The future of Mongolia

This week we were invited to attend a ceremony at the government building that honored the top Students in Mongolia. 

They honored children from every Province and the 7 districts in Ulaanbaatar.

All of the children were so impressive with their medals and accomplishments.

It is good to recognize those children who work hard and do a great job.

They received a bag of goodies, a framed certificate, a book with their picture in it and a start to a savings account.

 This is the official standard room in the Parliament building.

This is where the ceremonial signing of documents takes place.

This room is also where they welcome visiting dignitaries and 

official pictures of the ceremonies take place

Not just anybody can get into this room.

This is our translator, Muugii and in the background are Mongolian Horse Hair Standards.

When these standards are white, Mongolia is a peace, when they are black Mongolia is at war.

During the time of Chinggis Khan and his sons and grandsons, they were black most of the time.

Spring or maybe summer is finally here.

The sun is warm, the sky is blue, the trees are green, and the flowers are out.

Saturday, May 31, 2014 We went for a morning hike.

The temperature was warm, the mountain and wild flowers were beautiful.

It was refreshing to get a little ways away from the city.

I think it would be easier to hike, Elder Lewis if you weren't trying to push a tree up the hill.

 The camel at the bottom of the mountain.

We went for an afternoon hike in the city. 

Its was HOT in the high 80's.

We are not used to that and it about killed us.

Any way, I felt bad for these military personal that were standing at

Chinggis Square. It was noon, hot sun and they stood there for at least a half an hour

listening to a speaker.  

We don't know what was going on, we were just there long enough to take a picture.

 We then headed back to the Bayanzurkh Building.

June 1 is Children's day in Mongolia. 

The Service center was having a party for their children on Saturday.  

It was fun to see the children and to watch for a while.

Mongolian's love their children. 

Their children are their greatest treasure!

Scripture for the week: Luke 18: 16 But Jesus called them unto him, and said, Suffer little children to come unto me, and forbid them not: for of such is the kingdom of God.

Nay news is good news

We really have no news this week.  Which I guess is good news.

We are still here in Mongolia.

We still are trying to figure out what we are suppose to be doing here.

Elder Nay did a disaster simulation exercise with the Mongolian government agency NEMA and other NGO's in the country.

It helped the government realize that they really are not prepared for a major disaster.

This exercise gave them some starting points on what they do need to improve on so that if they do have a major earthquake they will be more able to respond to the people's needs in a timely manner.

We had our the missionaries that are assigned to the Jargarlant Branch 

over for dinner the other night.  They are a great bunch of Elders

and we appreciate their testimonies and hard work.

They are awesome!

Elder Murat, Elder Hill, Elder Erickson, and Elder Suralt

For family home evening this week we made another trip to

Zaisan Hill with Elder and Sister England and the new Doctor, and his wife,

Elder and Sister Lewis.  The Lewis' had not made the

trip yet, so we thought it would be fun and adventurous to take the bus and go.

It was a beautiful, clear, crisp and breezy evening.

It is always touching to read the dedicatory prayer given by

Elder Maxwell over 20 years ago and see how his prayer has been answered

with the winds of freedom in this country.

You can tell that spring is finally here.

I love the green!

It is so great to see green leaves on trees and green grass!

 It rained all day Saturday, but Sunday May 25, is bright and clear.

Have a good week

Scripture of the week: 2 Nephi 25:26 And we talk of Christ, we rejoice in Christ, we preach of Christ, we prophesy of Christ, and we write according to our prophecies, that our children may know to what source they may look for a remission of their sins.

Here were are in the Middle of May

Again, not much has happened this week.  We have been busy writing reports to close some of the DIC projects.  We did attend a Disaster Response and Preparedness meeting at the UN Building here in Ulaanbaatar.  They want to be prepared for the worse case scenario of an earthquake in UB in the middle of winter.  43% of the population of Mongolia lives in UB, the government is in UB the major transportation and industry, and major hospitals are all  is in UB.  We have watched the construction practices in UB and all I can say is if there is a major earthquake here it would be devastating.  I have to give them credit, that want to be prepared and try to have steps and protocol in place when a disaster happens. They are going to have a simulated disaster this next week, it will mostly be computer and agencies trying to figure out if they know what to do in case of an earthquake.  I think Elder Nay plans on attending and I will keep our office going.

Again we had some snow this week.  You can see the ice floating down the river.  

Sometimes I forget that it is actually the middle of May.

But then I do see things that remind me that spring is here.

Life is still hard for some people here in UB.  

Almost every morning you see the bottle collectors going around and

gathering up the plastic bottles.  I don't think they can possibly get very much

for recycling them.  But that is what they do.  I am pretty sure they are homeless.

At least they are doing something to try to survive.  

Most people here are trying to survive.

I am constantly surprised at their ingenuity.

If they are unemployed they try to come up with some kind of plan

 to provide for themselves and their family. 

 We see a lot of street vendors, just selling out of boxes along the street.

We see people setting up car repair places just to the side of the road.

We even saw a car wash to the side of the road.  

The man had a couple of barrels of water, an airless spray machine, a generator and hard work.

There is a lot of dirt and mud here and cars get dirty quickly,

so hopefully he will have a lot of business.

Speaking of hard work.  Most people do not have water or sewer in there homes.

They have to haul their water to their homes.

Here is a picture of a typical water dumpstation and people waiting in line to get water.

This is my favorite statue here.  

I don't know what it is called but I call it "cooperation"

If everyone works together and helps each other out, 

we can all have plenty and be happy as we serve each other.

Days seem to come and go pretty fast. 

We have been on our mission for almost a year now.

We will be home before you know it.

