Mongolia Mission Week 73 - Easter in Mongolia

 Mongolia Mission Week 73

Our hope with this blog is to share highlights with our family and friends about our exciting opportunities and awesome responsibilities in Mongolia. It's an impossible task, though, because it's hard to condense everything into a few words and pictures. So ask us individually if you'd like to know more about anything! You can contact us by email (jrose219@gmail.com or krose213@gmail.com), Facebook messenger, or you can text Kathy's phone (515-537-3273). 

It was transfer week! We bade farewell to Elder Anand, who left to serve in Ulaanbaatar.

Our little group seeing the elders off at the train.

Friday morning, Elder Temka arrived. He's replacing Elder Anand and waiting for a visa to go on a mission to South Africa. We know there's a reason he's here. And speaking of divine design, we were excited to welcome Sister Fifita back to Sainshand! She was in Sainshand before for 6 weeks and now will spend the last 6 weeks of her service here as well. Then we will share a long flight home to Utah with her and several others on May 16.

She brought Sister Hayman, who barely arrived in Mongolia on Thursday morning and about 11 hours later was on the 12 hour overnight train ride. We can't even imagine having that train ride immediately after 20+ hour of air travel. We appreciate her cheerful attitude, even when jetlagged!

We enjoyed a welcome dinner together.

With the rest of the Christian world, we celebrated the Savior's atonement and resurrection with a special service on Easter. Each day of the week leading up to Easter, we posted a Holy Week spiritual thought in our church message group. We did our best to celebrate and make it meaningful for our congregation because it is so important for everyone to understand Christ and to know of His love for us all. He lives! Because of Him we can live again! And because of Him, we can choose to be cleansed of our sins. We can be worthy to return to live with Him and our Heavenly Father together with our families forever.

Elders Temka and Odbayar with Sisters Fifita, Heyman, Keogh,
and Grover practicing "I Stand All Amazed" for the Easter service.

Later, the sisters came to our house and helped
us make deviled eggs for Easter dinner.

 Baagii and her sons joined us for Easter dinner. With the elders
and sisters, 12 of us were cozy together in our little apartment.

We served camel tacos, fresh guacamole, chips and salsa, deviled eggs, cheesecake, and chocolate cream pie. Maybe all of that doesn't scream Easter dinner, but we did the best we could. The chocolate pie was a double failure, however. The crust did not look good and the pudding didn't set up. But it made a delicious chocolate soup for dessert. 

Only the crust looked bad at this point. Then we cut into it..

After dinner, we played games, including UNO and
Taco, Cat, Goat, Cheese, Pizza, and ...

Shagai - the traditional Mongolian ankle bone game.

Our youth activity this week was helping the youth learn how to teach a lesson. Kathy did some instruction and modeling; several of our youth taught us something they were interested in. Lessons included how to play volleyball, how to play the piano, how to sweep a floor, and how to dance (with everyone participating). It was a fun and valuable lesson. It's so important for youth (and all of us) to learn basic teaching techniques, since in this church we all participate in teaching and learning from each other.

Luckily, we have a 12-year-old boy who translated what she said.

Such a busy food week! Our dear friend Alice and her daughter, Michelle, came to dinner so we could celebrate Alice's birthday. She teaches English at our school and helps coordinate things for us. Our young English teachers joined us. Some of them teach in her classroom at the 3rd School. 

Michelle aways says something hilarious and keeps
us all very entertained. We all love interacting with her.

We baked Alice a banana cake for her birthday - 
rectangular, because that's the shape of the pans we have.

Sadly, we taught our last class at the medical school this week. When these students finish their schooling they will go work in the rural areas around here as surgeons, dentists, pharmacists, etc. These are busy, smart, talented students. They're so busy that we pretty much had different students each week. But it was fun to have the opportunity to help in some small way with their English skills. 

All of a sudden, the walls of our apartment stairways and halls got painted. All 6 stories. A small crew puttied all the walls in the morning, then painted the orange part in about 6 hours starting at 6 pm. The next day they came back to tape off and paint the gray trim. They were so fast!! 

