Lunar New Year 2009

The three day Lunar New year (White Moon) festival is winding down.  The official 3 days are over although we will be wishing peace to many more households for the next couple of weeks probably.  Out here in the countryside you tend to know more families and when you see them for the first time after the new year there is a special greeting that you give each other.

 

Shauna, K-Lee, and I visited 7 families.  With each family I ate at least 10 bodz (meat dumplings).  This was washed down usually with salty milk tea, maybe some fermented juice, and in one special case some fermented camel milk.  Of course K-Lee loved all the milk products to chew on, and Shauna and I are even enjoying them more then we have in the past.  I caught myself actually reaching for dried milk curds over candy at one house!

 

Here are some pictures of us with some of our friends during the holiday.

 

    

   

New Support Paradigm

Have you ever read the book "Who moved my Cheese?"  It is a good book about change and the way different people handle change. 

 

With the year 2009 comes many changes not just for us (Mikayla, new house) but also for World Partners.  With the downturn in the economy and wanting to be more flexible they have now done away with the SHARE system.  Yes you read that right NO MORE SHARE'S.  For those of you who have supported us but never really understood the whole system you no longer have to worry about it.  Now we will only communicate in actual dollars needed or pledged and not 2.3 shares ($46/month).  This will also save ink (except on this newsletter) in trying to explain the system.  This is also not simply a cosmetic change as some have been in the past.

 

As of now our salary is directly tied to our support.  Meaning if our support falls off so does our salary.  We are still a part of World Partners health insurance, and they do have a contingency fund so that we can have time to bring our support back up.  However if our Year To Date support drops then so does our salary.  What this means is if you normally pay once a year it is better for us to receive that at the beginning of the year.  If you pay quarterly then it won't effect us because of the contingency fund.

 

The amount we need for 2009 is just under $75,000.  This includes everything from our salary, health insurance, newsletter cost's, to our return plane tickets.  This also reflects a 7% reduction in our salary.  Most of this amount has been pledged and we thank you all for your continued support.

Help us build our home

We are planning on building a two story home this summer.  We are building a home that is comfortable for a family of 4 and adequate for a family of 6.  Since Shauna wants 4 kids we are trying to plan ahead.

 

We will hire 3 Mongolian men to help for about 3 months.  We are also planning to have 2 teams come from the US to help.  We hope to do some building for the local community and are waiting to see what the local leaders would like us to do.

 

To get a little feel of what we are thinking here is a picture of our friends houses who lives in Bayankhongor.

                       

 

If you would like to receive an application form please send an email to us.  We are trying to keep the size of the teams manageable.

Life is a bit crazy

I have not been able to update the blog in a while. I'm not sure if that is good or bad. It means we have been keeping plenty busy actually living life rather then writing about it. But that is just a nice sounding excuse :)

I have decided to expand the content of this blog. It has mainly been a way to update people on our family, I now want to add a few posts on what God is teaching us, and how He is working in our ministry. So you can look forward to those posts as well. As for now here is an update on... well Kaylee.

Kaylee is doing good, she has an occasional cold/cough but pretty healthy. Her bottom two teeth have broken through but still pushing up. They no longer hurt as much. She is now eating dinner with us. Thanks to a handy food grinder we were given she eats what we eat.
We had a good Christmas. Kaylee was sent a lot of Toys. Of course all the toys from America have both English and Spanish. I'm not sure why parents can't find Mongolian language toys :) Shauna's big gift this year was a rocking chair that has been set up for a few months. (It makes those few middle of the night crying sessions better.) I, Jeff got enough money for tools that we should be set once we start to build the house. Meaning I should be able to buy 2 cheap Chinese tools of everything I will need. I figure most will burn up by the time the house is finished. With most tools I figure I can buy 3-4 Chinese one's compared to the cheaper American tools.

Headed for the Big City

Well we had an interesting trip heading into Ulaanbaataar.  Kaylee needed her 6 month shots and we were going to watch our friends two teenagers while they went on a trip.  We were supposed to be gone about 12 days but it ended up being 14.  That is life in Mongolia.

