2010 in review

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Fresher than ever.

Crunchy numbers

A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 2,100 times in 2010. That’s about 5 full 747s.

In 2010, there were 8 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 15 posts. There were 15 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 22mb. That’s about a picture per month.

The busiest day of the year was February 8th with 85 views. The most popular post that day was Mongol Geo-Tools.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were facebook.com, spankapps.wordpress.com, cuso-vso.org, faragraphics.com, and vsocan.org.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for heather in mongolia, mongolia, heather fara, zud, and vso mongolia.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

1

Mongol Geo-Tools February 2010

2

My Work September 2009

3

Zud Reflections February 2010
3 comments

4

About Mongolia September 2009
2 comments

5

Departure day has arrived! October 2009
2 comments

Mongolian Transplants

Today Mongolians typically eat only boiled meat at every meal, year round, but this was not always true. In the days of Chingis Khaan, I am told that it was illegal to eat animals in the summer. Mongolians ate meat in winter and vegetable and milk products in summer.

When Mongolia was associated with the Soviet Union, they had large irrigated farms and produced enough vegetables for export.  When the Soviet Union dissolved, Mongolia’s agriculture market crashed and individual family herding practice (still seen as the easiest/safest route to self-sufficiency) became nearly the sole occupation.

I worked with herders who lived on lands that were once great farms. You can still see irrigation channels from satellite photos.  I was surprised when they asked me to teach them farming. Surely, people in the community must have once been farmers? It was bewildering. Research into the issue revealed that that the majority of international donor projects teach or fund farming and the requests for teaching are exponential.

My apartment had a large south-facing window, so I started a home vegetable garden with heirloom seeds carried from the USA. I sprouted seeds in egg containers, transferred them to plastic drink bottles, and finally into halved gallon jugs. The soil in Mongolia is exceedingly poor, but my work with the Mongolian Women Farmers Association meant that I had access to beautiful black organic compost that my plants loved.

From seed to sprouts in my apartment

When it came time to leave Mongolia, I began searching for a home for these plants and now my green babies are helping care for Mongolia’s babies. The Lotus Children’s Centre is a Buddhist residential and outreach service for abandoned children in Mongolia. The children at Lotus, eat nutritious meals heavy in vegetables. This year Lotus secured money to build greenhouses and teach the children gardening. My little garden of tomatoes, herbs, and flowers is now getting them started.

I just received a letter and this photo from Lotus. They report that my plants have been transplanted outside and are in the ground now.

What color will these become? Pink, purple, striped?

Everything is in fruit and flower now.  The tomatoes are cold weather heirloom varieties from the North America, so the kids are in for a colorful treat soon! If all goes well they can save seeds and continue these works for years to come.

Yeah Mongolian Geospatial Conference!

The GIS and Remote Sensing (RS) conference went beautifully with loads of talks, posters, and a couple workshops.

All the concern that people would not come was silly. There were a hundred people who checked the website in the week before the conference and the bus was full for the star party. Tee shirts sold out before I could get one my size. The star party was wholly Mongolia in flare with traditional singers, traditional culture stories about the stars, karaoke, dancing, and a 3D movie – all in the middle of nowhere Mongolia

If you are interested in what was discussed, the agenda is posted on the website. The conference dealt heavily with climate change and urban development, issues central to Mongolia now. I will also post abstracts to the website by July 2010.

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Бороо brings beauty to everything

I have never loved rain (бороо: borro) as much as I have today.

After many long months where the temperature dropped down to -45C and the sky was black with pollution from burning tires and dirty coal, followed by a month of yellow dust storms that made smiling or opening eyes outside impossible, today is the first day that I have breathed clean air in 8 months.

I have been unable to stay inside. I walked the entire city breathing as deeply as physically possible. My nose and lungs are intoxicated by the smell of wet dirt. Overnight grass has sprung up in wet ditches and there is a damp quiet to the sound of traffic. I am skipping and jumping. Violins and cellos pluck new songs in my head.

This month I have been helping a local women farmers association, while I wait for comments on final reports on GIS maps and policy papers. This NGO teaches the poorest of the poor in Mongolia to farm so so they can afford to send children to school, feed their family, and supplement their income in general.

This month has been a truly happy one for another reason. I accomplished the impossible and my own personal challenge. I was able to teach a Mongolian farmer web design without the use of language. We were both left glowing in excitement. This glow has lasted for days. There are so many ways to communicate that are underappreciated and underutilized. This experience left me feeling that the unspoken ways of communicating are the key to effective teaching. It is these connections that capture the learner. I don’t really think it is the material. When these connections are strong they inspire creativity and the learning capacity that every teacher craves.

