Genghis Khann

This is the Genghis Khann Square in the middle of the city of Ulaanbaatar. It is huge, you could fit several football fields in this Square. Genghis Khann as a hero was not allowed under Communism but in 2006 this huge bronze statue of Genghis was created as a focal point on the back of the large government building. If Napoleon and Alexander of Macedon are National heroes and the pride of the French and Greeks, Genghis Khann is something more than that for Mongols. The Washington Post in 1995 bestowed upon him the title of The Man of the Millennium.
It was well known that his law and incorruptible officials did more to attract people into his empire than his military power.( What a novel concept) To those countries who worked with him, he promised protection, religious freedom, lower taxes and a heightened level of commerce and prosperity but let's not go into detail on what he did to those who did not work with him.

Here we have a picture and Brian and his wife Anca (Anca is from Romania and that is the correct spelling of her name). They were the first to show me the great square. It happened to be in the middle of town and on the way to one of the few really good coffee houses in town with a great bakery.
You pronounce Genghis as "Jinggis" and it is frequently spelled as Chinggis, but you see it spelled both ways. His name when he was born in 1162 was Temujin. He took the title of Genghis when he was 44 in the year 1206, when he founded the Mongol empire, and lived until until 1227. His empire, as I am told, was the largest geographical area ever assembled under one empire.

It is a beautiful square and on one side of the square there are active theaters and assembly halls for productions of fine arts performances by the Mongolian Symphony, Ballet and Opera. I went to see Swan Lake last Sunday evening and was really impressed by the terrific performance of the 17 Ballerinas.
We could have taken better pictures of the square but I was definitely ready for a latte.

Need a Yak Hair Rope for Your Ger?

In the four pictures taken in and outside the Ger, a lady, her neighbors and her cute little photo hungry son, gather around the stove in the center of the Ger and make ropes for Gers out of Yak hair. The Yak hair they use has been discarded by the factories that use the good Yak hair to make clothing. They form a loosely organized coop and gather in her Ger and make this rope. It is used on the outside of Gers to keep the felt in place. They work all year on the rope and are able to sell a little over a thousand dollars worth of rope a month during the four warmer months of the year, when Gers are primarily being built. This is definitely a cottage industry. The lady and her neighbors have been doing this for several years and are now trying to move into a new venture. They have been able to obtain some scrap leather but need to buy some additional material so they can make switches/whips to sell to the guys who ride the horses and there are a lot of horses and riders in this country. They were applying for a mico finance loan out of the CHF branch office in Edernet.
The other picture of Brian and the three ladies was taken in the urban area of Edernet. This lady and her friends make fresh fruit jam and distribute it in the grocery stores in Edernet and Darkhan. CHF staff had been assisting her in applying for a loan at the local bank but the banks in Mongolia are just like the banks in the rest of the world, they don't want to loan anything to anyone. Brian, the Deputy Director of the CHF program in Mongolia was present to try and and get creative with the structure of the loan. My only thought was that some fresh bread and butter with a little of the great tasting jam might loosen up the bankers but Brian's idea was probably the better way to go.

The Maket Place in Darkhan

Last week, Brian, the Deputy Director of the CHF program and Altanbagana Bayarsikhan
or "Bagana", as I call him, who is the Program Director for the spin off non profit corporation, and I, visited the branch office in Darkhan and some of the recipients of service in that city. It is a city of about 75,000 people about three hours North of Ulaanbaatar and the temperature was about your average 0 degree Fahrenheit or colder. I know it was -33 degrees Celsius in Ulaanbaatar that day. Anyway, it was your average cold day in Mongolia. We visited some of the service recipients and the branch office and the 7 very good staff, who work in that branch office. Even with a very down economy, they are meeting their quotas of services delivered to small businesses in Darkhan.
There is a market about a half block from the office that is open everyday and Brian asked me if I wanted to go over and do some shopping after lunch. It seemed to be a little cold to be doing much shopping but we went over to the market and checked it out and this is basically the way it is everyday of the week.
I am sure my old buddy Nelson in Chicago would have loved to have been there to challenge some of the pool players at minus 18 degrees Celsius and they play there everyday except when they cover the tables when it is snowing and there is very little precipitation in the area.
It is also a good place to buy a whole sheep and one of the best parts of a sheep, as you might not know, is the very fatty tail, so they leave some of the wool on it to highlight it. The skinned sheep and pigs are definitely frozen and no flies are buzzing around like you might see in Mexico.
The quilts were nice and looked warm but not as nice as the ones Rene makes.
I might have bought something but I was not really interested in taking my hands out of my gloves in order to get money out of my bill fold.

