Vol Comm and Moving In
on Sarah in Mongolia (Mongolia), 09/Nov/2009 10:00, 34 days ago
I am all recovered from my brush with the cold, and will be getting the flu shot this week to avoid getting that!On Friday night we had the volunteer committee meeting where we feed back to the programme office any issues that are bothering us. It was an interesting meeting that didnt get too heated and afterwards we headed out for food and drink. It was great to catch up with some of the vols from further afield and to hear what everyone was up to at their placements. A few of us then headed on to Steve and Belinda's ridiculously posh place which is absolutely amazing! Unfortunately at this stage my voice decided it was going and I ended up rasping away for the evening. I completely lost my voice on Saturday and ended up missing the weekends social activities because I couldn't speak!However I was up for moving into our new apartment. On Saturday Sarah and I moved into the apartment we had finally decided upon - the first one we saw about 10 days earlier! As luck would have it as we were moving in we ran into one of the Americans from the party the week before and we discovered we are living in the apartment beside his, so it is nice to have an English speaking neighbour. We got moved in, settled in and had a quiet night watching the 4 English channels on our TV!On Sunday I did laundry. This is such a simple process in the UK - separate colours and put in machine. Leave for 90 minutes, swap loads and put the wet stuff in drier. 90 minutes later it is clean and dry. Not so in Mongolia. We are lucky because we do have a twin tub, and so we are not handwashing for the year but it is still an all day task to wash 3 loads of laundry. I hadn't done much laundry in 6 weeks so I was definitely due washing. First step fill the first tub with water and soap, secondly add half a load of clothes and leave for 15 minutes to churn. Next empty the water from the tub. Now the tub is not connected to the mains water so this at first involved buckets until I made the decision to relocate the washing machine to inside the bath which made life easier. Once it is empty rinse the clothes. Then but the clothes into the spinner 2/3 items at a time. Spin for 3-5 minutes until most of the water is gone. This leaves you with a pile of wet laundry that then has to dry on a rack overnight. Repeat 6 times!Of course because I had no drier this meant I spent Sunday sitting around the apartment in my summer clothes as everything else was wet! I had also managed to pick up some cleaning supplies and food so most of the pots needed washed as did the glasses and the like so in between washes I spent the weekend cleaning.