Morning in Hung Hom

Early morning is a good time to walk or run around the neighbourhood.  Some people are going to church.

Others are going to the temple. 

Fruit stores are setting up the colourful produce.  

Stores are throwing out yesterday’s cardboard boxes, while today’s goods are being delivered. Which will, in turn, become tomorrow’s discarded cardboard boxes.  

Noodles are being delivered to restaurants. 

Housewives are at the wet market, buying groceries for today’s meals.  

Many people are having their breakfast, typically eggs, toasts, and noodles, washed down with Hong Kong-style milk tea, or coffee with evaporated milk.  

Or congee with all kinds of fried dough. 

Nearby, a work gang is distributing tasks among members.  You, do this.  You, go there. 

Street sweepers are on the streets and sidewalks.  We should thanks them for keeping the streets clean. But we don’t.  

Some people are distributing free rice and other foods for the needy, mostly elderly people. 

IN the mean time, expensive-looking fish maw being dried on the side walk, right next to passing cars. 

Old ladies pushing heavy carts, laden with flattened cardboard boxes, to be taken to recycling shops, for a few dollars.  Perhaps more than a few.  

On the same streets, buses loudly display advertisement for jewellery, being worn by beautiful young brides.  What a contrast of fortunes.  What have they done to deserve their fate?

At least, at the beginning of the day, things look hopeful. Relatively speaking.

Mongolia Old and Young

Mongolia is old, and young, at the same time.  It is old, because it has been a distinctive people with a glorious history for more than 2,000 years. From Chinese history books, we learned that by the 3rd century BC, a confederation of tribes called the Xiongnu (匈奴) lived in the land to the north of China, roughly where the present day Mongolia is.  The Xiongnu fought the Chinese for many hundreds of years, sometimes winning and sometimes losing.  At one point, the Han Dynasty Emperor sent a famous general 霍去病 to chase the Xiongnu all the way to a sacred mountain, the famous Langjuxu  Mountain (狼居胥山), where he offered sacrifices to Heaven after a major victory.  Scholars believe that this is the present day Khentii Mountains, to the east of Ulaanbaatar. The story was told from the Chinese perspective.  I am still trying to find the Mongolese version. 

In the mean time the tribes continue to splinter, merge, and evolve continuously, making it difficult to trace exactly who becomes who.   By the 12th century, some 1,500 years later, the Mongols emerged among the descendants.  Genghis Khan unified some of the tribes and conquered others. His sons and grandsons continued and vastly expanded on his work, creating a gigantic empire stretching from Korea in the east, to eastern Europe in the west.  It is believed that Genghis Khan also came from the Kentii Mountains, and was buried there somewhere, even though no one seems to know the exact site.  A gigantic stainless steel statue of Genghis Khan mounted on a horse stands on the main road to the south of those mountains.  

Subsequently, the Empire, like others before and after, splintered and faded away.  In the 1600s, the Manchu, a small, related tribe to the east, rose rapidly from the forests of Manchuria in northeast China to conquer Ming Dynasty China, drafting in the Mongols as a junior partner, as the Manchus created the Qing Dynasty.  In the waning days of the Qing Dynasty in the 1900s Mongolia came under the dominance of Russia and subsequently, the Soviet Union.  

It was only when the Soviet Union collapsed on its own in 1991, that Mongolia became independent.   Hence it is quite young as a modern, independent state.  

The Mogols have been nomadic herders for thousands of years.  They live in distinctive, circular tents called gers, which can be moved from time to time as the herds move.  Their lives center around the horses and cattle.  They have no permanent houses, palaces, and cities. They had little use for academic knowledge other than those related to their cattle, horses, weapons and war.  They had no written script for a long long tim, until around 400 years ago.  

Now the majority of the population live in cities.  Although many still live in gers scattered around the perimeters of the city.  Many young people still do not feel a great urgency to acquire an advanced education.  Even though they are just as eager as youths elsewhere to get their hands on mobile phones and associated technology.  The capital, Ulaanbaatar, has no elevated highways, nor underground railways.  Even though the roads are in permanent traffic jams.  Many people do not ride horses or engage in heavy physical activities, yet their diet continue to be mostly meat and potatoes.  Land continues to be valuable, for mining and houses, in addition to cattle raising.  Everything is in flux.  Everybody is adapting.  

It is quite a fascinating country, where history is in motion, being fast forwarded.  

From Rwanda to Mongolia

Two teams are returning from Mongolia after completing eventful but ultimately successful projects.  These two teams had in fact been preparing for a year to carry out their projects in Rwanda in July this year (2026) - installation of solar panels and running STEM workshops (including AI) for children. Then Ebola broke out in May in D. R. Congo, on the west side of Rwanda.  Rwanda took serious precautions quickly and the disease has not spread to Rwanda so far.  But people are worried.  We had to scramble to move the teams to other sites. 

