Sunday, May 16, 2010

Family Fun

Times flies when you are having fun we all say & this was true for us this past week. We started our restful week playing in the yard out front of our building, going for walks & catching up on some Spring cleaning that we never had time for earlier. Later in the week we hired a friend to drive us 40 minutes outside of the city for a family day hike & ended the week with playing a new fun board game called Pictureka.

When the Kids & I were in the front of the building throwing our Canadian Frizbee to each other so many Mongolian kids, women & men watched us. Some were amazed, some laughed, while others had no expression on their face. The reason is that in Mongolian culture parents do not play with their children. Children play (games, sports, etc...) with children & adults play with adults (games, sports, etc...) There are very distinctive lines between child & adult things. Men/fathers especially do not play with their children of for that matter other children (their friends children, families children.) When I am playing with the kids, teaching them games/activities & especially encouraging them that they are doing a good job many Mongolians are confused. Mongolian parents "never" encourage their children in anything. They always ask "what happened" when they did not win or get a perfect score in school. Culturally, the reason is that a Mongolians "worst" fear is childhood pride. If their children are proud then bad things will come on the family. So they never encourage their children.

It always amazes me when 2 weeks ago we were still having temperatures of -10 Celsius & this week our average temperatures were from 17-28 Celsius. On that note I was so happy that on Friday our central heating turned off for the spring & summer. Our apartment during the 1st part of the week was 32 Celsius at night & we couldn't open the windows because spring in Mongolia is full of dust/sand storms with wind speeds of 50-100km/h. 

On Thursday we packed our backpacks & headed out of the city (the 1st time in 9 months) to enjoy the outdoors together as a family. We had our Mongolian friend drive us to a place that looked good on the side of the road & had him pick us up 5 hours later. We packed a frizbee, ball, food, a newspaper (for a fire) & the most important toilet paper. Here are a couple of pictures from our trip:







All in all I think we hiked, mountain climbed 10-12km.

Teresa, Kiel & I visited the private school that we would like to send Kiel to next year. We got a tour, talked with the schools principle (from Toronto) & got to meet both grade 3 teachers (both from Ontario & one of them received her B.Ed from Acadia University.) More than 50% of the teachers are Canadian & they use the Ontario Provincial School Board Curriculum. Also during the tour we learned that computer, gym (swimming lessons during the winter), art & music classes are all part of their daily learning. Kiel was also excited that they offer cooking classes as an after school program.

The children we got to meet, his potential classmates were extremely friendly & asked him many questions. As of right now Kiel would be the only non-Mongolian in the entire 3rd grade, which is awesome given the fact that earlier in the week Kiel told me that he did not have any Mongolian friends & it bothered him. Here is another opportunity for the Gospel as we will be able to befriend more Mongolian families.