Back in the beginning of June after classes got out, Darkhuu, one of the school workers Tunga, her daughter Bolorerdene and I painted my classroom. Each teacher is in charge of keeping their classrooms looking nice, but my room had been used by a rotating list of short lived teachers and it had not been painted in a long time.

First we puttied over all the holes and scrapped off all the spit balls.

We then painted the walls light green and the trim white.

My tables and benches had been collected from the discard pile in an unused classroom and were a range of orange, blue and green, so we painted those as well.

Fortunately my room has new, fake wooden flooring, so we didn’t have to paint the floor like many other teachers. The room stayed pretty bare all summer since it takes forever for the scary Chinese lead based paint to dry.

At the end of August I put all the furniture back in my room, rearranged the desks in the hopes of cutting down on cheating (Ha!), duped Bayarsaikhan the school facilities manager into giving me an old rug, and hung up all my glorious new posters I ordered from America. It will still be unbearably cold in a month or two, but at least we have fun things to look at.