Mongolia has always been a place of intense fascination for me.

On Thursday I saw the film The Story of the Weeping Camel at Fall Creek Cinema. Part documentary, part re-enactment, the movie shows the life of a nomadic family of herders living in the gobi desert. When a mother camel rejects her colt a musician is summoned from the nearest village, a two day ride by camel. The musician plays an instrument, likened to a fiddle, for the camel and a woman sings. This ritual causes the camels eyes to tear and to finally accept her colt.

Despite the foreign location and culture, certain elements of the rural, herding lifestyle felt very close to home. The film spans a period of several weeks during the spring when goats and camels are giving birth. Lambing and calving season for ranching families in North Dakota is similar in many respects. Baby calves are brought into the home when they are sick or the weather turns bad, bum lambs are given bottles, nightly vigils are held by various family members to keep watch over the heifers (first time mother cows.) Lives are spent predominately outside, in extreme temperatures no less. Close families, with mutliple generations live on the same farm, if not in the same house. Rural people come together for religous community gatherings. (In the Catholic church I grew up in one of the prayer requests in the summer was always for rain and good crops with the congregation responding, "For this we pray to the Lord.")

The parallels I drew between my experiences and the life of the Mongolian family is the way it goes with so many narratives: we learn about something wildly different and then find how similar it is to our own story or to stories we're familiar with. Maybe the similarities we find between narratives are (or should be) just the jumping off point. We find a common experience from which we can work at understanding that which is truly foreign. (I have more thoughts on narratives and their function, but that is a blog for another day.)

The dialogue in the film was simple, at least in the translated subtitles. For long stretches there were no words at all, only the movements of life in the gobi desert. I also appreciated that no background music was added, which made the music played in the ritual at the end of the film that much more striking. Throughout the whole film the wind can be heard, either howling fainlty as background noise or taking center stage in a sandstorm. Wind is a crucial element in any story about the desert and I liked how the directors portrayed it (dealt with it?) in this case.

The movie had almost a home video feel, or at least the feel of amateur filmaking. At first I found myself being frustrated with the "low" quality, but when I thought about it I realized that a more stylized, hollywood feel would have been too intrusive for the subject matter, and probally not as truthful.

Besides me there was only one couple in the theater. I chatted with them for a while and learned that the man is a professor in the computer science department and works closely with the two computer science professors that I babysit for. Not at all surprising to stumble upon a connection so quickly in Ithaca, yet still a delight that never grows old.

I left the theater with a desire stronger than ever to travel there. Hillary Clinton talks about her brief visit to the capital Ulaanbaatar in her memoir. She describes the people as being warm and friendly, despite rampant poverty. Mac and I are starting the application process for the peace corps, and looking at leaving sometime next fall if everything works out. While you don't get to exactly pick your location, Mongolia has never felt closer. The one little twist is that couples who do the peace corps together must be legally married before leaving on their assignment. With our current plans, that gives us a year . . . Again, a blog for another day.