Dancing With the Eagle Hunters...

March 04, 2019

Dancing With the Eagle Hunters...

So this week was flipping dope. I'm just gonna get right to the point, we went to the Eagle Festival here and it was freaking awesome. You will never guess who I met and talked to. Have you seen the movie The Eagle Huntress? I know mom and the girls watched it. Yeah so I met the main girl. You may think I'm lying, but I am not making this up at all. I got a picture with her and everything. We asked her if she was the girl from the Eagle Movie and she said yes. So it really was her. It's crazy that I met someone who is so known around the world, but who lives super remote. She was super nice and spoke some Mongolian so we could talk to her. She was just a super nice, genuine girl. Really cool meeting her. Most of the Eagle hunters spoke only Kazakh, and no Mongolian at all. So we really couldn't communicate at all with them. We got some pictures with them though, and could sorta communicate with hand signals. I met this girl there who was selling some cool hats, and I was talking to her about her hats and how it is living in Bayan-Ulgii (look it up) and then all of the sudden this old Kazakh guy walks up and she goes complete Kazakh language with him. It sounded super pretty, but I did not get a single word of what they said. It's completely different from Mongolian. But the guy spoke enough Mongolian that I could talk to him too. He is from a super small little village in Bayan-Ulgii and he hunts foxes and rabbits and makes hats by hand, and sells them. And that's his job. So I asked him about living there, and he asked me about living in the city. I ended up buying a super awesome handmade fox fur hat, the ones with the ear and neck flaps. It was only like $30 too, which is crazy to me. It was just such an experience the whole time.

So during the festival they had some competitions with the birds and stuff. Most of the competitions involved the horses too. For one they would ride and while riding have to pick up little bags of money off the ground while staying on their horse. It was pretty impressive. Then they would grab a sheep skin and while riding have a tug of war competition. That was awesome. Then they used their birds to fly to a target and back and grab a dead rabbit.

I feel like I should explain how the whole thing went down though lol. So right at the beginning the dudes (and the girl) ride in on their horses from over this mountain. And you can see them coming in from over this huge mountain and then they line up in front of us when they reach us and introduce who they are and where they are from. Then they ride down this lane and with their bow, they shoot this huge wolf pelt and wolf pelt ball things (they are like the size of 2 watermelons each) with an arrow, then ride past the crowd and the whole thing begins. They started by playing some traditional music (all Kazakh, it's a Kazakh celebration, not Mongolian really). Then they showed how they train the birds. Had some competitions like I talked about. And then at the very end they awarded the bird who won the prize, the owner of the bird also got a prize, but here the real prize goes to the birds. They really respect animals here and even in the horse racing, the horses get all the honors, not the owner or the rider really, but they still get recognized. So the eagle got some good meat and a medal. And then to celebrate the ending, all the eagle hunters started dancing and chanting. They had us all join in on their traditional dance and they pulled me into the center and had me do their traditional shoulder dance haha. It was so funny, but it was super fun. So I was in the circle of like a hundred people and this Kazakh dude was teaching me and showing me how to dance the Kazakh way, man it was cool. Something I won't ever forget. After I got it down, they started pulling in more and more people until we were all dancing around the hunters. They all had their birds on their shoulders too, so we were dancing around some huge eagles. Then when it was slowing down, this Kazakh hunter pulled me and Scrimsher and Pickering and Teasdale and Bustamonte aside (we were really getting into this traditional dance thing) and had us do our own little dance circle and it was pretty fun. It felt like I was on Walter Mitty. So we were just going hard with this Kazakh dude, doing a super traditional dance. I honestly haven't smiled that much in a long time. Being taught by a Kazakh dude how to dance, in the middle of nowhere, deep in the mountains of Mongolia, while he is chanting a traditional song. It was awesome. It was easily the most fun I've ever had my whole mission, I wish you could have seen the things I've seen here. Meeting people who live by hunting with Eagles for their food. Who live in little villages in the middle of the mountains. Who don't even speak Mongolian and I had to have a person translate for me to talk to them (it was really cool to do this, I was going through Mongolian to talk to this guy and hear about his life and get to know him). It was just ridiculously cool. I just wish you could have seen it all and experienced it all. I just loved it. This place is so wild. I love my mission. No one else in the world gets to do what we do. We are just out here running around with some нүүдэлчид. It's so wild. I love this place.

In other news, we had a baptism this week! Those 2 boys got baptized. They are super great dudes. They have been coming to church for quite a long time and at the baptism all the members knew them and it really just felt like a big family. It's a weird feeling to try and describe, but seeing how they all acted with the kids and how they talked to them and teased them and joked with them. It really felt like a big family event. That's something really unique to Mongolia that I've felt in all the wards here. It's probably because of the culture and the smallness of the wards, but it's a really cool feeling. So they got baptized, it went really good. I baptized one of the kids. He is super cool, and when him and his cousin walked into the church they were super stoked and jittery and excited for this. So it was cool to see it all come together. At church the next day we got another investigator. A friend of hers brought her to church. So we taught her a lesson that day and she seems really interested and genuine about this all. She said she believes in God which is a huge thing out here for us. Most Mongolians want to believe in a higher power, but they can't put God into a figure. So they worship the sky, and that's their God. So when she said that she believes in a God and she can sorta picture a person, instead of the sky. It's pretty cool.

We also taught that other girl who came to church last week. Her sister is a member and she wants to be baptized, and she should be getting baptized on the 23rd of this month. And after that we had Zagadsuren (the family we teach) and her two sons pass their baptism interviews. They are getting baptized this Saturday. It's awesome having work and having people to teach and watching them progress and grow.

Love you guys

Austin

This is picture overload. I didn't want to forget anything. The festival was incredible.

This is Sister Harper. She was so funny. It is technically against the area authority rules to ride a camel. After Sister Harper got off she said, "you all rode the camels when I had my eyes closed. I saw nothing." hahaha