When will the good things start?

Fifteen years ago Ulaanbaatar was a place where you could walk across the street and not look both ways. Where you did not fear that you would be pummeled by a beefy SUV taking a sharp corner at 50 mph. Those were the communist days. The only cars on the street were Russian-built, and they numbered less than 5,000. Those were the communist days. Today, with absolutely no new roads built in UB (nor widened), there are about 70,000 vehicles roaming the streets at any given time. Welcome to democracy and capitalism at its vicious best.

Yesterday I attended what you might say a �pot-luck� gathering at a German family�s home out in the yurt suburbs. Driving out of downtown UB and into the suburbs is like entering the slums of Bogota or Buenos Aires or Calcutta. But unlike those slums, these are relatively new---all haphazardly partitioned and facetiously arranged. Since nobody (technically) owns any land in Mongolia except the government, I wonder who decides how much land you can have if you move to UB fresh from the country. The cover of my Lonely Planet guidebook says: �Mongolia: Discover a land without fences.� There should be an asterix next to that statement, since UB is nothing BUT fences. There are fences around the parking lot outside my apartment complex, with a gate to boot. Fences make it impossible to pick just any route to walk around your neighborhood. They even fence up the wild land on the outskirts of UB�big parcels that have nothing more than a yurt and an SUV parked outside. For all this talk about Mongolians being hospitable and �open,� they sure are freakishly paranoid. It is a standard practice by every Mongol who locks a door to set two dead bolts and then give a tug on the handle to make sure it latched. And this is just to lock up an empty classroom inside a building that has a Security Guard checking everyone�s IDs at the door. This weekend I take a trip to the countryside. I�m curious to see if my host family relaxes a little bit. Leaves the car door unlocked from time to time.

But anyway, so at this �pot-luck� this family was BBQ-ing lamb ribs. Huge, foot-long ribs. 95% pure, free-range fat and a few nibbles of meat attached to bone. Yum indeed. I ate two and swear I heard my arteries hardening. My dad would be proud.

It�s fun watching even the most daintiest Mongolian women eating huge, slabs of greasy fat off a bone. I asked Naraa, my assistant at the TV station, if she ever went a day without meat. She said she did, and got horribly sick the next day. She typically eats meat 3 times a day. And that�s the norm.

Americans think we�re meat-eaters if we eat it everyday for dinner. But try breakfast, lunch, and snacks, too.

So the views from this house in the suburbs were actually quite superb. Just behind their house was a rocky bluff. A Catholic nunnery was next door. These Germans frequently took ex-prisoners into their home and taught them the word of God. They had a nice, newly built house, with a yurt in the backyard of course.

English class has been a learning experience (more for me than the students). I make up lesson plans, but it doesn�t matter. We change topics as rapidly as we want and by today I�m making up the syllabus as I go along. Flying by the seat of my pants. Naturally, I have the occasional student who challenges me on such petty things as whether �Playing� is a verb or a noun (today she admitted that it wasn�t a noun, it was simply a gerund). And quite frequently it is the students who decide what I�m going to teach them. I have them making photocopies of a text to read for next week, which I will prepare comprehension questions for. Then in class, we discuss. They want to speak (they care little for reading or writing) English. Of course, they don�t realize that they should speak English with each other. They complain that everyone only speaks Mongolian in Mongolia. That�s like saying only English is spoken in the United States.

But the basic truth is that everything they see on TV and at the movies is dubbed (poorly) into Mongolian. Only the most enterprising businesses write their signs in English (not Russian Cyrillic). And, many will simply never leave Mongolia. Thus, they will never be fluent. They will never realize how aggressively they drive. They will never see how filthy and polluted of a city they live in.

Again, contradicting myself, many Mongols have studied or lived abroad. Very few, however, return.

Now I want to bring up a few billboards and t-shirt phrases I read today. First, on a billboard near the central square, it read, �Sex with children is a punishable crime.� Some foreigners might take this the wrong way. Mostly the billboard is referring to the quite large under-age prostitution ring. Hundreds of Mongolian girls are inadvertently sent to places like Macau or Taiwan to Beijing to work as brothels. Once there, they must work up enough money to come home. The brothels are set up so they never have enough money to do this.

The second sign I read was on a young ladies T-shirt. Above a picture of Snoopy (Charlie Brown cartoons are big here), it read: �When will the good things start?� That about sums up the mood in UB. They�re on the path to full democracy, they have trusted that capitalism is the ultimate truth, and now they wonder: When will the good things start?