Goodbye Hutul

Keeping up-to-date with my blog has been a particular challenge for me lately. Things haven’t been going that well for the past little while and in trying to maintain a positive blog I’ve ended up simply avoiding the internet!

I’ve been reluctant to write negative things up to now but for some reason with recent changes in events I more willing to share now. Working in Hutul for the past 3 months has been somewhere between difficult and non-existent. Because both of my counterparts were fulltime teachers it was almost impossible to get them to dedicate more than a couple of hours every week to working on their NGO’s. Over last couple of weeks since school tapered off I’ve had the opportunity to work with them a little more but finally confirmed that their objectives were not going to coincide with those of my placement organization’s – thus I was pulled out.

After laborious negotiations I’m finally employed again and will starting working at the program office in Ulaanbaatar this week to conduct an impact assessment for VSO. I’m excited about the job, I’ll get to meet with many different organizations and get new skills under my belt but I’m sad that it didn’t work out in Hutul for many reasons.

Although the reasons I was asked to work in Hutul and the ones that I was actually brought there for had nothing to do with each other I worked hard to develop relationships with my counterparts and learn to live in simple circumstances. In UB although there is a large network of volunteers and ex-pats in general it’s a smoggy, noisy, expensive (relatively) city – not where I was hoping to work when I signed up! Nonetheless, I’m excited about the prospect of learning a bit more than the value of patience and the luxury of the occasional kettle water bath in my time in Mongolia.