Off to Mongolia

In the 5 months since I last wrote, there’s been a sea change in my household; I’ve published a lot of articles and I’m heading to Mongolia in less than two weeks.

The last first: I will be helping a talented woman, Yanjmaa Jutmaan, put together a book about her fascinating life. We met through Good Samaritan Ministries of Beaverton, Ore., in February, and she told us of her desire to help sexual abuse victims in her country (Mongolia has some of the highest rates in Asia because of the isolation of many women in their yurts) and to build a Christian counseling center. The latter is going to involve serious money. I will follow her around for three weeks with a laptop writing down her story and transforming it into a small book that we can use for fundraising and to let other Mongolians know of her life and mission.

Yanjmaa, who has a doctorate in math from the University of North Carolina/Charlotte, was the youngest college chancellor in the country when she took over the university in Khovd, in western Mongolia, for a few years. She is an amazingly qualified woman and currently does consulting work for the government. I have set up a GoFundMe here to raise $5,000 for my trip and for the design, proofreading, printing and distribution of the book. My services will be donated. There will be more to come about all this, but with Veeka living apart from me, this was the one time I could do such an exotic project during a season when the weather is decent in the world’s most lightly populated country.

Which brings me to …Veeka has gone to live elsewhere for up to a year. Her mental distress and violence was too much for me to handle and a state program opened up whereby she could stay in a place a half hour from where I lived where there’d be professionals working to get her on the right meds. She’d also get the inpatient therapy she needed. At least that was the plan.   

I took her there Feb. 4 in the middle of a snow storm. The facility was so disorganized, it lost her suitcase for the first 24 hours, leaving my terrified child with not even a nightgown to change into. February was a crazy month in this area, with constant snow and storms, meaning that a lot of staff couldn’t even get to her facility. 

The weather evened out in March, but it was clear she was not adjusting well nor were the meds working. By April, it was clear something was very wrong and it didn’t help that her therapist was leaving after only a year there. I was visiting her 2-3 times a week and she was refusing to attend the public school on campus plus her appearance was a mess. She was very depressed and lonely, as she was not making friends there. One of the girls attacked her quite badly in mid-April to the point where that child got sent to jail for 10 days. The attack came two days before Veeka’s 14th birthday, which she celebrated at the facility. A friend brought her a Jasmine costume, as Veeka loves Aladdin and anything connected with it.

Veeka’s face was bruised for a month. So I’ve had to marshal my social worker and therapist contacts to meetings at this place to demand that something change. In May, a new therapist arrived and she appears to be working out. Veeka has slowly returned to attending some school classes and she is on a better set of meds. The situation there is still not ideal but at least I can take her on outings without fearing she’ll attack me. One bright spot is that she got her braces off recently. 

So I’ve been alone for more than four months now, using that time to write more stories, do some biking and skiing; substituting and work on long-delayed projects. I tried the Keto diet during Lent but sadly, it did not work out! I just don’t like eating all that fat.

Other news: ReligionUnplugged.org, a sister site to getreligion.org, has published four of my culture or travel/religion stories, starting with a profile of contemporary Christian musician Pam Mark Hall in April. It also ran my piece on Fort St. James National Historic Site in March and earlier this month ran my piece on an unusual coffee shop run by Greek Orthodox nuns living in the mountains of central Washington.

And on June 13, the 20th anniversary of the opening of Washington Family Ranch, a Young Life camp in central Oregon that used to be known as Rajneeshpuram, ReligionUnplugged ran my story on the ranch’s transformation.

And on April 14, the Seattle Times ran my profile of Delilah Rene, ‘the most-listened-to woman in American radio’ in its Sunday magazine. I spent much

of last fall trying to contact her and secure an interview with her for the Times. We finally agreed on a date in January, which meant a day trip to Port Orchard, a small town across the Sound from where I live. It was a highly interesting day interviewing this unusual woman who’s birthed or adopted 14 kids, married 4 times and clawed her way to the top of the pile of female radio celebrities. At least I enjoyed being there even though our agreed-upon interview time got shoved back several hours to make room for a TV spot. But I never heard back from Delilah after that, even though we both bonded briefly in discussing what it’s like to have children with mental issues. Sadly, her second bio son killed himself in the fall of 2017 because of depression. I made her mourning of his death the central point of my story, as it was clear she was still in heavy grief over his death and she was struggling to see where her Christian faith was relevant in this crisis. She refused to post my story on her web site and her spokesman was quite curt with me after the story ran. Fortunately, the folks at KSWD, her local station in Seattle, were more than gracious and posted the story on their Facebook page.

Once Veeka left, I thought I’d have huge blocks of time, but my days have surprisingly filled up with many things plus I substitute in public schools 1-2 days a week, which is draining. Many of the goals I had for my time alone are still unrealized, as I constantly get interrupted by all sorts of emergencies. However, I did help a second author get his book (the title begins with the words Incestuous Christianity) published in April, and I learned a lot more about the publishing business in doing so. I’ve spent time with my mother, who turned 91 last month and is doing well.

I’ll be publishing on this site a lot more next month when I’m in Mongolia. For those of you who pray, keep in mind my flight on July 2. I have a very narrow window between connecting flights in Tokyo and I’d like me and my luggage to arrive in Ulan Bator together and on time.