The Weather in Mongolia

I always loved the words from the Christmas song where it said, "The weather outside is frightful but the fire is so delightful". I have some fond memories of moments in times past where that song was very valid but it is not a tune I hum here in Mongolia. One might think that is because there is no fireplace inside but actually the weather might hit -40 outside but it is not too bad. Now I would hate to be a sheep herder out on the range watching after my herd at -40 but just walking around town or going to the office, it is not too bad. It is very dry and there is little if any wind or precipitation. The sun is usually shinning and the sky is almost always a bright blue color. Some folks have told me "Mongolia" means land with the blue sky.

When I was preparing to come to Mongolia, I heard nothing but how cold it was in this country so I went for the warm clothes. I have a pair of double lined blue jeans and a pair of boots from REI that are good to a minus 25 or better but I almost never wear either one of them. I just wear a pair of old black roper boots like the ones I wore in Oklahoma, in the winter, 45 years ago and a medium pair of trousers with a medium weight undergarment and a big coat of course and I never get cold. I bought liners for my ski gloves but I never use them.

So I minimize any major concern about the weather but I do not minimize any worry about walking on icy sidewalks. I try to utilize what I learned in a walking meditation class from a Vietnam Buddhist at Spirit Rock Dharma Center who taught a course on Walking meditation. You need to be very present when you are walking and pay attention to each step. It is a practice of focusing on the here and now because if your mind starts dreaming about something else then you can be in big trouble. This is especially true at night, when you have to watch out for open man hole covers where the homeless have gotten down in them to be close to the warm underground hot water pipes that are used to heat all of the buildings in the city to avoid freezing to death. I saw a couple of guys the other morning going through the dumpster and I thought how tough that would be to try to find something to eat. Whatever they found was going to be totally frozen and those guys certainly do not have micro waves to thaw out their frozen food for breakfast. I felt a little bad enjoying my hot coffee as much as I did when I got to work that morning, but as every morning, one of the things that went through my mind in a moment of thanks was not just for the hot coffee but the fact that I had not slipped on the ice and broken my neck as I walked, very carefully, to work as I do each morning.

Just remember, when you come to Mongolia in the winter, watch out for the open manhole covers at night and the slippery ice....or you can come in the summer, like most intelligent people do, and enjoy the beautiful green grass in the wide open country and great weather but who would want to do that....oh...I think I see a few hands going up amongst the readers of this blog.

Back to Baganuur

This week I was on the road three days visiting branch offices in cities outside of Ulaanbaatar. The office in Baganuur is one of the smaller cities and has a small staff of two.
You will see posted here a picture of the office and a picture of the two staff. Their names are Narangerel or Nara and Khurelsukh. Both of them are top notch folk with college degrees.
There are two programs being run out of the office. One is for small businesses, non-agricultural related, and the other is for the small agricultural related businesses. There are two fellows who supervise these programs out in this branch office who work in U.B. and have other assignments as well. They are two really bright high energy young men with Master's Degrees. I have posted their pictures in front of the huge monument of Genghis that is located on the way to Baganuur. Batbaatar is the young man on the left who has his MBA out of Korea and Batorshikh on the right and he has his masters Degree out of Istanbul, Turkey.

Then I have posted the picture of the old guy with the monument to the really old guy, Chinggis Khann, in the background. You can tell how huge this monument is by looking at how it dwarfs the car parked in front of it. You can take an elevator up into the top of the monument.