Below is the song that has been echoing in my head as I dance in the rain outside falling on the parched Mongolian steppe.

Capacity Building

When I arrived in Mongolia last year, I looked at the number of tasks outlined by the grant and wondered why I could not just get these done in a few months and go home early. These were foolish thoughts in retrospect.  My job has required major rethinking due to serious development issues.

There has been winter weather and flu travel restrictions that lasted for months. I have seen what looks to me like a dichotomy of good and bad herders, as one herder will lose only a few animals and a neighbor will loose all of them.  The pastures when I arrived looked extremely degraded and I have sat on a national committee where this is the discussion. I have felt judged for working on a project installing more wells because most scientists feel that the pasture is 1/3 overstocked due to nil government regulatory controls. I have also learned that the mining is actually the driving economy, it is no longer agriculture and there is a lack of integration between the industries. Regions of the country now have multiple serious documented mercury pollution issues, and many more areas complain of the same.  Many herders practice this dirty mining to secure funds so their kids can afford school. The more environmental option sometimes doesn’t work either: this winter a herder in my project area decided to comb his goats early to collect enough funds for his child to continue schooling, and the cold killed all his goats a week later.

As far as my project goes, I understand now that the eroding grasslands are the result of an unstable market economy. Even this winter, when a large percentage of the animals died so there is little wool to be had, the factories are refusing to pay a fair price. They are attempting to wait out the herders to get the lowest price. It is a game of survival and no one is winning. The every-person-for-themselves plan is just not working here, and the environmental and economic repercussions are serious and escalating.

So, rather than purely focusing on creating project maps, I have been working on capacity building. This is more than conducting trainings. It is organizational development inclusive of management structure, relationships between organizations, and regulatory frameworks that enable organizations to work at their maximum capacity. I submitted a policy paper to the Government of Mongolia detailing a path for a national information system where I argue for system development with full participation of government, academic, and business sectors, so that future attempts at capacity building result in sustainable development systems. There is an over reliance on foreign donors and international NGOs in Mongolia to handle poverty, natural disaster, and market development. This reliance must be phased out.

Mongolia has not had a mass exodus of skilled workers evident in other developing countries; there are many highly skilled people still working in Mongolia, but they are working outside their profession because their skills are not valued. For instance, many government jobs are appointed and staffed based on family and friend relationships, rather than skills and abilities. I worked with government employees responsible for mapping that only had a week-long course from an international NGO, when there are many Mongolians with graduate degrees in mapping.

Outside of work hours, I have advised many graduate GIS students in Mongolia. They are working on very interesting projects focused on the extent of mining pollution, forage prediction, water use and policy, climate change indicators, and urban planning. Professors lament that their brightest students all end up working for mining companies because no other employer pays. The rest are working as secretaries and other administrative positions only using their word processing and number skills.

In response, I am planning a GIS conference on in hopes of sparking some of the missing connections between government, business, and academia. The committee is working to personally invite local leaders with no training in GIS, to educate them on the value of this science for economic growth and development solutions. I just built a conference website at www.geospatialmongolia.org and if you are just learning about this conference and you want to contribute a talk or poster—ignore the abstract dates and email the committee. We want you to be there!

Unfolding Secrets

In international development, you never know how things will unfold. I have been here 6 months, and this month I learned two very important things.  Firstly, if law is not written well it can hamper work. Secondly, if you are working for an international donor and the money is funneled through the government, you better clarify your relationship with the government.

I was just officially informed that all map information that I collect on wells is state secret and if I distribute it, I could go to prison for 2 years.  WHAT?!

There was a long list of stipulations read to me detailing no sharing of information on winter shelters, summer camps, streams, etc, etc, etc.  It became clear that the government understands that I work for them, not the NGO that pays the bills. Then I was asked to sign a legal document for access to data that I already had or to say that I was OK with the rules.  I am not sure what it said because the document was in Mongolian, and no official English translation was provided.

I decided not to sign.

Then I rushed home, deleted all data that the government gave me, pulled the environmental reports off the website (they had maps in them), and canceled all data technical working group meetings indefinitely. I am not interested in visiting the prison and not going to argue. I understand that most of the data I have is not Mongolian, but they did not make distinctions on where the data came from.

For the next four days, I searched for translations of the laws read to me. Most of the laws are outdated; they only refer to printed paper maps of specific scales, not digital data.  Worryingly, I read that prison sentences could be 3-8 years, not 2. The main law is not translated yet and the official list of all things considered state secret appears …secret.

