes a low quality, low price product.  This led to all sorts of fun conversations and attempted explanations!

In Tsenker we had 13 attendees from all 4 camps in the area.  One group sent 6 of their young staff members for the training.  And they were all quite smart.  I was thrilled.

This time we decided volleyball would be our relaxation/sport following the training.  It's hard to tell but what appears to be beautiful grass around our feet is actually probably 30% wild onions!  They were so good.  You could just snap the greens off and chew on it while you played.  Of course we all joked that I wouldn't be able to kiss any of the pretty girls afterward.

On the way back after all our work was done, we took a different route.  After coming up over a hill, we found ourselves staring at some of the largest fields of wild flowers I've seen here.  This particular part was all orange but others were all white, or all yellow, and they'd just blend one area right into the other.  This is us pretending to look comfortable as thousands of bugs attacked!

And why not one more flower photo!  We took dozens.  This was actually us jumping toward the camera but it took too late and instead it appears that we've all just fallen down.  Needless to say, we enjoy our time on these trips and I'm going to miss hanging out with my staff at trainings.

Life lately

by Kara

A spastic update on life lately...

We've got a little more than a month left in Mongolia - that's it! It's crazy. I haven't fully mentally prepared myself for returning to the US. I've been so busy lately helping train the new group of volunteers that just arrived that I haven't had much time to sit down and think about all my own stuff.

Training the new volunteers has been fun (and tiring). It's fun to see all their enthusiasm and excitement. Until talking to them I had completely forgotten what it was like to arrive in Mongolia for the first time. It makes me realize how comfortable I've become with many aspects of life here and how normal so many things seem. It's hard trying to balance giving them an optimistic, yet realistic view of what their Peace Corps service might be like, but I'm trying. The worse part about training is that we spend 4 to 5 hours a day commuting from our office to the site their training is at. One day last week we had a tire blowout which extended our time on the road even longer. Not fun. BUT I do get to drive past herds of camels everyday, which still doesn't fail to excite me.

Though most of my mental effort is focused on training, I am thinking about life in the US a bit. I register for classes next week (!) and I'm job-searching. I'm hoping to find a part-time research assistant position at the university. These positions include a paycheck PLUS complete tuition coverage. Obviously that would be awesome and would ensure I wouldn't have to take out any student loans, but of course, these positions are highly coveted. I got really excited about one position that I applied for last week and just got an email from those in charge of hiring asking us applicants to be patient, as they received over 100 applications. Yikes. 100. Those are some tough odds.

Anyway, that's all I've got for this quick update for now. I don't even have any pictures to upload because I'm at an internet cafe and don't have access to my photos right now. Sorry! I'll be finishing up my portion of training next week then heading back home to Arkhangai for the remainder of our time in Mongolia. While in Arkhangai I'll be helping with a 4H exchange program that's bringing some American teenagers to Arkhangai to live with host families. We'll probably take them to my work's summer camp. We've also got Naadam (horse-racing, archery, wrestling) and then of course saying goodbye to everybody, packing up our stuff, giving away lots of stuff, etc. Crazy! Time is flying!!

Health Fair

by Kara

Saturday, May 21, 2011 was Arkhangai Aimag’s First Annual Health Fair! This event was made possible thanks to funding we received from the Millennium Challenge Corporation and from wonderful people in America who donated to the cause. A big thanks goes out to those who donated, particularly Mark’s parents.

We’d been talking about this fair with our counterparts for months and months but as things often happen here in Mongolia, much of the planning came down to the last minute. We were scrambling the week of the event to get everything ready. But in the end, the event happened and went pretty well.

The event included 4 main events:

1) 5K Community Walk and Run
This ended up being a little less than 5K, as we just used a course the PE teachers already knew about and could easily explain to everybody. It also just ended up being a run, rather than a big community walk, but that’s okay. We had adults and students participate (separately) and it was a lot of fun. And everybody who participated got a t-shirt custom printed for the event!

Lining up to sign up for the 5K. It was all about matching track suits.



Pointing out the course



And the adults are off!

Part of the race involved avoiding yaks. Yak-attack = disqualification



The finish line


2) Poster Contest
We invited students to submit posters that were related to the theme of tobacco and alcohol use and the effects the use of these substances can have on people’s lives. The submissions were really great. The winning poster will be printed on a bigger poster and displayed in town.

