Of Raisins and Rocks

Today, I was unintentionally blindsided. Miscommunication is bound to happen when working in two languages (i.e. one person speaks only English and the the other speaks only Mongolian), and “awkward silence” doesn't even begin to describe what happened. This afternoon, my counterpart and I kicked off our weekly sessions to train a sampling of the high school students on life skills: self-esteem, communication, managing emotions, etc. We had agreed to have the first session be just an introduction and not jump into the material until the following week. While I have more experience with these trainings, I'm nowhere near capable of presenting this information in Mongolian and my assignment is to increase capacity in my counterparts, so the plan was for me to be present, but my counterpart (CP) would give the lesson. Walking into the classroom, the sea of faces looked out at us, and I stood by idly counting and observing the students while the introduction was presented. Some faces I recognized as having been in the last council meeting when I embarrassed myself by way of an improvised Mongolian speech.

Ideally, I'd like to have groups of twenty or less for these sessions, but I negotiated down to two sessions of 20-25 each. After the handful of stragglers came in a bit late, the head count stood at 53. “A bit high, but once we split them – because this was apparently a merged introductory session – that's just over what we'd decided on,” I thought to myself. Suddenly, my CP fell silent and gestured for me to come over to the podium to speak. About what? That was my question too. My first thought was to give the introductory speech about myself, but most of this crowd had already heard it. After a few moments, she audibly whispered from 2 meters away, “Life skill lesson (in Mongolian)” and gave a little 'go ahead' gesture. I had no materials with me, I wasn't prepared for this, and I was thoroughly puzzled because they wouldn't understand an English lesson and my spoken Mongolian is unforgivable. I know I passed through a few levels of blushing right then. We exited the room, leaving the students rather amused, to find an English teacher that could quickly help us figure out what went wrong. She had thought that I would give the first lesson in English since she hadn't done one before and I had thought that 1) she was going to give all lessons in Mongolian, and 2) this week was only an introduction. We agreed to go with my initial plan to try to somewhat redeem ourselves for the day, and I brought my laptop with the lesson information with me. As she read everything on the screen, I didn't have the heart to point out that she was presenting about 60% correct information. For all she and the students knew, everything was correct and we needed to end on a good note.



Afterwards, I asked who the extra students were. The breakdown she gave me totaled 43 and I questioned the mystery ten. Once I confirmed that we were indeed splitting them into two groups starting next week, the requested total number of students went up to sixty, which I rejected. We have a new plan for the next one. It will be better.




So, why the title “Of Raisins and Rocks”? Raisins in Mongolia are tasty and relatively cheap, but come at a risk. Through whatever mystery process used to harvest raisins, small rocks are frequently bagged alongside the sweet dried fruits. Being that the raisins are all sizes and colors, sometimes it's hard to find all the rocks without becoming part of the statistic that makes raisin consumption the highest ranked cause for dental emergencies in Mongolia Peace Corps Volunteers. I generally grab a handful, then, inspecting along the way, push them individually to my other hand before tossing them in my mouth. Today's lesson was an undetected rock. Sometimes, you double check before enjoying that snack, but that oddly-shaped, dark purple “raisin” escapes detection just long enough to jar you. There will be more like this, so the best I can do is to keep calm and withdraw the bite before it cracks my teeth. Over-stretched metaphor complete. Most of you are probably due for a dental checkup. Don't forget to floss.