Trip to Darkhan

Сайна байна уу?
(pronounced: Sain baina uu?)

This is how to say "Hello" in Mongolian.

Matt and Rochelle here to tell you about our interesting trip to Darkhan, the second largest city in Mongolia. It took about 4 hours to get there, and is ~ 250 km (150 miles) North of Ulaanbaatar (UB). The main roads here are pretty smooth outside of UB, but are narrow with potholes scattered throughout. Luckily we were in a powerful Nissan SUV, providing us a safe and smooth ride.

Matt here. One of my projects at work is evaluating a project being implemented by the Mongolian government that grants land leases and provides materials for building wells, fences and animal shelters to herder groups in the countryside near the bigger cities. Traditionally grazing land in Mongolia has been completely open access, so that anybody can legally live and graze their animals anywhere. There are some fears that increased migration to these "Peri-Urban" areas will lead to overgrazing of the land, which is the motivation for this project. Private property rights (in this case 15 year leases) should give these groups larger incentive to restrict grazing on their land to a level that does not lead to long-term degradation of the pastureland. My job is to evaluate the impact of this project on the economic activities of the herder groups, such as how much milk they produce, how many animals they own, investments in the land such as building animal shelters, growing hay, etc. To measure these things, we hire survey companies to send interviewers out to the homes of the people participating in the project (mainly gers/гэр, or felt tents that nomadic herders live in) and administer a questionnaire that we developed. The development of the questionnaire was the first big job that I was principally in charge of, and there were a lot of challenges involved since I'd never designed a questionnaire before, but it was an excellent learning experience for me.

Anyway, this survey is the reason we went to Darkhan. Another of IPA's (Innovations for Poverty Action, the organization I work for) responsibilities is to ensure that the companies we hire to do our surveys are doing a good job. So, we shadow the enumerators during the interview to make sure they are asking the questions and recording the responses correctly, are not rude, etc. Of course, I can't understand 99% of what is being said, so my Mongolian coworkers did most of the real work, while I just sat back drinking milk tea and eating mutton. Here's an example of Rochelle doing this with some suutei tsai (сүүтэй цай):

This is tea with lots of milk, salt and sometimes butter. The ratio of milk and salt is always different, depending on people's preference. The above example was pretty light on the milk. Overall I was a little bit useful because I was able to talk to my coworkers during and after the interview on different issues relating to how the questionnaire should be correctly administered (for example, whether a sheep being taken by a wolf counts as "theft" or "natural disaster" and how to estimate the amount of hay purchased). But the main reason for me to go is to just see how the interview process goes and actually meet some of the people we are interviewing and see how they live. It is very difficult to try to make sense of what numbers about herders living in gers actually mean when you've never been to one. So in that sense the field visits are very valuable.

The people we visited were quite far from Darkhan -- it took about 2-3 hours driving on any icy, extremely bumpy path through the snowy countryside to get to the interview locations. Everyone got carsick. I'm not entirely sure that overgrazing is a problem here given that there were often several miles between one ger and the next, but I really don't know. Another survey being conducted by USDA will compare land quality on the leased lands with similar land in other areas which will give us an idea of how much of an impact the project has on the land. Here is a field of sheep and goats that we drove through:

Here are some of the gers:
Note the cute baby.

 Note the solar panel and sattelite dish, quite popular among ger-dwellers. Also the dog on the left.

Here's the result of that magical sattelite dish:

 The poles that hold up the roof of the ger have many uses. For example, holding papers and lightbulbs:

And drying boots:

Here's some classic Mongolian horses. They are much smaller than American horses but they are tough and fast and they get thick wool in the winter. Their back is maybe 4-5 feet tall. Nice camerawork Matt!

Finally, here's a glimpse at the decor in our hotel room in Darkhan:

And Matt with a statue of an iron man:

The end.

Rochelle's first week

Hello friends and family!

