Words from Mongolia
21st July 2013
I’m back in Ulaan Baatar. It’s 5am. Sporadic sleeping patterns for some reason, temporary insomnia. I’m in a hostel dorm with 11 other backpackers here. It’s actually someone’s apartment on 3rd floor converted into a dorm. 6 bunk beds brought in and we have a fire place, kitchen and lovely living room carpet. And they just put up a ‘Hostel’ neon sign outside and backpackers will come. £5 a night. Oh they will come.
I spent the last week on a ger camp in Mongolia teaching English! Completely spontaneous and random.
Arrived in Mongolia around 10 days ago after trans-siberian train across Russia. The postcard image of Mongolia (wide open grasslands, hundreds of galloping horses, nomadic ger camps) is so true! The whole of Mongolian country is this! (except Gobi dessert which I still have I to visit). All hilly grasslands with no fences or ditches with wild horses and livestock. Then….oh my lord….you arrive in the capital city Ulaan Baatar and it’s a slap in the face… this city’s infrastructure is on the brink, the centre is ok but the outskirts and dusty bumpy roads as you arrive…it reminds me of Beijing 12 years ago…and the traffic jams. The drivers don’t obey traffic lights, so you sprint across the wide pedestrian crossings, always making eye contact with oncoming drivers while running, your awareness is so active that in a strange way it may safer than home….cos at home you get docile and routine-like with traffic lights… but in UB you can’t… or you’re dead.
Anyway, rewind: I was an English language teacher for a week. I arrived in Ulaan Baatar last week, the day before Naadam festival, excited, met up with fellow backpackers from Russia, but… Naadam being the biggest festival of the year: everything was sold out, I mean everything, even all accommodation, so I was homeless. In the last hostel searching for a bed, I saw on the noticeboard: ‘Volunteer to teach English and get free accommodation and food on a ger camp’. Screw the festival, I’m gonna teach English! Christine, a Swiss backpacker I met in Moscow and Guillaume, a French backpacker I met on the trans-siberian train, thought a great idea and joined me. We called and were told we’d be collected at 4pm that day….. 4pm… Well, I can officially now say that being late in Mongolia had beaten all other country records… our driver arrived….11pm. 7 hours later. One of the things you really learn when backpacking is Patience. And waiting 7 hours for him actually turned out great cos we met and chatted to many interesting travellers sitting outside the hostel during evening telling stories, watching locals play basketball in the small square across. I think I’ve met the most adventurous backpackers in this country: a Spanish couple cycling from Spain all the way to China via Iran and now want to cycle to Tibet, then they want to come back to Mongolia and buy 3 horses and make their way back to Spain with the horses instead of bikes. Here’s their blog: plantyourself.wordpress.com. Also American man late 60′s who can’t tolerate retirement (which he said is golf and watching sports games on tv), decided to teach English in India and travel Asia for 5 years.
I’m digressing from my English teacher abroad experience!!!
(lack of sleep, verbal diarrhoea).
So we got picked up 11pm, drive a few hours to country and meet the English ger camp boss at 1am and he was absolutely pissed drunk. OK it’s Naadam festival across the whole country so we forgive him. But overall he was so disorganised and unprofessional, I kept saying ‘Patience Trevor… Patience’. He put the 3 of us in a small dirty cabin smelling of urine with one bed and it’s fucking freezing. So the 3 if us zip up in our sleeping bags and and fall asleep instantly (or fainted from shock). Next morning we wake up cuddling each other like John Candy and Steve Martin in Planes Trains and Automobiles (why are you holding my hand? … where’s your other hand?).
But that first morning when I stepped out of the cabin…. ahhhh….we were in the beautiful Mongolian countryside surrounded by Ger camps and horses and sheep and goats and cows and barking dogs and wild woods and abundant insect noises!! NATURE at last! It was beautiful!
We requested we need to be transferred to a bigger clean cabin with 3 beds and no smell. So we switched cabins with the boss, he knew we would have left otherwise.
The deal with this English volunteer work: it was an English summer camp teaching mostly teenagers and a few adults. An Australian teacher fell out with the boss, packed his bags and left. So the boss desperately needed native English speakers and asked backpackers to volunteer for a week at a time. I thought a great way to integrate with Mongolia. He asked us to tell the students that we were ‘teachers’, not tourists. And Guillaume pretended he was from Canada. The boss said don’t worry about ‘teaching’ just converse with the students and make it up as you go. They split the students into 3 groups for Christine, Guillaume and myself. I got the advanced class….naturally, as I’m an actor Darling The boss and other local teachers disappeared for the mornings, probably stayed in bed and we spent 3 to 4 hours every morning teaching for a week… it was exhausting! I never knew 3 to 4 hours of teaching could be so tiring.
I’ve never done teaching in my life. So I improvised …. the moment, the second, I started to teach, teachers who’ve inspired me in the past came to my mind…like Ragnar!: first thing Ragnar said in first acting lesson to class was: “I don’t know what to do……”. I said exactly the same to the students and they gave me the blank wtf expression that I probably gave Ragnar (i.e. ‘did I just pay for a teacher to come and tell me he doesn’t know what to do!???’). But immediately an idea popped in my head! I had no wi-fi but I had a book on 18th century literature at the bottom of my backpack with Goethe and Keats poetry (I’m serious, don’t ask why… a miracle). Travelling across Asia I forget to get mosquito repellent (borrowed) or sleeping bag (borrowed from drunk boss) or precautionary medication for travel sickness (just pray) but I have my Keats and Goethe poetry in Mongolia. Hallelujah!
