This past July, UTS student Karl Jones and his wife traveled to Mongolia for three weeks as part of his UTS independent study global justice course. Karl traveled amongst the people with a mind to learn about their history and the impact of international banking and corporations on the country today, particularly the impact on the poor. Inspired to share his experiences with friends, family, and other interested readers back home, Karl wrote a journal during his travels and started turning it into a blog this week.
You’re invited to read Karl’s blog and learn about his powerful experience. I’ve added his blog to our blogroll in the sidebar and don’t forget: subscribing to his blog via RSS feed is easy.
Update: Karl has lent us more context on his blog in this post’s comments section.
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Nate –
Thanks so much for promoting the Mongolia blog. For those of you who visit and read it from the social justice perspective, I will alert you to a few things.
One is that there is a fair amount of pure vacation involved. The trip was originally planned as one and continued to be – to a large extent.
Secondly, while there are areas of clear social justice focus (mostly later), as the trip went on I became increasingly frustrated with the extent to which my experience of Mongolian life was through a tourist lens – despite living in close quarters with local people. Unlike my brother-in-law who is a journalist by trade and nature, I found that it took monumental effort and hand-holding to just sit down and interview one of our hosts about her life. For whatever reason, I found setting that up very uncomfortable and unnatural.
Finally, in looking into the role that international banking and corporations play in the country, I didn’t find some of what I was looking for based on my reading and am only slowly – outside of the journal context – beginning to connect the dots in new ways. As an independent democracy with a full relationship to the broader international community, Mongolia is pretty young (1991). Right now my feeling is that Mongolia is more in danger of slipping into some of the global injustices that are common in other countries rather than that they currently suffer from them.
Having said that, enjoy the blog!