The Five Snout Daily

Swarthmore Alumni Mag

We meant to close this blog down months ago, but we keep finding reasons to keep it going. Our most recent update is this article about Mongolian community radio stations in the Swarthmore alumni magazine.

Thanks to the editor, Mr. Jeff Lott.

Radio World

The PR blitz continues with this article about Gobi Wave in the December 6 issue of Radio World. CLICK HERE to download the article.

So we've figured out YouTube. Here's the year in video clips.

The Amazing Race

The Amazing Race came through Mongolia on May 31. Read the backstory here. And see the best 37 seconds of the show right here:

Tank Driving

"I love eating the meat and shooting the guns." -Jargalsaikhan

Luce Mongolia

Two weeks, two Russian vans, 13 friends, 2200 kilometers, one trip:

The West

Mongolia's west is wild and wonderful. We visited in October 2005:

Gobi Wave

This is a great community radio station in the Gobi Desert. Read more about the station here. The station got a big equipment upgrade in June. Read about that here. And here's a little video:

Orhon FM

Another community radio station in Darkhan:

Birthday Week

Click here to read about Birthday Week. And here's a video featuring musicians from the Ulaanbaatar Children's Palace:

Daily Life

This is what it looked like most days in Ulaanbaatar. Music by Sun Kil Moon:

I Come From Mongolia

This is actually sound without video. You will first hear the voices of some Mongolian English teachers from the Ulaanbaatar Children's Palace. Then you will hear their students. Rachel spent the year working with these teachers and their students.

NPR Stories

I did two NPR stories during the year. Mongolia is the Texas of Asia and an Albanian woman learns how to box in Ulaanbaatar.

The End

by Rachel

Charlie and I will be back in Washington at dinnertime tomorrow, so this is goodbye.

Writing this blog was good for us, and we are grateful for those of you who read it. We are working on our answers to “So, how was Mongolia?” and writing the blog helped us start to process a very complicated year. We are also grateful to those who stayed in touch. It made a big difference when we felt very far away.

We look forward to seeing you all soon. Thanks again.

The Trip Home

By Charlie

World travelers take note: Chiang Kai-shek International Airport in Taipei, Taiwan has free wireless internet. Or at least Terminal 2 has free wi-fi. Hookup to the SSID “HTY_FREE”.

So here we are for the next three hours, waiting for the China Airlines plane that will finally take us to America, The Greatest Country in the World.

We departed Penang, Malaysia this morning. It was fine. The plane was packed and we were the only white people in Economy Class. There was an American woman in First Class, but we didn’t talk with her.

We haven’t really thought about Taiwan at all this year, so it’s nice to get a little taste of it on our way out of Asia. Taiwanese people seem somehow different from Chinese people. The language is the same, but it sounds different. The youth are more funky, almost as funky as Korean youth.

Electrical plugs in this airport are of the American variety, which is neat. And the airport could be in America. I have no idea what the rest of Taiwan feels like, but this airport is fine with me.

But then there is that lingering and looming problem of China. One of these days, will China get a bug up its ass and try to sort out the Taiwan issue by force? I think not. But if I were Taiwanese, I’d spend most of my life wondering about that.

A few words about Penang:

It is not my most favorite place in Asia. I’m grateful for everything that we’ve done this year and I’m even grateful for the opportunity we had to visit Penang. But it is kind of gross.

We stayed here, at the Golden Sands by Shangri-La:

All of these pictures are pirated off the Golden Sands’ website and of course they make the place look far better than it felt in real life. Isn’t that always the way? Incidentally, we also found this to be true of Lonely Planet guidebooks.

Anyway, it was fine. And I feel bad for complaining.

Our room looked more or less like this, minus the fresh flowers and minus the stuffed animals on the bed:

We had breakfast here, at the Garden Café:

We had five breakfasts here and we didn’t discover the roti bar until our penultimate breakfast. That was our mistake, because roti for breakfast is a winner.

We had one “western set lunch” in the hotel’s Italian restaurant, called Pepino!

We also enjoyed a few dips in the pool:

On our first night in Penang, a taxi driver told us that we would be seeing many visitors from the Arab world. As it turned out, we saw hundreds of Saudis on holiday. We guess that our hotel mates at the Golden Sands are probably middle class folk, since most were not traveling with their servants.

I don’t think that I’ve ever seen so many women covered head-to-toe in black cloth. All you could see were eyes peeking through very thin slits. I saw one woman who didn’t even reveal her eyes. I guess she could see through a screen. Cultural judgments aside, this was bizarre.

