Work in Mongolia
by Victoria
Mongol puppy
Work in Mongolia: Regime change begins at home June 17, 2006 The local change in project management took place yesterday, June 16, 2006, at approximately 4pm (east asia time, or central asia time, whatever time zone I’m in), and I must say I’m quite pleased. Already there are plans in the works for me to take more of an interest in the exploration program, like dealing with the drills and learning to use Arcview. More interesting than QAQC (snooooorz). But I don’t know yet who will be the new boss…. The big boss visits next week to tell us. The work here is progressing; we’re one step closer to dewatering the mine. We’re putting into place the liners for the pond to hold the water from the mine (being the good, environmentally friendly, neocolonialist corporate citizens we are). The head frame is at least partially up and the volume of prairie boy miners has doubled. My MP3 list about death songs is up to 16. 1 hours, with the recent addition of the “The CN Tower Belongs to the Dead” by Final Fantasy. The coffee production is going well. I receive daily compliments. I don’t think my Ecuadorian, organic, fair trade beans will last the whole set, but there’s a can of Tim Hortons coffee and some German stuff as well to tide me over. There’s a new puppy on site, named Rex! The French-Canadian drill foreman is looking after it and it follows him wherever he goes. It’s pretty tiny but has huge paws, so when it grows up it’ll be named Tyrannosaurus Rex. Its adorable but kind of scared of people. So until it actually lets me pet it my favourite dog is still the one at the new camp (name forgotten), that bites at everyone’s heels when they’re walking. Summer has brought us a baby hawk. Soooo cute. Its nest is on the edge of a small cliff not too far from the mine. It could fit in my two hands. It has gigantic claws and soft downy feathers, but all it does is lie around with its tongue out waiting for mama to bring it food. Mama was circling not too far away. Summer has also brought us awesome weather. The warm weather has brought a bunch of tubby shirtless Mongolian men. I’ll attach a picture of the hawk and puppy, and spare you the shirtlessness. Me and Buz have been walking to and from the office to the camp. We’ve gotten a little lost a couple times, turning a 25 minute walk into an hour, finally seeing the camp in the valley behind us. Buz calls it prospecting. But no worries, we realized if we walk in a line from the gate to the tree then we stay on course. I think Buz has taken a picture of every flower on the way. As for the language front, I’ve been mostly learning Mongolian nouns, like key, scissors, food, lately. But I can pick words out of pop songs, as most of them seem to contain love you, miss you. That lesson did come in handy! In grammar news, it is now only correct to put one space after a period, not two. And you are supposed to use four dots (….) instead of three (…) when you trail off incoherently. It’s nice that even though I’m in one of the more remote locations on the planet I can still keep up on grammar news. |
