My new family

Last Thursday afternoon we left the dorms to move in with our host families. I was picked up by a 20-something woman, her husband, and a 13-year-old boy. This was pretty confusing, since the only woman listed on my host family information sheet was the 40-year-old mother. It took me a few minutes to figure out that they weren’t all from the same household. I would be living with the boy’s family, while another trainee would be with the woman and her family in another house nearby.

It turned out that the boy who met me at the dorm was Dagva, the oldest son in my host family. His full name is Dagvadorj, and like most Mongolians he has a short name that he goes by: Dada. I decided it would be too weird to call him that, so I’m going with Dagva. He has the best English in the family by far, which makes him critical to my communication this summer.

So Dagva and I got dropped off at his house and I went in to meet his mother and his baby brother. The toddler, Sanja (full name Sanjajamts), is much like American toddlers in that he is both cute and destructive. His favorite new pastime is beating me up. That is, when he isn’t busy putting various knickknacks in his mouth.

Most Peace Corps Trainees call their host parents Ehj (Mom) and Aav (Dad), and I guess I’m going that route too, although I haven’t had to refer to them or call their names very often yet. (Side note: some Mongolians say “aav” with a “v” sound and some say “aaw,” which is why Katie calls her guy Aaw. The real transliteration would probably be something in between the two.) Aav is a truck driver who spends a lot of time on the road and/or working wacky hours, so I haven’t seen a lot of him. The last family member is Puka (full name Purevnyam), the 9-year-old. He speaks very limited English, so we help each other with pronunciation.

My host family lives in a two-story house and they seem to be upper-middle class in the town, considering that there aren’t a whole lot of single-family homes around. Some trainees ended up in gers (yurts), but most of us in this town are in apartments or houses with indoor plumbing. So my digs are relatively posh, though I don’t have hot water and I have to wash clothes by hand.

So after I met the mom & baby, I got settled into my bedroom, which is the corner room upstairs, adjacent to the living room and the parents’/baby’s bedroom. I think my presence pushes the two older boys out to the living room, but I don’t feel too bad about that since that is where their giant TV is. Pretty sure I would have been cool with that when I was a kid.

By this point it was about dinnertime, wherein my contribution was peeling a potato. This turned out to be a meal prepared just for me and Sanja, a trend which has been fairly consistent since then. I guess it’s fitting since my Mongolian survival skills are still at the toddler level. I’m not sure whether there’s room for advancement to the big kids’ table or not. Either way, there are a lot of meals to go, as my host family is responsible for feeding me three times a day for the duration of training, which works out to more than 200 meals.

After dinner we hung out upstairs, with Sanja running laps around the sofa and pausing to smack me in the chest each time. Meanwhile, two people who I presume were from a hardware store were putting together a TV stand that the family had just bought. Dagva showed me some of their family photos that had been assembled into an album by the volunteer they hosted last year. During all of this the dad showed up and didn’t say a word to me — I only knew who he was because I had just seen pictures of him. So that was a little weird, but I think that’s just his personality. He has been a little friendlier in the past few days, especially when he was interested in learning about my iPhone.

Most of my family time here has been outside on the basketball court or tossing a frisbee around. I don’t think these kids had ever thrown a frisbee before, but they’re learning quickly. Maybe by the end of the summer I’ll be able to get a game of ultimate going. We have also played a lot of Uno, which has helped me learn numbers and colors in Mongolian. I got sick of playing Uno the other day and asked if we could play another card game using traditional playing cards; Dagva proceeded to teach me a Mongolian game that was almost exactly like Uno.

So there is a taste of what my life will be like this summer. I’m attending Mongolian language lessons from 9am to 1pm each weekday and technical or cross-cultural sessions most afternoons. Other than that I’ll be spending a lot of time with my adopted family. We’ll see how much it starts to feel like home.