The Luce Scholar who spent her year in Malaysia gave a nice and concise presentation organized around a top ten list that she collected during her year. While I liked the presentation, it didn’t make me like Malaysia. The good news is that Malaysia is diverse – “With a capital D” – as the Luce Scholar explained. The bad news is that diversity does not really equate with harmony or equality. And sharia law seems to be on the rise.

The worst thing about all of this is that we spent ten very long months in Mongolia watching Malaysia tourism advertisements on BBC World. “Malaysia, Truly Asia” is the slogan that is sung over beautiful visuals. We actually saw one of these ads the other night at the Golden Sands. As each wonderful visual clicked by, I thought, “We haven’t seen that – or that – or that – or that.” We did see a jewelry factory, a turtle cesspool, a butterfly farm and a spice garden. The spice garden was by far the nicest – or least offensive.

But just like the two-week trip through Mongolia, this experience was not entirely about the place. It was about the people. For the third time this year, 17 Luce Scholars and Spouses got together with people from the Asia Foundation and the Luce Foundation to talk about the year. And that was very nice. Each Scholar (or Scholar & Spouse Team) gave a presentation. Some of these presentations were excellent. For the nitty gritty on the best presentations, please see Raduga.

Wrapped Up

by Rachel

Well, we are done. We had our last official Luce dinner this evening, and everyone has started to scatter. Some folks are staying in Asia, some are traveling for a few months, and others are heading back to start school and jobs.

We fly tomorrow from here to Taipei, Taiwan to San Francisco to Seattle. If all goes according to plan we will be in Seattle a little before 12:30 Sunday morning (July 23.) We’ll spend a week on Salt Spring Island in British Columbia with my parents, Lucy and Rich. Then we’ll spend a few days in Seattle with Doug and Georgine. Finally, we’ll attend Katie and Doug’s wedding near Eugene, Oregon.

We’ll be back in Washington on August 7.

Yipee.

A Snow Leopard in Penang

by Raduga

Meow and hello. My name is Raduga and I am a snow leopard.

My new owners, Charlie and Rachel, brought me here to Penang, Malaysia far from my native Mongolia. Even though the climate is very different, I see it as a learning opportunity.

We are staying at a big resort hotel on the northern coast of the island. All the other cats I’ve seen have lost their tails, so I have stuck pretty close to the hotel so as not to lose mine.

Luckily, Rachel and Charlie spend their days listening to their friends talk about other countries is Asia – places where I have never been. I am learning a lot.

We will leave tomorrow for America – the place Charlie calls “the greatest country in the world.” I understand that I have a lot to look forward to. I will miss Mongolia, and especially my old owner, Amanda. She knows the people who are trying to make sure I have a place to return to when I want to visit my snow leopard friends. Bye Amanda. Hello America.

The Epic, Mongol Style

By Charlie

Well, it’s done.

We left Mongolia about 36 hours ago. The Korean Air flight left on time, at 1:20 AM on Sunday, July 16. With the national Naadam Festival concluded, the flight was predictably packed with Koreans and other non-Mongolians fleeing the Land of Khan.

I love to fly, even if I am just a passenger in steerage. But this flight – on a beater of an old Airbus 300 – was horrendous. For the entire four-hour experience, the sadistic Korean flight crew kept the fluorescent lights blaring on their brightest setting. Never mind that it was the middle of the night. My only guess is that the bright lights drive the in-flight duty free business, which was brisk. Koreans seem to have an insatiable desire for overpriced luxury goods.

Less annoying and more horrifying was the approach to Inchon International Airport. About 90 seconds before we finally landed, it occurred to me that our passage from Mongolia could very well end in a catastrophic plane crash. It seems that we landed in the middle of a monsoon – or the Korean version of a monsoon. The plane shook violently and seemed to lurch and bend in many different directions.

Indeed, that flight made me long for the 13 days that we spent bouncing over 2,000 kilometers of Mongolian mountains, rivers and steppe in two Russian vans. In a way, this trip was too easy and too well planned. Nothing went wrong. We had no mechanical problems and no injuries. We never ran out of water. We never went hungry. In this way, it was a very un-Mongolian experience. For $910 per person, that’s what we paid for. Money well spent, I guess.

The hero of our excursion was Sengee, our guide from Nomadic Expeditions. Here he is towards the end of the trip rigging up an anti-mosquito defense system. Fortunately, the mosquitoes were never bad enough to require the deployment of this monster.

It would be impossible for me to chronicle every day and every experience of this trip. Instead, I will use the Five Snout Summary that has served us so well throughout this year.