I have been traveling for three days this week and then had trouble with getting onto the blog. My grandson Mike helped me out on the web this morning so I was able to log on and finally get another blog posted.

The Country Director of CHF here in U.B. and his wife have invited me over for lunch, to meet their three small children and to see Beverly Hoover, a former CHF employee, and her husband, who is working at the USA Consulate office here in U.B., so had better run.

Gers and Yurts

In Mongolia the small round houses made primarily from a felt material are called Gers. In Turkey, they are called Yurts. Their primary use has been to provide shelter for people who are nomadic and follow their herds of sheep, goats, and cattle to wherever it is best for the animals. Around half of the population of Mongolia live outside the cities in Gers and all of the land outside of the cities is public land.
When I was 11 and 12 years old, I would visit my grandfather and grandmother Hoyt and my uncle Jack and his wife Helen for a week or two in the summer. There were times when Jack would saddle up a horse for me and he would saddle up his horse named Dick and we would go check the fences and the cattle. He would sometimes break into an old song called "Don't Fence Me In". If Jack and his horse, with whom Jack had a special bonding, were here in Mongolia in the summer, they could ride for hundreds of miles across green fields and never see a fence. They would see a lot of animals and Gers, but no fences.
The woman in the picture by the Ger is the grandmother of the little girl above. The grandmother's name is "Budiav" and she and her husband live in the Ger in the picture. They live on the edge of the town called Baganuur. In cities and town the government will give people small plots of land of about an acre in size. The people place their Ger on this plot and enclose their area with a wooden fence, like the one you see in the picture.
In Ulaanbaatar, about half of the population of over a million people live in the suburbs of the city called the Ger Districts and in those areas people live in their Gers within their fenced in area called a Hashaa. These people do not have water or sewers in their Gers but there are kiosks in the area shared by many families, where they can go get water. Most of them do, however, have electricity. In the main part of the cities and towns they do have relatively good running water and sewers to their apartments and homes. You do not hear people in Mongolia say they look forward to when they can move out into the suburbs of the city. I must say that I do like the flush toilet and hot and cold running water in the shower in my apartment. Even though the Gers are cute, I do prefer life in the innner part of the city.

Baganuur, Mongolia

This 83 year old fellow and I enjoyed a nice cup of tea and a friendly conversation, thanks to a translator. We were sitting on the floor of his small but nicely decorated Ger , where he lives with his wife and grand daughter. They are in the process of obtaining a loan for a storage unit for the vegetables they grow in the summer.
The Ger is in Baganuur, Mongolia, where CHF has a branch office. It is a town of about 26 thousand folk two hours to the East of Ulanbaataar. It is a mining town and all of the coal that is used to heat Ulaanbaataar comes out of Baganuur.

His grand daughter was even cuter then the picture. When we went into the Ger, the guests move to the left and the residents move to the right.
It is a very small but very neat ger. She very carefully folded up her coat and put it away and then helped her grandmother get the refreshments out for us. She helped me with the camera some and took te picture of her gradfather with me on the floor.

The Slippery Sidewalks of Ulaanbaatar

Today, Glenn, the CHF Country Director returned from vacation with his wife and three little children. They had vacationed in Hong Kong and took in Disney Land with the kids in Hong Kong and said it was great. Glenn was the country Director in Sri Lanka before coming to Mongolia a couple of years ago. I had my regular meeting with Seegi and then went out to one of the work sites in the suburban area of the city with the Director of the work site. He is a high energy 30 year old Mongolian with a Masters degree from Istanbul. I will be going with him on Wednesday to another site he manages about two hours to the East of the city. I will talk more about the work of the sites later this week.

