Mongolia Mission Weeks 69 & 70 - On the Road Again

 Mongolia Mission Weeks 69 & 70

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). 

Here's your humor for this week: when young volunteers in this church get close to their time to go home (usually after 18 months or 2 years), the travel department makes arrangements and sends the itinerary to their parents. So Kathy's dad got our itinerary this week. We haven't received anything yet, but he knows the date, time, and seat numbers assigned to us (on May 16). We thought it was funny. But he sent it to us, so now we know, too.

We spent a few days in the city this week and then drove home to a full slate of activities. First we'll show you the adventure of the drive. The wind was blowing snow again, but we drove during the day, so it wasn't too bad to deal with. 

We did had traffic issues as usual.

A couple of places were interesting.

In the city we attended an amazing zone conference. It was actually two zones together this time. Each conference seems to get better. We were richly blessed by great instruction and an outpouring of the Spirit. We also heard the farewell testimony of a sister missionary from Mongolia who was in Sainshand with us for a short time. 

We really love Sister Narantungalag.

Once again, we gave cleaning awards to companionships who kept their apartments the cleanest. It's great that, as busy as they are, nearly all of these young people keep their apartments clean - at least when they know we will be checking.

We indulged in great dinners at 3 of our favorite places in Ulaanbaatar. For a date night dinner we ate at Choijin Temple Restaurant and had "Mediterranean food with a Mongolian flair" and a delicious fruit tea. The next night all the American senior couples went to The Mongolian. They serve a tenderloin on a hot rock that is about the best beef we've had in Mongolia. Except for that which we cook ourselves, of course.

Horritos, Roses, and Harts on the loose again!

While in the city, we met with several people about projects we are working on. Even with an extra day budgeted, we don't always get everything done we would like to. We did try to be useful in helping prepare lunch for 2 other zone conferences. We took all the food to a stake center building across the city to be in place for Thursday, as we were headed back to Sainshand that day. Then we just had to go out to dinner again with the other senior couples and introduce them to HePing Chinese. 

Their menu is like an encyclopedia - so many things to choose from. They have pretty authentic-seeming Chinese food and pretty amusing translations of the dishes, so you never quite know what you are ordering. We chose five dishes, and all were delicious. Another win!

We had a great time at dinner together!

This is a lamb dish where you put meat into
little bread pockets. Amazingly delicious!

This is eggplant for people who don't like eggplant.
It's crispy and sweet on the outside and served
in a nest made of crispy egg wisps.

On Thursday we loaded up to head home but made one stop on the way at the Mongolian United Bible Society. We wanted an English Bible for one of our friends who has decided to be Christian and has great English. He likes coming to our church activities even though he doesn't think his parents would let him be baptized. One time when he came to our church he said, "I like it here because you are my people!" We have a number of people who like hanging out at church with us and don't quite know why. They feel the Spirit.

He really wanted an English Bible of his own, though. It's only available at one place in the capital that we know of. Turns out they not only sell Bibles but also have a Bible museum. We saw replicas of the Gutenberg Bible (1454) and the Kennicott Bible. This latter Bible was created in 1476 and is 922 pages long with color illustrations on 238 pages. It is beautiful!

One page of the Kennicott Bible. This artwork looks like the
Mongolian eternity knot we see everywhere here.

It turns out that Christians have been in Mongolia for centuries. The museum described and pictured a stone found in a far western province with inscriptions from 780 AD showing the presence of Christianity. The term 'Erhuun,' which means Christian, appears in a variety of languages in the area. This poster says the widespread use of the term underlines broad geographic spread and integration of Christian communities at the time. 

Our wonderful museum tour guide!

The Mongolian Bible Society also has one of only two Braille machines in Mongolia and has the entire Bible in Braille. 

It takes 50 volumes of binders to hold the Bible in Braille!

The museum covers the history of how the Bible was translated into Mongolian - a process that really impressed us because of how much work it took for dedicated and inspired people to translate sections of the Bible for Mongolians. Different people over the ages worked to translate, and sharing Mongolian Bibles during the time of Communism involved persecution. The first complete version of both the Old and New Testaments was published in 1990. In 2025, a translation straight from the original languages of Hebrew and Greek was completed. There are also additional contemporary versions available now. 

Members of our church who have a Gospel Library App in Mongolian do not have rights to the Mongolian Bible. We have not received permission to use it yet, so members need to find an app from the Mongolian United Bible Society. This creates interesting challenges when we teach from the Bible in church meetings and people in the class have different versions of the Bible.  

But people in this country have really benefitted from the sacrifices of those who brought them the Bible. Some are devout Christians. People on the streets know our English teachers as "the Jesus People." People are drawn to the paintings in our church building and recognize Christ. And many who love what they feel when they visit us take lessons and learn about the restored Gospel of Jesus Christ, that the church Jesus established when He was on the earth is restored again in its entirety.

As we left the city, we used Google to show us the less congested streets. There was no issue leaving town, but Google said our highway home was closed and we would need to take a detour - adding 4 hours to our 5.5 hour drive! We prayed it would change and proceeded towards home, as the detour was along the route. By the time we got to the detour point, Google changed and said the road was open. We consider it a double miracle - that stopping allowed us to discover the museum and also delay until the road issue that we didn't know about was nearly resolved.

After we got home it was life as usual; we participated in 4 different activities in quick succession. When the plan for our youth activity fell through and we couldn't play basketball and volleyball, we pivoted in true Mongolian style and had a board game day. It turned out well. 

The girls even schemed to surprise Elder Anand
with cakes for his birthday.

Also that weekend, our first Sainshand returned missionary, Elder Buyan-Ulzii (Boyka), spoke in our sacrament meeting. We had a potluck meal afterwards. It is exciting to have this wonderful brother be an example to our youth and to have his help.

A couple of days later, a baby in our group turned 1 year old. This is a big deal and was the basis of a big party her mom threw for her and their friends and family at our church. Boyka served as the MC for the party and even sang.

Misheel is a member of our church. Last
year John gave a blessing to Odluna, her daughter.
It's hard to believe she is already a year old!

Important relatives made speeches.

Later in the week, we had some friends over for a late Tsagaan Sar celebration. They had been visiting relatives in another part of Mongolia over the holiday, and then we were in the city, so our getting together had been delayed. Now, it finally happened. We made buuz for the event, of course. It's the traditional Tsagaan Sar dinner. But besides that, they had invited us over both last year and this year to teach us how to make buuz. We had to show them that we could actually do it.

We were pretty proud of ourselves with the results.

There are several ways to fold buuz.
This one looks rather like a "rose."

With our friends Michelle and Molly.

We were blessed these two weeks with safety on snowy roads, a spiritual renewal and valuable instruction, discovering some interesting history of the Bible here, and getting to spend time with wonderful friends. We are always blessed and amazed at what we get to see and do and most of all, the people we get to do it all with.