Bob's Mongologue

A Bit of Self-Discovery

2009-11-10T18:01:00.000-08:00

In the following e-mail, I explore my own reasons for volunteering. Its idealism can easily be juxtaposed to the pragmatism in the above message. Please note: the term "hero's journey" doesn't imply some sort of weird, megalomaniacal self-image. It's the literary shorthand for a character's self-actualization or inner realizations. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hero%27s_journey. Mrs. Eagle, to whom I refer, was the amazing high school English teacher that taught us critical and literary analysis in a way that would have been mind-blowing even at the university level. This e-mail was written to Damien, and has quotes from an earlier e-mail to Jenn. Please listen to the embedded song as you continue. After finishing with “Into the West,” which I mention, I had it playing on repeat as I wrote most of this:

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TO DAMIEN:
You have quite a knack for writing, you know. You make my Quixotic quest out here sound like a pitched battle against the twin evils of hardship and complacence. Should my life ever be worthy of novelization, I think you should be the writer of the narrative. Not three minutes hence, I at last finished The Silmarillion. It took being in Mongolia to get me through the whole "A son of B, slayer of C, betrothed to D" aspect. After the first third, it really picked up some momentum, and as with any good book, I had a tear in my eye not only for the beauty of the final prose, but because I feel like I'm leaving a friend who can craft fine fantasies by the side of the road as I ramble on. I'm still riding the euphoria of the epilogue, as I term it. I'm listening to "Into the West" from the Return of the King soundtrack. 

I can confess to you that most of this seeking for self-actualization that I do out here really is a Joseph Campbellian search for a hero's journey. I've come to some realizations about the nature of such in this regard. I'm going to start typing and copying and pasting, and see where it leads me...  

I've had a lot of time to think about this topic in Mongolia. All through high school and college, there was always a sense of preparing to set out and become the person that I wanted to be. That luxury is now behind me, and the realization that it's as much now the time to start self-actualizing as ever can be utterly paralyzing. The only way that I've been able to get out of bed in the morning is to take things one day at a time. Life in Choibalsan is tough, there's no doubt about it. Yet I firmly believe that I am becoming a stronger person with every day that I stay here.

The thought of turning back, as so many of my peers have done, seems inconceivable. I'm pretty sure that there is no coming back. I think at least once a day about how nice the luxuries, comforts, and particularly companionship of home would be. But if the opportunity or even the necessity arose, they would have to drag me onto that evacuation helicopter kicking and screaming. I'd apply the next day for something to keep myself on the hard road.

I've realized that when I complete my two years of service, I will have finished A hero's journey. Not THE hero's journey. That's what I've had to come to terms with. Life is not a book with some happy ending where time stops before things change and people die. But it is (if you choose to put yourself in the right places) a series of endeavors that make you stronger after each trial and tribulation. Every time you finish, you're ready to undertake something much more harrowing. The fact is, you can't go straight from the Shire to Mordor. But if you make it through the Barrow-downs, Tom Bombadill's wood, Bree, Moria, etc., you're ready for it by the time that you make it to the Dark Gate. I've spent way too much of my life thinking that I will have accomplished something amazing by the time I'm 25. That happens in mathematics and sports. Not in my field. Instead, I'm trying to keep myself as healthy as the food and climate here allow, and to develop my capacities.

What I'm focusing on here is getting REALLY GOOD at what I need to be doing. I'm trying to excel this job's pants off. I pour myself into lesson planning, and make myself available for socialization with host country nationals for a portion of the day that some would consider to be unhealthy. I do this because I want to beat the curve, and suck as much out of this amazing adventure as I can. When I've got a few months left here, and am deciding between going straight to the Foreign Service or graduate school with aims towards USAID or professorship, I want to have really lived Peace Corps Mongolia. I probably spend an hour a day doing precisely the opposite of that. I find myself taking refuge in my apartment and trying to live as close a facsimile of American life as is possible. I am okay with doing so, but only to the degree that is necessary for me to keep my sanity, and maintain my ability to spend the rest of each day working on developing not just the capacities of my students and counterparts, but myself as well. Otherwise, the paralysis extends beyond the 15 minutes after I wake up. 

