All Is Given by Linda Neil

Author:Linda Neil
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIO026000, BIO007000, BIO022000
Publisher: University of Queensland Press
Published: 2016-09-15T04:00:00+00:00

Wild Strawberries in Mongolia

My sister packed tubs of fresh strawberries in our suitcases the morning we left for Ulaanbaatar. Cathie had heard there were shortages of many things in Mongolia’s capital, and strawberries in particular were nearly impossible to get hold of. She was used to the variety of travel but these days she liked to know at least what she was having for breakfast. Hence, she had packed the strawberries, along with a carton of So Good soy milk and some Weet-Bix covered in Glad Wrap.

We were departing from Hong Kong, where Cathie was head of music at the Chinese International School. Unlike many of the expats she worked with, who lived on the main island of Hong Kong, she lived in Kowloon, where she bought Weet-Bix, So Good and most of her preferred Australian brands at the local supermarket. Things like her favourite bread mix were harder to find, but Cathie managed to get a steady supply from friends who’d visited her regularly since she’d relocated to Hong Kong.

She’d been at the school for a couple of years and I was on my first visit. I’d been invited to give some writing and songwriting workshops at the school, and to accompany a group of CIS students on one of their annual international field trips. These trips occurred in a school hiatus called Project Week, during which the students travelled to various parts of the world and performed civic-minded projects for those less fortunate than themselves. Knowing that most CIS students came from wealthy families, I imagined that many people in the world could qualify as less fortunate. In Cathie’s opinion, though, Project Week was a good consciousness-raising opportunity for these kids, many of whom held multiple passports and expected to further their education at Harvard or Oxford.

Our group had elected to visit Mongolia and help the Christina Noble Children’s Foundation. On the outskirts of Ulaanbaatar, the foundation had built the Blue Skies Ger Village for kids in need, and the CIS students would be donating and erecting a ger. A ger, or a yurt, is a demountable home that can be cooled in summer or insulated in the long harsh winters for which Mongolia is especially famous. I thought it was an ingenious design, perfectly suited to the nomadic animal herders of Mongolia, who travelled in search of pastures to feed their livestock.

I was going to Mongolia as an observer and archiver of the trip. I was also gathering material for a possible radio documentary. Consequently, on the morning my sister packed the fresh strawberries, I was more concerned that I had remembered all the equipment I needed: my recorder, a supply of discs and batteries, a microphone, and headphones.

I was more intrigued than worried about the trip, though I was quite prepared for most of my preconceptions to be overturned. I brushed up on my rudimentary Mongolian history – on Genghis Khan, for instance, who conquered Eurasia in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, after leading his battalions of horsemen from the desert all the way east to Constantinople.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.