BEIJING - I have now met, and gotten smash with, a good chunk of the Mongolian Peace Corps.
After braving clubs with names like Ikh Mongol with the married and similarly named Eric and Erica, wandering the streets of Ulaanbaatar late at night with banned-from-his-college-for-life Maryland native Jeremy, I spent last night swapping Mongolia stories with straight out of Queens Craig.
Last night Craig wore a faded jacket, a plain shirt, and flip-flops. He has a messy beard that in Queens might be dismissed as hipster posturing, but here, given his time in the Mongolian hinterlands, seems authentic.
He's in Beijing for the week, taking his first trip out of Mongolia in over 18 months. The trip is an opportunity to experience the Great Wall, Tian'anmen Square, and dinners without mutton. Highlights so far include a trip to McDonald's, where he ordered two hamburgers and a large french fry, and the joys of Tsingdao Beer, only 60 cents a liter at our hostel.
Craig has a Mongolian girlfriend, a sign designer who lives in the same eastern provincial capital.
"But there aren't many signs in Mongolia," I said.
"Chances are, if there is a sign, she designed it," Craig said.
Demand or no demand, sign maker struck me as an unusual profession in rural Mongolia. I asked Craig what the rest of the town's residents did for work.
"Teacher. Government worker. The Chinese zinc mine outside of town." After each profession he paused. "A lot of them are unemployed. There's a lot of unemployment."
None of the jobs Craig listed require any local ingenuity or entrepreneurship, just money from Ulaanbaatar or foreign governments.
I steered the conversation toward a favorite topic, politics. Are Mongolians political people?
The answer came easily: no. Craig's attempts to talk politics are usually met with dismissive generalizations or nervous laughs. There's one person in town who works fervently for the Democrat Party. The others don't seem too bothered.
Last year the Mongolian government fell after the Communists pulled a series of manuevers in Parliament. The Communists were able to break out of a coalition with the Democrats (the result of a tight election the previous year) and form a new government. What exactly happened isn't clear; some people in Ulaanbaatar have called it a coup. Craig found out when one of his co-workers came up to him after class.
"The government collapsed," he said, and then dropped the topic. Concerned, Craig tried to continue the conversation, to little success.
"They'll make a new one," the Mongolian said, "Don't worry."
But I could tell beneath the beard and easy exterior, Craig is worried. Worried that country he's spent nearly two years in is sliding toward chaos, or somehow unable to start improving the impoverished lives of its people. That 15 years of democracy haven't brought real reform to the rural areas that need it most.
Soon Craig must decide whether he will stay in Mongolia after his Peace Corps term ends. He's considering it, moving in his girlfriend and maybe even settling down. There's something in voice that leads to me believe that won't actually happen, that somehow he'll take a different path, out of Mongolia.