Freshly puttied. Orange is a common color in homes
and on apartment exteriors here. 

One of our church youth told us orange is a color
used traditionally and represents caring for your family.

Winter laughed at us one day when we had a sudden snow squall.

What?! We thought it was spring!

But it was pretty dry and sunny the next day. 

We often see workers along the edges of streets, manually sweeping gutters and shoveling desert sand out of the way. We noticed a curb this week that shows us how important this is. 

The sand fills up the gutter!

This is unusual. We are very impressed with how hard people work to keep things looking nice in a windswept land. Paint makes things cheerful, and hand brooms and shovels keep things sharp. But most of all, the people here impress us with their ability to live in a harsh environment. God's Mongolian children are adaptable and resourceful. We're glad we've had a chance to be inspired by them.

As an example: this guy needed to work on the undercarriage of his car.
So he parked it over a depression in the ground.

Mongolia Mission Week 72 - Babies and Connections

 Mongolia Mission Week 72

Our hope with this blog is to share highlights with our family and friends about our exciting opportunities and awesome responsibilities in Mongolia. It's an impossible task, though, because it's hard to condense everything into a few words and pictures. So ask us individually if you'd like to know more about anything! You can contact us by email (jrose219@gmail.com or krose213@gmail.com), Facebook messenger, or you can text Kathy's phone (515-537-3273). 

We had many highlights this week; one was our P-day visit to the countryside to see the babies! Baagii, from our church congregation, has a brother who lives not far from here. When we heard the camels had babies, we all wanted to go see them. There were 10! And they are so cute and fluffy!

In each case, mom or baby was tethered so they wouldn't
both wander away into the desert.

We also saw a pen full of baby goats and sheep
whose moms were out grazing.

This kid happily holding a kid born earlier that day.

Imagine this view out your front door! (The motorcycle is a valuable herding tool.)

However, getting there was a challenge. It's not like a ger out in the countryside has an address. We had a pin to it on our digital map, but knowing where it was and actually getting to it with few to no roads took some navigation skills. 

We started down a nice, new asphalt road (which is quite a rarity) but soon realized we were on the wrong side of the railroad tracks. So we took some dirt roads to get closer to the tracks, hoping to find a way to the other side. Luckily, there was a creek bed running under the tracks with a space tall enough for a car and with other car tracks running through there. So, it must be okay, right?

Then we did some adventure driving across the Gobi. We found the place, just where our digital pin said it would be, although before we went home we found ourselves needing to change a tire. Some of the brush attacked it.

Could have been worse! It was a nice day, and we had
elders and sisters willing to help.

Earlier in the day we had visited the energy center, monastery, and caves not far from the baby animals. We get there every few months when we have new young people serving here. It's an opportunity to visit a local place of historic, cultural, and religious significance. And this time, we even had great weather!

Us, Sisters Keough and Grover, and Elders Anand and Odbayar 

This is how you receive energy.

There was a silent but watchful overseer soaking up the sun.

The easy to explore "caves" are more like rock cavities, some
with manmade access.

This one is called the birth canal, symbolizing a birth into a
new life free from sin. Sister Grover came out breech.

These caves were historically used for meditation
or hiding from communist persecution. Now people 
leave offerings of  food, money, birdseed, etc.
They also burn incense in some.

After P-day, it was back to work, but our school has one week of "independent study" and a two week break before testing season begins, so our class load is lighter. But we were invited to judge the English speaking at another area-wide English competition. We're getting to the point where we see a lot of familiar faces both in schools and in town.

The speech contest judges.

Some of the speech contestants.

We have fun in our assignments and projects!

In other news, on one of our walks, we found a teeter totter. Turns out that after all these years, we still know how to operate one of these.

At the medical school we participated in an earthquake drill at 4:00 pm in the middle of our class. Protocol means we first have to climb under our desks until signaled that we needed to go outside with a book or backpack over our heads to protect from falling debris. You'll be happy to know that we all survived!

You can see new construction, which will mean more classrooms 
for the medical school. There's a new dorm being built as well.

The youth at our church had separate activities this week. The young women went to our local senior center to serve some of the older residents of our city. 

