Mongolian Kitsch

About

What’s up everybody! My name is Jonathan Haley. I am an electrical engineer from Vancouver, Canada and I am going to be volunteering with VSO as a youth netcorps volunteer in the areas of computer Information Technology (IT) and website development.

Over the next six nine months, I will be living and working in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia where I’ll be volunteering with several local NGOs (Non-Governmental Organizations). Most of the time I’ll be sharing my technical skills through training and working with Mongolian development workers on some of their website and database/IT projects. I am hoping to make a positive and meaningful contribution to their work and help increase their capacity to serve the needs of the Mongolian people.

I am volunteering because I believe I have a ton to learn about the world and I hope I might be able to help a few people while gaining some perspective and experience. If I can go to a different country, help bring about some sustainable change, gain a deep understanding and appreciation for another culture and language, and share my experiences with as many people as possible, I will have accomplished pretty much everything I had hoped to.

VSO Canada is part of a larger network of volunteer-based development agencies, which work with local NGOs to address skill shortages and work toward locally defined development goals in more than 30 countries around the world. I decided to volunteer with VSO because of their transparent and clearly defined approach to long-term development and community empowerment. International development is an extremely complicated and equivocal world, but I believe VSO is important because they put the needs and opinions of the local people above all and give them the tools to bring about their own change as they see fit.

The purpose of this site is to inform and entertain. Thanks for reading, following along, or simply just looking at the pictures! I would love to share my experiences with you, so please feel free to ask me questions, make comments and requests, and pass this page along to anybody you know who might be interested.

Jonathan Haley

 

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About The Content

It should go without saying that I write pretty much whatever comes to mind, and my opinions and bizarre ideas on things do not and should not reflect those of the NetCorps Program, CIDA, VSO, VSO Canada, people from Canada, people from Vancouver, other people named Jon, etc. etc.

The best you can hope for on this site are the impressionistic expressions of a highly unreliable narrator who compensates reality with creativity, accuracy with precision, and seriousness with irreverence. Enjoy!

 

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About The Site

This is a WordPress.org site using a modified version of Ed Merritt’s Autumn Concept theme. It is hosted for super cheap at www.mambo-express.com and currently runs on a LAMP system with PHP5, MySQL5, and Apache 1.3. All rights reserved. All wrongs righted.

There are 8 plugins used:

Akismet 2.0.2
» Matt Mullenweg (url)
Akismet comment anti-spam.

Easy Tube 0.2.2
» Paul Bain (url)
YouTube embedder.

FireStats 1.3.6-stable
» Omry Yadan (url)
Statistics plugin for WordPress.

NextGEN Gallery 0.73
» NextGEN DEV-Team (url)
A NextGENeration Photo gallery for the WEB2.0(beta).

TimeZoneCalculator 0.51
» Bernhard Riedl (url)
Calculates different times and dates in timezones with respect to daylight saving on basis of utc.

WeatherIcon 2.99.122
» Garett Harnish and Viper007Bond (Viper007Bond)
This plugin displays the current weather conditions on your blog by querying the NOAA website.

Wordbook 0.9.1
» Robert Tsai (url)
Cross-post your blog updates to your Facebook account.

WP-PluginsUsed 1.00
» Lester ‘GaMerZ’ Chan (url)
Display WordPress plugins that you currently have (both active and inactive) onto a post/page.

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