keep your face out of my office!

Another thing here, that is weird, is that Mongolians seem to love opening doors and looking in.  I sit in the office, working, or having my 11 O'clock snack, or whatever, and every few minutes, someone opens the door, looks in, and then closes the door again.  At first I found it a little unsettling, it is constant, I mean literally every to minutes, the door opens, a random pokes their head in and stares for a few moments, then shuts door again.  I just ignore them now.

this is where I work

Just a quick post, I am at work, and I feel so ill.  Head pounding, sinuses blocked and sore, eyes fuzzy.... yes, poor me indeed.
So I am just going to show photos of my work, then go home.

this is what I see as I am walking down my street

The Hospital

Making lunch.

My desk, and my interpreter, lovely Zolo.

So - thats it, you can see where I live, where I work and where I hang out on this blog now.  The next posts are going to be about various things in UB.  Buses, Restarants (PECTOPAH) and Mongolians, and the music I have heard, and the Ballet I went ot see, and the Neurosurgery Department where I tart wrk tomorrow, and the injection class I sat in on, where I watched 13 nursing students inject eachother in the bum wth novocaine, and other things - there is always something utterly random just around the corne here.....and I will tell you all (all 8 of you - come on, if you read it, become a follower, it makes me look more popular) all about it very soon, just as soon as I feel human again and find my brain. 

I'm going to be on the telly!!

So, there was a house party friday night, where I met this really cool girl, she had broken all her bones in an accident some years prevously, and I was fascinated to hear all about it. 

This week at work (phew, getting up to date!) has been quite eventful.... I have been being taken around the hospital, to view the departments.  I have a uniform now - it makes me feel a bit mre official, despite the fact that it is more reminiscent of a beauticians outfit than a nurses.....

The hospital is very clean, there are cleaners everywhere scrubbing every inch of the place.  However,the resources and facilities are very basic.  The beds are scrawny springy contraptions, with mismatched bedding, sagging ominously in the middle.  The wards are quite stark, the lack of equiptment is startling.  I am shown the "injection room" - the equivalent of our treatment or CSSD room, there is quite literally, nothing in it, aside from a small trolley, with a cute assortment of bottle, and a CARDBOARD sharps bin.  The infection control risk assessment health and safety nurse impulses I never knew I had start fizzing and popping.

the nurses look very swish, their uniforms are beautifully laundered (not like mine! I am a disgrace!) and they are wearing high heels and immaculate make up (again, not like me, I look like I got dragged through a hedge backwards!).  But I am unable to ascertain what they are actually doiing, they bustle and they hustle and they fustle, but I cant see what is actually happening.

I am taken to see their "poorly patients" and I wantch as they clean and dress a grade two ressure sore.  Again, inside my head the "project 2000" in me is screaming "noooooooooo".  But I stand mute, and when asked my opinion, givea neutral response, I advise turns and fluids.  I begin to concoct a training session on pressure area care in my head as I am taken round other departments. 

On the ground floor is outpatients.  I am taken to a small kiosk where a woman sits with a very strange apparatus in front of her.  It is a huge glass jar, stoppered with a rubber bung, out of which come two rubber tubes.  In the jar is what looks like frog spawn.  After an elaborately sign languaged inquiry, I am told it is egg white and oxygen, and people are lingin up to buy a cup of it for it's healing properties.  I am taken to the front of the queue and given a cup of froth and a spoon.  It tastes quite sweet and frothy.  I eat it all up and say "mmm".

the rest of my time I spend in the office, it is very peceful and pleasant, and my colleagues cook a meal at lunch time, using a large rice cooker, in which they first cook rice, before setting it aside and frying mutton and vegetables to eat with the rice.  It is always very tasty, and at other times there are cakes and bread and tea to have.  If we are alone in the office, Z goes to the shop and buys us Mantuu, steamed bread with salami sausage in the middle.  Oh I eat well at work!

One day I wake to my alarm, and reach out to press snooze, as usual.  Only I dont press snooze, I unwittingly turn it off.  When I wake - sleepily thinkng , hmm that seemed like a long five minutes - I find it is 8.05am.  I am due at work at 8.20.  After staring in disbelief at the time, wasting precious seconds, I leap out of bed, into my clothes, out of the door and into a taxi.  Chigeerei! I say, straight ahead!  I tell him when to Baruun gar teeshei eegeere (take the right hand turn) and we are soon at teh hospital.  I am denied entry to the lift by the very stern lift attendant, so I run up the 5 flights of stairs, falling in to the office at 8.30.  On time, but resembing Worzel gummage on a bad day.