So after 20 minutes of trying to pronounce my 12 students names I plunged right into Goethe’s poem ‘Little Rose Red, Little Rose On The Heath’. The students knew how to write and read very well but were not confident in speaking or pronunciation…. so another of my past teachers came to mind…Patsy Rodenburg!… and I did her basic voice exercises with them. The Right To Speak. Take your time. Relish the language. Love the sound of the language, onomatopoeia, don’t intellectualise, sense it, don’t look at your dictionaries. I still don’t know if this was a hit or miss… I took a risk…
It was difficult for them to pronounce V in a word. I got them doing the ooovvvv vvvooooo avvvvvv vvaaaaa eevvvvv veeeee.
And gave them the best command of the English language – I gave them more poetry!! Keats! Yes!!!
Some of you can imagine me getting real passionate in the class to deadpan students… Christine recorded some of it, I’m yet to see it. Maybe there’s a film script in this: ‘Mongolian Poets Society’ staring Ryan Gosling in his oscar winning role playing me.
I hope they got something from it. Better than “The man jumped over the dog”, “The cat sat on the green car”. They hated grammar and there was an unanimous vote from them to keep us as long as we wanted to stay. Over the week I got more confident and really wanted to get their imagination going. Tried to get stream-of-consciousness stories going: where everyone adds a sentence to a story we make up on the spot. They were shy so I got them to randomly point at a sentence in one of their books, read that sentence and we’ll incorporate that into the story. We had great quirky bizarre stories so was very funny.
They wanted to hear accents and idioms… I did my best.. they laughed… at the accents… or me?.
Also we did some folk rock songs… Simon and Garfunkel’s “feeling groooVVVVVeeeee..” But singing lesson was not that successful, probably cos they were imitating my singing. They had beautiful traditional Mongolian songs which they sung every night in a goodnight circle. I really felt humbled to be part of that circle.
Students kept calling me “Teacher”. I reiterated: “Call me Trevor!!” Student: “Teacher!” Me: “Trevor!”(few minutes later)Student: “Teacher!” Me: “It’s Trevor!!!!…” (pause) Same student: “Tre-Wer!” (longer pause) Me: “OK let’s do V pronunciation exercise again”.
Classes were 90 minute sessions, break and another 90 minutes. This is long and exhausting. And most are teenagers on a summer camp (little sleep), I could see their concentration waning after 30 minutes – I’d ask them “do you understand what I’m writing on the board?”. No reaction. “If anyone doesn’t understand put you hand up?” Blank reaction. Then one day I said , “ok new subject, I’m gonna talk about..” and wrote on the board : “Trevor’s sex life…” and they started tittering, Oh! this re-ignited their concentration! Another day I wrote ‘Fuck’ to see if they knew. Of course they did.
Nobody in the world knows of my sex life except 12 Mongolian students…. weird…
Kidding. I didn’t tell them.
But I did mention some personal stories (try to connect it to the poetry). I told them the first time I fell in love (didn’t even get a kiss..), the first time my heart was “smashed to smithereens” (Oh! being so poetic with hyperbole here as actors do) And we all know teenagers love ‘love stories’, they’re not cynical about love… ..yet…
Afternoons were walks in the woods or up the hills. And the stars! 2 clear cloudless nights during the week. Beautiful. But cold.
The food on the ger camp for the week was rice semolina, soup, meat, bread, soup, soup, meat, meat, rice semolina, stale bread (put it in the soup/semolina and forget it’s stale) soup, soup, staler bread, soup and some meat. We had a natural spring outside, pure water. The drunk boss wanted to show-off his traditional Mongolian cultural food habits and one night brought in 2 sheep heads after 3 hours of boiling them and asked us to help dissect and take every morsel of meat off the heads including eye balls, tongue and brain (the delicacy). I tried. I couldn’t. All I could do was watch him and a few students devourer like vultures. This meat was probably in the soup the next day. When you’re in the middle of nowhere and hungry you just eat. Another night: we had to try horse milk. God!! so pungent, so bitter, disgusting. And we had natural yogurt most nights before bedtime! A ger across the field produced it. Chirstine had honey which made the combination delicious.
I will miss the students. They were great. I don’t know if I could be a teacher forever though. There was a university chemistry teacher there, practicing her English. Had lovely conversations with her, her daughter studied in Cardiff, maybe we can meet again in UB before we leave.
So… getting back to UB… we didn’t want to wait another 7 hours (and this time the bosses car was being fixed…) so we basically prepared to hitch hike back, expecting to sit on the back of a truck and breathe all that dust but ended up in a H3 hummer SUV (one of the students dad who works for Rio Tinto mining in the Gobi dessert happened to visit and we jumped on board). He drove us back to UB, overpassing every vehicle, breaking speed limit, like we were on an emergency diplomatic mission. I saw what we see in most countries: increasing contrast between wealth and poverty.
Now I’m back as a tourist and will go see some temples and monasteries.
As Blaise Pascal said: “Sorry this letter is so long, I didn’t have time to write a short one”
Same apologies from me.
Tre-Wer, aka “Teacher”
More writing
Words from Mexico (March 2021)
Words from Iran (January 2020)
Click for Words from Myanmar (January 2018)
Click for Words from Russia (July 2013)
Click for Words from Mongolia (August 2013)
Click for Words from China (August 2013)