head for the woods

tomorrow morning the plan is to eventually get on a train with 50 youth from the three different UM churches here and ride it four hours into the countryside of Mongolia where we will spend four days camping.

i am the girl who planned her finals week after the first day of classes. i make lists. i keep schedules. i write things down and try to think ahead. i like details and organization and plans.

mongolia has broken me of all of those habits, because it's just not possible to plan and organize and know details here. but the longing for those things is still there, deep down in my planner's heart, cringing at the non-possibility of schedules that mean something and the existence of details being figured out.

so you can imagine how planning a camping trip for 50 some people has brought out this conflict within me.

Ah! We need a schedule. Ah! We need plans. Ah! We need lists. Ah! We need to plan ahead.

And then there is reality.

We had meetings. In which the item that was discussed the longest and with the most gusto was what food we were going to eat. We are buying two entire goats.

We had to find tents for everyone to sleep in. As of three days ago, my church had found 2 tents (fitting maybe 8 people) for 20 people. No one had started worrying about the tents until a week before we were supposed to leave. Today? We somehow have six.

We had to buy train tickets. This posed several obstacles.

One, we needed everyone's transportation money. As of Friday afternoon (we were going to buy them Saturday), we had four people's money. Four out of twenty.

Two, we had to have everyone's name and birth registration number. This required tracking down everyone who was coming and hoping they could remember/find their number within the span of about 60 minutes. This was complicated by the fact that everyone here changes their phone number on an every day basis. So we called neighbors and friends and all of the possible phone numbers and somehow ended up with all of the registration numbers.

Third, we went to buy the tickets and were told we had to have an official document stating why we were going and who was going, signed and stamped by our country supervisor. So we went to her house and typed the letter. We then realized we need everyone's last initials (no last names here) too. More phone calls, more brainstorming about who could reach who and who would know whose last initials. Managed to finish the list.

Fourth, we had to get the keys to get the official stamp. Then today we had to get the official stamp from the office and actually stamp the letters.

Fifth, we went back to the train station today to show them the letters and buy the tickets. Turns out we can't buy the tickets today because the director isn't there to look at the letter and approve it.

We have to go back to the station at 8 am to show it to the director. This is assuming she will actually show up at 8 a.m.

The train leaves at 10 a.m.

breathe.

i'm heading for the woods. And hopefully I'll be getting on a train to do so.

if not, we're going to need to find somewhere to eat 30 kilos of potatoes.