Today, like most days, I walked home literally into the sunset, with a swarm of laughing children surrounding me and walking me to my front door. We call them the "hello monsters," because they enjoy nothing more than to say "hello" at you every thirty seconds. Occasionally they range up into "goodbye" and "my name is..." territory, but seldom far beyond that. In any case, I was exhausted from working for 9 hours and yet, had a ridiculous grin on my face. I realized that it's after I've spent the day helping people-to the best of my ability and no further-that I'm happiest. It's when I feel overwhelmed, particularly when I wake up in Mongolia each day, that I'm the most disconsolate. I'm pretty sure that if I were the center negotiator on climate change talks or nuclear disarmament accords as the person I am now, I'd be pretty miserable for lack of ability. 

As much as she's one of the best influences I've ever had, Mrs. Eagle broke us, somehow. She taught me to see every book I read, every action movie I see as male mental masturbation to the idea of a call to adventure and the ability to fulfill it. And yet, I love it. I bury myself in it. A quote from Snow Crash, one of my new favorite books:

"Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. 'If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, and devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being a badass.'"

So true. Maybe the thirteen-year-old in me never grew up. Or maybe a lot of people have this neurosis, I'm not sure. In any case, I've spent a hell of a lot of my life waiting for a call to adventure. But I've had to come to terms with the fact that my family, friends, or loved ones are not going to be murdered by some spectacularly mustachioed villain. Some wizardly old role model is not going to appear and reinvent me in some convenient and catchily-scored montage. We see self-actualization as this 2 minute series of clips of somebody trying to lift a weight and being unable, only 5 cuts later to be pulling a truck through the snow with nothing but their pecs, a big metal chain, and some tremendous testicular fortitude. 

You don't get conveniently reinvented. You reinvent yourself, and to do that you need to get out of your box. In my case, the necessity was to put myself in a situation of relative hardship, where I could not only come to better appreciate the ridiculous comforts that my American lifestyle affords me, but also to be somehow reforged into someone a little stronger.  

I've also given up on having a bird fly up to my window with some entreaty for aid strapped to its leg. I've had to find my clarion call. Aid and Development is the closest thing to a moral crusade that I'm going to get. And it's not a bad one. Hell, it's the biggest one. I'm unhappy with the lot of the Developing World in that they were dealt unfairly hard hands in life, and I'm unhappy with our lot in that we don't have any easy way to fulfill our desire to improve life. All the hard work has been done for us where our own well-being is concerned.

A major mistake-one that I've been desperately trying to avoid-is getting out here and somehow seeing myself as the "chosen one." I've learned that in nothing is predestined, particularly greatness. You may be smart and you may have lofty goals, but it takes DECADES of self-investment to turn yourself into a "hero" who saves lives, stops wars, or builds a better world. I'm pretty sure that within the somewhat narrower scope of reality, that's what I want to accomplish. Here's my last paragraph of the aspiration statement I had to send in when I got my invitation: 

I hoped to be invited to Mongolia starting the moment I was nominated to Asia. It was my opinion that in Mongolia I could help people who were in the most need among the Asian countries in which Peace Corps operates. As far as my personal goals are concerned, I hope that the relatively Spartan nature of Mongolian living will enable me to appreciate the blessings in my life all the more for the severity of their absence. I have loved Asia throughout my life, and I anticipate that the beautiful terrain and rich culture will further heighten my admiration for the starker places in the world and those that inhabit them. I also wish to prove to myself that I will succeed in a lifelong career of international service and ideally, humanitarian aid. I believe that only by having been in the trenches (i.e. the classrooms) of the twin causes of global development and integration could I ever wield the proper wisdom or authority to direct such crucial and yet intractable endeavors.

Here's a paragraph from another e-mail I wrote:  

What I need to work on is enjoying the ride there. I've lived my whole life imagining this perfect self that I want to be, ready to set out on page one. I'm learning that I'll be halfway through the book before I feel I'm ready for much of anything. I think in the interim I need to keep my mind set on ambitious yet barely-achievable goals, and end each year as different from and as better than the person as whom I began it. Keep riding the edge of the envelope, and learn to be happy there. At some point, even if you succeed, it's world peace, but for how long? Forever? See progress in how far you've come, not how much you've whittled down the way to go. There's always going to be farther to go, until the world ends. And if we ride hard enough, that's not the sort of thing that we hope will come about for absolution, for the comfort or release of being finished. That's going to be precisely the sort of thing we're trying to prevent, raging to make the world as good as we can for as long as we can, and becoming more capable of doing so with each passing day. Right?

