A Week to Remember

Our Dear, Dear Family:

We did make it back from the Gobi alive, arriving in Ulaanbaatar just before noon today. The trip by plane is not bad: 560 km, less than one and one-half hours.

We left our apartment at 4:30 a.m. Friday morning to get to the Chinggis Khan Airport for a 7:00 a.m. departure. The mining company, Ivanhoe Mines, had arranged for us to travel on their charter flight which flies their workers back and forth from the mines for time at home. Most of the workers work 56 days at the mines and then have two weeks at home. There are about 600 workers there now, 100 of them day workers from the local area.

The assistant to the vice president in charge of this mine, Bayarmaa, and the leader of our Church group there, Aibek, met us at the company air strip. Bayarmaa was assigned to be with us all of the time; Aibek and other members joined us as they could. Bayarmaa is married to a Canadian (Ivanhoe Mines is based in Canada); she spent one year in medical school here and then graduated from the National University of Mongolia with a law degree. She was a very pleasant and delightful person to be with.

There are about twenty members of the Church working at the mines (the Mongolian name is Oyu Tolgoi, which means Turquoise Hill), but maybe half of them are less active and some actually avoided any contact with us. We met with up to ten of the members in three meetings: an informal meeting in our apartment (a modular studio apartment that was very comfortable); a fireside on Saturday night; and Sacrament Meeting on Sunday night. Linda and I both spoke in the fireside and the sacrament meeting. The chapel there is a ger where two returned missionaries who married two or three years ago live. The meetings were very spiritual and pleasant. We ate all of our meals in the company cafeteria, together with our members, the miners, translators, and administrators. We became good friends with the chef, who is French. One of his assistants is from India, another from north China. The meals were excellent. The cook being French, he even prepared croissants, chocolate eclairs, home-made ice cream, and French bread. They had two lines: one serving Mongolian food, the other European.

During working hours, when we could not be with the members, Bayarmaa took us sightseeing. We visited the Soum center (a soum is like a county in Utah) named Khan Bogd. It was very different from the many others I have visited: there were new brick homes and quite a number of Land Cruisers. Bayarmaa told us that the people of this town surface mine gold in the nearby canyon. We drove up the hill beside the canyon and walked to the edge to see some very spectacular rock formations and old cottonwoods.

Bayarmaa lived in the Gobi for twenty-eight years. Her first trip out of the desert was when she was eighteen years old. Her family had raised camels and other livestock, so she was able to tell us a lot about life in the Gobi. We saw no green grass anywhere, but the camels, horses, cows, sheep, and goats were fatter than the animals I see on green pastures here. There was a carpet of dried grass and plants in the area we traveled, and Bayarmaa said it was very nutritious for animals. The only water we saw other than the wells at the mine site was in a pool in a canyon at the edge of a rocky range of hills. It was a very beautiful spot with turquoise-colored water in a pool forty feet across and old gnarled cottonwoods among the huge rocks.

We also stopped early one morning at the ger of a camel herder. He had about twenty-five young camels tethered near his ger and we could see the mothers in the distance. At almost exactly 10:30 the huge mother camels came trotting toward the ger and were soon feeding their babies. We went out among the herd and quite enjoyed watching and hearing them. The herder said that he sold the male camels and sometimes the younger ones. A large camel would bring about $1,000.

In the afternoon we drove into a more remote area with huge ledges, not unlike the ones above Fremont. Here we visited the site of a Buddhist temple constructed in the early 1800's. The Russians destroyed it in about 1940. The walls of what had been quite a large complex are still standing; and the CEO of Ivanhoe Mines donated $130,000 to build a huge stupa eight smaller stupas surrounding it in round circles, the whole things shaped like a lotus. The main stupa was painted brilliant white, with a gold Buddhist lotus on the tip of the spire. There is a golden, seated Buddha inside the stupa; and the inside and the eaves are decorated in rainbow colors, similar the inside wood of our ger.

All in all, this was quite a trip. I will try to send a few photos.

This week we met with two old friends, both of whom I trained in Utah: Amarjargal, former prime minister and foreign minister, and now a member of parliament; and Batayev, who just retired as chief of the Mongolia Police Academy. It was very pleasant seeing them again. Amarjargal treated us to Indian food in a luxury hotel near the parliament building; Batayev treated us to a very nice European lunch at a hotel owned by his daughter.

Linda has taught family history to a lot of people during the past week; I have gotten a lot done on our lost missionary search.

The weather here is still surprisingly warm; in the Gobi it was almost like summer in Utah.

We are both in good health. Linda, however, is quite tired today from the rigors of the trip. She stayed home and I came directly to my office.

This afternoon I taught the first seminar for Mongolian missionaries just being released from their missions. I taught almost four hours about skills for adjusting to their release and for their futures: the Church, education, family, work, etc. It was enjoyable. I will meet with them weekly for the next three weeks and then monthly for the following five months. In this way we hope we can help them get well settled in their lives and stay active in the Church.

Each Monday night we have a fireside in the mission home for all returned missionaries who would like to come. I must leave now to be with them.

We love you.

Grandpa and Grandma Jackson