Khuvsgul Catch Up

I’m alive, I promise. My apologies for not updating the ‘mingle’ for some time. I meant to give you all the scoop on the rest of Khuvsgul before I left for Khentii and then when I got back from Khentii I meant to give you two scoops on both Khuvsgul and Khentii, but I failed and I’ve returned from Sainshand without giving you anything. Please forgive. To make up for lost time I’ll start by giving you the breakdown of my Khuvsgul homestay day by day. Here goes:

September 12:
Today was the first full day of my homestay. My father had arrived late the night before so I woke up hazy eyed to his greeting. My host mother gave me a hot bowl of milk tea and some fresh bread with orom. Orom is the foam ladled off the top of boiling yak or cow’s milk. When the foam is cooled you’re left with a rich and creamy spread that is absolutely delicious. I helped my sister shovel the poop out of our goat and sheep pen. It was an octagonal fence with made from several Siberian larch logs. I glamorously pushed thousands of little goat terds with the flat, tarnished shovel into a big pile in the corner of the pen. Then my ten year old sister, Hulan and I shoveled the pile onto a torn synthetic burlap sack and in several trips moved the pile to a larger dung heap about ten meters away. My host mother was so proud of my poop-scooping abilities that she invited me back into the ger for another cup of milk tea and a hard candy. About an hour later I was sitting inside the ger watching my mother mend a shirt. Hulan was running back and forth from behind the ger to the door bringing my mother new cuts of meat. I asked my mother if I could help her at all and she took my hand and led me outside. My father, Tsogtbayar, my oldest sister, Ariuntogs, and Hulan were busy slaughtering a sheep and my mother sat me down with them. My father had already skinned it and removed its organs and was now separating the cuts of meat. Ariuntogs handed me a knife and one end of the large intestine. We squeezed out the rest of its dung onto the grass and then slit the small intestine along the top. Then we scraped the inside out. After we had finished, we went inside to prepare dinner. We rinsed out the stomach and then poured a mixture of blood and salt until it inflated ten times its size. We cut strips of fat, the small intestine, and some unidentified rubbery thing to stuff the large intestines for a ‘sausage.’ The stuffing was topped off with some more blood and salt and the end was sewed shut with a splinter of wood. All our concoctions and the liver and kidney were tossed into a pot of boiling water and left to simmer for an hour. I had already determined that I didn’t like the boiled blood the day before and I was hoping I could skirt that portion of the feast. But they generously gave me a piece of everything, extra blood and I had to choke it down. After several offered helpings I was finally able to convince them I was full.

September 13:
I helped my mother make aaruul today. Aaruul is the traditional Mongolian cheese curd that’s rock hard and rather sour. It’s made from yogurt that’s boiled for an hour over the fire. It’s thickened and cooled and poured into silk fabrics, placed into a tray and put outside to harden in a rectangular shape. Once it’s hard enough to remove from the fabric, it’s broken into smaller blocks and dried for several days. When it rains we have to run it inside before it gets wet. A storm rolled in today and I made several emergency runs with my mother. Our ger had a solar panel which powered our single energy-saving lightbulb and black and white satellite television. That evening we watched sumo wrestling. Boiled mutton and flour noodle soup for dinner.

September 14:
My little sisters departed for school today. Countryside kids spend the week in dormitories at the Soum center and come home on the weekends. After an hour of preparation, packing clothing, food, and books, the family loaded all their supplies to the back of the motorcycle and my father, mother and two younger sisters set off for school. I spent a large part of the day examining our ger and landscape today. My family has two gers side by side. One housed Ariuntogs and my sister-in-law, Bolormaa (I had two older brothers, only one of whom I met) the other housed my mother, father, two younger sisters and myself. Ours was a relatively large ger with five walls. The stove in the center was tarnished and black. There were two beds on the east and west sides. The north end traditionally holds an altar. The altar can house anything that the family cherishes or finds sacred: photos, buddhas, figurines, offering plates, etc. The Darkhaad Depression was an open, grassy valley nestled between a majestic mountain range and a river in front of rolling hills. My family’s camp sat a few hundred meters from the river in a field of boulders, something that I still don’t quite understand. Boiled mutton and flour noodles for dinner.