This is a game we spontaneously created last time we were there.
We put a bunch of tables together and pulled chairs and
wheelchairs around them. Residents love batting the ball around,
and everyone can participate even if they're blind or mostly deaf. 

For the young men's activity, they worked on social and intellectual skills by playing Catan, Monopoly, or chess. 

And celebrated Ulzii's 12th birthday!

John won, even though it was Spongebob Monopoly!

We're continually awed at how interpersonal connections seem divinely orchestrated. A few months ago, we ran into a young woman with really good English who works at a local convenience store. We and the sisters became friends with her. But then we lost her. This week we found her working in another store of the same brand. She had gotten a promotion. We were delighted to run into her again and got contact info. We are hoping she'll come to our English classes at the church. Whether she does or not, we know there is divine design in connections and impressions we make, if we are in tune.

A sweet connection we have is with a student who occasionally comes to English class at the church. We found out she had just participated in an art Olympiad and is an aspiring artist. When we asked her to show us a picture of one of her art pieces, we were blown away with what this 14-year old produced. We loved it!

She showed us a video of an old Mongolian tale about a mother camel that rejected her baby - until a man played a song for them on a horsehead fiddle. Her picture depicts this story. It's wonderful. (Especially on a week when we just saw baby camels.)

And we had lunch with Molly, a dear friend headed back to a master's degree program in Taiwan. She's the one who persuaded us to participate in a dance class last year! Molly's done a lot towards helping us understand Mongolian culture and traditions. We won't see her again before we leave Mongolia. More and more, we have to plan and juggle how we will get to have our last interactions with people we have come to know and love here.

Elder Neal A. Maxwell, of the quorum of 12 apostles, said something interesting about connections at a speech at BYU in 1996. We've heard his words quoted by several different people through the years because they ring so true: 

"It should not surprise us, brothers and sisters, that Heavenly Father brings about these intersectings and intertwinings of our lives. So often (after something is over) we will say, 'little did I realize' or 'I had no way of knowing' in referring to these intersectings. But why should we be surprised? Each of us has circles of friendships, and within those lie the portion of the human family whom God has given us to love, to serve, and to learn from . . . None of us ever fully utilizes the people-opportunities allocated to us within our circles of friendship. You and I may call these intersectings 'coincidence.' This word is understandable for mortals to use, but coincidence is not an appropriate word to describe the workings of an omniscient God. He does not do things by 'coincidence' but instead by 'divine design.'

This describes so many of our experiences here. We meet God's children in the countryside, the shops, the schools, even in dance classes. Our lives are enriched by them. Before we came, we prayed that we would end up in a place where we could do some good. We will never know all the results of our interactions, but we trust that our sain ban uus (hellos) at least brighten someone's day. Theirs brighten ours!

 

Mongolia Mission Week 71 - Easter, Spring, and New Beginnings!

Mongolia Mission Week 71

Our hope with this blog is to share highlights with our family and friends about our exciting opportunities and awesome responsibilities in Mongolia. It's an impossible task, though, because it's hard to condense everything into a few words and pictures. So ask us individually if you'd like to know more about anything! You can contact us by email (jrose219@gmail.com or krose213@gmail.com), Facebook messenger, or you can text Kathy's phone (515-537-3273). 

One day as we drove through the parking lot of our apartment complex, we found a complete ger in the parking lot. We're told they sometimes get set up for the week of a funeral to give family a special space to meet and share meals, etc. We wanted to get a picture of it, but before we knew it, it had been disassembled and was in the process of being taken away. 

They are built and taken down so quickly!!

We start this week's blog by reporting on our Saturday church youth activity: "mini-missions." We helped the youth plan a 90 minute mission experience, and we were blown away by the Lord's hand in how it turned out. In the States, many times mini mission experiences for the youth require weeks of planning and coordination, which are luxuries we do not have (due to lack of people and resources). We streamlined our plans, but when even some of our basic ideas didn't work or fell through, we were discouraged. Then we realized, once again, that we just needed to have faith that the Lord knew what needed to happen and would help our youth have a meaningful experience.  He did.

