Summer, Screams, Selbe Khadat - Сэлбэ Хадат

It feels like summer, warmer although a little dusty and windy at times. The building site for the new college is progressing with formwork for the ground floor (in Mongolian "first floor") almost complete, and barrowloads of on-site batched concrete being poured into the floor beam forms.

Yesterday (uncharacteristically for a Saturday) I was working at the college office, after leaving some things behind on Friday afternoon, and heard screams of pain and crying from the building site, which moved into the building. We emerged to find a trail of blood and a young female construction student nursing what I feared from a distance might be an amputation or a deep cut, which was rapidly being wrapped in bandages. We established that a doctor and ambulance had been summoned, but that then, after quite a scene with colleagues and students in the college, the patient was driven to hospital in a jeep by Shari, our builder. I later learned the student had caught her left little finger in the roller of a large concrete mixer and that it would be likely to be rehabilitated with a splint.

The previous day I was away from the college on a building site visit, in a small summer resort village called Selbe Khadat - Сэлбэ Хадат, (Сухбаатарийн Дураг 16-р Хороо) about 25km north of the city. We collected the client developer for the Eco-houses from his office at a hotel and went via Sanzai to the Sukhbaatar district, finally over several kilometres of unsealed roads to the site on the gentle north slope of a mountain, looking over a pleasant valley of holiday houses. There was a nice stand of Blackwood trees on the site and many more on the southern boundary where the mountain rose up. We discussed putting three ecologically sustainable permanent dwellings on the site, and considered the land value (about 25M MNT) and potential for capitalisation of the land in relation to the adjacent summer houses.