I’m living in a place where time can seem at a standstill, where the days mold together as one. As you wake up day in and day out, you begin to feel like a zombie, numb to change. Once in a while something catches your attention, and wakes you up temporarily, whether it is something that fills the air with laughter or the noise of glass breaking as you threw a chair through a window, depends of the day but most days do not differentiate from each other. At times, it can be a struggle just to figure out what day of the week it is. This is not a grievance of my circumstances, but rather the only way I know how to describe the life of living at a mining camp. You become complacent, get into a routine, and the only thing that snaps you out of your haze, is when something interferes with your routine.
Life at camp can be rather boring. My daily routine is typical. Wake up, Breakfast, Work, Lunch (call home), Back to Work, Tell myself I’m going to go to the gym tonight, Make up an excuse as to why I don’t need to go to the gym, Dinner, Watch a movie, Go to bed. The odd time there is a substitute, like instead of watching a movie, I’ll go to the bar and once in a blue mood, I will actually get my ass to the gym. In a nutshell, you have a great deal of time to think.
When I decided to move to Mongolia last year, I wasn’t sure what to expect. Everyone told me, ‘Expect the unexpected,’ and as I’ve learned, there is no real way to really prepare for the unexpected, except to over pack. I knew I’d come here and learn a great deal about my industry and to a lesser extent, learn about myself. Now nine months into my assignment, both my knowledge of the job and my personal growth have grown somewhat at par. I find certain things I’ve learned about my character, quite surprising, mostly because of my reaction to certain experiences. My reactions were different then I would have first anticipated. I’ve known for a while that I am not a patient person, but I would have never predicted exactly how impatient I really am.
Mongolia has certainly made me work on my patience or more accurately forced me to work on it. I’ve learned I’m a creature of habit more than adventure; this is one of the more shocking discoveries I have concluded here. I’m someone who is always up for a new experience, case and point, why I’m here. But to my surprise when things get changed up or interrupt my routine, anger, and discomfort are feelings that rise up within me, before enjoyment, and excitement. In a place where time does not move, I certainly don’t feel I have a great deal of it to waste or spare. My impatience is the main cause of this discomfort; I’m certainly not a person who likes to ‘go with the flow.’ I don’t know exactly why I expected that by placing myself in a foreign country and integrating myself into a new job, that having control over my circumstances would be a luxury I would be accustomed to receiving. As they told me, ‘Expect the unexpected.’ Yes, I’m starting to understand what they meant by that.
Expect not to be in control and maybe, more importantly, expect to learn about how not to be in control. I’ve learned that when I’m caught off guard, my anger rises from 1 to 10 in a rather short period of time. And when I say I’m caught off guard, it’s very, very rarely something big, but rather multiple small things that are impeccably timed. For example, the showers in the female blocks all have timers on them (approx. 10min), not a big deal you’d think, except when your time runs out in the middle of shaving your legs and you are covered in soap. And not ONE of the other six stalls is free. Or the time I was getting ready to go to bed (it was already passed my bedtime), and the spring on the bathroom door adjacent from my bedroom door decided to break and when it closed, the force of it shook my entire building; let me just tell you this, that no, I mean absolutely no ear plugs can shield you from a fake earthquake. This must have angered someone else in my bloke as well because when I woke up the following morning, the entire spring on the door was ripped off and left to tangle for the world to see. Interfere with our sleep and I suppose you’ll see the female wrath.
Here, I don’t have control of my accommodations, or how thin the walls are. I don’t have control of the colour of the water (which at the moment is a steady brown as you can from the photo), my towel is slowly turning brown, and leaving your mouth open isn’t really optional. The only thing I have control over is my reaction to these changes. And as you can suspect, this conclusion does not make me happy. But at the end of the day, none of these things are deal breakers in the sense that I would quit my job over them; all they do is make me appreciate home more and gives me a new definition of what roughing it means. I remember going camping back home for a few days and thinking I was roughing it. Right, really roughing it, since I was met with a clean and hot shower at the end of the weekend. As my friends back home say, this is a character building exercise, easy for them to say from their recliners. The way I see it, if I’m in a character building exercise I cannot control, my friends can atleast have a laugh at my expense.
