The Last Normal Day

By Charlie

It’s Friday at 10 AM and we have no more boxes to pack, no more stuff to give away. If we needed to get on a plane this afternoon and fly home to America, we could. But we won’t. Our Luce Scholar colleagues will arrive here tomorrow and we’ll spend the next two weeks gallivanting across Mongolia according to this itinerary.

We are looking forward to this trip, but planning it has been a monumental undertaking that started last year. In addition to negotiating with the tour operator and buying food for meals that we will cook on the trail, we also organized air travel from Beijing to Ulaanbaatar for 8 people and from Ulaanbaatar to Penang, Malaysia for 12 people. In a country where it is still hard to use a credit card, you can imagine how exciting it was to buy $7,000 worth of plane tickets.

In a sick sort of way, planning this trip filled a niche in my life that has been otherwise empty this year. At NPR, I am a planner, organizer and worrier. This trip has required all of those skills in spades.

Despite the agreeable weather of the Mongolian summer and the sadness we have about concluding this year on the lamb, we are ready to go home. As full as our lives have been this year, I have definitely suffered from not ever having a real job. Last summer, I relished the break that I had won from NPR. But I arrived in Mongolia on September 1, the day when it became clear that New Orleans was in big trouble following Hurricane Katrina. It was tough for me to miss that story.

Here in Mongolia, I’ve tried to keep busy with a portfolio of volunteer jobs. The work I did with rural radio stations was the most successful. The six months I spent at a newspaper and the national airline were somewhat less useful.

But even the radio station project was tough at times. In order to get money for the project, I had to operate inside the world of international development. One byproduct of this year is that I will be forever suspicious of aid projects in the developing world.

A lot of aid money in Mongolia is thrown around by the Economic Policy Reform and Competitiveness Project (EPRC), which is funded by USAID. A US government employee doing an assessment of the EPRC last fall actually interviewed me. Based on that experience and various other anecdotal encounters, I’d say that this $2 million per year operation is a gigantic waste of US taxpayer funds.

Each and every aid organization in Mongolia should be evaluated according to this one simple question: “If (your organization) disappeared tomorrow, would anyone care?” In the case of the EPRC, I think that the answer would be a resounding No Fucking Way!

But US taxpayers are not getting totally fleeced in Mongolia. There are good projects being funded by USAID. A US-based NGO called Mercy Corps does business development in the Gobi. Another US-based NGO called the Cooperative Housing Foundation (CHF) runs a business development project in the ger areas around Ulaanbaatar. Both of these projects have Mongolian clients who benefit everyday from services paid for with US government money.

I am especially enthusiastic about the CHF project. It is called the GER Initiative. A ger, of course, is the Mongolian nomad’s tent. In this case it also stands for Growing Entrepeneurship Rapidly. Through the GER Initiative, Rachel and I have bought several hundred dollars worth of stuff that we are shipping home to America. On a broader scale, the GER Initiative connects small-scale producers with buyers. They help entrepeneurs manage responsible, sustainable businesses. It is a simple idea that is so important in Mongolia.

On a more micro level, I will not miss the daily wrestling match of life in Mongolia.

A few days ago at the bank, I watched a fat Mongolian man plow to the front of a long line, pushing pensioners out of the way. I looked at the guy. He glowered back at me as if to say, “What?” Then I looked at one of the older women behind me. She shook her head helplessly. I planted my right elbow against the man’s left shoulder and my right fist against his right shoulder. My eyes came up to his neck. I forcibly pushed him to the back of the line saying, “Eshay, eshay, eshay!” “This way, this way, this way!”

Yesterday at DHL, a pleasant Mongolian woman in the signature yellow and red DHL uniform told me that I could not buy shipping insurance because the woman who handles insurance was taking a day off for personal reasons. I got stern and lectured the woman about how international shipping companies work in the rest of the world. After five minutes of this, she got the insurance forms and sold me $25 worth of shipping insurance. Easy. (Will USAID reimburse me for this piece of freelance business development consulting?)

And, of course, the internet is a daily roller coaster. It usually works, but often at speeds that would have made AOL blush back in the early 90s.

There are nice things, too. As I’ve been writing this blog entry, Naraa of Gobi Wave fame has been sending me SMS text messages from the Gobi. She was supposed to be in UB today, but that is apparently not working out. She wants to know if she could see me next week. She also inquired about Simon and Rachel. Naraa, of course, is the embodiment of everything that is good about Mongolia. (As it turns out, Naraa will arrive in UB at 5:30 PM on Friday night. Maybe.)

And last night, my friend Tamir and I drank a lot of dark Chinggis from the famous Keggy as we tried to make a DVD. Tamir works for the Voice of America. Together we installed VOA satellite dishes at two radio stations. I made some narrated slide shows about these projects. Tamir loved the slideshows and wants to share them with his bosses on DVD. Making DVDs is hard, but the Keggy helped a lot. (We love you, Keggy!)

You can download and view compressed versions of our movies about the stations in Darkhan and The Gobi.

So this will be the last post for a while. Check back after the middle of July to read reports and see pictures from our two-week Mongolian adventure.

And thanks to everyone who has read our blog this year. It’s been nice to have you with us.