The capital of cashmere
I’m discovering there’s quite the lively art scene in Ulaanbaatar. A lot has nomad and landscape themes but this painting, representing the great Mongol queens, reaches back to the 13th century.
I will say that flying into Ulaanbaatar was beautiful and frightening at the same time; frightening because there was a nasty-looking storm close by and I didn’t want us flying into it. However, there were the most beautiful, sweeping, green hills outside the city. So we circled and circled over the city, finally making a dive into the airport. Happily, my host, Yanjmaa Jutmaan and her 13-year-old son, nicknamed Hash, were there waiting for me. So was my luggage.I'd just said good-bye to a very unhappy Veeka the Sunday before; had done a massive clean of my apartment, put my mail on hold, finished some freelance pieces (including this Seattle Times travel piece that ran in June) and read up on where I was headed. What does the capital of Mongolia look like? I kept on searching my brain for tantalizing reminders and it took me a day to realize it looked a lot like Kazakhstan, which is quite close to Mongolia. There’s that same Central Asian milieu that former Soviet republics (like Kazakhstan) or satellites (like Mongolia) have; the drab prefab concrete panel buildings that Nikita Khrushchev fell in love with during the mid-1950s and mandated for all future construction in the Soviet empire.
MIAT Airlines is what got me into Ulaanbaatar.
As I learned on a tour of the National Museum of Mongolia, the Mongols had been controlled by China for centuries and the Russian Communists offered them a chance to shake off their overlords. The Russians drove out the Chinese in 1921, the Mongolians proclaimed their own republic in 1924 and the Chinese, who were invaded by Japan not long after that, weren’t in a position to do much about it. There’s been little love between the two countries for millennia. Remember, the Great Wall was constructed to keep out the Mongols.
People tell me here that before the Russians came, there was no electricity, water utility or sanitation. Most everyone lived in yurts, basically. So, the Soviets built up the place, but it was a devil’s bargain in many ways, as Mongolia went Communist for decades. The Mongols had their own script, but the Russians brought in Cyrillic, so everything here uses that alphabet. I haven’t used Cyrillic since I was in Kazakhstan 12 years ago, so I am madly trying to re-memorize the letters so I can read the signs. That said, there’s an amazing amount of signage around town in English, even in the not-so-touristy areas.Anyway, Yanjmaa got me squared away in a spare apartment about a mile from the center of town and we spent the next day getting internet set up and buying food for my refrigerator. She mentioned that the $33 or so that I spent on a week’s worth of breakfast food is what some people here live on for an entire month. I got to meet her husband, Khudree, and their four boys, two of which picked up English while she was getting her doctorate in North Carolina from 2008-2012, so they are quite fluent. The oldest, named Dash, wants to attend Stanford and major in international law, as opportunities aren’t great here in Mongolia. Unless you’re into mining or tourism, the economy is not booming. Ulanbaataar is opening up a new international airport sometime in the coming year, so that might help the tourism angle, as there’s not a ton of airlines that fly into the country.
The view out of my apartment window. Notice the Soviet-style building on the left. The construction on one of the buildings seems to go 24/7.
My Delta flight into Tokyo was great; the MIAT (Mongolian Airlines) flight on a Boeing 737 into UB (as they call Ulanbaataar), not so much. In terms of the food and service, I felt I’d gone back 15 years. The city itself has some really nice areas woven in with this odd sloppiness with everything looking like a construction site with unfinished building materials just sitting around. Like walking up crumbling steps to my apartment where I’m literally stepping on the rebar where the concrete has worn off. Or being in Yanjmaa’s office building and just seeing holes where light fixtures or sockets should be. Or the access roads to parking lots behind buildings filled with crater-shaped potholes because neither the building owners nor the municipality take responsibility for those lots.
I spent Friday playing tourist and visiting, among other places, the Gobi Cashmere store in downtown Ulaanbaatar. I had never seen cashmere in so many beautiful colors and designs. I wanted to snap them all up, especially the coats. Cashmere is very warm, which is why I wear a cashmere sweater when I ski. It's also a major industry here and the wool comes from goats.
A model at Gobi Cashmere walks about in a gorgeous pink/lavender pantsuit number. I never knew cashmere could do that.
While we were at the store, we caught a fashion show, which was much fun.My efforts at learning the language are pretty futile. I have picked up sain bainuu, which is ‘hello’ and bayartai, which is ‘good-bye’ and tiim, which is ‘yes’ and ügui, which is ‘no.’ But it’s not like anything I’ve tried to learn before. The closest language to Mongolian is Kazakh, not Russian.
I’ve talked about before why I’m here: To help Yanjmaa to write a small book about the story of her life, which is extraordinary for a 40-something woman who was Mongolia’s first female college chancellor. I got to know her through Good Samaritan Ministries in Oregon, as she’s their representative in this country and her desire is to start a Christian counseling center here. It would be the country’s first. “Counseling” is not a term Mongolians understand plus it’s considered weak to ask for it. The closest word they have is “advice.” But the problems, particularly sexual and domestic abuse, are huge here, so what I’m doing is coming up with ways to tell Yanjmaa’s story and help her start raising the funds, first to allow her to counsel full time, then hire staff and eventually build a center. I spent time with Yanjmaa when she was visiting Oregon in February and I felt that she was never going to realize her dream with the funds GSM was raising for her; what was needed was her story published in English, then Mongolian, that she could use for fundraising and grants.
Yanjmaa and me in Sukhbataar Square, the main plaza in downtown Ulaanbaatar
So here I am, following her around with my laptop. Today, we were asking her mom about details of Yanjmaa’s childhood. We spent the weekend at a retreat center north of town where Yanjmaa’s church was hosting a visiting team of evangelists from Singapore. Yanjmaa is an evangelical Protestant and, when Mongolia went independent of Russia in the early 1990s, some 400 missionaries poured into the country and planted many churches, which quickly filled up with people weary of Buddhism and shamanism, the major two faiths in Mongolia. I read Rick Leatherwood’s “Glory in Mongolia” before flying here and it gives a decent description of how this young church was birthed. Yanjmaa was barely a teenager at the time, but she was among the first wave of people converted to Christianity out of basically nothing, she has told me. Since then, three decades have passed and it’s remarkable that evangelicals have gotten so far in so little time and have established many churches around the country whereas there is only one Russian Orthodox church in Ulaanbaatar despite 70 years of Russian dominance. This is not to be triumphalist but it is revealing. Still, I talked with a local pastor yesterday who told me Christianity’s growth has slowed in Mongolia in recent years. That is why I want to help these folks develop supporting institutions (a counseling center) and uniquely Mongolian Christian literature (Yanjmaa’s book) as building blocks for something lasting.
Yanjmaa, who is a painter as well, works in a studio along with another Christian artist I met Thursday. We sell Yanjmaa’s paintings through GSM.
As I listened and observed during this retreat, I noticed the Christianity taught by the Singaporeans was quite basic and that there were a number of non-Christians at the retreat; something you’d never see at a similar event in the States. Even though evangelical Protestantism is very new, it’s made some impressive inroads into the art community and a few weeks ago, a group of Christian artists staged their own exhibition in the capital. I’m trying to interview a few of them now as I’m highly interested in how a new religious tradition impacts a culture built around nomads and wide-open spaces. As I write this, I’ve only spent four full days here, so I am hardly an expert on this place, but I am trying to make the best use of my time. Thanks to Verizon’s international calling plan, people can call me from the U.S. (and Veeka has done so several times) although I am 15 hours ahead, so I am sleeping when folks on the West Coast tend to be awake.