Today is Chinggis Khan’s birthday, and as a national holiday, we all had the day off from work and school. With the cooling temperatures, I’m starting to feel much lonelier. I so badly crave the ability to speak English consistently, to not have a daily language barrier frustration, to go to yoga in a real live studio every Sunday, to go on a morning surf check with a cup of coffee from Café Classique. The Peace Corps braced us for this, but the anticipation is nothing like the actual sense of isolation in a foreign community. I haven’t posted so much recently, because I’ve been harboring feelings of resentment, anger, negativity and sadness. Yesterday’s new moon marked my intention to shed all of that, to move forward without focusing so much on all of the obvious hardships.

I moved to Holland right around the same time of the year that I moved to Zavkhan, in the early fall at the start of the new school year. Nine years later, I put far more effort into my experience here in Zavkhan than I ever did in Amsterdam. Yet, I can’t help but feel like that young, desperately homesick fourteen year old wanting so badly to feel like she belongs. I eat lunch in our school’s cafeteria everyday, and every time I grab my bowl of tsuvain or nogootaishol and sootaitsai, I scan the room looking to see where I should sit. Just recently, I realized that I eat at the table with the cool teachers.

How did it come back to this?

I celebrated Thanksgiving in Amsterdam with a family from Oxnard, California, a couple of missionaries with five children, all with the names of international cities. Despite my lack of religious beliefs, I loved that family to death. If I were to go back to my dad’s home, I could probably still bike to their house and back without fail. They embraced their American identities by opening their homes to everyone in the community to celebrate the holidays. They helped me feel like I belonged in a period in time when I felt so alienated from my Dutch family.

So I’m embracing my American identity, attempting to feel like I belong in Zavkhan. I’ve invited over my counterparts to my house for chicken-filled ravioli that took decades to prepare. I’ve taught passing kids how to say, “hey, what’s up” and “awesome.” I keep a smile on my face, even with swollen eyes from tears the day before. It takes the edge off of the dozens of well-meaning Mongolian youths who pass me shouting “hello” and “hi” all at once.

I’ve thrown myself into my work, establishing myself in what seems like a flurry of nonsensical organization. There’s no obvious work for me at my host-country agency, and my main counterpart, the school social worker, is as clueless as I am on what my primary duties could consist of. I’ve made dozens upon dozens of suggestions, but to no avail. He started his job about a week after I got to Uliastai. He’s incredibly genuine, albeit brand spanking new to his role as our school’s social worker. Everyday he asks me what I’ll be doing, and I’ll tell him in my broken Mongolian, and he’ll nod his head and say “that’s nice,” before heading off to do something else.

Some host country agencies take their volunteers by the hand and lead them into the darkness, while other volunteers, like me, are airdropped in and feel things out in the blindness until the surroundings are familiar enough to accomplish anything. The kind of independence I have developed in the last two months has been astronomical in size, but has taken an enormous toll on my emotional wellbeing. The Mongolia we see in pictures when googling “the steppe” is not the Mongolia I experience in the workplace, and the growing pains have been stretching my muscles until the point they rip.

I’ve found solace in my art class, my favorite success so far. It’s beyond the level of difficulty that I could have pictured, because the art-enthusiast technology teacher doesn’t speak a lick of English, and I’ve only been speaking Mongolian for a few months. But its been working, inexplicably. The same seven kids have been showing up every week, and eagerly show me their finished products at the end of class. My counterpart art-teacher is always on time, a Mongolian miracle, and always makes a small effort to make time to lesson plan, another Mongolian miracle.

Never in my life have I actively pursued small pleasures the way that I do here. When something goes right, it warms me like a drug. Just finding someone motivated enough to do execute a task with me is a victory.

Its only been about two months since I’ve arrived at site, and it feels like a couple weeks but it also feels like its been about a year. Its already started getting pretty cold, and when I think about the impending winter my heart starts racing a little. This will be my first, real zuud. I’m still in this out-of-body state where I don’t really believe I’m in this for the long haul. I talk to a few Peace Corps friends on a regular basis, and a theme that comes up in our conversations is the whole “living in the present” cliché. Frankly, it’s the only mantra I can live by that gets me through the day.

In the United States, I wasn’t exactly confident in my professional abilities. I enjoy waking up late, I prefer to work at home, I loathe the small talk that builds those relationships that get you a promotion, or as it was in my case, the privilege to continue working for free or better hours. But now I’ve found myself clinging onto the people who are even just a little bit nice to me, asking them slightly moronic questions like if they have children or what their hobbies are. The whole notion of “awkwardness” flew out the window when we stepped off the plane in Ulaanbaatar back in May. I watch myself do a lot of things I wouldn’t have ever done if I wasn’t here, but when it comes down to it, I’m not given much choice on the matter. There is so much that is out of our hands, and most of the time, I’m mentally standing five feet away watching myself perform tedious tasks with a stupid smile on my face. (One of my favorite words in Mongolian: тэнэг (tenig)—stupid.)

