Random Mongolia Photos #2

Making Horhug, a traditional Mongolian dish, Khentii Province

Goat meat for the horhugh, Khentii province

You cook horhug using hot rocks.

Adding the rocks.

Archery practice, Khentii Province

Making Marmont horhug. the body is stuffed with hot rock, and the outside is blow torched until cooked.

The finished product

Gers, Khenttii province

My Khenttii Enumerator and me.

Buddha statue in Zasian, Ulaanbaatar.

Ulaanbaatar

Zaisan monument

Zaisan monument

Zaisan monument

Camel, just outside Ulaanbaatar

Random Mongolia Photos #1

 

Ger materials, taken in Khovd Aimag center

Me and a herder inside his ger, taken in Khovd province

Me and a herder family, taken in Khovd province

Baby goats playing with wire. Taken in Khovd Province

Aarul drying on top of a ger, taken in Ullastai

Yaks, taken in Zavkhan province

Soyombo Symbol overlooking Ullastai

Remnants of Soviet Industry, taken in Ulliastai 

Exploring the remnants of Soviet industry in Ulliastai. From left to right: Bill, Duuluna, and Karen

Somewhere on the road from Tonsentengel to Ulaanbaatar.  

The bus I spent 29 hours on, from Ulliastai and Ulaanbaatar.

Raw yak wool, taken at a weaving factory in Ulaanbaatar.

Raw pressed wool, taken at a weaving factory in Ulaanbaatar.

Spinning at the above factory.

Photo of the Naadam horse race.

Quick Post: Mongol Derby

The loyal readers of my blog might remember a skeptical, English girl who was here as an operations manager of a 1000km horse race.  Today, said race has begun. Thirty riders have started, we will see how many finish a week from now.

Here's a satellite map where you can track the riders: http://www.theadventurists.com/the-adventures/mongol-derby/edition/summer-2013

And a blog to get updates: http://mongolderbyblog.theadventurists.com/blog/

This is a fascinating event, conducted by some awesome people, initial skepticism about my work aside. And of course it's all for charity: http://www.coolearth.org/adventurists

What I'm Doing in Mongolia Work-wise

A lot of people have asked, “what exactly are you doing in Mongolia?”

In one sentence: I am conducting an international development consult for the United Nations Food and Agriculture Office regarding rates of return in the Mongolian Livestock Value Chain survey embedded in a larger Strengths Weaknesses Opportunities Threats (SWOT) analysis of the industry as part of my master’s degree.

This description causes many to ask, “OK, what exactly are you doing in Mongolia?”

“Drinking way too much milk tea and airag.”

As part of my Master’s in Development Practice, I am required to do an international development consult for an outside organization. Originally, I was supposed to go back to Thailand to work on a climate change project.  Funding fell through.  So that I did not get screwed, Professor Roland-Holst (who we affectionately refer to as DWRH) connected me with the United Nations Food and Agriculture Office (FAO). They wanted to do an analysis of rates of return to middle men in the Mongolian Livestock Industry, but weren’t really sure about how to go about it, and don’t really specialize in this type of work. DWRH had sub-contracted Berkeley grad students to do this kind of work before in South East Asia using value chain surveys.

DWRH in Ulaanbaatar

So, I was handed a terms of reference to a project about ducks and bird flu, and told to write some kind of work agreement for myself. Never having written my own job description before, and not knowing what a value chain was until I looked it up on Wikipedia, I pretty much just ran the words “Thailand” and “chicken” through find-and-replace so that the document read “Mongolia” and “livestock.”  I added a section on SWOT to give myself another tangible deliverable in case the quantitative survey failed miserably. According to DWRH, FAO liked this, and my project was a go.

I ended up in Ulaanbaatar on June 14 with minimal understanding of both livestock systems, and Mongolia. I mean, I could find Mongolia on a map, and vaguely remembered some stuff from 7^th grade history about Genghis Kahn (which I now know is better pronounced as Chinngis). Thankfully, Zilbo pointed me to this classic of livestock economics: Binswanger, Hans P. and John McIntire. 1987. "Behavioral and Material Determinants of Production Relations in Land-abundant Tropical Agriculture." 

My overall plan has been to start with the qualitative and move to the quantitative. Many in academia seem to view these tools as somehow at odds with each other, but really they serve complimentary functions. Qualitative methods yield understanding, and structure to the study of a problem. They produce concepts of how things work, and what is important. Quantitative methods measure effects, and, when well done, provide evidence for or against hypotheses generated by qualitative methods. 

Effectively, this meant that I spent my first week doing qualitative, unstructured interviews with NGOs in UB. From there, I flew out to Khovd to start talking to rural people, keeping my interviews free form and informal. That began to give me an understanding of the industry. From there, I have developed a survey tool (using Open Data Tool Kit), for the purpose of conducting quantitative surveys, which I have been doing since Ulliastai. It’s a tad unfortunate that I am both designing and implementing the survey, because I keep changing the questions in an effort to improve the survey, but so it goes.

