2/23/21

I thought you might be interested to know that the village where these children attend preschool (pictured in the Jeep video) is called Cogoog and is in the Kazakh-minority dominated western-most province of Bayan Olgii (portrayed in a NY Times article yesterday and home to the famed Eagle Hunters). It is my wife’s ancestral village and the inhabitants are all Kazakh. She grew up there until her teens, after which she moved to a larger village to attend middle/high school. The jeep-type vehicle is called an ‘UAZ’ and is a hardy Russian vehicle that can travel over very bumpy roads better than any bus can (at least without falling apart). It certainly is unsafe by Western standards for all of these kids to be stuffed together like that, but it is truly miraculous that they attend school, in a place where kids are often kept home to help care for livestock instead. The “clown car” is a very common sight in Mongolia, too, since private car ownership is relatively low, at least in the countryside. One final note: this video has been circulating for years. My wife and I first saw it sometime in 2018, I believe, so this was all pre-pandemic. My wife’s entire family still lives in a neighboring village, and the kids have been out of school for almost an entire year at this point, which is a complete tragedy, of course, but Mongolia has done exceptionally well preventing the spread of COVID because of extreme measures like school closure.

Patrick Francis

Hanover

In response to:

I count 33, but I may have missed a couple. You? Every so often the internet washes things up that just have to be seen. A jeep pulls up to a school in the Mongolian countryside. A couple of adults pop out, a couple of teachers wander over, and they start lifting little kid after little kid after little kid out. "[I] have myself been crammed into a jeep with 20 people," one commenter who taught in Mongolia writes. "You get piled in layers to fit. Is actually helpful in the winter when temperatures drop to -50."