Horsey photo 3: in mongolia you are never too young to get on a horse
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About Me
- Julia
- i came to mongolia looking for a personal challenge. what i've found is a beautiful country with a warm down to earth people and a bright bright future.
big blue sky
9 comments:
Julia:
I can't get over how healthy and beautiful these people look! Look at their coloring, their rosy cheeks! Great photo.
people in the countryside often look very healthy and happy, many in the city too. i think mongolians generally have a very good outlook on life. they are mainly buddhist which might have something to do with it, or just very down to earth people with a beautiful country and a rich history to be proud of.
the strangest thing to me is how any mongolian is physically healthy. their diet is largely made up of fatty meat, and various types of dairy products. they don't drink water, i don't know how they don't dehydrate, (but they do drink lots of salty milky tea) they eat A LOT of meat and some of the more 'cosmopolitan' mongolians eat a bit of salad, but that is usually covered in mayonnaise or yoghurt. i guess they do eat noodles and sometimes a bit of potato..
but seriously, how do they stay healthy on that? the life expectancy in mongolia is about 64, which isn't that bad really.
Maybe it's because they are so physically active, compared to westerners, and maybe their relative isolation has kept them away from certain diseases and illnesses. I don't know, but they look the picture of health!
that would make an interesting topic of study, i should think.
mongolians say that because the wintertime is so cold, many viruses and harmful bacteria die out, and they start the year with a clean slate.
the 4 main infectious diseases in mongolia are hepatitis b&C, tuberculosis, brucellosis and sexually transmitted diseases.
hepatitis is because many people don't have access to running water in their homes, they have to get water from the river which is often where people wash and bath - and animals use.
TB and brucellosis are from the animals, and non-pastuerised milk.
STIs are a prob because mongolians are a very sexually active bunch, including outside of marriage. fortunately AIDS is not a huge prob yet. there are only a handful of cases and there is a LOT of international funding and effort going into prevention. which is great.
there are some strange diseases in mongolia - for example, bubonic plague! people get it from marmot hunting, becasue the fleas on the marmots carry the plague. people die from it each year! (marmots are a prized delicacy in mongolia. they cook them by ripping out the innards and stuffing them with hot rocks and blowtorching the outside.. sounds tasty!)
essentially though, the health system in mongolia is appalling by western standards. one of the bigger problems mongolia needs to overcome.
there are some weird (to me) medical practices too. for example EVERYONE has had their appendix out, and has a big ugly scar to prove it. i think it was a communist inspired approach, take everyones appendix out and prevent appendicitis. apparently they had full time appendix surgeons.
secondly, many people take a break from work for a week and go into hospital for a preventative treatment. they get an IV drip and 'vitamin' injections. its a strange concept to me, but maybe it does work. who knows.
Julia:
Interesting. Because we are adopting a baby from China, I have to have immunizations for a lot of this stuff . .
I wonder if anyone has studied this topic!
are you really adopting a baby from china? thats amazing!
why did you decide to do that? do you know where the baby is coming from within china? should i not be asking so many questions?
i imgaine the health situation in china involves a lot more diseases than mongolia, simply because of the population density and the problems that causes. health is not my field though.
i didn't have to have to many injections before i came over here, because i went to india the year before and had them all. but i did have to get rabies injection, bloody hell they hurt! (and there was three of them). better than getting rabies though....
when are you going to china?
Hi Julia:
Our dossier went to China in July, and apparently the "wait" for our child is between one and two years! I am hoping it won't be that long. I am going in for the Hepatitis shots Thursday, and yes, I have to get rabies shots as well. Maybe I can wrangle some pain meds out of them before the shot - I don't even know if that will help.
I've always wanted to adopt, and we decided on China due to the situation with so many girls given up under the one child-policy. Also, we understand that Chinese orphanages - while far from perfect - try to keep the babies healthy as possible. We will be bringing antibiotics with us because the babies are suceptible to infection when brought to the U.S., if they aren't sick already.
I haven't written anything about this yet because it seems so far away. But I'll probably bring it up on my blog soon.
Thanks for your interest, and thanks again for posting these beautiful photos!
thats such a beautiful thing to do. I hope it all goes really well... and i hope the rabies shots don't hurt too much.
Re: the healthy look of the Mongolians. When I traveled in the Peruvian and Bolivian Andes, I noticed the beautiful skin and rosy cheeks of the indigenous people there, too. I began to develop a theory about the beneficial effects of thin cold air on skin! But then, it also seemed that everyone in Denmark has beautiful skin, so maybe it's just the cold!
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