I have barely got my breath back when I am told I need a photo for my ID badge, and a camera flashes in my face.  oh dear I think, my vanity stinging, that wont be a good photo, but never mind, almost no one will see it.

I become aware of some excitement in the office, and I am pulled down the corridor being told through giggles that I am to "make a drama".  I am propelled onto a ward where I am aghast to see a film crew.  My instructions are to pretend to discuss a set of notes with another nurse.  this I do with aplomb, having done Am Dram before (daaahling).  But after they have finished filming my boss comes over and is fiddling with the front of my tunic.  I realise my button has been undone, and I have just been filmed with my bra on display.  Wonderful.  But worse is to come.

We then have to all walk down the corridor together, with my boss nudging me saying "we're like top models" and my interpreter in fits of giggles I give in and start laughing, turning just intime to see tha the camera is still on us.  Oh well.  I am soon released form "set" and go off with Z to a "physical meditation" session we have been invited to participate in.  It is very calming and soothing, we do gentle exercises, it is somewhere between tai chi and yoga and five rhythms hippie movement class.  I am feeling relaxed.  Until the door opens and the film crew burst in.

So - fame and fortune here I come - I am to be on a TV show, I dont know whichm what channel or when, but I am just waiting for the autograph requests to start.....

Dancing Salsa to a Phillipino rock band singing cheesy pop covers at a mongolian night club

So - that week was a bit of a write off, I graduated languge school, and had the worst sore throat I have ever had.  SO by friday I was ready to party.  four of us went to this club we had heard of called Strings, where there was a resident band.  We pid 8,000 MNT (a lot) to get in, and found a table.  The music was fun, the band was energetic and E taught me salsa so we danced all night.

I had to move house the next day, and I dont know what time I got to bed, but it was late, and I had to take E along with me to the apartment for moral support.  The place was empty and grubby, and the bed made me literally shudder, and I almost cried.  However, I pulled myself together, bought some bleach, and some colourful material and I girlified that pace right up.  Check it out.

So - settled in to the flat....next step was starting work.  I had met my interpreter at a work shop the previous week, we had arranged hat she would meet me at my flat and take me to work, as I had no idea where it was.  5 Minutes before she was due to meet me, she texted me saying she couldnt meet me.  Uh Oh.  I went out and jumped in a taxi, but couldnt rememeber the mongolian name of my hospital, i could only say hospital, so the taxi driver took me to a hospital....the wrong hospital....I rang my boss and asked her to tell the taxi driver where to go, and I eventually made it to work.

I LOVE my work.  I LOVE IT!  I am so lucky!  I have a lovely desk, in a lovely office, with lovely women.  My interpreter, Z, and I spent the week bonding, and I love her too, even though she dropped me in it that first day - its water under the bridge now.  I also LOVE my boss, she is amazing.  I admire her very much.

That first week, not a lot happened, oh, except for being asked to make a small presentation about what nursing is like in the UK to give to "some nurses".  I duly wrote the presentartion, and as I was being hustled along a corridor to give it, asked, um, exactly how many people am I presenting this too....oh, about 250 came the flippant reply, just as we turned into a huge room, with the 250 nurses sitting bored and chattering.

Well, I just had to take it in my stride, walk confidently up to the lectern and tell 'em about myself and nursing in the UK.

By friday I was exhausted, I had not anticipated how draining it is to be trapped in a language bubble, its a struggle every day to understand what is going on and to make myself understood.  Although I love Z, she was not so good that first week about interpreting....a rapid conversation would happen in Mongolian, and I would look pleadingly at her throughout, waiting for a scrap of information as to what was going on.  "what did they say?" I asked. "oh.....yes." would be the reply.  For the first few days "yes" was the answer to every what, why, where and when question.  So I arranged an informal meeting with another volunteer and her interpreter, a more mature woman (Z is very young and this is her first job) who has been a health interpreter for several years.  I engineered a conversation betwen her and Z about therole of an interpreter, and the particular challenges of working in healthcare.

I also spent most evenings during the week at various social events.  This is the week that all the VSO's working in diferent Aimags were leaving, so it was a leaving meal out every night!  I was sensible though, and would have no beer and go home early.  Mostly.

Priscilla forgets her pants, and other stories

Ok ok ok - I know, I havent written for ages, I have been so busy, life's a constant whirl.

A brief account of the last week in the guesthouse, or the big brother house as we all called it.  I have language lessons for the last week, and I scored major points by going in when I was ill, and still being great at mongolian.  Although I am quite annoyed with the rumour mill at the moment, apparently one of the stories going around about me is that I was top of the class.  Booya.  Here I am at school on the last day, and getting my certificate.

