The Nays in Mongolia: Musings in Mongolia August 9 2014

It has been a pleasant summer in Ulaanbaatar,

not to hot and enough rain to keep everything green and growing.

The flowers have been beautiful this year.

Here are some pictures of the beautiful greenery.

This week has been slow.

Our regular translator has taken 10 days off so we have a substitute translator.

Her name is Baigalmaa.

She is a returned missionary (she served in Oakland California),

married a returned missionary in the Hong Kong temple

and she is expecting her first child in November.

She is very sweet and knowledgeable and we appreciate her willingness to help us out.

She also is employed part time to translate our Church hymns into Mongolian.

Right now the Hymnbook that is used here only has 68 songs, that includes children songs.

The plan is to have a Hymnbook with 200 songs. She has translated 170 so far.

She says that it is difficult to translate the hymns into Mongolian,

because Mongolian has so many more syllables in their words.

Also there are quite a few words for which there is no translation into Mongolian.

There is quite a process before each hymn is accepted.

She translates it, it is reviewed by the service center here,

they send it to a pre-printing to see how it will look when it is printed,

it is then sent back to her to see if it still makes sense,

she then approves it and then it is sent to Salt Lake for approval.

She says that sometimes the printers get it all wrong.

For example in "Praise to the Man" instead of saying "traitors and tyrants now fight him in vain"

it came across as saying that Joseph Smith was a traitor and tyrant. Any way here is her picture.

Muugii and Baigalmaa

We have two new sets of Missionaries in the Jargalent branch, two sets of sister missionaries.

We are excited to have them and to feel of their enthusiasm for the work

and their love of the Mongolian people.

Sister Eskelsen, Sister Mungundulguun, Sister Cleveland, Sister Zaya

On Saturday, August 9, Jargalant Branch had an outing for the Relief Society and Priesthood.
They first met at the church and then we were going to travel by bus to the designated site.

Here is the food being sliced and prepared at the church before we left.

We had horse meat, potato salad and rice.

While we were waiting for a bus, a few of the sisters asked a meeker driver if he would be willing to drive us to the designated site. He said he would.
So 18 of us climbed into this meeker. 19 total people in this van.
Pretty amazing.

Here we are all climbing out to the meeker.
We then hiked up a road to a beautiful pine forest.
It was breathtakingly beautiful!
Fresh air, greenery, partly sunny skies and great people!

Crossing a small creek

The babies here are SO CUTE!.
Most have a lot of hair and cubby cheeks.

Munkhbattar showing off berries, and strawberries he gathered.

There were lots of different kinds of mushrooms growing everywhere you looked.

Activities included, two different types of volley ball, berry gathering,
soccer, red rover, Simon says, rope games, card games and eating of food.
It was fun to be with the saints and enjoy their friendship.