Settling In

Some of our first house guests

Hello everyone!

We’ve been in our “newlywed” (9 months after the actual wedding, but still) loft apartment for more than a month now, and enjoy it very much! Yaejin especially has been working on beautifying our home by developing a most enthusiastic floricultural hobby. "Our" collection is ever growing, which is a point of humor among us and the family, but it does make the apartment feel more pleasant and alive. Coincidently our home has become quite the popular spot for Yaejin’s siblings to gather on weekends and national holidays (of which we’ve already had several, including Buddha’s Birthday, Children’s Day, and Election Day). During school and homework hours we don't see the children much, but throughout their free time they will come around, hoping for something interesting to happen in our house. At least one evening during the weekend we'll do a movie or something with them, and when the weather is nice (which has finally started to be the case now and then!) I might bring one of our American outdoor activities out. Of these outdoor activities, we brought:

1) Frisbee - I brought this last time I came (in 2019) and it was a hit but I never  managed to impart the concept of an actual game with it, and it's lost a good deal of the novelty it had back then. I'd like to get a game of Ultimate happening, but so far it's proven difficult to get too many of the kids doing the same activity outdoors. 

2) Slackline - This has been a curiosity to the older kids and great fun for the small ones to play on with a handline, but it's hard to appeal to both groups, as the hand guide the kids use gets in the way of taller people. I also worry about safety and care of the material some, since Mongolians tend to be pretty DIY about stuff, and I already observed tying knots in the hand line instead of using the ratchet. Still, if i take the time to set it up it will stay occupied by younger ones.

3) Spikeball - This is my personal favorite, and has been well-received by those who have played it, though I definitely feel the need to keep my eye on it the whole time unless one of the more responsible siblings are there -- lest some younger kid jump/fall into the net and break its frame! The chief detriment to this game has always been the lengthy set-up process, and often it takes time to get new players to realize how to pass the ball instead of just trying to bat in into the net every time.

4) Pickle Ball - The clear and current winner in terms of popularity with the kids here! They have all taken ping-pong lessons so the paddle motion is somewhat similar, and the younger kids especially like being able to play competently without any supervision. We don't have a net though, so there's a bit of subjectivity in judging whether a shot is too low or not.

For the older kids, though, none of these games compare to the Mongolian affinity for Basketball (which i find utterly boring) and Volleyball (pretty enjoyable, but again without a net limits the playability). While the national sport of Mongolian wrestling is still quite popular, basketball is the clear king, with many of the youth wearing Nike and (bootleg) Air Jordan apparel; NBA, MNBA, and even 3x3 games are televised, and I'm told pick-up games can be a form of outreach for Mongolian churches -- at least, thus it was before Covid-19.
While the older kids / young adults might try out our strange foreign games, their attention always settles back to roost on basketball. Anyone who enjoys the sport would be quite welcome to come over for an international missions-type experience.  But enough about games.

Mongolian lessons in the morning

While the nature of our work is still a bit in process, we have started to fill out our daily schedules. Yaejin has continued to teach English and Korean online and work on discipleship with the other women of our church, and has taken the job of cashier for our group’s NGO. I have been taking Mongolian classes every weekday morning -- a super nice guy named Javhaa volunteered to spend and hour and a half with me in the mornings, declining the teaching fee we offered (and occasionally switching out with other nice guy Shinē who I know from my visit here before our wedding).
I'm also doing an hour of Korean practice with my high school sibling-in-laws in the evening, and helping them with their studies in the afternoons (they are doing an American correspondence course for their high school). Generally they don't need frequent help so I just study and work on other projects with them until they need explanation on something. I also was there to prevent too much goofing off on the computers, but hopefully we have that a little more under control now without the need for my supervision. I've also just started teaching them how to use MS Excel.

Working with the high schoolers

Elderly man waiting for the bus
wearing traditional deel.

The various other tasks and projects we are working on are related to the existential question looming over the church group: how to pursue new evangelistic endeavors in this Covid age. Up till now the Mongolians had been going door-to-door to give a 5-10 minute gospel presentation, with some effect in the capital and great effect in the countryside villages. Mongolians have a very easy-going and hospitable culture, usually letting strangers in for a cup of tea unless they have a strong reason not to (on their way out, someone is sick in the home, etc.)  However, Mongolia has been one of the strictest nations in their pandemic response, nearly shutting everything down for many months, and still oscillating between medium and tight restrictions even today. When the infection numbers go down they start to loosen up, then it jumps and they clamp back down in what seems to be a two-steps forward one-step back kind of way -- or often closer to "two steps forward, two steps back" as the case may be.
In spite of these measures, the infection rate has been and remains extremely high per capita, so attempts to meet with strangers face-to-face will not be welcomed. Moreover, the government/society seems to be extra suspicious toward churches, to the point that we still have not resumed our regular Sunday worship gatherings but only meet in smaller family units
(which still amounts to 14 people in our case). 

 

The government gave out a stimulus check to all citizens over a certain age, but it had to be picked up at each person's bank, leading to huge, hotspot-looking lines for several days.
This is the only picture i managed to get but some banks were lined around the building with people waiting to get their parents' checks.

No one knows how long the cautionary measures will continue, if they ever end at all -- whether due to lasting cultural shifts from this period or due to further permutations of this or other pandemics to come. The obvious idea is to move toward media-based outreach, but that is something for which we are way behind the curve in terms of learning how to do well. However, due to the small population of Mongolia (last estimate at 3.2 million) it's not as hard to be among the first to try things in the language which could potentially gain traction. To that end Yaejin and I, and some others are trying to get used to different media-related software and hardware, and we've all been asked to brainstorm on other approaches to reach people in these times. 

We also submitted my Mongolian green card application, which required quite a lot of documentation (information about my parents, paternal uncles and grandparents, financial status, etc.) but that preparation seems to have paid off because the actual submission went very smoothly. They will send someone to our house to interview me at some point, which I understand will be the final hurdle to getting legal residency here. So please pray that that goes smoothly!

Other than that, we are doing well. We both feel quite busy, though we often have few substantial results to show for it. We want to edify our siblings and the other church members, and strengthen the community therein. We need prayers for wisdom and creativity on how to effectively reach out to the Mongolian people during these anti-social times.

Made a large snowman on May 22

Enjoying our "balcony" (the rooftop outside our window) on May 29