A Good Way Off the Main Road

Last week Renee' and I had an enjoyable time hosting a vision team from Crossroads Fellowship in Clarksville, TN.  We were able to take them to see various parts of the C&MA work in Darhan, Erdenet and Bulgan - as well as share future ministry possibilities here in Ulaanbaatar. 

There are a lot of fun stories that I could tell here (from "Bobble-Head" to horse-guts.  You probably had to be there), but I there was one incident that was most memorable (for me, anyway).  We were visiting Jeremy and Renee' Bergevin in Bulgan.  My friends Larry and Melissa, along with Jeremy, Renee', Baby Clara and I went on a mission.  I have a friend in language school who met a nomadic herding family outside of Bulgan.  She wanted me to take them a gift and letter. The problem is that finding a nomadic herding family can prove to be a little tricky because they're ... well ... nomadic.  One never really knows where a nomadic family might be at any given point in time. 

The day started with Jeremy and I asking around the market for this particular family.  The first people we asked knew exactly who they were.  This was a good sign.  The sales lady called someone else from across the market.  She knew them even better and told us which direction to start heading. "Take the Ulaanbaatar Road toward the town of Urhang and ask around".  So we did.  We stopped at several gers, in fact.  Each person knew who we were looking for and kept pointing us further and further out into the countryside.  We finally ended up finding this family in a ger off any main road.  We followed a literal cattle path through a field as the snow started to fall in order to get there.  But in the end, we found them. 



We were treated to classic Mongolian hospitality, with milk tea and bread, cream and jam. The man showed us his 96 head of horses.  Melissa got to milk a baby goat whose mother had been eaten by a wolf ten days before, along with two baby goats who were only a couple of days old.  It was a good adventure with good memories in the Mongolian outback.




(Jeremy and the husband discussing horses)