This week wasnt that exciting as I was struck down with a lurgy, we had been taking i in turns to be ill in the BB  house, and this was my week.  However there was one nutty night and morning.  For some reason the BB house was filled with steam on evening, it was weird, like mist inside.  thick mist.  then the lights went out.  they came on and off again a few times through out the evening, and eventually we decided to call it a night and go to bed, but just then the door burst open and in fell the philipinos, they'd been taken out by some mongolians and had clearly been plied with vodka, they were hilariously drunk, and being very sweet and funny.  They eventually let me go to bed, where I fell into a deep sleep, to be woken by shoting and banging.  Seems the boyfriend of the girl working at the guesthouse had turned up at 3am, drunk, and with some grievance.  they had a loud fight before she eventually hit him over the head and pushed him bodily out of the house. 

the next mornig i woke with my throat on fire and my head pounding, I croaked to the others that I couldnt go to school today, and they went off without me.  I felel back to sleep and was woken later on by a film crew breaking the door of my bedroom off its hinges. 

Oh, and the next day, when we got the school bus, Em came running up saying wait wait, Priscilla forgot her coat!  as she climbed onto the bus she added "and her pants!"

Skulls in the street and the Embassy Cat

Wow, it has been a whole week since I last wrote, and what a week it has been.  Last time I wrote I was reluctant to go to the social evening, but it turned out to be a lot of fun.  We went to a Hot pot restaurnt, which was a huge place where each table, or set of tables had its own kind of wicker gazebo, and each person had their own wee gas burner and wee saucepan of soup.  We then ordered baskets of vegetbles, wonderfully colourful collections of spinach, lettuce, pak choi, a variety of exotic mushrooms, chinese leaf and sweet potato.  I went and sat with a group of lads who were ordering beer, as I could tell that was where I would fine my kindred brethren, and sure enough they were funny and irreverant.  K and I went to the pub with them afterwards, and I finally felt like myself for a while, sitting in a pub cracking jokes round the table is my bag.

Instead of going to language shcool during the week, we were attending sessions at VSO designed to introduce us to living and working in Mongolia.  I must admit I got very frustrated with these sessions, as many of them were - shall we say - superfluous....

However on wednesday I went with a current volunteer to a Community Health Clinic in the north of the city, in a Ger district, which is like some kind of utterly surreal shanty town.....a huge area of gers and hastily constructed minature houses, made of bricks and resembling a playmobile village.  The snowy mountains loom impressively behind the blanket of eccentric structures, and the coal smoke that streams from every chimney catches in my throat and makes me cough in a way I cant remember coughing before.

I sit in on a training session, given by an american nurse, to a disparate group of Mongolian Community Nurses.  They are a mixed bunch, there are 15 of them, and none looks under 30.  They are not smiling, they look tired and indifferent.  I introduce myself in Mongolian, and they barely evn look at me.  However, they appear atentive to the lecture, and take notes, though no one asks any questions.  Most seem to lose interest about half way through, one nods off, and another is staring in a manner which although not hostile, is not friendly.... I begin to worry about my own job, but then I notice that the American Nurse has made a sttement about normal sinus rhythm, which the Mongolian nurses are questioning, there is much talking and gesticulating, and I am reassured that there can indeed be a lively interaction and that they were all listening afterall.

On wednesday evening we had another "social evening", a gatherine of most of the VSO volunteers, as well as those from a German NGO, and an Australian NGO.  The event was held at an art galley, and there was a very random buffet, of scotch eggs and mince pies.  Yes, Mince pies.  K and E and me did a bit of networking, there was an indepth conversation about the Mongolian Cashmere Industry, and we also got persuaded to come to the Mongolian Winter Olympics.  We then went with the boys to the pub, were there was much raucousness and laughter, and beer.  We then went to an "after party" at an apartment, and that is wen the vodka was brought out, and where my decorum left the building. 

Suffice it to say, that the next day, K and I were feeling quite worse for wear, yet we had a 9am start at the VSO office, from where we were taken to visit the UN Medical Centre, where we are to go for medical treatmetn should we need it.  There is a security office one must go through first, before entering the compound, and I just find the Mongolian men in their Soviet style uniforms so surreal.  They have extremely smart military style jackets, big black boots, and a high fur hat.  they look very stern, and some of them have guns.

We met with the UN Doctor and found out that the pollution in UB is 12 times the WHO safe levels, so we are strongly advised to go to the countryside every weekend to clean our lungs.  We can also expect mild anaemia while we adapt to living at high altitude.  Being short of breath has become as normal as - well, breathing. 