After receiving personal invitations, the youth all came in dresses, skirts, white shirts, ties, etc. to the activity (This is a big deal! Wish we could get them to do that on Sundays!). They were buzzing with enthusiasm. Some had gotten up at 6:30am to more fully experience mission life.

They received training and were each assigned a companion.

We split them into 2 groups. They headed down opposite sides of the street the church is on, each with a pair of elders or sisters. They greeted everyone they met and let their lights shine. One group found us sitting on some steps, and one group found Boyka, our recently returned missionary. We each accepted invitations to learn more, so they took us back to the church and taught us about the Savior (The church is where most investigators get taught). 

Our group of testimony-filled youth and their mentors.

It was an amazing experience! These kids have testimonies of the Savior and His atonement. They answered our questions, which were typical questions Buddhists might ask, with conviction. It was humbling to see the Lord at work. They even got a taste of  how challenging mission work can be.

Then President Kunz and his family came to Sainshand to conduct interviews with the young people serving here. He also reorganized our Deacons' Quorum. Since our group is part of a mission branch, he holds the priesthood keys and is the only one who can set apart a new Deacons' Quorum president. It's pretty cool that the priesthood keys this new 12-year old president holds came from a man who got his keys from President Oaks, our church president. It's real power and authority.

A couple of days later was March 14th, pi day. We celebrated with a chicken pie.

Then our Family Home Evening for the month focused on Easter. Once again, it was very clear to us that the Lord directs this work and magnifies our simple plans. Our plans fell together quite miraculously. We briefly discussed some events of the Passover week, the atonement of Jesus Christ, His death and resurrection. We watched a couple of short videos to help these new members (and some investigators) with understanding. Then, those attending all wrote down what Jesus has done for them on palm leaves. 

We used them to line the hallway of our church as decorations for Easter.

We concluded with bringing in a celebration of spring, which included an easter egg hunt for candy-filled plastic eggs. 

Sisters filling eggs Elder Eaves gifted to us last spring.
Thanks so much to his mother for sending them last year!

Pretty sure Elder Odbayar has never hidden Easter eggs before. 

There was an empty egg, representing the empty tomb. It was the hardest to find, and the finder received a prize. 

Then we decorated and colored hard-boiled eggs.

It was a great evening with good participation.
(And some help from Amazon for egg dye.)

On Easter we will hold a special church service focused on the Savior, Jesus Christ. The following weekend, April 11 and 12, is our Church's General Conference, two days of broadcast meetings with talks from our prophet, the apostles, and other women and men who are general leaders of our church. Due to time differences and the need to wait for it to be translated into Mongolian, we watch the broadcast a week later than it occurs in the USA. 

Our next youth activity was focused on physical fitness. We rented a gym for two hours; our youth played volleyball for an hour followed by basketball for an hour. This is a pretty common practice here. Often these gyms are school gyms - you reserve one, and if no one more important reserves it out from under you for a competition or something, you can pay a minimal fee for personal use. People here love volleyball and basketball. That's mostly what school PE classes focus on, and there are a lot of really good players who continue playing as adults in various teams and tournaments. We had a great turnout for this and strengthened our teamwork and friendships. 

We found another English speaker in town! Well, there are 4 Peace Corps volunteers teaching English here, but we rarely see them. Natalie is here from an Australian charitable organization as a volunteer at the medical school. She's a nurse teaching medical topics. We got together for dinner and a nice chat. She's only here for a few months, missing the adventures of winter and summer.

In Sainshand, the weather is warming, but we are still a ways away from seeing anything greening or blooming. Meanwhile, back at home in New Harmony, spring is in full force with our nectarine tree and plum tree both in bloom, along with the daffodils and hyacinths. 

Nectarine blossoms we hope won't freeze.

Ditto for the plums.

We miss home and family, but it's incredible to be part of this work here. We see clearly how much the Lord loves His children. We see how He gives them (and us) opportunities to grow through important lessons and to see His hand in what happens. Spring is a wonderful time to reflect on new growth and fresh starts and to remember the Creator of the world, what He has done for us, and what He is willing to do for us, no matter what.