Let's build a house
Trip Start
Jul 17, 2008
1
8
26
Trip End
Aug 16, 2008
Ulaanbaatar,
Mongolia
Tuesday, July 22, 2008
My group consists of Jenn (from Regina), Jake (from Toronto), Travor (from Toronto) and Suzanne (from Halifax). We arrive late at the work site due to traffic and the fact that we had to do two other drop offs before us.
The houses we are building are very simple. They have no plumbing (outhouses, sort of) and no in wall electricity. They are wood frame, with foam and insulation and brick finishing the walls. Roofs are metal. Very, very basic.
We don't have a translator on our site so we have to struggle with the communication barrier. At first our family (for whom we are building the house) tries to tell us in great detail what to do. Of course we don't understand. Fairly quickly we revert to hand gestures and monkey-see-monkey-do in order to receive our assignments. Basic assignments are:
- moving bricks closer to where the bricklayers will use them
- moving bricks anywhere
- sifting sand for the mortar
- sifting sand for rocks
- drywall installation
- insulation installation
- mixing mortar
Basically a lot of our tasks are 'grunt work'. Some of the tasks are ones that the family just doesn't want to do. While we move bricks for two hours, the family sits off to the side. (That's not a criticism, we're there to work. It's just an observation.)
Jake is immediately a family favorite. He takes the mixing mortar task and does it so well that anytime he tried to move to another task, he would be told energetically to 'Jack shovel' (they called him Jack). Even the three year old at the end of the day was telling him to shovel!
The family that will move into the house consists of a grandfather, grandmother, mother, father, a daughter (13 maybe) and a son (3). For the entire day until we saw him peeing standing up, we all assumed he was a girl! They currently live on a yurt on the property. Inside the yurt they have 4 beds, a stove, 2 dressers and a table. It's simple yet cramped. Hence the need for the house. The house itself won't be much bigger than the yurt if at all. But the house will provide better insulation during the winter (Ulaanbaatar is the coldest capital city in the world, Ottawa is second) and less maintenance (the skin on the yurts have to be replaced every year).
It takes a while for the family (especially the 3 year old) to warm up to us but at the end of the day the three year old is playing with us and we're offered a bowl of soup. It's mutton soup with potato and onion. It's very good! We have to leave but they were also preparing some dumplings for us!
For dinner we have traditional Mongolian (fast) food. It's good to know that fast food is greasy in every culture. This doesn't go down so well with me and/or I come down with some bug. Not the life threatening kind thankfully. Just the kind that your mother warns you about when you travel and eat strange and exotic food.
Not that this is going to stop me from enjoying my visit. After dinner part of the group heads to a local bar for some beer sampling. I'll just sum up by saying I have not found a non-Budwiser beer here yet. I may have to switch to gin and tonics. That could be trouble!