Everybody arrived on July 1, pretty much as scheduled. The eight people coming from Beijing on MIAT were right on time, as were the two people coming from Seoul on Korean Air. One person coming from Beijing on Air China was, of course, delayed. Anyone coming to Mongolia should remember that Air China is pretty much guaranteed to be late, even when the other airlines are on time.

We spent the first afternoon drinking at the Chinggis brew pub, repacking our stuff and doing some last minute shopping. That night, the Asia Foundation hosted a little reception for the group with $300 released by the Luce Scholars coordinator in San Francisco. It was nice.

We departed early the next morning for Darkhan to visit Orhon FM, one of the radio stations that I worked with this year. Later that day, we reached the monastery at Amarbayasgalant. It’s a beautiful spot that somehow avoided being destroyed by the Soviets.

Four Luce Scholars posed in that area for an album cover photo.

On our second day, we had lunch here:

Our drive west, towards Lake Hovsgol, required us to cross the roaring Selenge River. The Russian vans can drive through all kinds of rivers, but not this one. Here we required the services of a “ferry.”

This vessel is powered by nothing more or less than the current of the river and a few rustic Mongolians who operate cables and rudders to get the ferry moving in the right direction. Fortunately, the ferry does have a tender.

According to the bottom three lines of this sign, the ferry’s cost schedule is as follows:

Person with motorcycle – 1500 tugrugs ($1.25)

Person with horse – 500 tugrugs ($0.40)

Sheep / Goats – 100 tugrugs ($0.08) per head

Cows – 300 tugrugs ($0.25) per head

This ferry is awesome and ingenious – a real tribute to Mongolian ingenuity and the Mongolian way of doing things.

Many of you are familiar with this person:

Rachel organized the food for this excursion. And yes, we did eat pasta puttenesca somewhere in the middle of Bulgan Aimag.

The ingredients:

The dish:

Keeping this group in liquor was another fantastic challenge that kept Jonathan – aka “The Sprucemoose” – fully employed for days. This was just one of many hauls.

Our most distant destination was Lake Hovsgol, in north-central Mongolia. In June, it took us about two hours to fly there. This trip took four days. It was worth it.

We visited some reindeer herders at Hovsgol. These guys usually live in teepees in a very remote part of the region.

This family comes down to the lake in the summer to make a little money by hosting tourists like us. Maybe this is good for the people, but the reindeer seemed pretty depressed and lethargic. They like cold weather and the lakeshore is just too warm for them. Rachel cheered up one reindeer by sharing her Oxford American with him. Aww.

We headed south from Hovsgol to Tsetserleg, where we hoped to see a Naadam celebration. But because this is Mongolia, the Naadam was rescheduled and we missed it. Bummer. But we did manage to see some stuffed snow leopards, which was almost cooler than Naadam.

Moisture and cool air camp out in the mountains. As we drove down to the steppe, we watched that weather system clash with more mild conditions. It was spectacular.

We spent our two best nights camping by a river outside of Tseterleg. These were the long summer days and peaceful evenings by the campfire that made the trip worthwhile for me.

And, of course, we had to drive through a few rivers:

On our way back to UB, we visited the site of the ancient Mongolian capitol at Kharakorun. Here we saw – among other things – eight burly yaks pulling a ger on a wooden platform, Chinggis Style. This was part of a cultural show that also featured a child contortionist and the execution of cattle rustler. Ah, Mongolia.

Yes, we loved it.

The reality of our situation has not yet sunk in. We are in Penang, Malaysia for the next week. This place is very much not like Mongolia. When we left UB the other night, I was too tired to have a lump in my throat. That lump will inevitably come. When it does, I hope that the joy of these memories will temper our sadness.

The Last Normal Day

By Charlie

It’s Friday at 10 AM and we have no more boxes to pack, no more stuff to give away. If we needed to get on a plane this afternoon and fly home to America, we could. But we won’t. Our Luce Scholar colleagues will arrive here tomorrow and we’ll spend the next two weeks gallivanting across Mongolia according to this itinerary.

We are looking forward to this trip, but planning it has been a monumental undertaking that started last year. In addition to negotiating with the tour operator and buying food for meals that we will cook on the trail, we also organized air travel from Beijing to Ulaanbaatar for 8 people and from Ulaanbaatar to Penang, Malaysia for 12 people. In a country where it is still hard to use a credit card, you can imagine how exciting it was to buy $7,000 worth of plane tickets.

