There’s really not that much difference between 10 below and 30 below, she says, but once it gets to 35 below, well, that’s a tad chilly. “There’s something about the words ‘35 below,’ says the Peace Corps volunteer by phone from Bor-Ondor, Mongolia, a town of about 8,000 where she teaches English to grade school and high school students. “Your eyes start to freeze. That’s an interesting feeling.”
Peace Corps volunteer Hannah Klausman adapts to the cold temperatures and warm culture of Mongolia
At home a world away Peace Corps volunteer Hannah Klausman adapts to the cold temperatures and warm culture of Mongolia
By Mark Baker
The Register-Guard
Published: February 24, 2008 12:00AM
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“The camel ate my homework, teacher, I swear!” — Lead quote on Hannah Klausman’s MySpace page
S he’s eaten mutton dumplings and camel meat. She’s survived back-to-back winters with temperatures hovering at 30 below. She’s slept in a nomadic tent. She’s even slaughtered her own goat for dinner.
After living in Mongolia for the past 20 months, though, Hannah Klausman says she is used to most of these things. There’s really not that much difference between 10 below and 30 below, she says, but once it gets to 35 below, well, that’s a tad chilly. “There’s something about the words ‘35 below,’ says the Peace Corps volunteer by phone from Bor-Ondor, Mongolia, a town of about 8,000 where she teaches English to grade school and high school students. “Your eyes start to freeze. That’s an interesting feeling.”
But the 25-year-old Klausman, a 2000 graduate of North Eugene High School, would not trade her experience in the landlocked Asian nation wedged between Russia and China for all the mutton in the world. “It changes your perspective on what you can do with your life,” she says.
The annual Peace Corps Week around the world, including here in Eugene on the University of Oregon campus, begins Monday. This is when past and current volunteers and staff promote the federal agency that traces its roots to 1960 and then-Sen. John F. Kennedy’s challenge to students at the University of Michigan to serve their country by living and working in developing countries. Since then, about 190,000 volunteers have served in 139 countries, according to the Peace Corps Web site.
Klausman was one of the first graduates of North Eugene’s Japanese immersion program. In the fall of 1988, she began the first grade with 24 other students at the newly opened Yujin Gakuen Elementary School. Twelve years later, she was one of just five high school students to be the first to graduate from the program.
She learned Japanese at a faster rate than other students, says Noriko Ruth of Albany, who was one of Klausman’s teachers at North Eugene. She took first place in a speech contest in Portland among Japanese immersion students from around the state, Ruth says. “Everybody said, ‘She talks like a native,’ ” Ruth recalls.
Now, Klausman is picking up Mongolian. “Oanha yy, mai neim iz Han-nah,” she says into the phone, which translated, is “Hello, my name is Hannah.”
Opening windows
Klausman earned a scholarship after high school to study at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, majoring in international studies and graduating in 2004.
Her experience with Japanese culture and her visit to that nation as a fifth-grader had a lot to do with her wanting to go somewhere in Asia when she joined the Peace Corps in 2006, Klausman says. When told there was an opening in Mongolia, she jumped at the chance. “I always kind of thought about it when I was young,” she says of volunteering. “I just realized it’s a great opportunity.
“It was definitely scary, considering the temperatures we deal with out there,” Klausman says. On this morning in mid-February, as she speaks, it’s about 20 below outside. “A warm day,” she jokes.
Klausman’s work in Mongolia — the land ruled by Genghis Khan eight centuries ago — is part of a national drive to make English the primary foreign language there.
Mongolia is slightly larger than Alaska in area, but has about 700,000 fewer people than Oregon’s 3.5 million. It is a nation of dirt roads, camel herders and plank shanties that continues to emerge from the shadow of the former Soviet Union and move toward a free-market economy in a globalized world.
“We see English not only as a way of communicating, but as a way of opening windows on the wider world,” prime minister Tsakhia Elbegdorj told The New York Times in 2005.
Klausman has about 40 to 45 students in her grade-school class, and 36 in her high school class, she says. She also teaches English to other teachers and to members of the local police force, as well as on the radio.
She lived for a while in a gar, a nomadic tent that “looks like a large felt tent,” but now has her own apartment in town provided for her by the school system.
“Now I have indoor plumbing,” she says. Klausman receives a stipend of about $110 a month, which is enough to get by because she has no bills to pay and needs money only for travel and food, she says.
Klausman organized a fitness/yoga group in Bor-Ondor and received a foreign-aid grant to buy equipment for classes. She also raised $1,500 with the help of family, friends and the University of Oregon Peace Corps office to remodel a traditional dance and music room at the school where she teaches.
Her students voted her “best dancer,” says Klausman’s mother, Anita Tanner of Eugene, a registered nurse in at the UO’s Health Center.
A shot to the lips
Klausman has taken to traditional Mongolian dance, joining a local group that practices it, and has become pretty good at it, she says. Although adapting to a new culture took some getting used to, Klausman says everything is mostly “second-hand” now. Camel meat “tastes a lot like horse,” she says. “But you probably wouldn’t know what that tastes like. It’s pretty good. It’s a lean meat.”
When her parents, who are divorced, came to visit her last summer, that was, well, “a very interesting thing for them to see here,” Klausman says. Many Mongolians did not understand how a divorced couple could be on friendly terms and be doing something together. (Her father, David Klausman, is a computer consultant in Eugene.)
Another cultural shock to Klausman’s system was the tradition of downing shots of vodka to celebrate anything and everything, she says. Vodka is used as a sacred ceremonial offering. It’s a sign of respect to accept it at someone’s home, she says. Sometimes, you have to be crafty about refusing it or watching how much you drink, Klausman says. Women can politely bring a shot to their lips and hand it back; men can just dip a finger, then touch their forehead and flick a small amount to their left, right and front.
Or you can always sneak some into your juice glass, as Klausman taught her mother to do. Anita Tanner had a more difficult time with fermented mare’s milk, which tastes “something like sour, watery yogurt,” Klausman says.
Klausman hasn’t been back to Oregon since arriving 20 months ago, but did get to visit China and Thailand with her parents last summer. Her service ends in August, at which time she’ll come home to Eugene for a visit. She’s considering her options after that. Maybe a government job overseas with the Peace Corps, or graduate school at the Monterey Institute of International Studies in Monterey, Calif.
“I don’t think I could do a 9-to-5 job,” she says. “Living here has taught me that people can adapt to basically any environment and accomplish things they never thought possible,” Klausman writes in an e-mail. “For me, that meant learning to saw and chop wood, make fires, using an outhouse in subfreezing weather ...”
“I love it here and Mongolia has become my second home. I have become very involved in my community ... and made some great friends.
As for having to face leaving in six months, Klausman says she’ll “figure out some way to solve the mutton cravings.”
