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.