quill

This feather had a quill as big as my finger.

Jack-Jack

This is Jack-Jack, a student.

We also called him Alfredo Jack, because he could talk in a remarkably convincing Italian accent.

One day he came to me and said, "Teacher, do you want to see the red potato flower?"  He showed me a red flower in the grass.  It happened to be my favorite flower in Mongolia because it smells so fragrant.  Little did I know that it was also edible.  He and one of his comrades scrabbled in the dirt with their fingernails for about fifteen minutes.  They came up with a small white thing that looked like a garlic clove.

 I tasted it and it tasted indeed like a raw crunchy potato (that is, like nothing really).

Jack-Jack kindly spent his free time at camp digging up the fragrant flowers and offering his produce to his special English teachers.

getting there all the way

After we got off the train, we were met by military trucks and soldiers ready to escort us to camp.  (That's us of course, not the soldiers.)

We and all our suitcases were put in the wooden beds.  We closed the canvas flaps to limit the dust some.  We still got pretty dusty, though.  When I got to camp, I traced my ear with my finger, and it came away caked with dirt.  So we felt very authentic.

The trucks churned up and down river banks, and over and through potholes and mudholes.  They sounded uncertain sometimes, but they never broke down.

And of course the usual cows and horses getting in the way:

getting there

To get to camp from the capital city (Ulaanbaatar), we took the train from the train station.  This may have been the Trans-Siberian railway.  I am not sure. There was much discussion on whether or not it was, and I never received a final answer.  At any rate, you will go to Russia or China if you stay on it long enough.

I had never ridden a train before.  I did not know what to expect, but I think I had pictured something like seats.  This is what I ended up on:

(On the second ride we had more passengers, so I shared one of these shelves with another person.)  Below me was a bench seating four more people.  Above me was space for all our luggage.  Across from me and kitty-corner was the same stack of benches/shelving.  So, each cubicle could hold eighteen passengers.  Each car had several of these cubicles.  It looks like this:

At the front of the car was a wood-burning stove.  The door to the stove was open, and it felt extremely hot.

After three and a half hours on the train, we got off at a little town called something like "tunkh."

7 Californians

My team (the seven students from a small college in Los Angeles).  I did indeed learn a lot about California.  And movies.  They learned a lot about Nebraska.  And chickens.

With Kiki, celebrating Naadam.

With Isaac and his ukulele, waiting for the train.

So, those are "my" kids.  Supposedly I was their leader, but I had a great deal to learn from them.  (I think they knew that.  They seemed astonished when I hadn't heard of the film E.T.  Apparently it's some famous sci-fi movie or something.)

Really, though, I could not have requested such a unique assembly of personalities, and now I can't imagine the summer without each of them.  God picked them for me (or me for them) and put us together.  I miss them.

what does the cow say?

I'm home!

I'll post photos over the next couple weeks as I sort through them.

See some of our non-English-speaking friends below.  We usually saw them when we went to the sinks in the mornings.