Яах ве?

Roughly translated, that means "what to do?".  The sort of question you ask when things don't go according to plan.  And that was the theme of my last 3 weeks in Zavhan, mostly because I heard that question on a daily basis.  This trip required much more flexibility on my part than previous countryside visits.  From nearly missing my flight out of UB (eznis airways called me on my mobile) to mutliple run-ins with drunk park rangers attempting to extort money from me and my colleagues to watching cops brawl with one another in a karaoke bar, there was hardly a dull moment.

After working a few days with colleagues at the Zavhan Health Department in Uliastai, I selected 6 sums (1 govi, 5 hangai; 2 PDA, 4 non-PDA) for the research and then worked in 3 of them.  The photo left shows a family moving from havarjaa (spring camp) to zuuslan (summer camp) - it was that time of year.  In the 1st of these 3 sums I took a translator from the aimag.  The morning that I was leaving for the 2nd and 3rd he didn't show up (Яах ве?), so we left without him.  From Zavhan, I traveled with people from the Health Department and Aimag General Hospital to a regional seminar in Uvurhangai (more on that in a separate post).

While I was working in Uliastai, I usually had an Internet connection, as a direct result of the ADB (JFICT MON-9053) project's activities at the Health Department.  Still, I didn't have the time to post to the blog, so I'm making up for that now with extra photos.  On to the highlights from the past weeks.

