Ger Chores (Гэрийн Ажил)

People - American and Mongolian - are often curious about my lifestyle. Living in the countryside in a ger requires a lot more work than is usual in an American house. There are lots of different chores and they all depend on each other, which I have to take into account when thinking about what to do. For this reason, it may be useful to show them as a flowchart:

I've used colors to show how certain chores seem to form natural "groups." As you can see, most of them fall into two major groups, one having to do with fire (orange), the other with water (blue). (Sounds very yin-yang, doesn’t it?) At least one chore, bathing, depends on both fire and water, because if I don’t build a fire, it would be way too cold for me to take my clothes off. For the same reason, making a fire is necessary to getting dressed in the morning. In fact, if I didn’t have an electric range and water boiler, then all the water-using chores, and all cooking, would depend on making a fire too.

There are other ways to think about chores and group them. One can talk about "inside" and "outside" chores, "day" and "night" chores, and "winter, spring, summer, autumn" chores. Chores are not just dependent on each other, but also on time - time of day, and time of year, and also time of day during certain times of year. For example most of the "fire complex" can be forgotten during the summer, because you don't need to heat the ger (some people still use it to cook). During the summer I never made a fire. Come September, I would make one every day, but if I skipped a day it wouldn’t matter. Making one every night became a regular affair, then making one every morning, and this would escalate until I made about 5 fires a day. Now in mid-winter I’m back to making 2 or 3, but only because the last fire, begun after I get home from work, I never let go out until after I go to bed. (Some people also wake up in the middle of the night to keep the fire going too.)

Some chores can only be done during the day. Any chore that requires going out of doors - such as sawing or chopping wood, are miserable at night in the winter. And even if I were willing to do so, other people aren’t, and circumstances would limit my going out to do them anyway: the well is only open from 1-3 pm each day, and the shops tend to close at sundown in the winter. Never have I had to give as much heed to natural cycles as I have here.

The chart above is typical of winter chores, because that's generally the most labor-intensive season - for me. For herders summer is generally considered the busiest, because unlike me they have to take care of milk-giving animals and baby animals.

MWW 39: Өртөө

Cyrillic	өртөө
Transcription	örtöö
IPA	[өrˈthө:]
Layman’s Pronunciation	ohr-TOH
Translation	1. station 2. the Mongolian Pony Express
In Genghis Khan’s time it was örtege.

One of Chinggis Khaan's major innovations was the creation of a messenger system spanning almost the entire Asian continent, which has been called a Mongolian Pony Express. The system was punctuated by a series of relay stations where messengers changed horses. Messengers sometimes covered 300km each day to pass information on to moving armies. Өртөө originally meant a station or post, but it came to be used for the entire system that they formed together. After the Mongol empire collapsed, the Mongolian Pony Express shriveled up and died, but the word өртөө lived on. Today the Mongolian Official Post Service is known as the өртөө улаа. (Given how inconvenient mail is here sometimes, I can’t help but feel like the өртөө may have been better run 800 years ago than now.) Өртөө is also used for "station," but in this sense it competes with буудал (formed from the verb буух "to get down, get off") and вокзал (a Russian loanword).

A Mongolian-Russian-English sign posted on the restroom in a Mongolian train car. Look for the word өртөө, which is used here as the equivalent of English "station."