Teaching English

As a result of the changes made in application of immigration laws (see prior posts), we will only be able to teach English for the organization which sponsors us. Our sponsor is now the Changiss Khan Hotel, just down from the Church office building and across the street from our apartment complex. A convenient location, indeed!

Unfortunately, we are no longer able to teach at the two places at which we have been teaching since we arrived over a year and a half ago – the National Archives and the Sukhbaatar Court Judges. We had enjoyed teaching there and will miss the friendships we had formed with many of those students.

We will spend about the same amount of hours at our new assignment with less travel time (that was sometimes a significant problem at the old locations – too many traffic snarls here) but more in class time. And there will be a lot more students. We taught only 12 or so students total at the old locations. We had 55 at our first class at the hotel.

But there are some nice perks at the hotel, too. The Operations Director and the Registration Director are both Returned Missionaries and the General Manager is an American (Sam Sallam) we have come to know through other dealings with him. He also is familiar with the Church and has a son who used to be an active member.

Between the three of them, they have insisted that we eat dinner there after class every day. That’s four days a week! And this is an upbeat, very nice establishment! At least one of the nicest in town, if not the nicest.

Thought you might like to see where we ate our first meal there. The sacrifices we have to make! This was actually a lunch after we held our first, level testing class. From now on, it looks like we will be eating dinner.

We’ll see if we will be able to stick with it every time we teach. But it will be nice, at least once in a while!! We’ll let you know how it goes, from time to time.

While we were there, they brought in a group of children from a nearby orphanage and feed them lunch in another part of the hotel. You’ve got to understand that these little Mongolian kids are just wonderful! Much cuter than the American kids (with the exception of our grandchildren, of course!).

They were sure excited!