Ploofle

Training of trainers and orientation days are finished, and I’m back in the capital for the first full weekend “off” I’ve had here. Course, I’m working on other things – friends of mongolia newsletter, thesis, IT stuff, banana bread? – but at least it’s a change. It’s pretty quiet here due to world cup, but the most important development is that there is a korea-based donut chain with a branch in Mongolia. I haven’t been there yet, but it’s a major goal for next weekend.

The other thing is that there’s a place that makes pho here – Kenny Rogers Roasters(? which is similar-ish to Boston Market). It’s not tooo bad, but could be improved.

Randomly, the other person in the coffeeshop here is a lama who I assume is Tibetan as I can’t understand what he’s saying on skype. He also produced from somewhere in his robes an iPad and a 13″ macbook.

In other other news, no one has called me since I got here – I know I’m hard to  get to, but huh.

Tags: mongolia, work

aaaah work aah. Today’s the first day off in a bit and I’m working on other work. Baah.

On the other hand, walking around checking housing for the trainees was fun – and made me miss my host family. The training site soum we were at was so peaceful and the drive there was beautiful. Sigh.

Today is Children’s Day here, which means way too much sugar, theater shows, movies, parents spending time with their kids, and in all likelihood tantrums.

The trash trucks still sound like ice cream trucks.

Tags: mongolia, work

I’m tired, but damn, was it tasty…that’s all I’ve eaten for the past 2 days – I’m kind of hoping there are still some leftovers to eat tomorrow too!

The local chicken, after all was said and done, was closer to a cornish game hen size, while the chicken that was brought from UB was a normal-sized monstrosity of a bird.  Bayan-Ulgii (a province further north) folks came in and one of em is an excellent cook and put together three amazing casseroles – corn, broccoli, and green bean.  We then had a huge bowl of stuffing, two large bowls of mashed potates, homemade applesauce and pseudo-cranberry sauce, glazed carrots, biscuits, and corn bread.  There were 5 pies of 4 different kinds – lemon meringue, pecan, pumpkin (2), and apple.  All of the crusts turned out great this time and the meringue was amazingly easy due to a pinch cream of tartar from a package Bonnie sent me. I’m going to need to make more lemon meringue here – I have all the ingredients and it’s only 3 eggs – it was the first pie to go too.

After the main food, about half of the group of 12 was either laying on the ground or groaning about how they may be sick. Or both.  So I consider that to be the sound of success.  A couple hours later, after eating pies (we had about 1/2 pie baked for every person there), many laid down/groaned again.  Today when we came back over to eat leftovers, same thing.  This makes me pretty happy

Still, we’re only making slow progress through the food – I may reacquire the cranberry sauce from Jen if there’s not a likelihood it’ll get finished – I made 3 good-sized jars’ worth and I don’t know if we even got through one yet.

I leave for UB this Tuesday but still haven’t finished everything I wanted to do – like laundry, cleaning, actual work…so…time to turn in so as to do it tomorrow…

Tags: food, work

So, I believe the baby-in-progress count for people I know pretty well is at 3.  Including people I don’t know as well the count doubles.  Ugh.  What’s with the babies!?  Am I missing out on something?

Jen’s cat is behind my computer and poking his head around the corner of the screen comically…

Oh, and work – I’m doing in-service training for the 19s and that means content creation.  How one “teaches” peer education in a 45-minute slot and “research methods” in 1-1/2 hours I dunno, but it’ll get done somehow.  I’m pretty excited about this stuff, though, as I’ll get to interact with youth and business dev people in addition to health volunteers – plus all their counterparts.

The side effect of this is that there are several things “I must do” at work before I am “allowed” to go to UB.  And they’re all time-consuming.  Fund Peace Corps project is taking up a goodly amount of time, I’m reinforcing new contacts my program staff introduced me to while they were here, and thesis is again getting pushed to the end of the queue due to this stuff.  Plus we need to kill a chicken or two sometime this week for Thanksgiving, so Fri night/Sat are definitely booked.  I’m supposed to fly out this Tues, the 2nd…ugh.  How will I get all of this done?  And I’ve heard that the airline flight schedule will change on the 1st, so it’s possible that I’m not leaving the 2nd.

Ah, Mongolia.  And life.  Thank you all

And I’m hungry.

Tags: babies, don't eat babies, food, work

This flowed from various conversations I’ve had today as well as a slashdot article called “The Stigma of a Tech Support Background.” I’m sympathetic to this person’s job woes, though it’s not a great time to be looking in the US and as several commenters suggested perhaps it’s him, not the job. From that post, anyway, I got a few books to look into concerning interviewing.

In my field, whenever I breathe “computer science” I get back a flurry of responses roughly like “bioinformatics! data manipulation!!” Any further discussions about social sciences, behaviour change, or structural health issues are swept away, much to my dismay.

Don’t get me wrong – I like data. I like learning new programming tricks, or connecting disparate data sets, or arguing that all this data isn’t worth a thing without a way to easily access it. Data helps make good decisions. But, for all the interest I hold in it, data’s only truly neat to me if it distinctly relates to people and change. This change could be a new approach, a new program, or just a better understanding, but it needs to be rooted in something that affects us.

Fundamentally, I like getting things done and seeing a change. I especially like getting things done that help ^[1] people, irrespective of what shape that help takes. I know that to get more things done, you have to work with (more) people. So I’m going to work with more people. I don’t like to admit it but I actually rather like people – albeit in some cases only in a wtf!? sort of way.

One of the comments on the slashdot post brought up these points:

Try telling your prospective employers these three things :
1) If I don’t know what you need me to know, by the end of the day I will learn it.
2) If my project isn’t done by the end of my workday, then my workday doesn’t end.
3) I want this job, and am willing to work my ass off to get it.

#1 and #3 are exactly how I feel a job should be; #2 is a bit painful but I tend to err on the end of long workdays rather than short anyway. Unfortunately, most people only focus on this flavor of work style in service-oriented jobs such as IT when this philosophy actually applies to all work, in particular people-centric work. With IT, ok, your computer’s down. With people, there is real shit going down. It’s why I would find it frustrating at times to work at a deliberate, pre-planned-3-years-ago pace.

I want to see things not only get done, but in the best/most appropriate way possible, and that means I’ll get passionate even about plans that are seemingly set in stone. Part of what I’ll bring to a job is my own self, and that means needing to be convinced that what we’re doing will work in the best interests of people or if not working hard to make sure it becomes so. If my job truly cares about people, I’ll care about my job. Though it would be nice if the job gave me partner and health benefits…

Other random bits related to work – your career decisions are only as good as the information and preparation you had at the time of the decision. If it doesn’t work out, don’t mull over the event; try to figure out what didn’t work and be ready for the next go-’round. There’s not enough time in the world for people to be rehashing old work decisions, of all things. If I’m going to think about the past, it’s going to be about non-work things: times I was happy, things I miss, tasty secret ice cream, that kind of stuff.

Anyway, hope I have a job that fits all this someday.

[1]Yes, yes, “help” as in facilitating or supporting in a culturally sensitive/empowering manner, not what I filter as appropriate change or next steps, as that’s not really nice. Among other things. [back]

Tags: work