Dalanzadgad, in South Gobi Province, a provincial town in the Mongolian desert, hs been our first attempt to use the materials outside of Africa. These churches are among the nomadic people of the desert, where there is very little resource to support or sustain the pastors of the new churches, and so the business training was undertaken as a way to equip those pastors with the ability to generate their own income, and be a financial asset rather than a financial burden on the church or the communities to which they are ministering.
This work was our first opportunity to test how well the materials would transfer from the African culture to the Asian culture, and also to see how a new team from the UK, self-trained in the materials, would cope with delivering them. What follows is very much a personal reflection on the journey and the key learning points we got from it.
We had a 12 hour stopover in Moscow on Sunday with everyone wanting to know whether we were supporting Chilseee and arrived in UB capital of Mongolia on Monday morning. There we met the Mongolia contingent of the team Bold, Magi, Mugi, Seke and Tsogoo and completed final preparations for the course. From left to right, the photo on the right shows Magi, Mugi, Tsogoo and Seke doing the final translations of the flipcharts for the course.
The quality of the Mongolian team was excellent. We did not really know what to expect when we arrived, communication has always been difficult in ascertaining exactly what has been done as it has been with Uganda but we were hopeful that we would at least have something we could use.
This was the first real training outside of the area for which the training was tailored, and the first in a non Anglicised culture where none of the participants spoke English, so we really needed something useable in the Mongolian language. What we discovered far exceeded our expectations; the workbook had not only been professionally translated, but it had all of its pictures, and tables, and had been paginated to exactly match its 'English' counterpart we later discovered how important this would be to us in trying to find out where we were in a script we could not read.
