2007 December

 

One of the boys left the house. He was not (yet) up to the regular life and discipline of Anna Home and regularly he did not go to school. He left of his own free will and lives with friends now. I don’t know under which circumstances. It is a pity that this had to happen, but the start of the house took place without any form of selection. It then can happen that there is a child who is not up to the life in a big organized group.
His place is taken by Ganzorig, a small boy of 10 years old.

SANTA CLAUS

The children have now learned about the existence of Sinterklaas, whose birthday the Dutch celebrate on December 5. Joke (Dutch), Deborah (1/2 Dutch) and I have explained it to them with pictures in a book. Of course we did not have a costume but we had “pepernoten” to throw around, chocolate letters and presents from The Netherlands.
After trying for some time it appeared to be possible to put the letters in the right order.

.

Then they had to be divided by chopping them. In the front you can see the traditional Dutch chocolate milk.

A box with beads for the girls!

.

.

.

.

MONGOLIAN READY

The Mongolian version of this website is ready now. That took a lot of effort. The English version was corrected and partly written by the Scot Angus, who uses a flowery (as we would say in Dutch) language. Much to the distress of my translator Munguu who went trough great problems to translate this. Then there were technical problems because the Mongolian Cyrillic script has two letters more than the Russian script and not all computers know this. Website builder Kim managed to solve it with a conversion programme which he found on the Internet.

POCKET MONEY!

The second board meeting was on Saturday December 1. Munkhuu has been chosen as chairman. The most important item on the agenda was the budget for 2008. It has been approved, but that is only the spending side. The incoming money now is enough to live up till the summer of 2008.
One of the enjoying items is the start of pocket money. Boldsaikhan came with the idea and to me it seemed a great plan, but I did not know whether this is in accordance with the culture and the poverty of Choibalsan. The board saw no problems but one of them said “I wish in my time I had enough money to give pocket money to my children.” We will give each child every week 500 Tugrik, around € 0,30. For children who up till a short time ago had nothing at all and often had to live of the selling of empty bottles and stealing this must be very special. We hope that in this way they will learn a little bit about the use of money.
Maarten