Our trip started out the day before as Jeff was putting on a heater thingy on the radiator.  He put a little hole in it.  So, he went to have it fixed and a  Mongolian welded the hole.  Jeff said it was fine.  He didn't tell me before we left he gave the weld a 50 % chance of staying together or breaking.  Not good odds for Mongolia. We left the next morning and the first 2 hours were okay.  Jeff noticed the heat was high and took a look.  Needless to say the weld did not hold.  I was really worried that we wouldn't make it into town.  We trodded on as we put water in all along the way.  We got to the next big city Arawahare and bought a bunch of water. 

Jeff went to the bank and when he came out and started the car it would not start.  I fretted because I didn't really want to take a microbus into town.  Jeff took a look and noticed the cable to the battery was loose.  He was able to fix it easily enough.  I thank the Lord it wasn't any more serious than that.  From Arawahare to Lune it is a paved road and so we did really well.  It didn't leak much at all.  Right before we left Lune we filled up all the bottles and topped of the engine fluids.  70 km. from Lune to UB is really bad road and the hole got much larger and we lost water faster.  We stopped and asked a herder where some water was because we were almost out and not near civilization.  I prayed so hard that we would get there and that people would be praying that we would arrive safely in UB.  Jeff taped up the hole using electical tape and duct tape.  We put the last of our water in and about 5 km later we hit the paved road.  Another 5 km and we hit a hotel and they had plenty of water.  The Mongolian worker was so helpful and let us have as much water as we needed.  The engine had gotten really hot.  I was thinking of ways to get into town without the car because I didn't know if we would make it.  We were about 50 km from UB. 

Well now we are back in Bayankhongor, so as you can see we made it back.  You never know what to expect when you live and drive in Mongolia.

Who's new to Byonkhongor?

We are!!  We have now been in BH for just over 1 month.  Jeff has been here a little less but we will get to that.  We moved out around the 15th of September.  We drove our new vehicle and arrived in 12hrs.  The only thing that happened was our new roof rack collapsed and we had to repair it about 1 hr outside of UB (the capital).  We moved into our friends house right away.  She is a single American gal so her house is a bit small but very cozy and toasty warm!  We have had the wonderful adventures of water delivery by horse cart, brownouts with the power (same as UB), fire building at night to keep toasty warm, and Mongolians following us around town to see the blond haired blue eyed now 6 month's old new foreign baby in town.  Here is a picture of the house we are staying in.

 

I (Jeff) and friend Dustin went back to UB to load up all our stuff on a big truck and have it delivered out here.  About half way back we noticed some antifreeze leaking ... to make a long story short we limped back to UB and arrived after an 18hr trip.  When we got the car into the shop the head was cracked.  Thankfully it cracked between two cylinders otherwise we still might be waiting to get to UB.  We are pretty sure there was a hole in the heater core and when we changed out the fluids the stop leak that was in the coolant was "watered down" and opened up the hole.  I have now seen more of the inside of my engine then I have ever wanted to see.  Our stuff was loaded up and delivered while we were still waiting in UB for the car.  We ended up spending an extra week in town.  I was able to price some stuff out for building a house though so it was not all wasted.

 

I have been meeting with the XAB members.  They gave me my work permit and now that the summer seminar season is over they are a little less busy.  I have done one example training of a CHE lesson and am working with a guy named tsigmed.  I am also teaching some informal English lessons and trying to maintain our car.  (hole in exhaust, add a block heater)  Actually Dustin is much more skilled at that kind of stuff I end up helping him.  Although he says second time around I'm on my own.  Hopefully that head doesn't crack again!

 

We have visited 3 churches and have about 6 more to visit in town.  Things are going pretty well, Kaylee has adjusted the quickest we are still finding our place here.  The JCS team has been great about helping us out.

Update on K-Lee

Mikayla is now 18 weeks just over 4 months old.  All our Mongolian friends say she looks like a Barbie doll.  Then they say that she looks like her father ... I'm not sure what they are implying by that.  Maybe if I had long hair I could get a job as a model, hahaha.  I doubt anyone is actually looking at what I'm typing here anyway everyone probably just went straight for the pictures.  I figure I will just type a bit more so it looks like I did something rather then just put up a bunch of pictures.