That’s pretty much where I am now.  Going to where different actors on the value chain and having an interpreter ask questions.  And drinking lots of milk tea and airag on the way.

Going in with minimal understanding of both has actually been an advantage. All my theories have been generated by work I’ve done, not by preconceived notions developed in a classroom. And I’ve been too naïve to avoid 30 hour bus rides, which has led to better data.

This has led to an understanding of the Mongolian livestock industry, which probably makes up at least 40 percent of the country’s employment when you combine herders, transportation and processors, that sees choices of actors as more rational in their context, and products more interdependent than one would think as an outsider.

The Mongolian livestock industry does face internal weaknesses, and many outside threats. And studying the value chain has led to an interesting understanding of the industry here in Mongolia.  I’ll discuss my findings in later posts.

Naadam Horse Racing

Until then, travel safe everybody.

The Ironies of Mongolian BBQ

Back in UB, after a long trip to Western Mongolia (which I will post about at some point) I saw a Mongolian BBQ place.  Or perhaps better to say, THE Mongolian BBQ place in Mongolia.  As my long sojourn had demonstrated- there is no such thing as Mongolian BBQ out in the countryside. The only BBQ place in UB is on the corner of "what passes for souvenirs in Mongolia" street, and "high end foreign catering coffeeshops set in Khrushchev era buildings" avenue.

It's apparently the first American chain restaurant to open in Mongolia. Hurray the ironies of globalization.

Before I came here, everyone told me how awful the food was.  But that really isn't accurate.  It's not bad, it's boring.  It's always some variation of meat and noodle, or milk. And it lacks anything resembling taste.

Here's some real Mongolian food for you:

Buuz and Khuushuur 

Sometimes you get lucky and get some ketchup.

Buuz are dumplings made of white flour noddles stuffed with fatty mutton and then steamed.  Khuushuur is essentially the same thing but pounded flat and deep fried. Definitely of Chinese origin.

Pretty rich food to eat during the summer, but you could see where it would do the trick when it's negative 30 out.

 Aarul

Aarul is dried milk curds.  Basically they dry the curds of the milk on the roof of their ger. 

Sun soakin' bulges in the shade

It's hard as a jaw breaker. You have to gnaw off bits of the block in order to get any of it in your mouth.  Then you are rewarded with a sour milk flavored jolly rancher.

But it lasts forever.  I interviewed a herder that made enough aarul to sell it. He would make it all year long, and then, once in the winter, a guy in a truck would buy all of his product at once.  And the stuff didn't go bad.

The Kazakh version of aarul.  It's deep fried.

Tsuvain

I wonder who thought, "You know what these starchy noodles need? More starch!"

Tsuvain is another typical Mongolian noodle dish that probably originates in China.  This is typically a mix of noodles, potatoes and some meat. Strangely, the potatoes and noodles kind of work together.

When I visited the Kazakhs, they served me tsuvain with horse. It was surprisingly good.

Milk Tea (Suutei tsai)

Bane of my culinary life

Everytime you enter a ger, this awaits you : milk tea.  It's a major embarrassment not to have any to serve to your guests, and it is a big insult to refuse it.

It's made by boiling some water and adding an equal part of whole milk, a table spoon of salt, and a tiny bit of cheap green tea. Since my work takes me to a lot of gers, I find milk tea to be a major source of my calories.  Also, if my next cup I had to drink didn't come to me until after the sun had gone supernova, it would be too soon.

So my readers, appreciate all the pizza, Thai food, and burritos you've got.  Because whatever you're eating, it's probably more exciting than Mongolian food.  As for me, I'm looking forward to some Mongolian BBQ when I get home.

Derbys, Mongolian Band, and Meetings

I went to drinks with Underseas Voyager Project Guy at an expat function in the second fanciest hotel in Ulan Bataar.  I had planned on trying to meet some miners and seeing if I could make any interesting contacts in the Gobi.  Instead, I found myself berated by an English girl from Bristol.

“You know there is no.. not really… a market in Mongolian livestock, you know? Not like how we think of a market”

“I know.  I had a meeting with Mercy Corps yesterday afternoon where we discussed that.”

“So then why are you doing a supply chain analysis here?”

I shrugged. “My master’s program requires me to do an international consultancy or internship of some kind.  The UN is footing the bill for me to come here. But, yeah, I know I’m kind of on a fool’s errand. Nothing to do, but to just do the best I can, and hopefully something interesting will come out of it.”

“Okay….” She inflected upward, then sipped her Tiger beer.

