Shocha!

This last week has been filled with extremes--ups and downs, hate and love. Last Friday, I was ready to hate Mongolia. We woke up and had no running water or light in our bathroom. I was responsible for sending info about our apartment development to potential buyers, and learned that because I was using webmail (the same as our Yale mail), the attachments weren't sending, and I just looked so unprofessional. And then Michelle and I were walking home from dinner, and I was holding a bottle of juice in my hand, and these three little boys come up and grab at it, trying to snatch it away. I kept my grip on it, and we kept yelling "No!" at them, but they followed us for three blocks and kept laughing and mocking us. One of them spit on Michelle's leg, and the others sneered at me. Fil jokes all the time about the "terror children," but this was the first encounter I'd actually had with them.

As we continued to walk home on the shitty, shitty roads with no drainage system (after raining for three days straight..all our roads have become ponds), I was ready to write off Mongolia as a third world country. I felt like such a horrible person, but even as I realized that I've lived a pretty good life, I continued to sulk on the way to our first AIESEC meeting.

All of our spirits were low going into the meeting, but we had a beautiful conference room in the university, had a blast playing Jeopardy with the 20 students in the room, and were able to very effectively convey the concept of the summer "project" to them. Everyone was in professional attire, and we had such a diverse group of Mongolians--despite the mood we were in initially, we were so happy the rest of the night.

The next day, we had our company picnic in a ger camp in the countryside. We learned Mongolian time is roughly an hour and a half late, definitely giving the Spanish a run for their money. I played basketball with the boys (and we won!); Fil and Yin played soccer, with goals made out of feces piles. We went horseback riding, and it was the most amazing thing on earth. I had a lazy horse that didn't listen to me when I said "Choo" to get it going; it responded to our guide, so I tried to imitate him by using a really deep voice and saying "Chooooo." I got all the other horses to start going faster, but still no luck with mine. But we rode up the hill, and could see the vast countryside, while our guide sang in Mongolian, and got a sense of what it was like to be him and just wander in tranquility. When my horse could see "home," and we were on flat terrain, he started to gallop--I could feel his legs powering under me, and it was so much fun to actually ride the horse and feel the wind blowing around me.

When we got back, the entire company was sitting in a ger, eating little snacks and drinking vodka. It's rude to refuse anything, and there's a person who sits in the middle and passes the food and cup to everyone in a circle. You have to accept it with your right hand, with your sleeve down. Fil was jokingly told that he had to finish the whole cup of vodka because the guys in front of them had to drive back to UB later; not realizing it was a joke, he downed the 4 shots worth of vodka...and Yin followed suit after. Ridiculous, much? The second time we went around the circle, everyone had to sing a song first. I was the second person to go, and as I was handed the cup, I felt like I forgot every song I knew. I finally remembered Backstreet Boys, and all the girls jumped in, too :D. It was awesome, whenever the Mongolians sang, no matter how old they were, they all knew the traditional folk songs--and can sing them incredibly well. We also got a mix of languages in--French, German, Russian, Serbian, Chinese, Spanish, Japanese, Mongolian, and English!! They love their beer and vodka, and they know how to have fun. They also feel a really strong connection to their "motherland,"--later in the night, with a guitar, they were all singing again. A friend told me that these songs have no author, they were just written by someone and passed along at get togethers like these; and the coolest thing is that it's the young generation that knows them.


As for work, I am becoming a cement expert. We're responsible for writing an industry overview for the prospectus to list their newly acquired cement factory on the Mongolian stock exchange, and even though it's cement...it's actually really interesting. On Tuesday, we had an analyst from Deutsche Bank interested in the Mongolian real estate market come--it was my first meeting with any kind of investor, and it took about three hours, but I got a really good sense of what the general market is, how a "professional" sells something to someone, and our company's future outlook. Lee, our boss, was exhausted after this (the analyst lady asked like a million questions a minute)--and took me to two bars/dinner for the next three hours. It was cool because he knows his shit about Mongolia, and we talked a bit about the US.

Mongolians are a great insight into deep-seeded human nature, and they're truly a product of their environment. They love to fight, and know nothing else than to be corrupt, sometimes. They're extremely tough, and courageous, but surrounded by a powerful country that's more agressive than them (Russia), and a powerful country that's sneakier and smarter than them (China). At the same time, the US is in an interesting place. It's really a great place, and Lee's been defending it for 15 years in Asian countries surrounded by Europeans. And I almost always do, too. But we're soft, and other countries are looking at us more like prey, and less like this awe-inspiring dream land we were ten years ago. We talk about China's media being censored, but there are so many things the State Department doesn't want to tell us, but are reported in foreign newspapers; or people just don't want to hear, so newspapers don't publish it because they have to make money. I know this is kind of a broad generalization, but I look at Mongolia, which is reaching a critical point. It's got incredible natural resources, and if it learns how to manage its money well and gains the infrastructural and institutional knowledge, can become a rich country in the next twenty or thirty years. Or, it can devour its resources and implode. And then I look at the US, which doesn't have that many natural resources but an incredible wealth of knowledge, but with a world that's becoming more and more sophisticated and a citizenship that often seems to be losing its values, that still doesn't want to wake up to the fact that the bubble we've been riding is going to burst, and is not going to be fixed anytime soon. And I worry about both. But I also believe more and more firmly that social entrepreneurship will be the key to it all. I've realized that it's a really nebulous field, and doesn't have a great definition. But whether it's a developing country that needs to develop a civil society or a developed country that needs to re-develop a value system, it's all the same--the business and the morals; the economy and the community need to come hand in hand.

Now I've digressed and probably make very little sense/am preaching to the choir. So I'll stop. Except to add that I'm also confused. I look Mongolian to everyone, but when I can't speak it, they ask what nationality I am, and whether I say I'm Chinese or American, I always feel a need to justify it with the other, and then I feel like I'm somehow snubbing one of my cultures and it's just strange.