My trip to Mongolia went well.

The office set-up went smoothly.  It was just like taking Beth, the new Country Director, home again.  She had spent much of last year in Mongolia as a Samaritan’s Purse intern for the Children’s Heart Project.  The people with whom she worked on that project are now her staff in the new office.

Mongolia has emerged as an independent nation after some ninety years of Soviet domination.  Ulaanbaatar is a busy city with a lot of both private and municipal construction occurring.  However, most people still live in the same drab apartment blocks which were erected all over the USSR.  These are featureless rectangular concrete buildings, each with either five or nine stories and three apartment sizes. They have drab, dimly lighted hallways and staircases, combination locks on the entry doors and remnants of paved parks between the buildings.  You really can’t tell the difference between either the various buildings or the apartments inside, no matter where in the city you go.  Since the fall of Communism, these units have been privatized and slowly, some are being remodeled.  Beth was able to find one of these remodeled units just a short block from the office.  Her new apartment is on the first floor, is bright and cheery, and the interior walls have been re-arranged to give more functional space.  The owner is moving to Europe so we were able to rent the apartment for a very reasonable price.  Beth also found a garage to rent just a few steps from her front door!  The garages there are a bit different from what we usually think of in the USA.  They are shipping containers which have been emptied of their goods and lined up along a deserted stretch of street.  Hers has a little light coming through the roof, but it is pretty level, has a secure locking mechanism, and will be able to hold a mid-size SUV when she finds a reliable one to purchase.

The Children’s Heart Project operates in every province in the country, so reliable 4-wheel-drive transportation is essential.  Over 120 children have come to North America for life saving corrective surgery so far.  There are currently about 40 on the waiting list, but more appear all the time for screening.  Each must have a heart defect which is not correctable in Mongolia, but which is correctable in the US or Canada.  Samaritan’s Purse arranges for the child and a parent to travel with a translator to North America where they live with a host family from one of the local churches near a participating hospital.  Pediatric cardiac surgical teams and hospitals donate their services for the procedures and follow up care.  We have tried transporting the equipment and surgical teams to Mongolia to do the surgery, but it has not been very successful because of the poor quality of follow up care and monitoring.

After so long under communism, the majority of families are non-religious or nominally Buddhist.  However, most of the families return from North America as Christians.  There are over 100 Christian churches in the capital, but not many places to worship in the rest of the country, so the families returning to the rural areas have been starting many new fellowships.  Samaritan’s Purse does follow-up visits at six months and one year.  Christian workers are needed and welcomed.

One of our partner organizations is a group of Mongolian Christian Veterinarians with American advisors who teach rural vets and vet assistants all over the country.  This is a society of nomadic herdsmen and the VetNet people bring them updated techniques and modern medicines while sharing Christ’s love.  Now that our office is established, we hope to be able to do more to support this organization as well as many of the other ministries in the country.

Mongolians are wonderfully hospitable people and seem to love Americans.  On one day I was able to visit the nomadic family of one of the heart patients.  We drove out into the desert over ox-cart tracks, when they could be found, and crossed frozen rivers between beautiful mountain ranges.  After unloading at a farm, consisting of three yurts, or felt houses surrounded by 1000 sheep, I was greeted and hugged and kissed by an old farmer and his wife and their extended family.  Inside, around a cozy fire I ate a slab of beef and mutton dumplings and dried milk treats until I was stuffed.  These are herders who eat what they grow, and they don’t grow vegetables.  I washed this down with salted yak-milk tea and fermented mare’s milk. What a treat!  I am so blessed!

These people don’t watch television, listen to radio, or get newspapers, so they still love America and Americans.  They base their love on direct experience rather than on propaganda.  You need to go for a visit or a short working vacation.  There is nothing like it in the rest of the world.

In His Love,
Paul

I wanted to let you know about my trip to Ethiopia.  I went to help Dr. Patrick Gitonga from Kenya train our Ethiopian trainers (23) in an additional curriculum we want to implement as part of our HIV/AIDS education work.  Under a grant from USAID, Samaritan’s Purse is administering a program we have developed (according to USAID guidelines) to educate young people aged 10-24 about HIV/AIDS.  This program is being implemented in four African countries - Kenya, Uganda, Mozambique, and Ethiopia.  Previously it was a two part program in which we train our national trainers who in turn train adults who already have a platform among youth, for example pastors, youth leaders, scout masters, school teachers, soccer coaches, etc.  Part one was all about HIV/AIDS - how it is transmitted, reducing stigma, its effect on families and communities, how we can help effected families, etc.  Part two is about giving youth the social skills (decision making, communication, relationship evaluation, etc.) necessary to make healthy choices and to live healthy lives.  This third curriculum, which Paul and I helped to write last summer, was developed in recognition of the fact that many young people between the ages of 10 and 24 are already married.  It is called “One Love” and is a marital faithfulness curriculum.  I think it offers valuable information and training for building strong marriages, thus reducing sexual promiscuity.  Wish I had known all this stuff 40 years ago!

The training went very well.  The curriculum was well received and we got some good feedback on ways to improve it, which I hope will be implemented soon.  The training was occasionally a little pressed for time because we had to do everything through a translator, more than doubling the time it took to teach.  He was excellent, a journalist for an English language newspaper in Addis Ababa who was on vacation.  But he admitted that it takes about 20 - 30% longer to say things in Amharic than it does in English.  This is partly because Amharic doesn’t have some words we commonly use in English, like “communication” so several words had to be used instead each time we used that word.  It was a lesson to me in remembering to write very simply both conceptually and verbally. Many people groups live very simple lifestyles that have not required them to develop some of the more complex concepts, and words to represent them, that we have.  On the other hand, they can sometimes say more about spiritual forces, agriculture, animals or some other topics than we ever thought of!  It’s thought provoking to consider how our language controls to a large extent what we can even think about!!

The Ethiopian people were wonderfully hospitable and the food was delicious.  I avoided some of the spicier stuff but I do love injera, the staff of life in Ethiopia. Tef is a small grain that is very nutritious.  It grows like wheat.  It is ground and made into injera, a kind of giant, thin pancake.  Injera is not turned, so one side is covered with broken bubbles and actually looks a bit like tripe.  Small piles of assorted yummy meat and vegetable mixtures are placed on this large (think large pizza size) pancake and you tear off stretchy pieces of injera and use them to pick up bits of meat,etc. and pop them into your mouth.  It is rude to lick your fingers because normally everyone shares the same meal!  When eating with other Ethiopians, our staff was careful to see that I always had a separate plate, fearing I would be offended.  Actually I have shared one plate meals of rice mixtures before in other parts of Africa and so this really doesn’t bother me.  You just stake out a territory and stay in it!  Maybe they were really more concerned about MY germs! 

So I had a successful trip, I feel, thanks in no small measure to your prayers.  There are always a thousand things that can go wrong, both in regards to travel and to the work itself.  Of course health issues are always a concern, but I stayed healthy throughout the training.  (I waited until it was finished to take any food risks and then paid for it!)  I was surprised to see Dr. Gitonga become quite ill one day however.  His stomach does not tolerate injera and he had to stick to rice, a more Kenyan staple.  Ethiopia is a beautiful country and Americans seem well accepted.  As you may remember they had a brief period of communism and a war with Eritrea, but the country seems to in a period of relative peace and prosperity at the moment.

This is probably more than you wanted to know. 

Thanks again for your interest and prayers,

Joyce