Ulan Bator – my ministry to the coldest capital city on earth

Jona with his ‘morin khuur ‘- a traditional Mongolian bowed stringed instrument.

Jona is currently undertaking „Alternative service abroad” with HELP International Mongolia instead of military services in Germany. Below he describes his recent personal experiences.

 

For now more than six month I live here - in the country of wild horses and rambling nature. But for now I mainly live in the coldest capital city of the world at its coldest time of the year:
The crazy traffic, the dust, the winter smog which fades the sun red in the morning and makes it hard to breath. The Ger areas (Mongolian round tents) with its inscrutable roads, the straying dogs digging in the garbage at the side of the road, children queuing with their canister at the water houses and thousands of corner shops – It seems I already got used to all of that. 

Than there is the ‘Зах’, a market where you literally can buy everything. But after two hours shopping, one flees because of the cold, and I ask myself how the sales man can bare that hour by hour and day by day without freezing to death.

’100-аль’ and ‚Цайц’ are DIY stores where we often buy construction material, they work like a flee market, at every stand they pile up numerous things, and if they can’t find what you are looking for, they run through the iles to find it for you at someone else's stand. There are also supermarkets like ‘Home Plaza’ where you have a familiar ring because the shelves are filled with common reasonable priced branded goods – even though they are not particular favorable here.
My every-day work is to help in our alcohol-rehab and to help to care for homeless people. I like this work. We see the thankfulness of the people and sometimes we really see, how a life is changed.

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