It was another beautiful sun shiny day in Ulaanbaatar. It was cold but you could see the surrounding hills and see the Ger communities where people live in their Yurts. This evening the moon was full but it was not a bright white color because of the smog. All of the thousands of little yurts in the suburbs heat and cook with coal and the city proper functions with an old Russian designed coal fired generator that provides the electricity for the city and the hot water that runs underground and heats all of the buildings. If anything ever happened to that old coal fired operation the city would be in big trouble and be without electricity or heat but it seems to be very reliable. Also the smog that comes from it in the winter, especially at night, is also very reliable. So far, the smog has not really bothered me except for that first breath of air when I step out of a building at night and forget to breath through my nose and suck in that smog ladened minus 23 degree air but then I take a breath through my nose and away I go slipping and sliding down the sidewalk.
The sidewalks on Peace avenue are about ten feet wide and most of them are slick as all get out. It is funny though that right in the middle of the sidewalk their is a place about 14 inches wide that is even slicker then the rest of the sidewalk. The teenagers use it and create it by running and sliding on it to expedite their way down the sidewalk. The other day I saw a little kid about five years old enjoying the slick area by holding the hand of what appeared to be his mom on one side and his dad on the other and as they walked down the side walk the little kid had his feet slipping smoothly along the slick area. He just slid along with a big smile on his face. It looked like fun.
One nice thing about getting to know the city a little better is that it doesn't bother me anymore that there are no street signs at any corner or anyplace else and the buildings and houses don't seem to bother with house numbers. No, I don't want to be the mail carrier but I am enjoying volunteering and working with some very nice Mongolian folk who are trying to help some very low income people improve their quality of life through economic improvement. Last night on CNN they talked about CHF International's postive assistance in Darfur and I said to myself, "I know that group" and then hit the sack and slept well.

The Streets of Ulaanbaatar

The streets of Ulaanbaatar are dangerous places but not, at this time, due to crime and muggings. They are dangerous due to heavy traffic, icy conditions, and this being a city where the pedestrians absolutely do not have the right of way and there are a limited number of stop lights. Neither the CHF Country director nor the Deputy Director own cars here in Mongolia due to not only the bad road conditions but also many of the drivers are first time drivers. Also if you have an accident you are in big trouble.

Tonight, there was a beautiful big full moon and everything was very clear but there are very few street lights except on the major streets. CHF staff members suggested I always carry a flashlight when I go for a walk at night in order to watch for man hole covers that have been moved by homeless people, who are getting down into them where there are some hot water pipes so they won't freeze to death. I do carry a flashlight and I do see open manholes here and there but at this time I think there are very few homeless people and children going down into them at night.

It is a great city for ice sculpture. They can do an ice sculpture in front of a business in October and it stays frozen until April. Most of the sidewalks, even in the front of businesses along the main street are icy. The other night I was walking along one of those icy streets and all of a sudden my feet slipped out from under me and I was up in the air with my feet as high as my head, but then I woke up and it turned out to be only a scary dream. I took the dream as a warning. I certainly don't want to try to get up the stairs to my third floor apartment with a broken leg.

I usually leave work a little early and go for a walk along Peace Avenue, the main business street, to get some exercise. One day last week, it was a minus 32 degrees Celsius/ minus 25 degrees Fahrenheit but it did not seem to be that cold. On Thursday, when it was only a minus 20 something, I went for a walk and a guy on the street was shining shoes at a reasonable price so I stood there and had my boots shined and thought, now this would not be happening in the states.

Today, Brian and his wife came by and we went for a walk for a couple of hours through the city to see some of the special sites and went to an indoor market where they had all kinds of fresh vegetables, primarily flown in from China. We then ended the day with a nice meal at one of the many enjoyable restaurants here in the city. You will see a picture of Brian and his wife at the restaurant on this blog. Then I walked a little over a mile to get home. Remembering my vivid dream of slipping on the ice, I walked very slowly and carefully, and besides, I was too full to walk very fast.

Mongolia's Fiancial Problems

Yesterday, the Mongolian dollar depreciated 40% against the U.S. dollar and the banks stopped selling U.S. dollars temporarily. This happened at the same time the Mongol Bank President resigned. The Mongol Bank is the same thing as our Federal Reserve. Banks had already become very tight about making any loans and has, at this time, stopped making loans for the time being.
The global economic problem had already been severely impacting the Mongolian economy along with a prolonged drought hurting the agricultural production in the country. Then of course there are internal battles going on in the political arena.

