Happy May to everyone – it’s been flurrying all day in Ulaanbaatar! My
family lives about 12km NNW of the city in the hills at the very edge
of the city (great hiking!). We live in a one-room house, but most of
our neighbors live in gers. The front window looks out over UB, which
is always cloaked in smog, and I rejoice each time I recall that I am
no longer living in that cloud.

Last month we did a homestay with herders in the Kharkhorin valley. I
got a lot of experience combing goats for cashmere, as the week we
arrived the cashmere prices were way up and everyone was scrambling to
comb all their goats and get the cashmere to town. Prices were almost
$33 a kilogram and you need two to three goats to get a kilo. My
family had about 100 goats, 200 sheep and 100 horses, cows and yaks.
There were seven members of my family living in our ger, including an
uncle who is a Buddhist lam. On this excursion we visited the city of
Kharkhorin, the site of Chinggis Khan’s ancient capital.

At the end of April we took the train to Erdenet, the copper and
molybdenum mine that generates about 40% of Mongolia’s GDP. The
environmental degradation that has occurred over the last 30 years is
sad to see, but we met a group of community activists who are working
to hold the mining corporation accountable for this damage and improve
their processing technology to minimize the pollution.

I leave Monday for a week in the South Gobi, visiting Oyu Tolgoi, a
proposed copper and gold mine site (the largest Cu/Au deposit in the
world) that a Canadian company is trying to get final legal approval to
begin operating. This is part of my Independent Study Project which
I’ll finish up in Ovorkhangai aimag on the Onggi River looking at
deforestation.