Mongolia

Mads Olsen - 11/07-2018

Саин байна уу! (In roman letters: Sain baina uu!, the Mongolian greeting)

The EWH Summer Institute has landed in Mongolia with me and 10 other eager engineering students for the first time! After spending almost 24 travelling, we all arrived safe, but tired, in Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia.

For this first time Summer Institute, EWH is cooperating with the American-Mongolian NGO Oddariya. The organization strives to improve the health care system in Mongolia, both in the capital, but also in the vast countryside where half the population still live the nomadic life. In the airport we we’re picked up by Oddariya staff and driven to a university where our host families came to pick us up.

The first 10 days in Mongolia have been spent with exploring the inferno that is Ulaanbaater, visiting the hospitals we will be working with, as well as language and culture lessons at the New Mongol Insititute of Technology, or New MIT as they call it. Learning Mongolian is no easy task, as the pronunciations are difficult and that fact that we had to learn the Mongolian Cyrillic alphabet which contains 35 letters!

Exploring Mongolia so far has been great. We have visited Buddhist temples, dinosaur museums, and some of us went 100km out of the city to visit Khustai National Park, where wild horses live.

Today is July 11^th, which marks the beginning of Наадам (Naadam), a Mongolian holiday with big competitions in archery, horse racing and wrestling. Today we went to the opening ceremony and tomorrow we are attending the wrestling games. I’m very much looking forward to exploring the rest of the Naadam activities and walking the festival grounds.

When Naadam has ended, we begin our work in the hospitals, which I’m looking very much forward to!

//Mads

Morgane Garreau - Post 1 from Mongolia

Сайн байна уу? (”Hello, how are you?” in Mongolian language)

It has been 2 weeks since I've arrived in Mongolia with my 9 fellow volunteers and my head is already full of wonderful memories. The journey began with training in Mongolian language and culture thanks to passionate local volunteers. We visited most of the hospitals we are going to work in as well. All of them are located in Ulaanbaatar, the capital city. About 1.5 million inhabitants live in UB, as Mongols like to call it, which accounts for half of the population of Mongolia. Its population is growing at a very fast rate due to the rural exodus, which lead to the creation of real yurt slums all around the city.

From the 11^thto 13^thof July, we were lucky enough to experience the Naadam festival. This is one of the biggest holidays in Mongolia together with the lunar new year. During Naadam, competitions of the three traditional sports (wrestling, archery and horse racing) are organised throughout the country. We were able to watch the wonderful opening ceremony full of traditional music, dances and parades in UB's Naadam stadium. As you can see in the picture, on this occasion I was wearing a traditional “deel” shirt that my really sweet host family gave me. Naadam is also the time where Mongolian people traditionally eat khuushuurs, which are fried dumplings filled with beef or mutton meat. You can find them at every corner! 

Tomorrow, our job at the hospital will start. I'll work with Katie from the US, who has already participated in the EWH Summer Institute in Rwanda. I am raring to go! 

Mads Olsen - Post 2 from Mongolia

Two thirds of the program are now behind me. The first two weeks working in the hospitals have proven to be quite the surprise, at least for me. I was originally placed at the 1^st Central Hospital, together with Marianne (EWH Summer Institute alumni and biomedical engineering student from Aalborg University), which is one of the largest public hospitals in Mongolia. It turned out to be a lot more well staffed and equipped than we expected, so now Marianne and I have been moved to a maternity hospital. We definitely have more work to do here, which is exciting.

The technicians at the new hospital are very skilled as well, but they are fewer and have lesser funds than the first hospital I worked at. Many issues are simply due to missing spare parts, as funds doesn’t allow the purchase of those. This means that almost all of the hospitals infant warmers are being used only as beds, because of missing temperature sensors. 

From the time I’ve spent at the two hospitals, I’m very hopeful for the health care system in Ulaanbaatar, however, the other participants’ hospitals are not in as good a state. We are also being told that the conditions are much, much poorer as soon as you get away from the capital.

When I’m not working at the hospital, I’m using every opportunity to get out of the city to explore more of Mongolia. This weekend I went to the Gobi Desert, together with two of the other participants and my host. My host, Bayar, was born in the Southern Gobi area, so we went with her, to visit her family. It is quite the experience, to see how the nomadic life is such an integral part of the Mongolian life. Having only blue skies and endless steppe around you, leaves you with this very special sense of freedom.

//Mads

Morgane Garreau - Post 2 from Chingeltei 

It has been three weeks since my work at Chingeltei district hospital started. I have been working with Katie, an EWH alumni from the US, as well as several volunteers from Oddariya, the local association who made it possible to organize a summer institute here. Their volunteers are helping us communicate with the local staff, which is very helpful since they don’t speak English at all. I have been really lucky to work with local engineers who are hard-working and highly motivated to make a difference in the healthcare system. During these three weeks, teamwork has proved to be very efficient and has helped us fix a lot of equipment. 

One of our biggest goals in this hospital was to fix infusion pumps. These pumps are meant to deliver medicine or nutrients to patients and are widely used in Mongolia during wintertime to cure children with respiratory infections. Ulaanbaatar is the most polluted capital in the world, and the situation is particularly critical during the freezing winter (temperatures can reach -40°C). Pneumonia is nowadays the second-leading cause of death for Mongol children under five. While repairing the pumps, we were able to give the main engineer a better understanding of this device. We could for example explain to him the different alarms that can be triggered and their meanings. 

Last weekend, we went to the countryside with volunteers from both EWH and Oddariya, as well as with hospital staff members. This event was organized in order to get to know each other and discuss the first ever summer institute in Mongolia. This was also an occasion to get some fresh air outside of the city and enjoy the amazing nature one last time before the quickly approaching flight back home.

//Morgane