There are a lot of things I could get upset about everyday. I got so homesick when I opened the package my mom sent me. I caught a whiff of the laundry detergent from home she used to wash underwear she bought for me from Ross. It was the smell of home. I hadn’t allowed myself to miss anything from home, because I didn’t think I did. That stupid smell sent me over the edge I needed to step over.

I’ll happily admit that this first bit here at site has been rougher than I wish it had been. There’s this chart that Peace Corps gives us that graphs out our happiness and mood levels throughout service. “Your service is a rollercoaster” is basically what it says. The spikes of happiness have been extreme, but the lows can be pretty damn low. Essentially, the first few months at site are supposed to be new and exciting! Fantastically grand with Technicolor multicultural shininess!

“Supposedly.”

But “no peace corps service is the same,” and “everybody has different experiences.”

So now I watch myself from a distance, living in the present, doing things that simply need to be done. I come home at the end of the day slightly proud, though. Even if its going to every damn дэлгүүр (delguur) on every corner to find eggs. In the United States, I couldn’t have been bothered to deal with the things I do here. I spend hours on the most mundane tasks but get a quiet pleasure out of accomplishing something together with a host country national and yes, building a connection.

I’ve just passed a threshold in which I no longer find Mongolia new and strange, but rather familiar and sometimes annoying. I can’t make it through the week without being watched while eating mutton at least four or five times. I miss not being able to eat local grown organic produce whenever I want, but I do have people who hover over me making sure I eat enough. It can be mildly endearing, albeit incredibly irritating at times. My ээж (eej—mom) called me and told me she missed me, which I was honestly surprised by. It warmed me.

Most of my days in Darkhan with my host family were spent either helping cook, watching weird television programs I never understood, doing a lot of nothing and talking about how hot it was. I saw my host dad probably once or twice, because my host parents lived separately. I had a strict curfew, and my ээж was vigilant. She’d call me every hour, on the hour, to make sure I would come home. So annoying, but so loving.

So, if anyone were to ask me how I feel about my service right now, I’d say just ok. I’m ok.

The tiny frustrations have percolated into one big giant realization: It just never works out the way you want it to.

That old, cliché saying— Expect the worse, hope for the best—its been ringing in my ears this past week.

I am eerily American in the fact that I subconsciously acknowledge that productiveness is key and that “time is money” and the best bet at success or happiness comes from action. My background in journalism led me to understand that I have to work all the time. I feel like a flustered pigeon that accidentally flew into a room after starting school at the beginning of this month. I’m not always exactly sure what I should be doing to pass the hours.

The frustration is the fact that I don’t know. I never know—the obvious manifestation of that idea is the ability to grasp the language. Every action is fleeting: I have the concrete basis of what I want to say or do, but if I can get maybe 30% of that idea expressed, its basically a success. I was given a vague job description and a desk, and the rest lies on the Peace Corps’ confidence in me.

I’m not sure if I should feel like I should trust my old instincts in understanding what’s fairs fair, because in all developing countries, nothing’s “fair” whatever the fuck that means. I haven’t been physically or emotionally comfortable in the last three months, and I work on my personal happiness daily to keep myself balanced. I supposedly suffer because the obvious is apparent: I’m going without a lot of aesthetic, material things that contributed to my security in who I am as it pertains to both my work and my identity.

During Pre Service Training, I was disgruntled, angry even, at the Peace Corps’ approach when it came to scheduling. I enjoyed waking up without an alarm, lazily wincing into the day’s first hours of sun. I felt like I was being realigned, being forced into adulthood by showing up everyday at 9 a.m. and wearing clothes that covered my tattoos, knees, and elbows. The anger boiled up after I had a heat stroke, and I showed up to training the next week with my tattoos bared unabashed with a scowl on my face. Take that. But that was petty.

My suffering, as maybe others would perceive it, is not really suffering. I used to tell myself over and over again while I lived in my hometown that comfort is dangerous, that if I let it get the best of me, I’d succumb to the secretary’s ass of personal integrity. I’m knee deep in puzzle pieces I’m trying to put together, and its not always pretty. There’s a developed and tasteful beauty in finding peace in accepting our world’s harsh realities.

I’ve just made acquaintance with that peace.