We spent our mornings teaching, each of us in charge of our own classrooms I taught the tenth grade. Nonetheless, we shared our daily struggles to come up with a lesson plan for our students, to communicate with our host families and taxi drivers, to determine what exactly was on our lunch plates and to figure out how to decline politely the excess amount of food presented to us by our host families. Each of us came from different backgrounds and had different reasons for travelling to Mongolia. We were quite a diverse group of volunteers: three American, one Spanish, one Chinese and two Irish students. ![]() Known as the “Land of the Eternal Blue Sky,” Mongolia is a sovereign landlocked country between Russia and China, with the 18th largest land area in the world and a minuscule population of three million, half of which live in the country’s capital, Ulaanbaatar. Not only do Mongolians not speak Chinese, Mongolia is not a part of China. When I told my family and friends in China that I was going to Mongolia, they all responded with, “Oh, they speak Chinese there, right?” Other than that, I knew nothing about the country or its culture. Growing up in China, I had visited the grassy steppes of Inner Mongolia, an autonomous province of China, and heard legends of Genghis Khan, the great Khan who conquered the largest area of land in history. This past summer, I signed up on a whim to volunteer for Learning Enterprises to teach English in Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia. ![]() “Great, your first hour in the country, and you have already disrespected the local customs,” I thought to myself as I began to question my decision to spend six weeks in Mongolia. “Please do not put your hat on the floor,” my host sister, Khaliun, says to me as she picks up my blue Patagonia hat from the floor and carefully places it on the nightstand next to my bed. A traditional Mongolian ger in Terelj, on the outskirts of Ulaanbaatar | COURTESY STELLA CAI
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