After the UN we were taken to the SOS clinic, an incredibly swish private medical centre where we will be treated should we be so unfortunate as to seriously injure ourselves, or become desparately ill.  by this time K and I were flaking badly, and becoming very grumpy, so we clamoured loudly for lunch, and off we all trouped to a vegan cafe called The Loving Hut.  It is a chain of restaurnts run by a Vietnamese woman who has set herself up as a Guru.  In the corner of the cafe was a TV screen, showing, on a loop, this woman preaching to her disciples.  Our food was very tasty, and served on heat shaped plates.

Fortified somewhat by this sustenance, our bedraged group were then taken to the British Embassy, to be introduced, or something, I am afraid I fell asleep.  We didnt see a lot of the Embassy, from the front door we were led to a sitting room, with large sofa's and arm chairs, and a big painting of the Queen,and randomly, a sleepy cat.  For two hours we were told about the political situation in Mongolia, and other stuff that I cant remember, now and again I would look up to see Ihab laughing at my pathetic attempts to stay awake and look attentive.

When we were finally liberated from our edification session, we straggled home.  On the way we saw a tramp who had either passed out or died, half on the pavment, half in the road.  My first instinct was to go to him, and at least get his head out of the way of passing cars, there were people all around, just ignoring him, and the traffic mercifully swerved to avoid him.  I was torn up inside about it, but my companions reassured me that the police would come and pick him up, and that it was better for us not to interfere in any way, being foreign and female.

That evening I turned the guesthouse siting room into a den of iniquity, we pulled the furniture around until we had created a card table, and I taught Ihab and K how to play poker.  Then we danced to 90's Reggae and laughed at eachothers increasingly comic bogling.

Friday I had a meeting with my "counterpart" and programme manager, in which I was briefed on my job.  I m to work from 8.20am to 4.20pm, and will be sharing an office with up to 5 others.  I will have an interpreter from 30hours per week.  I am expected to spend the frst month going around the different departments of the Hospital performing a needs assessment, so that I can then create pertinent training sessions.  I will deliver these sessions to small groups of nurses in the designated trianing room.  I will also give lectures to larger groups of nurses.  I said I would also give english lessons, and that these would be open to anyone at all.

That evening K and Ihab and I went to the flat of a current VSO, and had a very nice spaghetti bolognaise.  We then wet to join the lads in the pub, and more beer was quaffed.  Everyone went off around midnight to a club, but K and I stayed on in the pub talking talking talking until the bar staff very politely informed us that the bar was now closed - looking around us we realised we were the last people there and the staff were startig to put on their coats.  We marched home hand in hand, falling into bed around 3am.

Saturday we were soo tired and ropey, ut a trip to a mad cafe called "American Burger and Fries" sorted us out.  the burgers are better than I have had anywhere, and the proprieter is an American Mongolian who absolutely loves international volunteers, we get 10% off our bill!!

After this divine lunch, we went to the Cinema, which was an experience!  It is very western - gaudy and noisy inside, with arcade games and even a simulator.  Inside, taking our seats early to avoid the crush, I found the Mongolian Cinema ettiquette, or lack thereof, absolutley hilarious.  They talk, walk around, take calls on their mobiles, and bring their small children along for the ride.  We were watchig Wolfman, hollywood pap, that gave me about 12 heart attacks.  A small child in the row in fromt of us began wailing an was taken out by its unruffled father.

After the film, K and I were finished, so tired, so we went back to the guesthouse, stopping to get some food in a small MOngolian cafe.  portion sizes here are ENOURMOUS.  We orderd vegetable noodle stirfry, and were presented with two mounds of food that would have fed five people.  As we we leaving, and leaving a lot of our mea, I was feeling guilty for wasting this food, but physically nable to fit any more of it in my stomach, so I was gratified upon chancing to look back as I walked out of the door, to see that a street urchin had slid immediately into my vacated seat and was shovelling my left overs into his mouth with gusto.

Home we finally reached, and heard that one fo the VSO's had slipped on the ice and hurt her shoulder badly.  I am looking forward ot when the ice melts. 

Right, there is a very noisy french girl in this cafe, who is chain smoking fags and I have written so much I doubt anyone will read this far to see my sign off.  Farewell until I have more to say.  Oh yeah, the skulls in the title - every here and there I see a skull in the street, an animal skull i hasten to add, perhaps a goat or something.  The other day i was walking along when I saw  man carrying two cow heads.  Literally just carrying two cow heads, by the ears, it was ok - if a bit surreal - to see the front of their faces, but as we passed eachother adjacently, I was greeted with the severed side, blood vessels and muscle tissue, quite gross.

Such sights I see, its never dull. I love this city, despite the daily risk of suffication. Laters xx