the Mongolian challenge
Working with Mongolians can sometimes be really hard. If you’re foreign, everyone wants you to work with them and if you show even the slightest interest they take that as a yes and schedule you in without asking. We in the middle of a bit of drama between the school we take language lessons at and the school we teach English at. Our language school wants us to teach English there (surely 4 more hours a week isn’t a big deal!) while where we teach wants us to cancel our language school and just learn there (because of course their teachers are just as good!). Then our desire to teach one day a week (volunteer, in return for a visa) turns into them asking us to be there 30 hours a week… I got them down 20 and am now working on getting them to 13 (one hour for each class) which is already generous considering they’re not paying us. Life is like that sometimes here, you commit to things without any intention to just for saying “maybe” or “sometime” and then they don’t leave you alone after that. So it’s been kind of hard trying to sort that out, and frustrating cause we want to help but not be taken advantage of. Marielle is much better at things like this than me, she’ll just say no and walk out… I’m way to nice… we’ll get used to it, learn more Mongolian and how to negotiate our way through daily life here… As a side note, we do now have a humidifier to battle the extremely dry air of Mongolia. It came in the shape of a blue penguin of sorts which somehow just makes everything feel better…