Two of the winners

This one was pretty, and supposedly it was supposed to represent an alcohol and tobacco free life, but it was a bit of a stretch. It also looked like they just copied it from a book. But it was so pretty...

3) Nutrition Trivia Contest
Students were invited to participate in a trivia contest about nutrition and healthy eating. All 10th grade students have learned about this material in lessons throughout the school year.

4) Cooking Contest
All schools were invited to participate in a healthy cooking contest. The school cooks were asked to involve students in this as well. This was the least successful part of the event, as fewer schools turned out than we had hoped. The date of the entire Health Fair was changed from May 14 to May 21 at the last minute and some of the schools had prepared to compete on May 14 and were unable to participate on May 21. Though our counterparts were able to deal with so many aspects of last minute changes, this is one part that suffered. Hopefully they can do this next year with fewer last minute changes and better communication to all schools.

Event planners and winning cooks

Overall the event was a lot of fun. Again, thanks so much to our donors for help making this happen! We hope it’ll happen again next year too.

Transitions

by Kara

Though it's hard for Mark and I to believe, the end of our 2 years of service is coming to an end soon! We received official approval from our Peace Corps Mongolia Country Director to conclude our service and fly home July 24!!!

However, before that day comes, we still have a lot to do. Mark is busy finishing up projects at work, including the final reports for his unique business and unique product competition, training his counterparts on how to maintain the Travel Arkhangai website, and a couple more tourism trainings for local businesses.

I'm heading off to the city of Darkhan next week to take part in a two-week training of trainers. I've been asked to help train the incoming group of Community Youth Development volunteers. This is what Mark did last year after we returned from vacation. I'll be gone about 5 weeks total, spending 2 weeks preparing the trainings and 2 1/2 weeks actually doing the training. Although this means time apart from Mark (and our cat Mishka!) I'm looking forward to a change of pace and a change of scenery. Things at my work have slowed down a lot for me lately and I'm not very busy. If you know me, you know I like to be busy. Plus, it'll be fun to see a fresh group of people newly embarking upon their experience here in Mongolia. Mark is planning to try and come visit me in Darkhan sometime in the middle of my training too, hopefully around the time of our anniversary.

After I return from training I'll spend some time at my organization's summer camp. Then we'll celebrate Naadam (horse racing, archery, and wrestling summer festival) here in Arkhangai, hand out some more helmets to child jockeys, and after, pack up our apartment! We'll head into UB a few days before our official Close of Service date to do gobs of paperwork and medical check-ups.

It's going to be a little odd and possibly anti-climatic because PCVs from our group are departing at different dates throughout the summer, so there's not exactly one big good-bye party. In fact, we've already realized we've seen some people for the last time in Mongolia and didn't even do a proper goodbye. We've already started trying to convince people to come visit us in Seattle and hope to visit others in the future too. In fact, some PCVs are already planning a two-year reunion in New Orleans where at least 4-5 PCVs from our group are planning to live -- a few of them planning to live together even!

To make our return home a little sweeter we've also planned a short vacation in San Francisco on our way home! We're visiting one of my best friends and her husband there. And I've never been to San Francisco so while they're busy working during the days, we're going to explore the city. Then, I'll be home in time to spend my birthday at home with our friends and families!

I'm not sure what kinds of photos to include on a blog like this, but a blog post is boring without any, so here are some from events as of late.

Ondor-ulaan soum, about 2-3 hours away from where we live. Mark visited it last week with the national Mercy Corps director. 

Bulgan Mountain. This image is used on everything and seen everywhere throughout our town so it's a bit tired to us, but I have to admit, it is pretty. It's a very short walk away from our apartment.

And then there's the occasional dumpings of spring snow. Ugh. This was last week. 

I held my last Zumba fitness class this week! The girls are super cute and I'm going to miss this them. Two of them have come to almost every single class since October so I made them certificates and gave them some jump ropes as gifts (to keep up with their strict exercise routine over the summer). For our last class we ended up doing about 10 minutes of Zumba and spent the rest of the time taking pictures and eating cookies. :)