Minnie umd khaana baihn ve?!‎

This week’s rather boring. Not much going on, learned about something awesome though. Mongolian kids play what can only be dubbed as “The Mongolian kicking game”. The rules are as follows, you can’t kick someone who’s ducking down, and you can only kick while in the air. I played a few rounds with one of the ex-football players in my district on the sand volleyball court 😀. Also, my companion taught me a love of slide tackling in soccer, as well.

Actually, the district is a rather motley crew.

We have the most random assortment of people and backgrounds, and we’re constantly getting banged up.

For 9 elders, we’ve had

• 2 visits to the BYU health center
• 1 trip to the hospital
• 9 stitches (a face plant in four square and an unfortunate incident with a shampoo bottle)
• 6 bloody noses
• 3 prescriptions of antibiotics
• 4 volleyball spike blocks by means of the face
• 1 hacky sack to the eye

and everyone is usually bleeding from somewhere by the end of the day. Our teachers admire us for it though. They say that nothing’s worse in Mongolia than an elder that gets slowed down by injury. The people are just tough, and so is the environment. So the fact that we are never running at 100% and still keep chugging along is a good thing.

Random request list

• Photos. They’re more for icebreakers than anything. Just some family and friends, maybe some of the places we’ve been.
• Music. Classical is a given, but if you could get a hold of some Mongolian like we were watching on YouTube, that would be awesome.
• My hand wraps. I’ve been alternating in gym between balling out at the field or training in the room. The compression would be nice.
• Stewed Monkey Heads.

A Few More Details

This week was relatively boring, about the only point of any interest was that the whole district wore our bed sheets like robes down to the linen exchange. And I did a side jump kick on the serve in volley ball from 60 feet behind the line, aced the kill (i.e. no one hit it) 😀. Thought about sending some more Mongolian in the email, but typing in the phonetics takes forever, but I may just write some with translation.

The language is going well. I think my vocabulary is hovering around 300 words or so. I can hold a half-way descent conversation, and about the same with lessons one and two from Preach My Gospel. Mongolian is far more straight forward than English. It’s possible to phrase some of the ridiculously long sentences that we like to do in English, but it sometimes means tripling the length of words with suffixes and object markers. I like it a lot, but adjusting my speech sometimes takes a second. Also know how to talk trash.

Been senior companion for the last few weeks. It’s interesting with three people. One is used to being the oldest of a 7 kid Utah family, so sometimes he gets a little frictiony about having a 20 year old Bama boy be in charge. He was also senior companion first, and may have thought it was going to stay that way the whole three months. It’s odd, there isn’t even any power that comes with being senior comp, it’s all about service anyways. Oh well, he’s a good guy, and we’ve been grinding it out 🙂.

Off to go wash my clothes. Bayartai

Oh, paax can translate like yuck, gross, or disgusting. And Ashgyui dee literally means way better than expected, but it’s used kind of like awesome, sweet, etc.

Breath In & Breath Out

Got sick this last week. They ended up sending my down to the BYU health center for X-rays and blood work (they put me one of those cough guard masks, too. I think it scared the people in the lobby more than me). The doctor never told me what was wrong, but I ninja-ed a look at my write up, and I had a fever of 102, some kind of bacterial infection, and my diaphragm had spasmed. So they gave me one of those broad spectrum antibiotic treatments, claratin, and then they stuck me on a artificial steroid/adrenalin (they didn’t really say, I’m just guessing from a glance off the vial) for 20 minutes. Yeah…. that sucked. My pulse went from 80 to 140-50, and my bp went from around 110/70 to 130/90. I could hear it in my ears. So, that freaked the doctor out, and they kept me under observation until all the readings stopped going up about 15 minutes later. Was about ready to freak out on someone. It was liked being forced past all those levels of calm I keep up. Spent most of the rest of the day in class twitching with my head covered trying not to get agitated. One of my teachers, Sister Infanger, said that sometimes the Lord lets these things happen in the MTC so you’re aware of them in the field. I’ll keep that in mind. But, I’m all better now. The nuclear option antibiotic did it’s work, and the only lasting side affect of the inhaler was that I had cold sweats and shakes the next day, so I slept a lot. One more check on the “why I’ll never do drugs” list. Bore my testimony in Mongolian at the health center, too (We’re trying to get to 10,000 total).
 
Everything’s peachy other than that. Being sick finally made me relent and get a priesthood blessing from my district, and I sealed the blessing on one of my companions a few days earlier. The language is coming along, I can teach any part of the first lesson on the spot without needing to prepare sentences beforehand. My conversational Mongolian is a little shaky, but it’s mostly needing to learn vocab. Well, times almost out.  Bug people I know to use DearElder.com

First contact, part deux

My first contact email was somewhat more involved. I got THIS:

Subject: sonin yu ve?

Sain bain. Bi both adz jarglthtai. Minie xhamthratch goyah. Xooth both…. paax. Bi Mongolth xhethex bixhej, ashgyui deeh!

Bayahrtai.

The only bit I’ve been able to translate is the subject line, which basically translates to “Wazzup?”
I wrote back:

Bi mongol khel medekhgui!!
 
 

…which translates to “But I don’t SPEAK Mongolian!!”

My son, the wise-ass. I’m so proud!

Small World

Yeah, thursday is P-day .  .  . I have letters and photos I’ve been meaning to send back, but I havent bought any stamps yet. As far as a shopping list: Camera with cards, floride rinse, a box to send the palm charger back, a bathrobe, contact solution/saline, and a cat named Fifi. And could you send me the email addies for murphy and lorraine?
 . . . 
Oh yeah, I found Elder Ficklin. He’s going to Mexico, we snagged a couple pictures. He looks so much like his dad.