Your Assignment

Country: Mongolia
Program: Community Economic Development (CED)
Job Title: Business Advisor or Business Development Specialist
Pre-Service Training (in Mongolia): June 5 – August 13, 2010
Dates of Service: August 13, 2010 – August 12, 2012

There it is.  Katie and I started our Peace Corps applications in April 2009 and received our invitations in January 2010.  The interim was filled with countless hours of desperate searching on the Peace Corps Wiki site, Facebook, and other applicants’ blogs for clues about our destination.  We were pretty sure it would be Mongolia based on all the evidence, so it wasn’t much of a surprise when we got the  news.  Still, it felt great to move past the applicant phase.

You may be wondering what it’s like getting ready to spend 27 months in Mongolia.  Well, I’ll tell you this: when you know you’ll be leaving the country in four months and will not have access to America’s wondrous array of material goods, you start making decisions differently.

I give you Exhibit A:

Red Hot & Blue's All-In Burger

The picture doesn’t really do it justice because you don’t get a good view of the pulled pork that was stacked on top of the burger.  You can certainly see the ‘onion straws’ and cheddar cheese.

I’m confident that I would never have ordered this monstrosity under normal circumstances.  Thinking about the lack of pork-topped cheeseburgers in Mongolia, though, made me realize that these opportunities are quickly disappearing.  The most satisfying thing to do, really, would be to freeze that moment in time and have the burger delivered to me in 6 months when I’m scratching out  my eyeballs for want of a hamburger.  As far as I know, the technology for this does not yet exist, so my next best option is to eat the most disgustingly decadent food I can before June.  Now, please excuse me while I go take a mayonnaise bath.