Well, there are my thoughts, and pretty much where I am in life. Thanks for being an understanding brain connected to an empathetic ear. I guess it was as much for me to figure out as for you to read; it was extremely cathartic. I'm exhausted; I stayed up way too late writing this, so I'm sure that my paragraph order is all wrong and there are logical fallacies and typos abounding. I'm gonna head to bed and get ready for the wonderful experience of teaching 4th graders tomorrow morning. The plus side: every day, I get to eat lunch in a Mongolian public elementary school's cafeteria. Seldom can one experience grin-inducing cultural dislocation quite like that.

Swine Flu & Life as a Peace Corps Volunteer

2009-11-10T17:50:00.000-08:00

Hi. It’s been a while. By “a while” I mean ages, and for that I apologize. Somehow, it seems that the longer I waited to get this update uploaded, the harder it was to get anything down on paper. Pixels. Pretend paper. There is no dearth of content to be sent, nor absence of anecdotes to be accounted, but one day’s delay lead to another, and before I knew it, weeks had wasted away. This is not to say that I haven’t been writing, just that I’ve been unable to make anything bloggable. Hence my asking the ever-facilitating webmaster Madelin to post the snippets that you find arrayed above and below. In an attempt to make up for lost time and posts, I’m going to copy and paste parts of a few e-mails that I’ve written to some friends while here. I extend the greatest of thanks to Damien, Jenn, Ben, Madelin, Amanda, and all the others who served as interlocutors and muses. I apologize to the very few of you who have already seen a lot of this material. Another post will be coming in the next few days with pictures abounding.

We are presently at the beginning of Week Three of at least four weeks of school closures, thanks to the H1N1 virus’s virulence in Mongolia. Inter-aimag public transport has been canceled in some contrived containment scheme, yet our hopes of returning to work are nonetheless dashed each Thursday when the announcement comes from the Ministries of Education and Health that school will be closed nationally for yet another week. The government is having public school lessons taught on television, a spectacle that I have yet to witness, but I admire their initiative. I am fortunate in that my school is continuing to have teachers come in day after day, sometimes to shovel snow, sometimes to write and rewrite curricula, and sometimes it seems, simply to socialize. Many less fortunate volunteers have been sent to their gers to “rest,” a valued pastime in Mongolia, and perhaps justly so given that they appear to work several times harder than we Westerners do at most things. These poor Peace Corps people are steadily chewing through every magazine and book in their gers, and every movie on their hard drives. It seems that the resources of intellectual entertainment have become scarce. I’m sure that some are slowly yet steadily spiraling into insanity. At the very least, I have working in the computer lab to keep me busy.

The students are using fairly modern Dell workstations that were donated by an initiative called DynEd two years ago. DynEd had this idea where they would buy a bunch of Dell computers and donate labs of them to schools in developing countries. They would then provide six months or a year of really good computer-based English learning with headphones and microphones and interactive phonics lessons and what-have-you for free! Unfortunately, the funding ran out, the Education Ministries in these countries couldn't afford to pay first-world tech support and subscription prices, and the whole thing got shut down. It would have been more expensive for DynEd to recollect the computer labs, so here they stayed. I don't think DynEd was nefarious or seeking to take advantage of places like Mongolia, they just get a C- for follow-through on an otherwise A- plan (A- because they didn’t install self-destruct mechanisms that would activate whenever a Mongolian teenager inserted his greasy grimy flash drive into one of the terminals.) In any case, now they're all pretty much Yahoo Messenger labs, where students message one another even as they're sitting next to each other. 

I'm doing my best to salvage this resource, painstakingly spending 2 or 3 hours a day (or basically all my free time at school when I should be lesson planning) clearing off years of accumulated viruses and junk. I have most of the terminals working beautifully, (i.e. my OCD level of computer fine-tuning,) and have made it so that each of the English teachers has a personalized account on one of them. I now often come into the lab (also my work/prep room) to find all five English teachers at their stations, merrily Powerpointing away and printing resources with the printer that I brilliantly procured for them. By that I mean that I casually asked the school Director, who is both resourceful and very eager to keep me happy, and she had a brand new in-box HP printer on my desk the very next morning.

On occasions like these, I realize what a good resource I am, not due to any special training or teaching ability, but just because I'm a native English speaker with an amazing support network. One of my great coups thus far has been to write a short e-mail to an awesome charity called Darian Book Aid, which donates 30 pounds of books to any Peace Corps Volunteer who asks for them. My books should be arriving in time for IST, which is the big Christmas-ish seminar that we attend with our counterparts. Speaking of which, it is at that time that we have a sort of networking fair at which we meet various NGO's, charities, and what have you so that we can begin with our secondary projects. We also receive grant-writing lessons then. 

