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| Children bringing their household water containers back from the neighborhood well. This is how many of the neighborhoods around the edges of Ulaan Baator look. You can see the white gher interspersed among brick or wooden houses. These homes all have electricity but few if any have indoor plumbing. |
Suddenly my Mongolian teachers are gone!
One morning, not so long after my last update, my main teacher texted me "Today I got some work. I think I can't have lesson today. I'm sorry." I didn't think much of this, just that it was a good opportunity for me to review my notes from the past few lessons. Then an hour later Yaejin came to me saying that she'd just heard that both Javhaa and Shiné would be moving away the very next day! Oh.. that's quite a different matter from my understanding of his text. We both sat in the apartment relatively quiet for the next few hours, feeling discouraged over the news -- not because of my Mongolian lessons, but because we see both of those young, reliable, and spiritually focused guys as a positive influence on the team here, and were expecting them to be stepping more and more into leadership roles. The fact that they were both leaving at the same time (which was mostly coincidental), and so abruptly; leaving behind only one young adult member remaining in our team (who may end up leaving himself eventually, now that all of his friends are gone) felt like the rug being pulled out from the future of the group. This church is too small to already have sustainability issues like a lack of healthy demographic. Are young people simply not interested in working with us? Is this a pattern which will continue as the students graduate and move off as well, leaving the two of us as the closest thing to "young" people around? Etc.
For my part, I also was puzzled over how they could find more comfortable living conditions in Mongolia than here, but I don't think that's an immediate concern for most Mongolians, who are well-accustomed to living in gher (or "yurts," to use the Russian word). Upon further reflection we were able to come to more empathy for their decisions -- I certainly wouldn't have wanted to stay in one place forever when I was their age, though as far as I've seen so far we already have an above average national setting right here in our community -- even if the abrupt revelation was perplexing. Anyway, we were sad about it and there wasn't really anything to be done.
Thankfully, however, each of them paid us a visit before they left, which clarified their motivations a good deal and helped soften our shock at the situation. Both of them have had pressure from their families to do something that makes more money (Here they are only given a small salary, as their room & board, medical expenses, etc. are covered by the NGO. It is certainly enough for them to live comfortably and even save a little, but only a very little at a time.), and logically they know that now is the time to try a different career because they most likely will be able to come back here any time they want and the reverse may not be true. Shiné had an especially compelling reason, as his aging solitary grandfather has had some health scares and nearly died when he had a stroke and remained undiscovered for 3 days, and currently Shiné lacks the resources to make sure he's taken care of if something happens again. He was particularly sorry to leave us, as he's been here for over two years and really does love the work when they were actually able to go out and travel to share the gospel. I'm sure the past year of Covid restrictions inhibiting the evangelistic efforts of the group have been taxing on both of those guys in terms of feeling like they may as well get some different working experience and save up for now, and honestly they may be right as long as the main thrust of the missional work here is stymied.
Anyway, it was good for us to be able to hear their reasoning and know that we could part on good terms and hope our paths will cross again in the future. It doesn't change our concerns for the health of this group moving forward, but at least we know they weren't motivated by deep sources of dissatisfaction which could have been amended. We are praying that they will be able to stay rooted to Christ and be a light to others as they (Javhaa in particular, who says he will be living in a camp in the Gobi desert) are likely to be rather isolated from other believers in their new settings, and from what I hear there are no churches meeting together even now, for justifiable fear of government oppression if they were to do so. Prayers for our group's current demographical imbalance would be appreciated as well -- we want to have spiritually solid teammates of as many ages and stations of life as we can.
Thankfully, 18-year-old Bilthgé has volunteered to take up my Mongolian lessons. He has strong English compared to my previous teachers, which has its pros and cons, as you might imagine. He can explain to me a bit more easily, but also it can become a crutch if I'm not disciplined to try communicating as much as I can in Mongolian during our lessons. He has also started taking morning English classes with Yaejin in return. His English is good, but there's still enough room for improvement that she has plenty to teach him.
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| My birthday cheesecake hommade by Yaejin The flare was more than we anticipated! |
The school kids started their summer break on July 1, so we've had young sibling visitors hoping for some extra weekday game time! They are very glad to be free for the next month.
I've gotten some feedback about these entries going too long, so I think i'll wrap up here for now with a few more pictures and maybe update again sooner than I usually would. I'll post this now and check for typos later. 😅
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| These little cottony seed things were blowing all around for a week or so |
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| A member of Yaejin's collection. |
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| We had a lot of rain in June, and sunny evenings produced 3 sequential days of rainbows |
