Just call me Alaska

Here's the second post in the three-part series on the delivery of planters to my participating herder families in the countryside.

The second site I went back to was my eastern Ondorkhaan site in Khentii aimag. You may remember my slightly less enthusiastic post about my first trip out there. The people living around Ondorkhaan tended to be a bit more suspicious of me, and I picked up a sort of unfriendly vibe. So I was a bit nervous in bringing the gardens out to this group and worried about their reactions.

In the morning Chingerel and I hired another driver from the streets of UB, packed up the car, and headed off. Halfway to Ondorkhaan our driver Davaa turns to me with a confused look on his face and says in Mongolian: "Is your name really Alaska?" Haha! It turns out the pronounciation of my name in Mongolian, "Alayks", sounds a lot like a popular ice cream called "Alyaska". We all had a good chuckle once that was sorted out.

When we arrived in Ondorkhaan we called up Ganbaa, the driver I hired for our first trip. Although he lives in a haashaa (fenced in yard) in town, and he had asked if his family could have a garden as well so I said sure. We met up with his family, helped set up his garden, and he showed us the road to where the other families were living.

Again, I didn't need to be nervous! The families had all warmed up considerably since I first met them. I last visited this site in April, so it was a little trickier to find all the families since more of them had moved, but we found them in the end. See some photos!

I let the families decide where and how to put their gardens up. This family had a wagon caravan/trailer they use to move. So we put the gardens up on either side of it, so it drapes over like a saddle bag.

Herder kids are really strong. This little guy scooped up this lamb, nearly the size of himself, in one arm and posed with his bean plant in the other. Probably one of my favorite photos of all of them!

This family had found an orphaned foal a few days before. It was the cutest little thing, wandering around after us, nickering at us, flopping down to sleep next to their yurt, and tolerating lots of petting. When the time came for the garden photo it following it's 'herd' into the frame and the kids held it for the photo.

Gardens hanging from a shed.

An old couple with their nomadic garden. Another family looks after their animals (they're retired) so their gardens could be set lower than other families'. 

I got a few nice pictures of Demoiselle cranes!

Making the gardens together. 

Chingerel was cooing over this little filly even worse than me!

Stink-plant

It's been a long time since I last posted, but I come back to blogging with some exciting stories and cool photos :)

So the end of May saw me operating in a sort of methodically frantic manner to finish all the planters. I may not have learned to not bite off more than I can chew yet... anyways I was spending about 12 hours a day on the gardens, but I did manage to finish them all in the end! Here is what they look like fully assembled with a wooden frame:

 

I also planted some seeds so I would have seedlings to take out to my participants.

Some radish and turnip seedlings

With about 25 of these planters ready to go to my first site, I met my friend and translator Chingerel bright and early to arrange transportation the Mongolian way; flagging down passing cars on the street and asking if they'd be willing to cram the planters, seedlings, me, Chingerel, our supplies, and themself in their car and drive 5-7 hours outside the city over crumbling roads and paths that are little more than tire tracks through meadows and over mountains to find herders who may or may not have moved and who may or may not have cell phone coverage where they live. However, as this is Mongolia, drivers weren't too hard to find.

We set off to Arvaikheer, my third site, first. Since I didn't know quite what to expect when delivering the gardens I decided it would be best to go to the most recently visited.

I needn't have been nervous though because every single family was delighted by the arrival of their "nomadic" gardens. They thought they were cool! And to my surprise they readily strapped them up to the sides of their gers or hung them on the outside walls of their animal shelters and sheds. The best were the family with kids. I gave each kid a cup and let them choose a bean seed. My semester teaching kindergarten has given me a knack for getting kids excited about stuff that's not all that exciting on its own. So I turned planting beans into a game and by the end of it they were thrilled and convinced they'd gotten something between a new pet and a new toy. The big smiles on their faces made the whole thing worth it!

Garden on a ger! How cool is that?? Also note: Mongolians don't like to smile for photos, hence why everyone looks stony-faced and glum. They were just smiling mere minutes before!

This family decided to attach their gardens to their animal shelter. Most nomads' winter places have a permanent 3-walled barn structure to protect their animals.

All the littles ones with their bean-cups!

This family lived way over the mountains in the middle of nowhere (middle of nowhere for a nomad means even more the middle of nowhere than for the rest of us). They were so excited to see us that they insisted on having a good long chat, feeding us a meal, letting me ride their horses, and then taking pictures with their 1 year old daughter. Like most countryside Mongolian kids she will probably learn to ride at about the same time she learns to walk.

Attaching a garden.

On the way back we stopped at this lovely little marsh on the side of the road that was full of bird life. Many species of migratory water birds had made it their home for the summer. I saw a nice collection of cranes, geese, ducks, swans, and a stork!

And finally, I finish this post with an amusing story. At one family's place we drove up to their ger and upon opening the car doors were greeted with a wonderful herbal smell. A sort of minty-thyme scent carried on the warm wind. It smelled so fresh and nice! The herb was covering the ground and I picked a piece and asked Chingerel what it was. She promptly asked the herders, who sort of chuckled a little and then Chingerel explained that "the locals call it stink-plant"!

More blog posts will come soon about my second and third trips to deliver gardens :) Bayartai!

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.

Garden-making time!

Ack! Sorry again for the lack of blogging... when the posts are few and far between it's safe to assume that I'm super busy working on my project. So here's an update!

