Mongolia wasted little time in battening down its hatches to the novel coronavirus. It closed its 2,880-mile border with China on Jan. 27. It closed its schools the same day. It didn't take long for all major events and gatherings in the country to be canceled through February, including Tsagaan Sar, the lunar new year.

"Mongolia has been in a government shutdown since January," said Tony Mercatante, a 2015 graduate of Marysville High, who spent 20 months there as a Peace Corps volunteer. "With all the schools shut down, I — and all the volunteers — had no work. For two full months there was nothing going on."

Then government halted all incoming and outgoing flights between Ulaanbaatar, the Mongolian capital, and China, South Korea and Japan, which accounted for about 80 percent of air traffic. The Peace Corps decided to evacuate all 96 volunteers in the country.

The evacuation of Mongolia preceded the worldwide Peace Corps evacuation by more than a week.

"On March 15, the agency announced it would temporarily suspend Volunteer operations and begin evacuating Volunteers from all posts due to the COVID-19 pandemic," the Peace Corps announced on its website.

Mercatante was back in Marysville by March 6.

"Next to Peace Corps-China, we were the first country to get evacuated," Mercatante said.

The outbreak of what came to be known as COVID-19 began Wuhan, China, in December.

All the roads in Mongolia flow into and out of the Ulaanbaatar, the capital, located in the north central part of the country. The government closed the roads early in February and closed public transportation later in the month.

"Once that ended, you needed a private car to get back and forth to capital," Mercatante said. "You were stuck in your town."

Nowhere
Mercatante worked out of Arvaikheer, about 400 km — an eight- or nine-hour drive — from the capital in south-central Mongolia, which gave definition to the phrase middle of nowhere.

"There was nothing surrounding my town except miles of endless steppe interrupted by the occasional mountain," said Mercatante.

Two other Peace Corps volunteers also shared the posting.

Temperatures in the winter hit 43 degrees Fahrenheit below zero.

"I don't even know how to describe it," he said.

The steppe, a subarctic grassland characterized by dirt and rocks in the winter and short grass in the summer, rolls across nearly 900,000 square miles of central and eastern Mongolia and China.

Mercatante had no hot water and no shower in his dorm, which had a hot water furnace system heated by coal and an air purifier.

"I had to use a bucket and sponge to bathe myself," he said. "I didn't have a washing machine. I washed by own clothes by hand."

In the U.S., you go outside for fresh air. In Mongolia, you go inside.

"In my town, I had to wear a pollution mask every day," he said.

Electricity was intermittent. The longest blackout he experienced was six days last summer.

"I always had a power bank with a USB port to charge my phone, a flashlight and candle," he said.

Mercatante worked as a public health educator, teaching nutrition, exercise, hygiene, food preparation, sexual reproductive health, first aid, vocational training, English and other subjects to students of all ages.

He graduated from Wayne State University with a degree in public health and has been accepted into the master's program at the University of Michigan School of Public Health to study — ironically — infectious diseases and epidemiology.

He taught in Mongolian, which he studied intensely for three months while living with a local family. Once he began teaching, he was assigned a local teaching assistant.

"At first it was a lot of gesturing and Google Translate and pointing to words," he said. "But I got used to it pretty quickly."

Mercatante's teaching assistant picked up on the rhythms and quirks of his pronunciation.

"I spoke Monglish," he said.

Time to go
"The Peace Corps had to get permission to drive us out using six private drivers," said Mercatante. "The country has 21 provinces and we had volunteers in every single one."

The drivers drove around the clock for six days getting everyone to the capital and on fights to either Moscow or Turkey.

"My route was Moscow-Berlin-Frankfurt-Washington, D.C.-Detroit," said Mercatante.

A full term of Peace Corps service is 24 months, plus the three months of training. He would be leaving his service five months early.

Because of the international emergency, all volunteers whose posting was cut short because of the pandemic will receive a completion of service certificate and the appropriate benefits.

Mercatante departed Ulaanbaatar on March 5, traveled 58 hours and — after a canceled flight, a skipped stop and flying west through 13 time zones — was home by March 6.

By the time he left Mongolia, after two months of doing nothing, he was ready. He had met his girlfriend in-country, but her tour had ended a year earlier and she was home in Columbus, Ohio.

But he was also leaving behind plenty of new friends.

"It was a bittersweet moment," he said.

He left a major TED Talks project with his students, about the future of the country, uncompleted.

"The Mongolian people are incredible," he said. "So warm and welcoming. I never met a collective culture so welcoming of strangers."

Then, suddenly, he was home. Four-lane freeways, McDonalds, billboards, bowling alleys and the crush of family and friends.

"I've adjusted pretty quickly," he said. "I'm really thankful to have hot water and a shower. I forgot how nice it was to have amenities."

It was a world that quickly became smaller. Soon after he landed, Michigan, Ohio and much of his home country were in shutdown mode, practicing social distance and trying to contain the spread of COVID-19.

Just like Mongolia.

Jim Bloch is a freelance writer. Contact him at bloch.jim@gmail.com.

Published Date:2020-04-03