Mar 17 2007
FAQ about me and Mongolia
This is something I figured I’d send out so that people could rtfa first:
I leave Seattle on the 21st of March for Thailand for my grandmother’s funeral
I arrive back in the US (first DC) on the 30th of March
I leave for Mongolia on June 1st.
Mongolians speak Mongolian, which is in the Altaic language group, which is related to Turkic, Siberian, and sometimes Korean and Japonic groups. I’m a bit vague as it gets into linguistic things after that.
I go into 3 months of training in-country, which includes homestay, intesive language and culture training, and stuff. I then get placed somewhere, partially depending on how I do in the training, I believe. So, I only know that what I will be doing will be health-related, but not much more than that. Speculatively, I would hazard that Mongolia + Health could include things like nutrition, rural health care, alcoholism (though I hear this is a taboo topic), and HIV/AIDS, but I’m not sure. Women’s status there is relatively good (compared to my last placement attempt in Turkmenistan), so I am feeling ok about this one.
If you are interested in what other people are doing in Mongolia or pictures already there, here are a few links that I’ve been following on and off: flickr photos from Khovd (West), the flickr person’s blog, and another blog.
Believe I will make this both a blog entry and a page so that people can refer to it easily 