Her skepticism struck as a bit rich.  She organizes the Mongolian Derby, (which she insists on pronouncing DAHRBY), the longest horse race in the world, modeled on Genghis Khan's postal system that transverses the Mongolian Steppe, over 9 days and 1000 km long. And I’m the one on the fool’s errand. And she’s giving me skepticism for trying to do the first quantitative analysis of the Mongolian livestock value chain that takes into account the full offering of livestock products (meat, hide, fiber, dairy), substitution effects between animals, and rates of return.  At least I don’t organize a 1000 km horse race in the middle of butt f**** nowhere Mongolia.

OK, maybe I am crazy.

I’ve spent my first week in UB taking as many meetings as I can organize. It’s been limited due to what contacts I was able to make while in the US, but still things have gone well as can be expected. When one says I’m a researcher from UC Berkeley on a project that the UN is paying for, people seem at least willing to give you the time of day.

I should have gotten more done, but Derby Girl insists on dragging me to Mongolian rock shows.

Tuesday, I finally make it out to the countryside.  I fly to a town on the far west side of the country, Khovd. There, I meet up with some PCVs who know the local middle man, and we go from there.  After a few days in Khovd, I travel by bus to Uliastai.  This is a place even Mongolians say is remote (but of course there’s Peace Corps). According to reports, this province has the highest number of livestock in the country.

UB has been an exciting place, but everyone tells me that it’s there least favorite part of Mongolia.  I have to get out to the countryside, they say.  I did a long run out of the city today. What little of the steppes I saw, made me yearn for more.

 Looking down at UB.

 Ger town at the edge of the city.

The Steppe

Quick Post: The Mongolian Election

Mongolians go to the polls on Wednesday.  I won't be in UB to see it, but it would be interesting.

A Little Bit About the Mongolian Elections on Wednesday

Welcome to Mongolia

At the Beijing airport I met a guy who was also going to Mongolia.  I asked what he was doing there, and he said that he worked for an organization called the Undersea Voyager Project.  Yes, the Undersea Voyager Project, in Mongolia.

What’s even funnier is that he’s complete legit.  In the winter, oil tanker trucks drive into Mongolia over the then frozen Lake Khövsgöl in the far north of the country.  And an estimated dozen of them have fallen through the ice, and are sitting at the bottom of the 262 meter lake. To date it seems that none of these tankers are leaking, but these sunken tankers represent a ticking chemical bomb threatening to contaminate 70 percent of the country’s fresh water supply.

So welcome to Mongolia.  A country hundreds of miles from the ocean, where it makes sense to be an undersea salvage operator.

***

UB is a rough place.  I’ve seen about a fist fight a day here. Never felt threatened myself, but it does make one wary. The city itself is about 1.7 million people, housed in anything from ultramodern skyscrapers to decaying Soviet apartment blocks to ger towns.  And I’ve come to realize that ger town is the polite way of saying slum. In terms of infrastructure development, the town seems to be about at the level of Jakarta, though nowhere near the size.  The cottonwood trees are seeding, flinging white fluff balls throughout the city.  They say in two weeks that UB will be so full of the stuff that it will look like snow had fallen in July. (That's of course if snow doesn't actually fall in July.)

Near one of the temples. This seems typical of the town.  I saw some pretty large slums on the way to the airport, but could get the camera out due to not trying to fall on my face due to the sudden stops the bus driver would make.

At least Mongolians have some decent taste in music.

The main square in UB.

The new, ultra-fancy Blue Sky hotel.  I drank some beers at the top of it, but forgot my camera.

The second you get out of the city, the roads turn from atrocious to worse.  But the steppe of in the distance is incredible.  I’ve only seen it on my two trips to the airport (once to get my lost bag, once to deal with immigration). I should get there next week when I go visit some Peace Corps Volunteers in the west side of the country.

View from the car ride back from the airport.

Peace Corps Volunteers have offered what is the greatest bright spot in this Mongolia experience so far.  I am in awe of these people. From their stories, Mongolia life is harsh.  The winters long (it snowed two weeks ago) and cold (-30 C). And some of them live in gers. And they chop their own firewood. The food, while not as bad as reported, is pretty darn dull. To get from one side of the country to the other by bus takes in excess of 60 hours.  That is 60 hours on a bus to get to the nearest slice of cheese. And a lot of them sign up for a third year.

The research has been going surprisingly well, thanks to my fellow PCVs and contacts I’ve made through Berkeley.  I don’t have time to write about it all now, but the issues facing small herders in Mongolia strike to the heart of issues of development in general, and what makes Mongolia unique place. People have been very welcoming, and have been gaining a lot of qualitative data.  I take heart in this, but the more I learn, the more nuanced the industry becomes, and the more daunting the task I have undertaken.

The hard part begins next week, when I fly off to the far west of the country, and will hopefully have a chance to interact with herders, changers, and traders.