Pizza night

I love my Kindle so much. It's got a few too many God books on it (once, I bought the book of proverbs, thinking it sounded like an ironic and interesting title for a book. Little did I know it was actually the Book of Proverbs. Which meant all the books I was recommended {and bought} on Amazon.com were all God fiction. None of the blurbs mention anything about being a Christian read). But I'm slowly weeding them out, and I love it. Amazon have just released a couple of new Kindles. One is called the Kindle Fire and it's like a mini iPad but with better functionality (for me, anyway). I really want one - but it's not going to be released in Australia yet! Boo!

There are 9 more days until I leave Mongolia for real. Maybe not forever, but I certainly don't see myself living in Mongolia again any time soon. It's the end of a chapter - that's kind of hard to close. I'm still in denial about it. There's lots of things that are too hard to articulate. I wanted this: I wanted to shorten my assignment, to go home and start working again. But I didn't expect it to be a big deal for me to leave - and it is. It's opened up a lot of options for myself and my career. It will be hard to incorporate Mongolia in to the naive life I know I'll lead back in Australia. But that's what I want - a life where I don't have to see homeless children sleeping on the street, where you can't bribe officials to change your visa, where police are respected, where fruit is readily available, where health care is world class......

Blah blah, I don't think I'll be able to articulate it until I'm back home and have had time to just reflect on everything.

In the mean time, the new volunteers arrived on Sunday. They're doing their orientation now which means we're busy doing stuff with them. My bag is slowly getting packed, and my free time this week is completely booked out. My cupboards still have 'stuff' in them, but there's nothing worth eating in them, which is lucky because I'm eating out for the remainder of my time here. It's getting colder and the pollution is getting thicker. I'm not doing anything at work and it is exceptionally boring.

I did do a presentation yesterday on diversification ideas from Australia for Mongolia. I went through a bunch of basic stuff that I didn't even research. The powerpoint was terrible, but the presentation went well. I introduced the idea of developing stud farms, using volunteer labour for busy times, using tourism to increase revenue based on farming activities, motorcross tracks as a niche diversification idea, farm forestry, tree nurseries, seed collection, honey, services like child minding and postal runs, niche value added products such as biodynamic, organic, halal meats........

The only thing anyone cared about was introducing motorcross tracks.

Pizza night last night to meet the new volunteers. The pizza was actually really yummy! It was a pretty special moment, being in a room of 23 Australian volunteers. Everyone was just talking and eating and having a lovely time finding things in common and talking about development stuff (I guess, that's what we usually talk about). I'll miss that - being a part of such a diverse, yet similar group of young people in a country that we'll have in common forever.