If anyone can endure an economic crisis or any other type of crisis then I would guess the Mongolians can probably do it much better then most. They are a very proud people with a very strong culture that still has an enormous tie to the rural country side that is basically all public property and open range. I don't know how they will work out of this but you would not want to bet against them.

Meanwhile, CHF International and the new local non-profit, Development Solutions, that I am working with, are forging ahead without missing a step. We are currently working on multiple scenarios that could be followed on the way to being totally self sufficient when CHF pulls out in about two and a half years. Since Development Solutions makes its income by working with new and developing businesses, it would be easier to make a go of it, if the economy was growing, rather then being on a downward spiral.

This morning when I trudged off very carefully to work along the icy streets and sidewalks it was a minus 32 degrees but I have learned that here in Mongolia, you don't say things when you get to the office like, 'Wow, it is really cold out there", until the temperature hits a minus 40 degrees. It is rather intimidating when women pass me on the ice in their high heels and relatively tight slacks and the guys go jaunting along with only a cap and nothing over there ears. I doubt that I will really acclimate to the climate before I leave in April but it has really not bothered me up to this point and I have not even worn my super warm clothes. I am glad though that I am not living in a yurt.

The Beginnig of My work

CHF International is in the process of spinning off its work of assisting small and micro businesses to get up and running in the urban areas of Mongolia. This work is primarily in Ulaanbaatar, the capital, where about half of the total population of 2.5 million Mongolians live. It is my assignment to be a consultant to the new non-profit organization that will be continuing the work of CHF. I will be working with the staff and the Board of directors of this newly formed non-profit, during this transition period.

Today, I met with the new CEO, Serjmaa Bavuudorj "Seegii" and her Program Director, Altanbagana Bayarsaikhan "Bagana" . Both of them have come up through the ranks of the CHF program and have been doing this work for several years. The challenge of course is to make the new nonprofit organization financially stable with the ending of the grant from the Agency for International Development under which CHF has been funded during the past 6 years and ends at the end of March. There will, however, be some transitional funding and CHF will be working here for another two years in a different type of program and providing some assistance to the newly formed organization.

Both Seegii and Bagana are very nice folk and both speak relatively understandable English.
Seegii and I will be meeting for one hour everyday this first week. We will then shift into work on Business plans and work manuals. She has a nice office with about 7 people on the staff in the corporate office and then probably twenty people working from Satellite offices both in and out of Ulaanbaatar. We had our first meeting today and I think it went exceptionally well. I asked a lot of questions and listened to her explain her hopes and dreams about the organization and the challenges of making it financially feasible while holding to the mission of working with the very small businesses. She has also not staffed a Board of Directors before jumping into this position but I think she will do fine.

I hope this provides a little better understanding of what I am doing in Ulaanbaatar besides the big bucks they are paying me to come over here and work in the middle of winter.....oh I forgot, this is a volunteer position isn't it.....
Well....this is what I am doing anyway.

Happy New Year From Mongolia

New Year wishes to everyone from Mongolia. Today is Monday January 5th and I arrived at the Mongolian airport at 3 pm. this afternoon. It was a beautiful sun shiny day, even though the temperature was rather normal for Ulaanbaatar, the Mongolian Capital and the coldest capital of any country in the world- 3 degrees. It will be down to around -23 degrees tonight and that is also normal here in January for this city with between 1 and 1.4 million people.

Brian Walter, the Deputy director of the CHF Mongolian program here in Mongolia met me at the airport and we went into the main office in the center of the city to meet a lot of the staff. They have about twenty five very friendly staff working in the main office and then they have another 7 offices here in different areas of Ulaanbaatar and surrounding cities. There are about 47 CHF staff working here in Mongolia. All of them are Mongolian except for Brian and Glenn, the CHF Country Director, and I guess you can toss me into that non Mongolian group to bring it up to three non Mongoiians out of 47 staff.

The staff are all very friendly people and welcomed me very graciously with their limited english and I greeted them with the one Mongolian word I know, which is "hello". Maybe I need to pick up another word or two since I am going to be here for three months. I start to work tomorrow morning at 9 so I had better sign off for now.