A fond farewell

While most of you will wake up to a joyous Christmas morning, here at the center, we're a bit sad. Tonight, our Kopan nuns, Ani Tsultrim and Ani Somsom left for their home nunnery in Katmandu, Nepal. Ani Tsultrim had been here three years and Ani Somsom a year. Once they arrive home, they will go back to their studies that they interrupted in order to come here to Mongolia to teach. In the time I have been here, they have truly become my sisters who I hope some day to see again in Nepal. We'll see.

As you can imagine, the week has been full of tearful celebrations leading up to their departure. Below are pictures from the going-away luncheon the other nuns put on for their teachers.

All gathered for one more time

Ani Somsom has enough energy and laughter for 10 people

Ani Tsultrim enjoying the conversation

Ani Eme (means grandmother), 95 years young

Ani Dolma, Ani Nima, Ani Palyang

Ani Gyalmo will miss their support, but mostly their laughter

A small token for three years of service in Mongolia

Our loss will be Kopan's gain

The Dolma Ling Nuns



I for one, will miss them greatly.

Cool Educational Software

Have you spent way too much time and of course too much money this holiday season. Well, have I got a deal for you! How about some FREE software - not pirated but actual FREE software - and it's educational to boot.

Now that I have committed myself to study the Mongolian language more, I was on the lookout a vocabulary flashcard program that I could not only use on my Mac, but that I could recommend to my students who mostly use Windows. I was surprised at the sheer number of flashcard programs there are there, but I am a big fan of 'open source' software and see absolutely no reason to spend money on commercial software. But when I do find a good open source program, I've been known to send along a few bucks to help the programmer continue his work.

Anki

Anki is a spaced repetition system (SRS). It helps you remember things by intelligently scheduling flashcards, so that you can learn a lot of information with a minimum amount of effort.

• Review anywhere. Anki lets you study on your own computer, online, on your cell phone or other portable devices like an iPod touch or Zaurus.
• Synchronization features let you keep your information across multiple computers.
• Shared decks allow you to divide work between friends, and let teachers push material to many students at once.
• Intelligent scheduler based on the SuperMemo SM2 algorithm.
• Flexible fact/card model that allows you to generate multiple views of information, and input information in the format you wish. You're not limited to predefined styles.
• Audio and images are fully supported
• Fully extensible, with a large number of plugins already available
• Optimized for speed, and will handle reviewing decks of 100,000+ cards with no problems
• Clean, user-friendly interface
• Free and Open Source

After creating your flashcards (text, audio, image, combination of text-audio-image, etc), you start reviewing. It shows you the question and you think of the answer. There are four responses depending on how you feel you did: Again (oops, wrong answer), Hard, Good, Easy. Then Anki statistically knows when it should give you that flashcard again. Most other programs only give you two choices, right or wrong, so this could be even better. Especially for visual data like non-English characters, this is an amazing tool.

The one thing you will notice if you spend much time on the website is how much time must have been put into both programing but also the website, documentation and forum in order to be the most complete it could be. Simply amazing. In some areas, Anki might seem a bit daunting, but the flexibility of the program must allow for so much. And besides being FREE, you can download a version for just about everyone's operating system: Windows, Mac OSX, Linux (Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora) and also iPod Touch & iPhone. For more information, go to the Anki website.

aTypeTrainer4Mac

The other thing that I've been looking for is a good typing tutor program where I could learn to use my Mongolian keyboard. There are some good ones for Linux (like KTouch for Ubuntu) and a basic one for Windows XP (TypeFaster Typing Tutor) but aTypeTrainer4Mac is amazing. Why? you ask. I can switch from my USA English keyboard to my Mongolian keyboard layout and the program knows it and changes accordingly. So, in essence, I could use any of the many keyboard layouts for many other languages available on the Mac and learn to touch type. Wow.

Like other programs, you start at level 1 and learn to use two fingers to type two letters. Each level adds more letters until you can do the whole alphabet. So, if you want to learn to type, especially in languages other than English (and you have a Mac of course), you really should check this out. And did I mention it's FREE. For more information, you can go to aTypeTrainer4Mac.

Nunnery destroyed by fire

Friday morning, about 4AM, fire destroyed the main building of the Dolma Ling Nunnery that housed the kitchen, dinning room and was also home for several of the eldest nuns. Fire officials are still determining whether the fire was due to shoddy electrical wiring (a problem in developing countries due to poor construction standards) or the real possibility that it was deliberately set. It is a miracle that no one was hurt, especially due to the fact that the eldest nun, over 95 years old, had to escape by climbing through a window that fortunately had no bars (most first-floor windows in Ulaanbaatar are barred). The building is a total loss but it might have been partially saved except the night watchman was no where to be found and he had the gate key that the fire department needed to get into the property (the fire trucks arrived within three minutes after getting the call about the fire).  All this with night-time temperatures reaching -30F.

Looking in through the dinning room window.

The eldest nun in her room a few days before.

Her room now.

Kitchen, dinning room, accommodations, showers & bathrooms:
It was considered the heart of everyday life at the nunnery.

Luckily that fuel bottle in the picture was empty.

A picture of Lama Zopa that was saved.

Not much else could be salvaged.

For now, some of the nuns are staying with their families, but all the rest are here with me at the center. We have beds on beds trying to accommodate everyone. Kind of strange being the only guy in the bunch. Plus the kitchen just isn't made for so many people. Ani Gyalmo is in consultation with Lama Zopa and others at FPMT International about what to do after this tragedy. But in the end, all the nuns will help decide the fate of the nunnery, the only one of its kind in Mongolia. Please keep the nuns in your thoughts and prayers.