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.