Since my last trip to the countryside my garden project has really taken off. I was considering 3 or 4 different portable garden designs but I've finally chosen one to mass produce and give to herders to test out. You can see what it's inspired by here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjItiepmPA0

Mine is a little different from the above. The watering system is manual (a.k.a. you pour the water in at the top and when it trickles through you catch it in a soda bottle at the bottom and then pour it back through the top), but otherwise it's pretty similar. I chose this design for a few reasons. First, the frame makes it sturdy and durable, which is important if it's going to be out on the steppe on top of a ger and moved around. Second, you can get all the materials in Mongolia for relatively low cost. So far the projected cost is about $10-$20 per garden, though I will know the exact numbers when it's finished. Also I like this design because it conserves water, which I think will be one of the determining factors in the success or usefulness of the gardens when they're used. Finally, I chose this design for cosmetic reasons. Herders already place large, square solar panels, and square wooden boxes to dry milk products on top of their gers, so I'm hoping this design won't be so bizarrely different from that. I'm hoping the sort of familiarity will make it less weird for herders who are trying out gardening for the first time.

So that is my plan and I have been hard at work making the gardens. I was able to negotiate some work space at the Agricultural University (not an easy task, I'll tell you), and have set up a sort of garden factory in a corner of a professor's lab. Between many trips to the hardware market district and the "black" market I've amassed almost all of the tools I need, plus the necessary hose tubing, etc. It was an interesting day when I went to the plumbing section and told them I needed 400 T-pipe pieces... It became even more interesting when a homeless guy tried to steal a bag of them when I was getting in a taxi and I ended up chasing him down the street. But aside from people thinking I'm an absolute crazy lady, things are going really well! At this point it's mostly just a tedious process of preparing all the parts of the gardens. Oh, and collecting plastic bottles... I need over 800 for all the gardens. A few days ago I scandalized the neighborhood by picking through the trash in the apartment courtyards and collecting bottles. It will probably be my main method for collecting bottles since I need so many. When I have enough bottles and all the parts of my gardens I'll begin assembling them, and then in early June I will distribute them to the families who have agreed to test them.

So that's what I've been up to here in Mongolia. I'm heading out for my final countryside trip in the next few days, provided the weather improves. Spring in Mongolia is a funny time, you can have hot sunny days next to dust storms rolling up from the Gobi, next to blizzard-like snow storms. If the weather is good, I'll be heading off to Arvaikheer by next week!

Countryside Research Trip 2

Hello again folks!

Since I last wrote I have planned and completed my second countryside research trip! woohoo! That's 2 of 3 initial trips completed. My plan is to try out my garden design with herders living in 3 different parts of Mongolia.

My first site, the Northern site, was interesting because it's a lush valley (by Mongolian standards) and the historical center of agriculture in Mongolia. Most of the people I interviewed had moved to this area from the western provinces anytime from last year to 30 years ago so they could take advantage of the good grazing land that wasn't being used for farming. I think it's a fascinating case study of the interaction between farmers and herders and how that might help or hurt my nomadic gardening effort.

The new site I visited is in the countryside around Undurkhaan city, to the east. This time it was just me and Khongor, my translator friend, so we were able to get it all done in 2 days. This is a completely different place both ecologically and culturally. I chose this site because a. it's the true steppe grasslands, a flat expanse of feathery golden grasses populated by ground squirrels and gazelles, and b. there is a paved road all the way to the city. This means it's easy enough to get back and forth between it (feasibility! always important!). In this Eastern site I found a very different picture emerging from the people I talked to. Most people were born and bred in Khentii province (Undurkhaan's province) and had lived there their entire lives. Most families had more livestock than the Northern families but fewer cows, were busier with their herding, and also were much more suspicious of my presence. Generally fewer people were interested in talking to me. Of course there were still some very warm and hospitable families, but it seemed to be the exception rather than the rule. Still, I was able to do 10 interviews and find 9 families willing to test out my garden. So that's really good!

Now, I am beginning to design and construct the gardens. I will let you all know how they're coming along. I'm also planning my 3rd trip to the countryside, out to the west to a town called Arvaikheer. Being on the edge of the Gobi, that will be another different and interesting site!

Stepperiders

Here's the second post to make up for not posting at all in about two weeks!

So I got back from the research trip on Wednesday, and then on Saturday I went out with a big group of Fulbrighters and friends to Stepperiders, a horse riding ger camp about an hour outside of UB. We split into two groups (there were 12 of us total) and went for a sort of countryside trail ride. Trail riding with Mongolian horses means that the horses more or less end up choosing the path, speed, and duration of the trip. I was lucky and got one of the horses who was more inclined to cooperate with his rider. He was a really good horse actually. Pleasant, eager to please, responsive and athletic... When we got off the steep mountainous part and made it to the gently rolling steppe, he pricked his ears up and cheerfully trotted at the head of the group. We stopped for a break at a well to water the horses and then mounted up again to head back. The horses were all a lot more excited about this part of the trip, the part where we went home.

My horse, who I named 'Toast', wanted nothing more than to gleefully gallop his heart out straight back to the camp. He plunged down into the dips in the landscape and then surged up the hills, snorting happily. At one point we were calmly cantering until Joe's horse broke into a gallop, and with a little squeeze of my heels Toast accepted the challenge. He lowered his head and threw himself forward, quickly catching up with Joe's horse until he was sailing past. Racing across the steppe on the back of a half-wild horse was wonderful and exhilirating!

The next morning we went for a hike around the area. I found some circular piles of stones which I think are ancient grave sites (they look similar to others I've seen in Mongolia), and saw some giant vultures, and even a showdown between a crow and a vulture in the sky! (the crow drove off the vulture). Overall it was another great trip to the countryside: good company, beautiful landscapes, and fun activities.

The group of us

View from the top of the mountain

Me and Toast! and everyone!

Stopping for water