I'm coming to terms with the fact that we really are facilitators, not muscle. If you joined Peace Corps to dig ditches or feed children, chances are excellent that there's a native who can do it better than you. But if you want to spend some time IN those ditches (the trenches of “the great common cause of world development”?) or seeing how the children are fed and working out a better method, you can utilize Peace Corps' trusted brand name and amazing array of contacts to get some pretty well-directed aid sent in. Corporations and governments and organizations want to be charitable, and they give money away to do so. It's really up to us on the ground to direct it.

That's what volunteering in Peace Corps really is. You schmooze, you spend months figuring out what the locals need, and you end up helping them out with the skills that are your best. Beyond that, you're just the eyes and ears of the Development institution, and a young 20-something in search of some greater significance.

It's important to remember that Peace Corps volunteers are not out there to save the world. Well, that may be why we volunteered, but it’s not what we’re accomplishing. We’re working to help people as best we can, build person-to-person bridges and find ourselves! This last point is actually pretty important. We're all on a journey of self-actualization out here. We're out of our boxes, and after 3 or 4 months, we figure out how to meet our basic needs enough that we can get down to some pretty serious self-actualization. That’s the idea anyway.

Escape from Choibalsan: The Bob Figlock Story

2009-11-05T14:52:00.000-08:00

I'm pretty sure that choibalsan is where the zombie apocalypse will start. It's the factory town around an abandoned Russian uranium mine, for one thing. It's also full of giant old decaying soviet concrete apartment buildings. That's pretty much all there is, in fact. I live in one of the nicer ones. Expect me to start writing the screenplay for my zombie apocalypse movie, "Escape from Choibalsan: The Bob Figlock Story" pretty soon. I can already tell you the beginning.

EASTERN SIBERIA: EARLY 1960's

Two labcoated scientists, scorched and bedraggled, collapse into the snow, thrown forward by the force of a momentous explosion behind them. They turn to look over their shoulders at the immolating remnants of what appears to be a scientific facility.

Scientist one: Thank god the last of the virus has been destroyed. To think that we had created Hell on Earth.

Scientist two pulls a vial from within his coat, and holds it aloft to gaze at it by firelight. His face is tinged with marvel and with fear.

Scientist two: No, comrade, not the last

Scientist one, shocked: Why, Vladmir, why would you save any of that cursed virus?

Scientist two: The orders came straight from Comrade Kruschev. We are to bury a single sample, to be released in case Mother Russia should fall.

Scientist one: But where, Vladmir, where can the devil be buried so deeply that he will not rise again against our will, may God forbid it?

Scientist two: In an Uranium mine, comrade, just across the southern border from here. The Mongolians will never know what lies buried beneath them. They will never know what lurks beneath.... CHOIBALSAN.

(Title screen: Escape from CHOIBALSAN: The Bob Figlock story) is superimposed over the burning building.

The set is in a Mongolian ger. A stove burns weakly in the corner, and wind blows the tent flaps. An old, bunny-eared, black-and-white television is flickering.

Reporter, British accent: The UN and CDC jointly announced the discovery of a new strain of influenza, dubbed "The Choibalsan Virus" today, preliminary results show it to be remarkably virulent.... CCCHHHHKKKK

Static blasts onto the tv

The same set (in the ger.) The stove has burnt out, and dust covers the furniture. It appears that some time has passed. A bloody handprint is on the television's knob. The wind is blowing more fiercely than before.

Reporter, British accent: The United Nations General Assembly unanimously passed the Choibalsan Virus Containment Act today, shutting down all international borders for an indefinite amount of time.... CHHHKKK

And then something that starts to introduce the characters and whatnot. I thought of this entire thing while in the bathroom the other morning. It's just preliminary so far, but tell me what you think. Perhaps you could make an awesome movie poster? Ok, have to go.

