Zeb CP#6

     Wednesday (the 31^st) I met with Bayasaa over lunch hour. At first while we were eating we were just engaging in small talk, such as since his wife isn't here he has to do all of his own cooking. I took the opportunity to reinforce the term 'to miss' and asked him if his wife cooks good food and if he misses it, and he said that yes, she cooks good and he misses the food she makes.

    After we were done eating our conversation turned toward different comparisons between the U.S. and Mongolia, particularly touching on healthcare and medicine since he is a doctor. I think the way it started was that he again said that I should come to Mongolia to teach English, and said that for an American English teacher the wages were quite good. I asked him how much and he said between $2000 and $2500. I then asked him how much a doctor makes. He said he makes close to $1500 working at the main hospital and a smaller clinic. I said that I thought that doctors here in the U.S. make somewhere around $80,000 a year (I looked it up later and it turns out I was low). I said that for the doctor that is good, but for everyone else that is not so good. I mentioned that some time ago I needed some chest X-rays done that cost $250 here in the U.S., but I went to Costa Rica and had them done for around $40. When I gave the price here in the U.S. he laughed and said “In Mongolia a chest X-ray is maybe $20-$30! He did say that there have been some increases in medical costs in recent years, but from what I understand medical costs are still very reasonable.

    From there Bayasaa started talking about the corruption in Mongolia: there are high up government officials who make (take) hundreds of thousands of dollars per month. At this point in the conversation it was sort of difficult because Bayasaa apparently doesn't have a very large political vocabulary, so he often had a hard time expressing many of his thoughts. He was talking about how corruption in his country makes various aspects of life difficult, how much of the money that should be for infrastructure or building the economy goes to politicians pockets and how corrupt the Communist party was. He did seem to indicate that the Communist party is no longer in power and things may be gradually getting better.