Wow, it seems as though I have been in Mongolia much longer than 2 weeks! I left Jan. 1st- what a start to the new year! The plane ride was enjoyable enough because I actually look forward to the plane food and the personal TVs at each seat! I had an idea of the length of the trip and look of the plane because of my trip to Cambodia in December 2011- January 2012. I flew on American Airlines from Minneapolis to Chicago, where I switched to Turkish Airlines. During that 10 hour flight, I enjoyed the personal TV, where I could choose to listen to audio books, watch a selection a TV shows, listen to music, or watch a broad selection of movies. The entire Harry Potter series was available to watch and I decided that I would try to watch a bunch of them, but I ended up sleeping most of the time, and unfortunately was only able to watch the first one! I switched to a much smaller plane in Istanbul, Turkey. The previous plane had a row with 2 seats, aisle, 4 seats, aisle, and 2 seats. This smaller plane had 3 seats, aisle, 3 seats and to my disappointment no personal TVs! I had another 10 hours before getting to Mongolia, but luckily I had the book trilogy His Dark Materials on my iPad e-reader! This is an excellent travel book because it is very exciting and fun to read. Thanks for the recommendation, Becky! The plane had a scheduled stop in Kyrgyzstan to refuel and we had to wait in the airport for an hour. It was about 5 hours until Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia and I thought it would go fast, but this was the slowest part of the trip!! Luckily, the plane wasn't crowded at all, every other seat was empty (Who in their right mind would travel to Mongolia in the winter??!). We arrived at 10 AM and the plane circled around the city about 7 times until it was able to line up with the runway. It was really neat to see the city from above for a few times, then I really wanted to land and was getting frustrated with how many times we were circling!

When I was waiting for my luggage, it seemed so unreal that I had finally made it and was about to see Matt again! The airport was very small and he was waiting for me by the only exit doors. As we were saying our hellos a Mongolian man was asking us if we needed a taxi, and this happened many other times. It was pretty annoying to be pestered like that, right away. One of Matt's co-workers was nice enough to give us a ride to Matt's apartment, so we didn't have to pay for a taxi (although they are very cheap here). Here are some pictures of his apartment:

 Entrance: Door to the apartment to the right (we are on the 2nd floor).

Matt keeps his clothes in the shelve space to the left because their is no dresser. 

We also hang some of our nicer clothes up in the closet at the left.

His entire apartment came furnished with bed, desk, couch, chair, 

entertainment center, coffee table, rice cooker, dishes, etc.

 Kitchen: Not as beautiful as our last apartment, but I am not complaining. I am content with the kitchen. I like the teal wall color. The fridge is a little small (about 4.5 feet), but I am used to a smaller fridge from the Grandview apartments in Morris, and we don't have a CSA so we won't need to refrigerate large amounts of produce at one time! The one thing that is unfortunately missing is an oven! Matt and I are thinking of getting a crockpot to somewhat remedy that! 

Living Room: Here is the window I often look out to see what is happening in the park below (Check out the Babies of Mongolia page for more information about that). There are a lot of mismatched colors and patterns in this room with a 70s vibe: bright orange couch and shaggy green and brown rugs. It also has a very detailed and unique light fixture that sort of matches the flowery wall paper. I will have to take close ups of those things and add them. I keep my clothes in the shelves near the window, which works very well. I am pleased with this storage space.

 Bedroom: The desk, bed, and a chair are in this room. It also has an enclosed balcony that I might spend time in during the warmer months. For now, it's way too cold to go out there! I like all the shelf space the desk has. Matt and I were trying to rearrange the room, so we were trying to move this desk, but it is  mostly put together with wooden pegs and was falling apart. So we quickly learned that this corner is where it is meant to stay!

 

Toilet Room: The toilet has a room all to itself. This is, by far, the room that is in the worst shape in the apartment. Part of the wall is missing, there is an ugly board covering some of the hole, and the tiles are breaking apart. It works well enough and we keep this door closed!

 

Bathroom (no toilet): Shower turned into storage closet by landlord.

  Smallest washer I have ever seen! We don't have a dryer, but the air is very dry here so a drying rack works well.

Bathtub/shower. The sink faucet works as the bath water faucet as well. To use the shower, we just pull out the knob to diver the water to the shower head. The lighting is very dim and yellow in here. I hope to figure out a way to make it brighter, maybe we will put a lamp in here.

Whew! Hope you enjoyed the update! I am satisfied with this apartment for now. I think it is a nice space and am very happy to be living with Matt again!! I would love to hear your comments!

-Rochelle-