Fri, Aug 28, 2009 at 4:43 AM

Goat Wrestling... (unabridged)

2009-10-18T20:09:00.000-07:00

A story continued from an earlier post:

I had a ridiculous Nadaam weekend. A brief foretaste: it started with us wrestling the goat that we were taking out to the countryside to gut and roast into the trunk of a Hyundai sedan. The goat was, to say the least, displeased about being put in the trunk. It was a pitched battle for quite some time. He managed to ram the wheel and, unbeknownst to us, pop the tire. As we were driving to the relatives' house to drop the goat off, we realized the tire was popped, but the spare was in the trunk with the thrashing and thumping goat. That's how it BEGAN. I have a bunch more stuff to send you. Overwhelmed with it yet? Mon, Jul 13, 2009 at 1:42 AM

Contrary to earlier promises, I didn't slit the goat's throat, as there was a very particular way this goat needed to be killed. They make a soup out of the blood and so as little as possible needs to be spilled. Throat slitting is not exactly prime. They had us hold it down, and the grandfather took out a huge knife.
He made a decently sized-incision on the chest of the live goat, plunged his hand in, and fucking pulled out the heart. The goat was dead in like 15 seconds total. It was amazing. I'm told that I will be asked to do this soon. My god. They immediately fried the heart (giving me a hefty chunk,) and then filled the body with scalding hot rocks. A blow torch took off the fur and a lot of the skin. I went out to play soccer with all the kids, and by the time I got back they had most of the guts out. We made "hoshuur" which is pretty much hot-pockets, out of all the meat and the guts. I've gotten so used to eating guts..... Fri, Jul 17, 2009 at 12:29 AM

[[editor's note]] This story was in recent debate with Ryan North, author of Dinosaur Comics, who I met at a conference at the University of Illinois. Perhaps a few key details were curtailed in the telling of the anecdote, which was also part of the introduction. (something to the effect of: "Hi, I have a friend named Bob studying in Peace Corps in Mongolia. He is a huge fan of your comics. He sank the largest cruise liner in the Mediterranean and has ripped the beating heart out of a live goat.") Apparently you do need to make an incision before digging your hand into straight up flesh. We are not zombies.

Surreal.

2009-10-05T07:13:00.000-07:00

Please listen to this song as you read further:

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I have become an avid runner since coming here. On any day that I'm out of teaching class early enough to get in a good hour of meandering through the aimag's lesser-traveled back roads and horse paths, I do so. This evening, I went farther than ever before on what is perhaps my favorite trail. Though I have run with other volunteers, today I was alone. There are few trees in Choibalsan, but some outlying regions are fairly forested due to planting projects that the Soviets undertook decades ago. Running East-West clear across the Southern end of the town is the most convincing of these mock-woods. The trees there have grown tall enough that falcons and eagles use them as hunting perches from whence they can peer across the massive steppe that extends beyond the city limits in all directions. I jogged Westwards along these paths until I came to a fairly large and shallow pool, at the center of which sits a giant stone Buddha. I love to run around this pond, as I can see out over the massive Ger District which lies strewn to the North and West. The inhabitants of these areas tend to burn trash in large pyres, both for warmth and just to get rid of it. They were doing so in full flaming force this evening. The smoke filtering across the little lake makes for some spectacularly streaked sunsets, if you catch them at just the right time. After enjoying such a sight, I was jogging back home when a capricious urge overtook me. I cut through the trees to the south, and ran up an embankment that I had not previously noticed. This was quite a find, as the majority of the terrain here is about as flat as moonscape. Just as I scaled its 10 meter (towering, in my mind) summit, my ipod hit the crescendo of strings that occurs at about 1:32 in "The Kiss" from "Last of the Mohicans." My running playlist here is embarrassingly full of such grandiose music. At that very moment, three horsemen in full dels and felt caps (traditional Mongolian riding attire) burst out of the trees, singing a song in unison. Their entrance on the scene must startled two very large birds of prey, who tore out of the trees and the crimson sky from the Northwest and strafed directly above me, hurtling towards the Southeast. As I turned to follow their flight, I saw that they had disappeared into the largest and most luminous harvest moon I have ever witnessed. The three mounted Mongols streaked past me to the South. Just as this magical minute passed, so did the song end.

I stand fully ready and willing to admit that one of the reasons I came out here was to fill my days with moments that make me wonder whether my life is directed by Sergio Leone or Peter Jackson. Somehow the coincidences and happenstances of existence here are so obliquely arrayed that they align into cinematic moments that occur with such frequency that I am tempted to abruptly stop and demand that the hidden cameramen show themselves. On each of these surreal occasions, I find myself awash in wonder, admiration, and of course, contentment.

That's how I'm feeling right now. I'm still sitting in my sweats, having immediately torn out my laptop to type this.