1. The chase.  In one of the selected research sums, the driver, translator, and I had a very difficult time tracking down the bagiin emch.  We stopped at his home and met his mother who said he left alone on horseback the previous morning for his monthly household visits.  She said he would be gone for 2-3 days.  We drove in the direction that he had gone and asked after him at every place that we could.  From some construction workers at a children's camp, we heard that he was now traveling with one other person.  There was a brown horse and a white horse and they were possibly accompanied by 1-2 men on motorcycle.  We continued to look, but couldn't find them, so the translator asked me "Яах ве?"  After a think, I decided it would be best to return to this sum another time, especially since word on the pasture was that the emch was a bit drunk.  Just 5 minutes later, as we began to drive back towards Uliastai through a light rain, we spotted two men riding down a ridge towards us on a brown horse and white horse.  Our driver pulled the jar yus off the dirt road and began to race across a field directly towards them.  Ahead of them was a motorcycle with 2 men.  We slowed and flagged down the motorcycle to ask if that was the emch on horseback.  As soon as they spotted us, the two men on horseback turned their horses around and began riding up the ridge into the forest where our jar yus couldn't go.  The men on motorcycle were suspicious of us, but as soon as we explained our purpose there, they began to call out to the emch "[Name]! Your teacher is here!  It's ok!  Come back!"  From 200m away, after 8-10 minutes of yelling, they were eventually able to coax the emch to come down to talk to us.
2. How does this thing work?  As part of the HSDP-2 project, the Health Department received 10 motorcycles to give to bagiin emch - extensive assembly required.  When I arrived, the Health Department was in process of putting them together in the basement (photo right).  After these 10 are distributed, all of the bagiin emch in Zavhan will have their own motorcycle.  All of them are 150cc Chinese models, that are roughly half the cost of the Russian Planeta.  It took me 3km of riding one to figure out that the shifting pattern on these Chinese bikes is different than the one I am used to on Japanese motorcycles and the Planeta.  Up from 1 is 5, not 2.  And down from 1 is 2, not 1.  That explained why getting out of first was so difficult.  And if I thought that was hard, a day later I was on a horse, for which I have no effective experience.  This was my 3rd time on a horse in Mongolia.  After hearing that the owner said, "You're ready.  It's your horse.  Just ride freely."  I accepted his offer and started towards the other side of the valley.  After a few minutes of this, the horse decided on it's own to accelerate from amble to trot to run.  I repeatedly jerked hard on the reins while yelling at it incoherently until it stopped.  The horse's owner then warned me against wrapping the reins around my hand.
3. The longest day (revisited).  I hitched a ride towards one of the sums with a colleague from the Health Department and a private construction company that is building some new sum hospitals as a part of HSDP-2.  I was outside the Health Department ready to leave at 5am.  Because of some overheating problems with the Nissan SUV - I never heard so many people extol the virtues of the jar yus as in that single day, especially when they were struggling to extract the thermostat - we only made it about 100km.  The construction company called up a Hyundai microbus that took us the rest of the way.  But that meant hours of waiting.  When we arrived at their final destination it was around 11pm.  I was riding on another 50-60km.  I thought leaving in the morning would be a good idea, but my Health Department colleague said they were expecting me this evening.  I later found out that this meant they grouped all the male and female patients together so i could have a whole palat (4 bed room) to myself.  We left around midnight and arrived at nearly 3am, 22 hours later, even though it was only 250km from Uliastai.
4. Countryside rodeo.  In one sum, I went to a bag festival (read: rodeo) because that's where the whole bag was going.  For me, the most interesting activity was the bareback riding of unbroken horses (photo left).  More than one man was thrown within the first 1-2 seconds and left with a fistful of horse mane in his hand.  A man visiting from another sum broke his arm above and below the elbow after being thrown.  As I was traveling with the sum hospital director, this ended up being the activity for the next 4 hours.  In fashioning a wrap for the splint, I was surprised to see someone take a knife to a bus (Mongolian belt).  I don't think I'll see that again.
5. Field injury. The most embarrassing field injury to date ... and there have been several.  I carried around my English-Mongolian-English mini-dictionary in my back left pocket for a day as I visited 15-20 households with the bag governor and bagiin emch.  At each house I sat on a stool or directly on the floor.  And within the bag, we traveled by jar yus on some of the bumpiest roads I've been on in Mongolia.  At day's end, I removed the dictionary from my pocket and discovered a nasty blister where the corner of the book had been digging into my rear.
6. Research under the influence.  In one bag, many of the people were attending a child's haircutting ceremony ("үс авач найр", photo left), so we (bag governor, bagiin emch) also went (photo right, bag governor on the left and I had just washed our hair in the river, which explains the I-just-stepped-out-of-the-shower-look we have ).  Drinking - vodka and beer - was of course involved and everybody of age took part.  Even though people opened up more than usual, it was difficult from a research standpoint for a few reasons.  First, my own comprehension and recall deteriorated quickly following the first drink.  Second, people spoke much less clearly than when sober.  Third, and perhaps most difficult, was that people had a tendency to talk at me at the same time, sometimes two people and sometimes three.  I'm pretty sure that I couldn't manage such simultaneous conversations in English.
7. Janky Razr.  On my final return trip to Uliastai from the countryside, I rode with a young Ulaanbaatar family (husband, wife, 1 year old son) in their microbus.  They were returning from a visit to Kyzyl, the capital of Tuva (of Genghis Blues and Feynman fame).  He was playing music off his USB stick via a radio transmitter plugged into the lighter socket.  I asked if he wanted any music from my notebook.  So we stopped and he listened to what I had.  Javkhlan felt normal, but it felt a bit strange to play Tupac and IAM out where we were.  "Does your notebook have Bluetooth?" he asked.  I said it did.  So he asked if I could give him some music for the Motorola Razr he just bought in UB.  When my notebook's name appeared on his phone, he asked "Is this it?"  We were 50km from the nearest town and that town had only 500 people.  I have a feeling that these might have been the only 2 active Bluetooth devices in the whole aimag.  Transfer from his phone via my computer to USB worked fine, but reverse didn't - we discovered it was a memory problem, so we tried to some of the media files already on his phone.  The phone had an incredibly indirect way for erasing files and on most files it failed without explanation ("Erase 1 file?" > "Yes" > "0 files deleted").  The menus were in English, so I can only imagine how much harder it was for him (e.g. there were 2 messages using different verbiage to explain that there was no more space on the device).
8. Flat tires.  From Zavhan to Uvurhangai, we had 2 flat tires.  From Uvurhangai to Ulaanbaatar, we had 3.  The longest stop was on the road between Tosontsengel and Tsetserleg, at 3am when the spare went flat.  The driver pulled down an inner tube tied to the roof of the Landcruiser, but we didn't really have a way to pop out the rim.  It was dark enough that we were able to spot the next car coming when it was 5km away.  We flagged it down and the driver and co-pilot stopped to help.  It was a furgon traveling from Uvs to Ulaanbaatar, and everyone else inside was asleep.  I learned some new things about how to change a tire in the countryside.  First, instead of using the crow bars that they had to pop out the rim, they simply drove over tire with the front left wheel of the furgon.  Second, our driver said the tire takes 550 pumps from the hand pump, so we kept count.  Third, the rubber valve stem was a bit wide for the rim, so they took my knife and trimmed it.  Fourth, the furgon drive kept whacking the tire with a crowbar to gauge it's readiness - so I suppose a crowbar is the Mongolian Thumper.  Photo right is from a tire repair center on the way back to UB, third of three flats.
9. The outsider's outsider.  On the ride back to UB from Uvurhangai, I rode with in a private Toyota station wagon with a driver, his friend, the Bayanhongor Aimag General Hospital director, and a small, 40-something Chinese man.  As the director said, this was an "international" mashin.  The Chinese man is here in Mongolia doing construction work and aside from his name, which we got from his passport, we weren't able to get much out of him.  Until we got close to UB, where he spoke to someone on his phone in Chinese, he said maybe 10 words in 12 hours.
10. Otgon Tenger.  There is a Buddhist celebration at Otgon Tenger in Zavhan - 2nd tallest mountain in Mongolia (photo right, as seen from Hairhan Davaa near Uliastai) - this Friday and Saturday.  It's a very big event - it only happens every four years, so the President will be there along with lots of other politicians, priests, and important folks.  I would have stayed for the celebration, but I've got some more important business to attend to - I gotta pick me up some tater-tot at the airport on Thursday.

Comments

[tater-tot]

here i come!