September 15:
This morning Ariuntogs and I rode our pair of horses to the Bag center (local ‘town’ center) to purchase some items at the store. We rode through several ger camps and as my blonde head stuck out, were approached by several locals to share their greetings. The store we visited was a short larch log shack too short to house me. The store’s owner was an adorable little eight year old boy with Down syndrome who shook my hand and then proceeded to sneak candy out of the baskets. I later found out that he was the son of every family in the bag center and known as the happy child. We bought a package of baaw (cookies), a block of black tea, a package of raspberry gum and a bottle of lotion. On our way back we were approached by a young, drunk man on his galloping horse. He tried to sweet talk my sister, but his attempts failed and when we gave up and galloped away my sister raised her pinky finger at him and said he was gross (an upturned pinky finger is akin to a downturned thumb). In the afternoon my father took me out for another ride to herd our sheep and goat herd. We rode to the highest point in the middle of the valley, dismounted our horses and looked over the landscape through his tarnished binoculars. He took me a few kilometers further and taught me the names of each mountain in sight. We met two of his friends and dismounted again to take a break. Laying on one shoulder, I chewed a piece of grass and watched the three of them roll cigarettes in old newspaper and smoke them in the afternoon sun. We stayed out several hours and when we cantered back I was (surprisingly) eagerly awaiting our dinner of boiled mutton and flour noodle soup.

September 16
Today was a very, very bad day. I had thought a month into my stay in Mongolia I had outsmarted my body and skipped the usual twenty-four hour sickness. Not true. I woke up at 4am violently ill. I spent the five hours running in and out of the ger. I spent the afternoon with an empty body, trying to sleep off the pain. This was the day our class was supposed to visit the local shaman and ranger and I was extremely disappointed that I slept the entire day. At 7pm my family drew me a bath (filled the little metal tub with boiling water and let me crouch in the tub with a ladle. Needless to say I was happy for that day to end and for my sickness to be over. The family had boiled mutton and flour noodle soup for dinner, but I opted out of dinner.

September 17:
I watched my host father kill fifty flies with a rubberband in our ger today. He held one side back like a slingshot and nailed them every time. I helped shovel poop out of the goat pen again this morning. The afternoon was devoted to scraping moldy aaruul. Aaruul is an extremely important food in the winter and helps sustain the family in the toughest of times. My family stocks up on aaruul in the spring, summer and fall months in preparation, storing bags and bags of the hardened curds on the periphery of the ger. We had a bag that had gotten wet at some point and was covered in mold. Rather than dispose of the supply we spent hours scraping the spores with a knife (the same knives used for preparing dinner after a quick wipe of a rag). To spice things up, we had buudz for dinner tonight, one of my favorite Mongolian dishes, steamed lamb dumplings.

September 18:
One of my last days with my host family we spent a large part of the day taking family portraits. We saddled up the horses with the traditional, decorative saddles, dressed up in deels and started snapping away. In the afternoon I visited my peer’s ger for our language class. She lived fifteen kilometers away and my father and I took our motorcycle across the valley to get there. She lived by a series of healing springs and after our lesson the students and I drank to our head, stomach, eyes, heart and ears. This evening I helped my sister weave rope from the hair of a yak’s tail. First we separated the hairs and laid them out in large squares. The squares were rolled up and twisted with two hands to make tighter strands. Two of the tighter strands are then twisted and rolled into a longer rope. For the saddle straps we were making, three of the twisted ropes were then braided and leather bound hooks were sewn to the ends. Boiled mutton and flour noodle soup.

September 19:
Today was the last full day of my homestay. I spent most of the day scraping mold again. By the afternoon I had developed arthritis. I tried to explain to my family the probability of my graduate school path. They told me I study too much, but said it was a good thing. They gave me their address to mail them my photos and told me I should visit them again. A heavy snowstorm had hit UB much of southern Mongolia. As a result our drivers were delayed getting to us in the isolated Darkhaad valley and we fortunately got to stay with our host families a little longer. Boiled mutton and flour noodle soup.

September 20:
We were supposed to depart at 8am, but the storm delayed our departure until 3pm. It was a slow and bittersweet morning. My family gave me a wooden necklace and a vest my sister had made me as departing gifts. In the afternoon a surprise entrepreneur stopped by our house. My host mother teared up as I left and kissed me on the cheek. It was sad to say good-bye. We drove into Ulaan Uul, the Soum center, for the night and had soup for dinner again.