Earlier, and separately, our team had made an explorative excursion to Mongolia in March, initially hoping to set up some new projects there onwards from 2027, in collaboration with a big international NGO over there.   With the Rwanda projects now at risk from the Ebola threat, we sent another small team to Mongolia in early June, to see whether we can move some of the Rwanda teams there.   Things turned quickly.  It turned out that the big international NGO wasn’t a good match for us in Mongolia.  

However, a quick but short visit in March to Don Bosco Technical School in Ulaanbaatar, run by the Salesian Brothers, began to look much more promising.  While the exploratory team  was still in Mongolia in early June, we made the decision to move the two Rwanda teams to Mongolia, with the projects scheduled to take place in July.  We have less than a month to work out the details of the project, purchase the needed solar panels, controllers and batteries, other materials and tools, book hotel accommodation, buy the airplane tickets, … 

The workshop teams, in particular, have to make a lot of changes to the material, changing the language from Kinyarwanda to Mongolia, etc., and making appropriate changes to the curricula to suit the new site.   

 

The Salesians are really great.  They put a lot of effort in helping us solve all these problems, recruit the children for the workshops, …, to make the projects happen.  We also happened to have two students from Mongolia in the team that was going to Rwanda!  They turned out to be invaluable now.  

The upshot is that the solar panel team installed 20,000 watts worth of solar panels on the roof of the gymnasium, providing lighting for several classrooms.  The system saves the school quite a bit of money.  It also provides an object lesson for the organizatio, particularly the electrical engineering students in their school, and a prototype with much room for expansion, and application in other sites.  The team also installed a much better WiFi network for the school.  

The STEM/AI workshops were fun for the children. AI proves to be very popular, not only with the children, but for the Salesian Brothers and Sisters.  In the future, we may aim more at empowering their teachers, and strengthening some of the technical courses with AI. With a successful first collaboration, we are looking forward towards the coming year.  PolyU actually has also been sending teams of students in rehabilitation sciences to Mongolia for several years, on challenging projects in remote areas.  

All in all, a very satisfying summer in Mongolia.

IARSLCE APCoP Manila

The regional conference organized by the Asia-Pacific Community of Practice of IARSLCE took place from 15th to 18th, June, 2026, on the campus of the University of the Philippines – Diliman in Manila.  The president of the University of Philippines opened the conference. Dr. Grace Ngai, Head of the Service-Learning and Leadership Office at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University,  also a member of IARSLCE Board of Directors, then gave the opening keynote.  At the end of the opening ceremony, participants were reminded of, and encouraged to attend, the IARSLCE main conference coming up in New Orleans, USA, in October. 

The conference attracted 272 submissions of abstracts, 196 of which were paper presentations, and 66 were posters. Eventually, out of the submissions, 75 papers and 43 posters were accepted for presentation, and 9 workshops were run at the conference.  

180 people registered for the conference, with 151 final attendees.  These numbers do not include the members of the conference committee, the dignitaries, and the APCoP executive committee, nor the volunteers from the University of Philippines.  Participants came from Australia, Austria, Mainland China, Hong Kong SAR of China, India, Malaysia, Nigeria, South Korea, South Africa, Switzerland, USA, and, of course, The Philippines. It is necessary to note that austerity measures in place throughout many countries in South-East Asia may have impacted the number of final attendees.

Several innovations were implemented at the conference, in particular, holding with the culture of the host country, a strong social media presence. The keynote and plenary sessions were livestreamed on Facebook. All presentations, most posters, and the workshops had their own Facebook post with a short description and several photographs, courtesy of the official photographers. Many people find these posts very useful for catching up with missed presentations, matching faces to names and papers, tracking people down, making new connections, etc. 

At the Closing ceremony, Dr. Dennis Quilala made a report of the statistics and other relevant matters related to the conference.  George Luc, a member of the IARSLCE Board, briefed the audience on IARSLCE, and particularly, what opportunities may be found in IARSLCE.  Dr. Stephen Chan, former member of the IARSLCE Board, briefed the audience on the history and purpose of the APCoP, and the possibility of a 3rd APCoP conference, time and place to be decided.  

For the record, the APCoP had its genesis at an online conversation among delegates from Asia-Pacific, in 2020.  Said conversation was initiated by the organisers of the virtual IARSLCE conference, which took place when the in-person IARSLCE conference was cancelled due to the Covid pandemic.  Said conversation was followed by the creation of an emailing list, organization of webinars, and the first regional APCoP conference in Hong Kong in 2024.  The rest, as we say, is history. 

Mongolian Grassland

The Mongolian grassland in summer is truly gorgeous.

Green fields, blue sky and white clouds.  Everywhere you look.  

This is the best time of the year to be on the grassland.  Earlier it was still bitterly cold and the land was covered with snow.  A little later it will be hot.  Now it is around 20 C during the day, sunny most of the time.

Outside of Ulaanbataar, the air is crisp and it feels clean.  

 

The land is full of animals.  

Sheep and goats. 

Cattle. 

Horses.

And more horses. 

The occasional Buddhist shrine and little pagodas. 

There are trees.  

But far from enough of them.  

It is said that the government is aiming to plant a billion trees.