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.
