The Gobi and Research
Trip Start
May 12, 2007
1
5
9
Trip End
Aug 09, 2007
Ulaanbaatar,
Mongolia
Thursday, June 28, 2007
After the canyon, we drove some more until we reached this small town and camped out for the night. The next day, we drove to a national park that was yet again, an absolute wonder. In the midst of this dry desert is this sudden burst of green foliage and mountains that actually has a giant glacier running right through the middle. We all got to walk around on the glacier and take some pretty amazing pictures, and then we headed off to our next destination--"the flaming cliffs". The best way to describe these cliffs is like the Grand Canyon, but different from the canyon we saw the day before. The landscape was really alot like the deep red of Mars. We climbed around on the canyon for an hour or two, and then headed for our last destination for the day--the sand dunes! The sand dunes are really what you would normally think of for a desert--long, far-reaching stretches of sand piled so high that it takes about 10 minutes climbing to reach the top (finally, a geographic feature you would actually expect to find in the Gobi!). We all ran around and played on these dunes for a few hours, and ended our day camping in the small town yet again, only to wake up the next morning and head back to Ulaanbaatar.
After such a wonderful (and exhausting!) trip, I immediately had to begin cracking down on my research the very next morning. I am working with a Mongolian woman named Enkhe who is actually a PhD candidate in the School of Education at Pitt right now. We met because she was my Mongolian language teacher this past spring semester, and, after talking about my project, decided to work together since the topic was also relevant to her interests and current area of study. She has been incredibly helpful in coordinating our interviews, organizing our data, and of course, translating, so I feel very lucky to be working with her. So, the two of us have spent the past few weeks here in Mongolia finalizing our interview questions and observation tables, and yesterday, we finally got to put all our hard work into action.
Our first family lived in the "ger districts," a large collection of gers on the outskirts of Ulaanbaatar that is really equivelent to a ghetto or "the projects". The people that tend to live in these parts are generally very poor and often, have recently migrated from the countryside to the city so are in the process of looking for employment (unfortunately, often to no avail). The family we visited consisted of 4 generations--11 people total--all sharing the same ger (a space about the size of my college dorm room). Walking into the family's neighborhood, the high degree of poverty was immediately apparent. Wild dogs were running around, children were playing outside barefoot in tattered clothing, and the smell of sewage was almost overpowering. After reaching the actual ger of the family who welcomed us with warm smiles and bowls of hot tea, I got an even stronger sense of the constant struggle of their daily lives. There were only 3 beds, a simple set of tables of chairs, and a few pieces of cooking tools and utensils. That was it. For 11 people.
The family was very warm and seemed in good spirits, all very cooperative and articulate about answering our questions. Yet what struck Enkhe and I was how difficult it was to ask questions about family relationships and interactions, when clearly, the only thing on these people's minds at the moments were their extreme poverty. Nearly every question asked had an answer that somehow related back to the family's lack of resources and inability to support themselves, and understandably so. While the interview was certainly valuable and I learned quite alot, I found it hard to analyze these answers in terms of purely intergenerational issues rather than in terms socioeconomics. Perhaps the key to this problem is learning how to combine these two ideas, in a way that shows the influence of each issue upon one another, because both are clearly not mutually exclusive.
I think I just need much more time to think about it all.
Today we have 2 different interviews, both also from the ger districts, and Monday we have another two interviews as well, but from city apartments as opposed to ger districts, so it should be interesting to note the similarities and differences of these two settings. I will update again later into next week after I have some more time to mull over these issues a bit longer.
