This Beautiful World

We truly do live in an amazing world. We get to see the sunrise early from our apartment window and watch the town that we live in come alive each day. When we first arrived in Mongolia Deni and I had a hard time getting used to the sun coming up at 9 AM but now it us up by 6:30 and sets about 7 so it is pretty normal.

Last week at home was our church world wide conference which we were able to watch a little of live. Here in Mongolia last week was a normal Sunday because it takes about a week to translate all of the talks into Mongolian. This week was our "Conference Weekend". On Friday evening about 30-40 members showed up at the church to help clean up the grounds after a long cold winter. The winter cold is really hard on the infrastructure of Mongolia. They don't have very good building codes here so the buildings and roads suffer serious deterioration.
Before they started the clean-up project I asked if they had rakes and shovels and a weed wacker and I was assured that they had it all.
As you can see from the picture, their idea of "having it all" may be different from ours. The black looking "brooms" are made of braided metal and are heavy and difficult to sweep with. The rakes are "custom" made and not very sturdy. The handles are homemade or thin boards.




Our church building walkways and rockwork are cracking and crumbling so it takes a lot of work to sweep away the debris and to make it look nicer but the members do what they can to clean it up and make it presentable.

After the clean-up everyone gathered in the church for their traditional "Bodes". After all the Bodes that I ate at the Tsagan Sar celebration in Feb I'm not sure that I ever want to eat another bode. Deni likes them and I think that they are OK.                                                           The Mongolian's love them and they eat them any time they can.

Last December, before we left Utah, we sent ourselves a package of nutritional supplements that we were sure we would need and that we expected that we wouldn't be able to find in Mongolia. We have been taking NuSkin supplements since Deni was on the Biggest Loser and we have been much healthier than we have ever been. We knew that our bodies would be going through an onslaught of new bacteria and other health concerns and we wanted to give ourselves the best chance of staying healthy. We had a document that gave us the address to mail letters to a PO Box but packages were to be sent to an address with Mongolian Cyrillic letters. The USPS charged us $60 to send a small package to Mongolia and said that it should take about 2 weeks. After months of waiting and several calls to the USPS the package finally showed up the middle of March. Not in Mongolia but back at home where it started from. We had our daughter send us a picture of the label and we had the postal service in Mongolia look at it to tell us why it was returned. It was exactly like they told us to address it. They looked at the picture of the address and said "of course it didn't get here. The US postal equipment could't read the Mongolian address". We know that isn't what happened because it had Mongolia on it and we are sure it made it to Mongolia. Things just work different here and the people here just seem to accept that that's the way it is. When we first got here we were told by the Stake President to just accept the way things are and when we see things that frustrate us we should just say to ourselves TIOM (This is Outer Mongolia) and just accept that we will never understand it. Just about anything that we would expect to be easy becomes complicated for no apparent reason. IE: when I needed to be added to the bank signature card for the church it took 2 weeks, 4 trips to the notary and 3 trips to the bank. I was like, "why don't they just ...." but the Mongolians that I was working with just took it as the way things work. I am learning to just accept things rather than try to change things or try to figure out why they do things the way they do. Our package that came back to our home was taken back to the PO by our daughter and they resent it without charging us again. It had been damaged and had some holes in it from its first trip to Mongolia and we had lost a few items out of it so we had Sarah stick 2 hearing aids in and then tape it up good. It got to Mongolia in 6 days but then Mongolian Customs had it for a few days and they opened it and decided that the vitamins and hearing aids were valuable and said that we could have it for 45,000 tuges (about $26) but we wanted them so, of course, we paid it.

On one of our last Blogs I mentioned that we had visited a family who had borrowed a hearing aid and it changed his life but that he had to give the hearing aid back soon.

Some members of our ward put together a project to get some used hearing aids and today we gave him the hearing aids. Here is a picture of him and his deaf wife and hearing child. We know this will make a difference in all of their lives. Thanks to all those who are willing to make a difference. 

I asked this man to pose for me. He was in front of the meat market selling this rake that he had made.













We teach English most days at the "Childrens Palace". We think it is like a YMCA at home. These are some of the children dressed in traditional costumes ready for a performance.