Education student again answers Mongolia's call

Wednesday, September 17, 2008 -

 Anne Riordan
 
 Meeting a semi-domesticated reindeer
 

Anne Riordan fell in love with a place where winters last nine months and temperatures plummet to 40 degrees below zero.

After serving as a Peace Corps volunteer in Choibalsan City, Mongolia, from 2003 to 2005, Riordan waited for the opportunity to get back to the central Asia country. Her chance came in 2007, when a Fulbright Fellowship enabled her to return to Mongolia, where she completed research for her master’s degree in special education at UW-Madison.

“Perhaps the biggest difference from my Peace Corps experience was that this time around I was based out of the capital Ulaanbaatar,” she reports, after surviving yet another Mongolian winter.

She describes the challenge of living in the capital during the winter, particularly dealing with pollution from the coal-burning power plants. The city, however, also afforded her access to a workout facility and fruits and vegetables.  She says, “This was definitely a luxury compared to the Mongolian countryside.”

“My research was challenging, but overall it went extremely well,” Riordan says. “Once I re-learned how to relax and not be so concerned about time — something I had previously learned in the Peace Corps — things went a lot more smoothly.”

She returned to Madison in April 2008 to wrap up her master’s thesis, and then headed back to Mongolia.  She received an extension on her Fulbright to complete some projects with her host organization, the American Center for Mongolian Studies — www.mongoliacenter.org — and have some of her work translated.

Riordan, who can converse in Mongolian, conducted focus groups and in-depth interviews with Mongolian teachers, administrators, doctors, and staff from non-governmental organizations to learn about their perceptions of disability in the classroom.  Her research was aimed at beginning to understand how these groups shape their ideas about disabilities, and the factors that influence how they understand disability.

“One of the main findings of my research is that perceptions of disability are in transition,” she says. “By transition, I’m referring to the changes that are taking place within Mongolian society and across sectors since the transition from socialism to democracy in 1991. Much of the Mongolian system is based on the Russian system, and the recent influx of other ideas and perspectives is having an effect on perceptions of disability in Mongolia.”

She based her work on the Millennium Development Goals of the United Nations, which strongly encourage developing countries to implement inclusive education policies.

Even though she had been away from Mongolia only two years between her Peace Corps and Fulbright stints, Riordan marveled at the changes in the capital city — BMWs sharing the road with the horse and cart, buildings popping up everywhere, and the availability of spinach in the market.

During her stay, she has maintained a blog to share her experiences and observations, with photos. One entry, for instance, explains her Mongolian nickname: “Some people call me Ulaana because of my red hair. Other people call me Ulaana because of my red cheeks!”

Here are more excerpts:

August 30, 2007: “Perhaps I’ve become more perceptive, or there are more people in wheelchairs here than before. Granted, it is summer and I suppose this might be the only time of year when you can be outside comfortably in a wheelchair in Mongolia. …

“Yet, I saw at least four people in a couple block radius, in wheelchairs. Two of those people were begging and the other two were selling nuts and candy. When I passed by them, no one seemed to be making any money. The anthropologist inside me would love to interview these people, and begin to break the surface of what it means to be physically disabled in the Mongolian context.”

September 25: “The exportation of culture or pieces of culture is something that is particularly fascinating to me. I think that one of the most interesting recent exports of western culture is Hip Hop. It’s all over the TV here in Mongolia, and it seems to be a big part of youth culture. …

“Even more fascinating is the way these things get adopted or adapted — as Gita Steiner-Khamsi puts it, “Mongolized” — and then they become a part of Mongolian culture. Sometimes signs, emblems, or words lose their original meaning and become something completely different.”

October 5: “People here have a tendency to walk very slowly, as if they have no place to go. Now, maybe that’s true, maybe they have nowhere to be, but the sidewalks are so small and crowded, it forces the people who do have somewhere to be to walk slower. I suppose concepts of time are very different here than they are in the states. It some ways this is refreshing, in other ways it’s completely frustrating.”

Riordan’s experiences also include trips into the countryside and a Kazakh eagle hunting event.

Under the heading “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,” she describes her 290-kilometer expedition in February to Northern Hovsgol Province — “what might have been the coolest trip of my life” — on a ‘road’ that didn’t really exist.”

She writes: “We spent a few days with the Tsaatan, Mongolia’s reindeer herders. We enjoyed nature, slept in teepees, played with the kids and gawked at semi-domesticated reindeer.”

Lake Hovsgol was gorgeous, she says. “The craziest thing about the lake is that the water is SOOO clear, that even in its frozen state, you can see straight to the bottom. The ice must have been frozen four or five feet solid.”

In March, she notes that “technically, spring has arrived.”  Her signs of spring include being able to go outside in jeans (without long underwear), retiring her fur hat for the season, and taking a jog on a windy morning when the temperature has climbed to 10 degrees.

“People seem to have forgotten how awful and cold winter is,” she writes. “The long, ugly winter definitely has an effect on the psyche.”

Prior to joining the Peace Corps, Riordan received her undergraduate degree in secondary education from DePaul University in Chicago, her hometown.

She says, “I’m currently looking for a job in the NGO (non-governmental organization) field, working on international research, development and/or disability issues and advocacy.”

-- by Kerry G. Hill

To learn more about Anne Riordan's experiences in Mongolia, read her blog at: www.ulaanainmongolia.blogspot.com.

(This article is taken from the fall 2008 issue of Campus Connections.)

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