Prototype Planter!

Hello again everyone! Oh what a sad month May has been for blogging… apologies again. But like I said, the less blogging, the more I'm working on my project. Having spent almost every waking hour of the last month obsessively making parts for the planters like some sort of machine, I'm happy to say that my work is finally bearing fruit. (pun intended of course!)

Here it is folks! A nearly complete model of the planters I've been slaving over. I will be adding a wooden frame around it to make it even more sturdy (although it's pretty sturdy already since it all fits together snugly), and of course adding the plants to them. In the last week I've planted seeds that I'll take out as seedlings to my herder family participants in June.

Here are some cool features of my gardens:

-they recycle water; water poured in the top pipe trickles down all the columns of bottles at once. the pipe on the bottom leads to a container for catching the overflow water. Then this water, which is nutrient-rich from traveling through the soil, can be reused to water the plants again.
-they are designed to lie on top of a yurt
-the black paint on the bottles is to protect the roots of the plants from sunlight
-they are made out of discarded/recycled bottles
-the total cost of materials in each garden is about $6-8

I am thrilled with how these are coming out! They are a huge pain to make, but mostly because I've been making about 70 of them single handedly. I am eager to see what herders think about them, and I don't have to wait long to find out. At the beginning of June I will be heading out to the steppe again to deliver the gardens and provide a short training on growing plants and how to use the planters. I'm picking up the pace to finish everything by June 15th, when Matt will arrive! If I can get it all done I will be able to take a nice break until July, when I head back out to the countryside for mid-term interviews and question answering.

Ok that's all I have time to write now, I really should go paint more bottles...

3rd Countryside Trip

A week ago I headed out to my third and final countryside research site, around the city of Arvaikheer, in Uvurkhangai aimag. I was planning to leave about a week earlier than I did, but a day or two before my planned departure I suddenly came down with a vicious stomach bug and high fever, so I decided to put off my trip for a few days in order to recover. Luckily it was only a 24 hour sort of bug, and with a constant supply of Airborne, multi-vitamins, and tomato juice I managed to get back to 100% in 2-3 days. Considering this is the only time I've been really sick in Mongolia so far, it wasn't so bad.

This time my friend and translator Khongor was unavailable to come to the countryside, but she connected me with Chingerel, a friend of hers who was looking for translation work. During the trip Chingerel told me her interesting story. She had been a Buddhist nun for the last 8 years but she had recently decided that the nunnery wasn't the place for her. In her own words, she was "too much of a free spirit" to be told what to do day-in and day-out. She had decided instead that she wanted to make a lot of money working for a mining company as a translator. I thought this was a rather drastic career change, but it was lucky for me that she had decided to abandon the monastic life, because she turned out to be a fantastic translator and ambassador for my garden project. While Khongor's translations were good and always got me answers to my questions, Chingerel's fluid ease with the English language led to much richer interviewing experiences. For example, I asked one man how far his family migrates each time they move and he said "oh about 20-30 kilometers, sometimes as far as 100 kilometers". Him and his wife spoke for a moment and then Chingerel burst out laughing, and explained that the man's wife had told him "don't be a liar, we never move 100 kilometers!".

Another interesting moment on our trip was when we visited a relative of our driver. The woman of the ger was his sister-in-law and she had one daughter, about 7 years old. The woman was keen to show me some English language letters her daughter had received that had been translated into Mongolian. It turns out that her daughter is one of those "sponsor a child" kids. I was surprised and intrigued by this, because the profiles of kids they post on those websites or send in letters seem so removed from the lives of westerners, but there I was randomly sitting in their ger, sipping milk tea, eating lunch with them, and talking about gardening. Also, her daughter was wearing a pair of TOMS shoes, a company that gives a pair of shoes to a child in need for every pair of shoes purchased. Meeting this family definitely made the world seem a little bit smaller.

Besides meeting many delightful herder families, we stopped at a giant horse monument outside of Arvaikheer. It turns out that the city of Arvaikheer is named after a famous racehorse from 300 years ago. Mongolians name their horses by color, and they have hundreds of words to describe the different coats of horses. 'Kheer' is a dapple bay colored horse, and "Arvai" means swift, hence Arvaikheer, or Swift Bay city. The monument was decorated with Buddhist and Shamanist prayer flags and, at the back, a long line of skulls of famous and beloved race horses were covered in khatag, or prayer scarves, and faced west. It was an interesting stop off on our trip.

After a long hard day of interviews (9 in one day!) we finished up and headed back to the hotel in Arvaikheer. The next morning we headed back to UB on the 7 hour bus. The road is paved so it's not too bad of a drive. Overall it was a very productive and energizing research trip. Besides visiting many welcoming families, and the momument to Arvaikheer, I saw lots of wonderful wildlife including exotic ducks and geese, steppe eagles, enormous vultures, and even a wild hare. This research trip was a nice break from the hectic day to day busy-ness of UB and since I've gotten back I've been pumped up and working on making my hydroponic planters with renewed enthusiasm.

That's all for now!

Oh and here are some photos:

Monument to Arvaikheer

The row of horse skulls, knotted together and draped with prayer scarves.

Facing the same direction as the horse skulls, into the wonderfully open and empty landscape.

Me and Chingerel.

A preview of the incomplete planters.