Ulaanbaatar - an interesting capital city!!

We are in Mongolia!! Arrived here on Sept. 6, 2010 - a Monday. Today marks our 4th day. Everyone has been wonderful, but we have come to learn that everyone is very busy with their own responsibilities and really have no time to entertain us. We have tried to do a lot of observation and are at the point where we are making our own way. We will not be allowed to go up to Darkhan until we are registered with our sponsor and that will be in about two more weeks.

In the meantime, we have been asked to give personal, one-on-one English lessons to a government official who is going to take an English test soon and wants to be tutored. We will spend an hour and a half daily teaching him. We are a bit nervous but anxious to jump in and get our feet wet!

Tuesday night we were the senior couple atttending the ARP meeting. Wow! What a great experience. There were 25 people there - mostly non-members. They all shared openly the battles they are trying to overcome. The Church manual has been translated into Mongolian which is read and discussed. The teacher speaks only Mongolian and we had a translator who sat behind us and whispered in our ear what the teacher and participants were talking about. There was much said about Heavenly Father and his help. Many were recognized for their progress and changes. There was one man who is a bit obnoxious and took away from the meeting. We will most likely attend again next week and Don has decided to have a talk with him before the meeting to set some ground rules. The meeting is held every Tuesday night. Many of the same folks have attended for a while and expressed how much they have benefited from the meetings.

We observed an English class taught at the same meetinghouse on Wednesday night. This meeting has been ongoing for a couple of years. The Clarks, a senior couple, teach the class which is a free offering open to the public. Because it is taught in a chapel, they are a little more free to bring up gospel principles although they are careful to maintain the purpose. Last night, they had the class members read from the family enrichment manual (FHE) about what a happy home is. They read aloud and asked questions and discussed the ideas. Each of the participants volunteered to introduce themselves using a guide of statements they had to finish with their own information. There was a police detective, an OB-GYN doctor, legal people, construction engineers and others. They ranged in age from 16 to 47. The one thing they had in common was that they came to learn to speak English better.

We can see why people get interested in the gospel by participating in these kinds of classes. They are in the chapel, they feel the Spirit of the Lord, the teachers enjoy being with them and try to help them reach their goals.

People do all kinds of things for a living including mopping stairwells, picking up trash or whatever. These people are very ambitious and willing to work rather than getting a handout. We were told that people live in the manholes and there is a lady who lives under our stairs in our building. We were also told that doctors here are paid less than a translator. Things are very different here.

We live in an apartment building. Our apartment is on the 4th floor. There is no elevator. There are 69 steps to reach our door. We are comfortable and happy to have our apartment, which is an interesting subject for a future blog.

Traffic here is like something out of Indiana Jones!! Policemen stand in mid-intersections and blow their whistles non-stop. Good thing they use their hands and twirl a baton to SHOW who goes where because they whistle at everyone but it could be anyone! Drivers need two hands to drive - one hand the steer and the other hand to honk their horn! There are no rules of the road. Oh, I guess there is one rule, don't bump into another car. They miraculously keep that rule pretty well!!