Mosiah 2:18 Behold, ye have called me your king; and if I, whom ye call your king, do labor to serve you, then ought not ye to labor to serve one another?

Week of May 5-10

Not a lot has happened this week.  We did have the biggest snow of the season so far on Friday May 9.  There was 4 - 5 inches of wet packing snow in the morning when we went to work.  It then rained and melted the snow, making for a lot of big puddles to wade through.

Alvin ran his first race here in Mongolia

However, we sure miss a lot since we do not speak Mongolian.

Alvin had saw a sign advertising this race to help pay for water for the Mongolian National Park.

  There was to be an 8k, 4k or 2k and he sort of assumed that it would be at the National Park, because that is where it is safe to run.  

They have running trails there and it is a beautiful place to run.  

The race was to start at 9:30 am with registration from 8:45- 9:30 am.  We left our apartment a little after 8am and walked to the National Park. It took us a little over a half hour to get there.  We arrived, and there were a lot of people running, jogging walking around the two different tracks and tents were being set up and also a big stage was being set up.  

We walked around trying to find the registration area, but couldn't.  

We weren't to worried because after all this is Mongolia, and they never start anything on time.  

We kept walking and looking, finally we met an Australian who looked like she was looking for something. We asked if she was here for the race.  She was, but did not know where the registration was either.  We asked several Mongolians if they knew anything about it, some were there to also run the race, but did not know where to register.  Our new Australian friend tried to call her friend but her phone died.  She then mentioned something about a school.  Elder Nay knew where the school was.  I let our new friend borrow my phone and she finally found out that the race was at the school, not the park.  

By this time it was already 9:30.  We were 1.5 km from the school.  

So we hurried on over, we weren't to worried, this is Mongolia, they never start on time.   

Well they had started on time.  

By the time we reached where they were signing up, etc. it was 9:50 am.  We decided to go ahead and pay our money and run any way.  Alvin ran the 8k and I just did the 2k, I wanted to be in and take his picture when he came in.  Alvin finished in a little over 33 minutes according to his watch, not according to their time.  All in all, I walked 12 k that morning and Alvin did over 20 K. 

We walked more in the evening going up to our Branch President's home to Home teach his family.

This is Munkhtuya and Munkhjargal.  He is our Branch President.
His family lives in a modest ger. He has been a member for 15 years
and Munkhtuya has been a member for 8years.
He served a mission toRussia and speaks Russian and is learning a little English.
Actually his English is a lot better than my Mongolian.
Munkhtuya works as a translator for the church.  She translates written English into Mongolian.
( Such as the Liahona articles and conference reports)
They have very two very cute children, a son and a daughter.

 We had a baptism on Saturday evening. This is Elder Murat, Tumanbayar, Ganbold, and Elder Hill.
Tumanbayar is the ward mission leader.  He is such a good man, he has always been willing to go out with the missionaries and be their witness.  This has been a good calling for him.  This was also the first baptism he has ever done.  He did a great job!  Ganbold seems like a very humble man.  One who was touched by the spirit and was willing to do what ever it took to become a member of the church.

Scripture for the week: Moroni 10:6 And whatsoever thing is good is just and true; wherefore, nothing that is good denieth the Christ, but acknowledgeth that he is.

It's May!

The big news for this week is that our translator Muugii got MARRIED! She has only been engaged for a couple of weeks but has been dating Munkbaatar for a couple of years, on and off.

She came in on Tuesday and asked if she could have Wednesday off, sure we said. Then she quietly said that she was getting married.

Getting MARRIED? Yes.

Her family knew, but she did not tell any of her friends or invite anyone. She is a very private person and when we asked how they get married here she said basically they have to do a lot of paper work, take medical tests (including proving that you are not mentally disabled) etc. And then you can get married.  The church priesthood has no authority to marry, so they just had a local government official marry them.  

She seems very happy. 

They both have being sealed in the temple as their goal.  It costs approximately $2600 US dollars to make a trip to the Hong Kong Temple.  So it is a significant cost for Mongolians to make the journey. (Muugii gets paid about $4/hr (US dollars) and her salary is right in line or a little above what other Mongolian workers get paid.  We know they will make it there and we hope it will be while we are still here in Mongolia.

Also the weather has been beautiful until the snow came again.  Hey, what can you say except that it is springtime in Mongolia.

The Larch tree is getting green pine needles Yea!

I always thought it was quite depressing to see  Pine trees without needles during the winter

Saturday we had a Relief Society meeting to learn how to make American Cake.

Mongolian's really like cake.  They have cake for every special occasion such as New Year's, women's day and children's day. 

 But the problem is they don't know how to bake cakes.

They usually buy their cakes and pay a lot of money for it.

They wanted me to teach them how to bake a cake.

I used two different recipes, one for chocolate and one for yellow cake and both were the easy one bowl recipe, using ingredients that they could obtain.  I think it turned out okay,

The one ingredient they did not understand was baking powder.  

I had brought a couple of envelopes of a German brand that is readily available and hopefully they will be able to make their own cakes.

I didn't get pictures of the cakes, but here is one picture of some of the participants.

President Munkhjargel is the man in the middle and our Branch president.

He also is a chef by profession.  He probably should have been teaching the class.

While we were waiting for the cakes to bake and cool, the members were doing their cleaning assignments.  There were a lot of people there, and they were taking great pride in their work and taking great care of the building.  The children were more fun to take pictures of however, so that is what I took pictures of.

 This is such an adorable baby!  The chubby cheeks and the HAIR!

Have another great week!

Scripture for the week: 3 Nephi 9:14 Yea, verily I say unto you, if ye will come unto me ye shall have eternal life. Behold, mine arm of mercy is extended towards you, and whosoever will come, him will I receive; and blessed are those who come unto me