Mongolian Law

My office is putting together a huge document on how to train people to become paralegals, and so they are having me proof the English version, which is actually pretty good. My favorite paragraph so far:

"In law faculties moots are usually conducted formally and learners dress in robes and argue the appeal in a simulated moot court environment. This is not necessary for training paralegals. A simulated court environment can still be used but it is not necessary for learners to dress up in court robes."

I can just imagine the relief these paralegal teachers felt when they learned they did not need to find court robes........the paragraph also reminds me of why I'm not planning on going to law school.

This week I have been at the Northeast Asian Human Rights Defenders Conference that is going on here in UB. It's a kind of random assortment of people in the sense that I never knew that Cambodia constituted Northeast Asia, but people from Cambodian NGOs are here, along with people from China, Thailand, Hong Kong, South Korea, and, of course, Mongolia. In all, there are about 60 people here, only four of whom, myself included, are native English speakers. Still, the entire conference is in English.

Mongolia appears a lot worse off than I thought as far as Human Rights go. Like China, it is developing whole economies around trash collection, and other jobs that cause people to tramp around in some pretty gross stuff. Right now, there's no such thing as recycling in Mongolia, nor is there the understanding that trash doesn't just go away....not that Fresh Kills is anything to be proud of....So there are organizations that are trying to work with the trash collectors and to educate their children in an attempt to prevent them from spending their whole lives amidst waste. It's interesting that these people's occupation has made trash management a human rights issue.

In other news: I got my first set of business cards today. Who knew that coming to Mongolia would make me professional? They have English on one side and Mongolian on the other.