So, I am using international donor money (tax money from citizens from wealthier Asian countries) for things that the general public is not freely informed about. This feels fundamentally wrong.  Honestly, there are many decisions being made on my project that could use more public scrutiny.

Strangely, I found myself smiling for the next few days. Why? I am truly proud to be an American (not the end reaction that I expected either).  I am proud because I come from a culture where government transparency is expected, not the opposite.

In the U.S., government transparency has made high-resolution geospatial data free over the internet, available for free download 24 hours a day worldwide. There is a national data standards committee (composed of government, business, and the general public), so data is constantly updated, expanded, and improved.

In Mongolia, when the government has data, it is held tight. You can request it, but requests are not answered for months or never answered. Knowledge is respected like an object, not a flow. Holding more knowledge is equivalent to holding more power.

If knowledge is respected as a flow, rather than an object, sharing becomes key to its power. In this way, when the sharing stops, the knowledge looses value because it is no longer evolving. This approach to information sharing has led to rapid technology development, better land use planning, and stronger business development. The constant flow of information keeps people and countries innovative and efficient. I think this understanding has kept the US innovative and on top of financial markets.

Clearly the data that I have is not secret. I can download most of it from the internet freely in Mongolia. But state policy has not evolved with the times; so, working in a government capacity is difficult here. Mongolia must review its policies on data sharing and reassess what it considers state secret and punishable by prison.

Herding a Market Economy

There are no less than 6 major donor funded projects, just like mine, actively working to reduce the pressure on the pasture and secure livelihoods of poor herders. All programs educate herders on animal stocking and pasture rotation. All drill more wells. Most projects work to enable herders in developing alternative businesses. This project has been implemented time and time again. Long-term results for these short-term projects remain unmeasured; once the final report is written, that is that.

This week, the provincial governor told me that these projects repeatedly spend millions to train herders in alternative trades and fund many small and medium business enterprises surrounding small towns. He says that after a couple of years the herders always return to the countryside and these small businesses fail. This news hit me like a brick because, secretly, I felt that the most promising aspect of our project was alternative business development.

Today, I am back in Ulaanbataar and feel the stress of the city. My lungs have felt inflamed most of winter due to the black coal burning all day. Cars and trucks honk incessantly and the breaking of large crippled buses outside are like nails running across on a chalkboard. Water and power is out in portions of the city on a daily basis, and today the power was out at my place. I understand why a herder would not want to stay long in the city.

I have lived in the wilderness. Its beauty is enchanting, an ocean of peace. While life is hard one season, long carefree days are always promised in the next.  Knowing how to live off the land is a skill that is respected by all, but appreciated most by those who have done it. Each time you make it through a year, you are a champion. Having experienced this visceral sense of living, I remain driven to conserve wild lands and subsistence living.

little herders

If you are a poor herder and you loose your animals to due to lack of sufficient grazing material or water, you understand that this is a fact of life. You tried your hardest and did your best.  You will attempt to raise more animals to secure your livelihood and prepare for life’s next trial.

Herders do have a practical understanding of ecological processes. They understand that their grasslands can only support a limited number of animals. They will tell you that the trees are vital for rivers because they hold water. They understand that mining depletes the water table and rivers. They know that their topsoil is blowing away to China, Korea, and other Asian lands. They will tell you that global climate change has magnified drought conditions.

Herders will come to the cities when they are bankrupt or the lure of money is high. Moving to a polluted city where you will have to toil long hours year round to obtain a small wage is not the preferred lifestyle, but they will all be in cities soon, if the pastureland continues to degrade.

Today, many animals are fed imported feed, kept alive at higher numbers than these dry lands naturally support. Water is being drained from the water table faster than it can be naturally recharged. Herders report that rivers and lakes are disappearing and government officials, international development agencies, and herders report that animal production is lower than it could be due to a lack of wells. I suspect that if herders do not increasingly contribute to Mongolia’s new market economy, they will loose their land rights and protections because large international mining contracts play in increasing role in government land use and policy decisions.

Still, I remain optimistic that long-term solutions can be found to keep Mongolians working the land with ample clean water and wilderness.  I suspect that wells will reduce the impact of livestock on riverbanks and perhaps herders from washing vehicles in them. I am collecting and publishing environmental data that can be used to help solve environmental questions now and in the future. A friend is working for the World Bank establishing wool grading laboratories, so herders can be paid more for improved quality, rather than quantity. Another friend is working with Mercy Corps to improve the tourism industry, so that you will see the wild Mongolia, its currently unquantified, globally rare wilderness riches.