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.