Mongolia Mission Week 61.5 - Our Claim to Fame: Meeting the Prime Minister

Mongolia Mission Week 61.5

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). 

This week brought transfers. We never know who will be leaving and who will be coming. But Thursday was a day of excitement. Alice and Michelle invited us all over for dinner, hide and seek, and a coloring contest.

And then it was time for the train. Of the six of us serving in Sainshand, only Sister Fifita was transferred to Ulaanbaatar. So two sisters took the overnight train to Ulaanbaatar and then the overnight train back the next day. 

 

Our farewell lunch before Sister Fifita left.

We welcomed Sister Grover to Sainshand, which was a snow-covered city Saturday morning. We never get more than an inch of snow. But it's enough to make things slippery, especially when it packs down and turns into ice.  

This snow will never melt.

People scrape off the snow and carry it away.
We've only ever seen one snowplow.

We were assigned the snack for Saturday's District Council
the day the sisters got back. It became a French toast breakfast.

Then for our youth activity, we rented out a school gym for 2 hours. Apparently this is a common youth activity in this country. When the youth first told us they wanted to rent a gym, we envisioned weights, swimming pools, a big price tag, and wondered how a gym would allow our youth to really interact with each other. But especially in the winter, these kids have nowhere to play volleyball and basketball, two sports the entire population passionately embrace. So they rent school gyms and play hard. 

We played volleyball...

Then basketball....

And wheelbarrow races....

But somehow we managed to get three balls stuck in the rafters. You see, a volleyball got stuck on top of the HVAC ductwork. Then a second volleyball got stuck in the same area, as helpful people threw it up there aiming to get the first one down. Then a basketball got stuck trying to get both volleyballs down. Can you believe a fourth ball then was drafted into the action??? But the end of the story is that a couple of our English students were able to knock the two volleyballs down without getting another ball stuck. We ended the day with only the basketball still stuck. When we turned in the school volleyballs, the employee wanted to know where the basketball was. John showed him the picture and the employee really wanted to know how it got stuck there. There was not an easy way to explain that.

You can see one of the recalcitrant volleyballs hiding
from our attempts to dislodge it.

Sunday was a tough day. Church attendance was low, and one of our speakers didn't show up. But one of our youth did a great job of presenting the Sunday School lesson. And a visitor showed up in time to hear this lesson, which was important. The lesson was made even better by the testimony of an elderly non-member. She never says anything in class, and maybe doesn't understand a lot of what is said, but John specifically called on her. She let people know something she does know very clearly: that we are all children of God. So there was light in a discouraging day. God blesses and uplifts us even when we try to be discouraged. We just need to trust that things are in His hands. And we do. We see and feel undeniable evidence of that.

You get a bonus few days, as we are covering a portion of week 62 in this entry. Our Monday started with receiving a message at 7:30 am asking if we could be downstairs in 30 minutes to meet the Prime Minister. Wait, what? He was visiting our apartment complex. So, we went downstairs to meet him.

Turns out he wasn't quite there yet and no one wanted to stand out in the cold to wait. So we went back to our apartment to wait for a call (Have we mentioned that we hike up 6 flights of stairs to our apartment?) A few minutes later, we were called back downstairs and escorted up another six flights of stairs to an apartment at the other end of our building. The room was full of people, including the Prime Minister and a member of Parliament. And a lot of photographers. We got to shake hands and listen for a few minutes.

The Prime Minister is on the left. Of course, no house
is complete without a bowl of dried curd 

It turns out that our apartment complex is unique in Mongolia. A couple of our buildings are part of an effort to make housing more affordable. There is a "rent to own" plan to make apartments available to some elderly, disabled, single mothers, etc. And a plan where an apartment can be acquired by some people who qualify and are willing to teach English in one of the schools. So this plan was being promoted by the Prime Minister's visit and a special presentation.

The Prime Minister listens to the presentation.

Now we know why there was a heavy security presence (long, black cars and men in black standing around) in our complex.

This was actually a couple of days earlier.
We wondered what was going on. The day
of the visit no one was allowed to enter this area.

Later that day, we attended a graduation ceremony at the Polytechnic College. Our church has developed several free self-reliance classes. The topics include getting a better education, finding a better job, starting your own business, personal finance, and emotional resilience. For the first time in Mongolia, some of these classes are being offered, and our area is piloting them. 

The Polytechnic College is a vocational school for high school students and some adults. Some of the students recently completed a class on getting a better education. Now, some of the teachers graduated from an emotional resilience class, taught online for 12 weeks by MJ, who lives in Ulaanbaatar. He came to Sainshand for the final class and for the graduation ceremony. Eight students graduated and we helped award the certificates. This class is very similar to the classes offered in the U.S., and we hope to spread them across the country.

Helping people help themselves

You can see that our weeks can have a lot of variety, even in the dead of winter. So much of what we're here for is to make connections and spread the light where we can and however we can. Good things are happening in Mongolia!