2/16/09 Black Cloud...

For Mongolians, the lunar year is coming to a close. In every home across the land, families are preparing for Tsagaan Sar. Everyone young and old are preparing food for the festivities and doing a thorough 'spring cleaning'. Every day I find new volunteers scrubbing every square inch of the Center. The staff tell me of spending whole days making thousands of buuz (recipe). The feeling is that a good start to the New Year is a good indicator of the coming 12 months. Just imagine Christmas, Thanksgiving and Easter rolled into one holiday and you might get close to what Tsagaan Sar is here in Mongolia.

And while the staff and the center do a lot of work to help others, tragedy hit closer to home last night. All the staff have treated me like family without exception and that is one of the reasons I love it here. But Tsetsgee and her family have gone out of their way to make me always feel welcome. Besides being a fellow English teacher, she has really been my big sister here, always looking out for me, making sure I get enough to eat, that I feel needed. We have become a very good team, she and I. Last night, Tsetsgee's family had a major fire in their home. Although not completely destroyed, they spent the night in rooms at the center. Today she said they would be working to make the house livable again. It would be difficult for anybody, but with children I'm sure it's a struggle. With the holidays in just a few days, it couldn't have come at a worst time. Unlike in the west, there is no such thing as insurance to cover damages and begin repairs. The only insurance you have are you family, your friends and the kindness of strangers. The staff began collecting donations from everyone to help Tsetsgee and her family.

[UPDATE; I want to thank everyone again for their generous online donations
to help Tsetsgee's family. Thank you thank you thank you.]

I couldn't do it without my coworker Tsetsgee

2/7/09 Happy Birthday #51

As part of our social outreach, the English department is starting on a project to make a series of Beginner English books with cassettes or CDs to distribute to those who can't come to our English classes for any reason. We know their are single mothers who work but between family and their jobs don't have a spare minute to improve themselves or their situation. We have an active prison project and we want to help some prisoners learn English so they have a better opportunity to find employment once they get out. And there are probably a half dozen other areas we hope to use the books. But in order to do that, we need some way of paying for the printing costs and making the audio tapes/CDs.

With that in mind, we had an English Book Sale last weekend. I think the center has been collecting these books for some time. About three quarters are fiction, mostly those kind of books travelers take with them to wile away the hours in transit in distant lands. But we do have some college textbooks and some business books. I went through our English departments collection and pulled out any duplicate grammar books we had. I just want the books out where they will be used. This first sale was to our students here at the center and in a couple of weeks, we'll have another sale open to the public. We raised about $55 so far and I hope we top out over $100. That would really get us started.

I think almost everyone who gets old enough just starts to take our birthday for granted. It really is just another day, nothing special. Except to those around us. The staff surprised me yet again on Friday with two wonderful birthday cakes. And all week my students dropped off little things, a box of chocolates, a new coffee mug, a leather key chain, and even a CD of traditional Mongolian singing. For my class on Saturday, Junie who is also the daughter of one of the guards here, got up and led the whole class singing happy birthday. It was such a sweet gesture.

Any excuse for cake! Happy Birthday Jim!

But it was a long day. Besides teaching my Intermediate-2 class, I also had two movie showings. We show movies every two weeks, one in the afternoon and another in the early evening. Since this is White Month, where theme on the Education TV is Buddhism, we are showing Little Buddha and in two weeks, Seven Years in Tibet. It's a great opportunity for students to not only hear the dialogue but also to read the English subtitles (instead of the badly dubbed versions). We almost packed my classroom for the afternoon showing and again filled the Cafe to capacity for the evening show.

The only glitch came during the evening show when the sound system kept shorting out after the first five minutes of the movie. No matter what I did, it would come on for about a minute, then the breaker would trip. I got it all working when luckily I realized that we had a boombox with speakers that could work. So, the show went on from there flawlessly. So a long day ended successfully.

2/2/09 Teacher's Day

Well, classes have started to settle down a bit. I think my student rolls have stabilized and my final totals add up to 113. This semester sure is a lot different than when I arrived here last September. Although I'm very busy because of using a new textbook, I seem to have a lot more confidence with the material and how I'm presenting it.

Something new I got to participate in was scholarships. The center sees the English department as part of it's social outreach, helping improve people's lives through better English fluency. For most people, speaking better English can lead to better education and job opportunities. With that in mind, we charge just enough ($25/semester) to cover our expenses which still puts us far down the scale compared to English school businesses.

Even so, there still are people who can't afford our classes, so we have started a scholarship program or what I'd rather we called financial aid. Students are to write a short essay why they should get help. Iff they are still in school, they need to show us their grades and if they are out of school, they need to bring some tax information about the family income.

So, after that, the students come in for an interview. Don't tell them I would have given them all a scholarship without the interview. I believe they all showed a need. But it was nice to talk to them, even if it was through an interpreter. Tsetsegee and I were on the interview panel along with Davaa, the acting-director of the center. Like almost every modern culture, getting your children better opportunities in life seems so expensive.

We had several families who had more than one person in our classes but couldn't pay for them all. A few were either single mothers or children of single mothers. One young man couldn't even go to university this semester because the medical bills for his younger brother took everything the family had.

And unfortunately, this process isn't foolproof. We had one young woman refered to us by Save The Children and we gladly gave her a scholarship. But we failed to look into her situation deep enough because she stopped coming after a few classes for what we think was because she didn't have the money for bus fare to get here twice a week. And because of her families poverty, there is no way to reach her.

But we learned and will be working a lot harder, not only in helping these students attend our classes, but also helping them if they need it with school supplies, bus fare, clothing, dictionaries and books. If you'd like to help in any way, you can see I added a DONATE button. Every penny donated will go to needy people like the students above. I hope to highlight specific needs here at the center and the community we serve in future posts.

The surprise of the week came when they said we were going out to lunch to celebrate Teacher's Day. Yes, there is a nationally recognized Teacher's day, and from what I gather, being a teacher is one of the most respected professions in Mongolia. So, Tsetsgee and I, along with Glenda, our newest Buddhism teacher, had lunch with the rest of the staff at a nearby restaurant.

Celebrating at a nearby Korean restaurant

Teachers: Tsetsgee, Jim & Glenda