Meatless in Mongolia Part One

The red robed nun said I really hit the ground running, but the truth is more that I hit the ground of Ulan Baator in a white Land Cruiser, one of the hundreds among the Mercedes and Lexus SUVs clogging the traffic on the surprising well paved streets of Mongolia's major city. it had been borrowed for the occasion of fetching the two of us from Chingghis Khan airport just before midnight. As we rolled through the darkness to who knew where, I saw city lights in the distance and eventually a narrow river to be crossed, a surprise in a country defined by the great Gobi Desert. When we came to a halt in the unlit parking area of a red brick block building, I thought I had arrived at last at my final destination, Lama Zopa's Foundation for the Preservation of the Mahayana Tradition (FPMT) Buddhist temple, epicenter of His HOliness the Dalai Lama's aspiration to return Buddhism to the Mongolian people now that the rabidly atheistic Soviets have been pushed out. Wrong.

After 16 hours of flying and changing time zones from night to day all I wanted to do was go to sleep but after a climbed the cement stairs and took off my shoes outside a front door, I discovered I was going to a welcome reception in the private apartment of our driver, a tall, handsome young man who turned out to be the younger brother of the woman who outside the immigration and baggage area held the sign with my name neatly written on it. The two rooms of his residence were bleakly boxy and cement like, the remains of Soviet occupation, but the living room where we sat had a large flat screen TV with Phillips speakers above, plenty of electricity and running water--unlike all of Nepal and half of India--and a kitchen with a recognizable stove, a microwave and refrigerator. It also had a brand new, two week old baby asleep on the bed sitter next to me--a girl. The father picked her up with great tenderness and obvious pride: girls are a blessing in Mongolia where 67% of the men are alcoholic and violent by the age of 17. Young women populate the universities and offices and in droves, I am told, are chosing to be single mothers because most Mongolian men are so unpleasant to live with.

Although it was now after midnight, the wife had prepared us a full Mongolian meal--minus meat, indicating she is Buddhist now. On the coffee table in front of me was a plate of fresh sliced tomatoes interlaced with sliced cucumber, a bowl of Russian potato salad and another bowl of grated carrots swimming in loose mayonnaise--Russian food like borscht and mayonnaise salads are a culinary legacy of the 50-year Soviet occupation. There was also a polite plate of packaged cookies (what we would call biscuits). I held a soup bowl filled with warm rice-laced milk for which I had a spoon. (I later learned that milk rice with meat dumplings in it is more or less the national dish of Mongolia.) There was of course tea-- with milk. "You came to work with Mongolian food," the English nun said, "and here it is, so you hit the ground running." Frankly, I just wanted to hit the ground.

I came here on the strength of three emails, asking for a vegetarian cook to revitalize the Stupa Cafe, housed in a four story building that is the epicenter of the effort to revive Buddhism in Mongolia. The basement classrooms are used to teach English--over 250 students come for the ESL, Dharma to children and yoga. The rear of the main floor is a meditation hall mainly used absolutely every morning by a dozen elderly Mongolian women--and one man, about half in traditional dress, who chant while they fill 1500 water bowls as an offering of merit. Having accomplished that each morning, they then sit down and chant the entire one hour prayer of praise to the protector Mother goddess Tara. The front of the building has a small shop on the left and the Stupa Cafe on the right. Its kitchen abuts that singing shrine room and in the morning the sound of the faithful chanting is our kitchen white noise.

I was given a private room and bathroom on the second floor where the main meditation hall is. surprisingly anywhere from 12 to 60 people will show up for evening prayer services that start at 6PM. While they are in session, I cannot use the abutting kitchen set up for those of us who live here: a nun from western Australia, the center director who is from Italy, the ESL teacher who is from Kansas, and the outreach NGO director from Singapore. He supervises the soup kitchen/medical clinic/job training project about 7 kilometers away where the homeless former herders now congregate. Mongolia is superbooming just now, the fastest growing economy in the world because under the vast and fearsome Gobi Desert lie the world's second largest copper and gold deposits. And surprise! Everybody wants to tear up the Earth to exploit them. In addition to the torrent of foreignors pouring into this goldrush and not just for the minerals but the banking and real estate, over 1 million people have moved into Ulan Baator from their gers on the plains. More pour in every day. Sadly, the unskilled and illiterate have no place except in the outlying slums which are metastasizing at an alarming rate. So the Buddhists are reaching out in the spirit of healing and compassion but it seems they have unwittingly been pushed into fierce competition by the evangelical Christians and Mormons who apparentlyresort to any tactic they can think of to convert Mongolians to Jesus. The soup kitchen therefore has to serve meat, which is off limits at the Stupa Cafe. Indeed the whole point of my being here to make vegetarian food more appealing, if not downright magnetic.

The rest of the second floor is offices, the library and the lounge where we eat and meet. The top floor has the translation office and residences for the others who live here by the year. I am only here for five weeks.

More about the Stupa Cafe shortly. I have to go to work in it right now.

Sandy Garson"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
http://www.sandygarson.com
http://yoursinthedharma.blogspot.com/

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