In a sick sort of way, planning this trip filled a niche in my life that has been otherwise empty this year. At NPR, I am a planner, organizer and worrier. This trip has required all of those skills in spades.

Despite the agreeable weather of the Mongolian summer and the sadness we have about concluding this year on the lamb, we are ready to go home. As full as our lives have been this year, I have definitely suffered from not ever having a real job. Last summer, I relished the break that I had won from NPR. But I arrived in Mongolia on September 1, the day when it became clear that New Orleans was in big trouble following Hurricane Katrina. It was tough for me to miss that story.

Here in Mongolia, I’ve tried to keep busy with a portfolio of volunteer jobs. The work I did with rural radio stations was the most successful. The six months I spent at a newspaper and the national airline were somewhat less useful.

But even the radio station project was tough at times. In order to get money for the project, I had to operate inside the world of international development. One byproduct of this year is that I will be forever suspicious of aid projects in the developing world.

A lot of aid money in Mongolia is thrown around by the Economic Policy Reform and Competitiveness Project (EPRC), which is funded by USAID. A US government employee doing an assessment of the EPRC last fall actually interviewed me. Based on that experience and various other anecdotal encounters, I’d say that this $2 million per year operation is a gigantic waste of US taxpayer funds.

Each and every aid organization in Mongolia should be evaluated according to this one simple question: “If (your organization) disappeared tomorrow, would anyone care?” In the case of the EPRC, I think that the answer would be a resounding No Fucking Way!

But US taxpayers are not getting totally fleeced in Mongolia. There are good projects being funded by USAID. A US-based NGO called Mercy Corps does business development in the Gobi. Another US-based NGO called the Cooperative Housing Foundation (CHF) runs a business development project in the ger areas around Ulaanbaatar. Both of these projects have Mongolian clients who benefit everyday from services paid for with US government money.

I am especially enthusiastic about the CHF project. It is called the GER Initiative. A ger, of course, is the Mongolian nomad’s tent. In this case it also stands for Growing Entrepeneurship Rapidly. Through the GER Initiative, Rachel and I have bought several hundred dollars worth of stuff that we are shipping home to America. On a broader scale, the GER Initiative connects small-scale producers with buyers. They help entrepeneurs manage responsible, sustainable businesses. It is a simple idea that is so important in Mongolia.

On a more micro level, I will not miss the daily wrestling match of life in Mongolia.

A few days ago at the bank, I watched a fat Mongolian man plow to the front of a long line, pushing pensioners out of the way. I looked at the guy. He glowered back at me as if to say, “What?” Then I looked at one of the older women behind me. She shook her head helplessly. I planted my right elbow against the man’s left shoulder and my right fist against his right shoulder. My eyes came up to his neck. I forcibly pushed him to the back of the line saying, “Eshay, eshay, eshay!” “This way, this way, this way!”

Yesterday at DHL, a pleasant Mongolian woman in the signature yellow and red DHL uniform told me that I could not buy shipping insurance because the woman who handles insurance was taking a day off for personal reasons. I got stern and lectured the woman about how international shipping companies work in the rest of the world. After five minutes of this, she got the insurance forms and sold me $25 worth of shipping insurance. Easy. (Will USAID reimburse me for this piece of freelance business development consulting?)

And, of course, the internet is a daily roller coaster. It usually works, but often at speeds that would have made AOL blush back in the early 90s.

There are nice things, too. As I’ve been writing this blog entry, Naraa of Gobi Wave fame has been sending me SMS text messages from the Gobi. She was supposed to be in UB today, but that is apparently not working out. She wants to know if she could see me next week. She also inquired about Simon and Rachel. Naraa, of course, is the embodiment of everything that is good about Mongolia. (As it turns out, Naraa will arrive in UB at 5:30 PM on Friday night. Maybe.)

And last night, my friend Tamir and I drank a lot of dark Chinggis from the famous Keggy as we tried to make a DVD. Tamir works for the Voice of America. Together we installed VOA satellite dishes at two radio stations. I made some narrated slide shows about these projects. Tamir loved the slideshows and wants to share them with his bosses on DVD. Making DVDs is hard, but the Keggy helped a lot. (We love you, Keggy!)

You can download and view compressed versions of our movies about the stations in Darkhan and The Gobi.

So this will be the last post for a while. Check back after the middle of July to read reports and see pictures from our two-week Mongolian adventure.

And thanks to everyone who has read our blog this year. It’s been nice to have you with us.

Packing Up

By Rachel

We are not sad yet, exactly, but the beginning of sadness is here.