Myriam Takes the Reins

TERKHIIN TSAGAAN NUUR, Mongolia – I summoned my inner cowboy, felt the noise build from deep in my gullet, and then bellowed so loudly that the sides of the frost-lined mountains echoed.

"CHU!" I said, but nothing happened.

My diminutive transport continued to munch on brown tufts of grass, ignoring my command to go. I tried again, this time with a gentle voice.

"Chu." And again and again. "Chu, chu, chu."

The obstinate equine would not budge. He could somehow sense the novice rider (and poor speaker of Mongolian) in the saddle. Then a knight in a reindeer coat galloped up beside us, and barked the order with such gravitas that the horse had no choice but to trot. Myriam, once again, showed why she is the group's naturalist.

I profile Myriam at great risk, because she is one of the most mercurial personalities I have ever met. Her vivacious enthusiasm hides a complex person, someone who can't be pinned down. I'm sure the Myriam I know is quite different from the Myriam I would have met off the steppes.

So, I start with the irrefutable. Myriam is German, her nationality clear from the first word out of her mouth. Her cadences are a bit abnormal, drawing out "o" and "u" sounds for an extra beat. Her natural tendency is to reach for the longer cognate, using compound words that are seldom found outside of English academic literature. She sometimes says "jaa."

Her hometown is a small village in Southern Germany. Her parents run a biodynamic farm. I've never heard the term before, but apparently they raise livestock and vegetables using organic methods and renewable energy. Here Myriam learned how to ride a horse. She adores animals, and pets anything in sight with fur or feathers.

Despite their reputation for punctuality, Germans dawdle through school. She spent most of her childhood in a Steiner School (sometimes called a "Waldorf Education"), where pupils don't use standardized textbooks, they create their own illustrated guides to the material. Significant amounts of time were spent being creative, with many art and music lessons. Rote learning and grades were minimized, although when they were introduced, she did well. Myriam graduated from high school at the age of 19, and will take between four and six years to earn her bachelors. In between she is taking two Gap years, to break up the long stays in academia.

She wanted to do a long-term volunteer project, so when she heard about a Swiss-Russian charity that sponsored a village for mentally and physical handicapped Russians, she pledged a year of her life. Incredibly, Myriam spoke no Russian. She boarded a plane for Irkutsk, 5,000 miles away, without knowing a word of the language. On arrival, a man drove her 60 miles to her new work site. There is no Internet, no cable television, just a few buildings, a barn and some animals. She works alongside a few Russian staff members, and one other volunteer, who is Swiss.

Two months after she arrived, Myriam felt ill. Her stomach hurt so badly that the village van took her to a hospital in Irkutsk. The doctors determined she had appendicitis, and removed the vestigial organ. Maybe a surgeon did not sanitize the scalpel or a nurse had a touch of the flu, because Myriam continued to deteriorate after the surgery. She slipped into a coma, probably from an infection. Worried, the hospital staff called Myriam's parents on the farm.

At this point in the story, my mouth is open and my eyebrows are arched from worry. But Myriam continues her near-death tale in a jaunty tone, as if this was a perfectly normal string of events. "After five days I woke up," she said. "My parents, they were worried for me, jaa. But they knew if it was my time, it was my time."

After a couple weeks of recovery, Myriam resumed her unpaid position deep in the forest. She shared a stuffy room with the Swiss girl, washed dishes, planted crops, and hauled equipment. She supervised the mentally-challenged patients, some of whom were prone to fits of violence and hysteria. They have few resources and little support in this isolated village; most Russians stigmatize the mentally and physically ill. What little money comes in is mostly from selling crafts made by the residents at European craft fairs and specialty shops. Myriam works tirelessly; her respite trips to Irkutsk are weeks apart and then only for a day or two.

For the first month Myriam was essentially a deaf-mute. She could not express her desires or understand what people around her wanted. Slowly, slowly the words came. She wrote them down, made lists and practiced over and over with the residents. Soon she had phrases, then sentences. And as the months went by, she got to know the people around her along with the language. Now her Russian is at a level where she finds it easier to speak to most Mongolians in Russian rather than in the English she's learned in grade school.

Myriam finds satisfying what to most would be unbearable. She's in Mongolia on a holiday, a holiday mandated by her continued to desire to work. Russia would only issue this tireless volunteer a six-month visa, so she had to head south and wait for the embassy to slowly process a couple of pieces of paper. The current estimate is two weeks.

So she came out here to the countryside, back to open spaces and wild horses. Wearing a bell bottom-shaped coat of reindeer fur given to her by a colleague in Russia, she mounts her steed without assistance – unlike the other three riders on this particular day.

With a single "CHU!" she takes off to the south. After a few paces the olive-colored scarf with tiny croqueted roses tied around her neck takes flight, forming a train of fabric that flows backward, as she charges ahead, toward adventure.