Mongolia? China? Where the heck are we?

It's time we set the record straight! Since arriving in Mongolia-- we've gotten lots of questions and emails from friends, family, and people interested in where we are, what were doing, and how we do it!

One issue that seems to consistently pop up is our location and language. Many people think that we are living in the Chinese province of Inner Mongolia-- while we are in fact living in the very independent, very much separate country of Mongolia. The Chinese population sometimes refers to it as "Outer Mongolia," but this in fact is pretty offensive to most Mongolians.

Most recently, we recieved our alumni magazine from Ripon College. We eagerly flipped through the pages, very much interested in all things Ripon, and all the amazing construction and improvements happening! When we came to the Class Notes section, however, we noticed a glaring mistake in the information about us. In the magazine, it says that we are "of Mongolia, China." This is simply not the case! Any information blurring our residency, specifically between Mongolia and China, is a bit of sensitive subject for us, because we very much want information regarding our Peace Corps service location, and our location in life, in general, to be accurate.

The problem is that, for some reason, many people have already confused Mongolia with China. Yes, it is true that Inner Mongolia is a region of China sharing a name, and distant ethnic history. It is also true that our mailing address includes "via China," as mail in this part of the world is generally routed through China. We are, however, very much living in the country of Mongolia, a developing, large, landlocked country in Central Asia, sandwiched between Russia and China, with a population of only 2 million. They have one of the oldest used languages, Mongolian, with many dialects and written scripts. We live in the city of Darkhan, and really enjoy the work that we do here, and the Mongolian people have shared an immense amount of culture and their heritage with us, and we have grown sensitive, like them, to Mongolia being forgotten or mixed up with the Chinese province of Inner Mongolia.