Host Family Description

For the next ten weeks, I will be living in a four room wooden house, blue in color with an accompanying green roof. The interior of the house is decorated – from the walls to the bed and furniture to the floors – in colorful weaved rugs. Although there is electricity, there is no running water. The water is fetched, in a 15 gallon drum at a time, at the nearby well 100 meters from the house. The jorlon and a ‘sun shower’ (aka: outhouse and outshower) are outside and shared with the haashaa neighbor (haashaa = fence; some houses or gers share a common haashaa area in order to share resources, i.e. well, outshower, or garden). My room has the only bed and door in the house. The rest of the five member family sleep side-by-side on mats in the adjacent rooms.





My host dad is a telecom cable technician at the local post office. My host mom is a researcher at the nearby hospital; she has been working there for the past 27 years. My host parents are in their late-40s. I have three younger host siblings: two brothers and a sister. One brother is a recent college graduate of 23 who has moved back home in order to plan his next steps; a common move by young graduates in the States as well. The other brother is 19, attends college in UB and is working two jobs this summer for a little spending cash during the school year. My host sister is a sweet girly girl of 21 (her favorite color is pink, and she can’t go anywhere without her zebra-print heels). She, too, is a recent college graduate but her ambitions are higher; she will be going back to UB to pursue her MA and has plans of becoming a customs officer. Her ‘job’ this summer is to take care of me, a task that includes: meals at promptly 8:30am, 1:30pm and 7:30pm (times scheduled around my language and technical lessons at the nearby school) and Mongolian tutoring. My family seems wonderful and thoroughly accepting. My PST is off to a great start.