Searching for Squash in Mongolia....

By Tracy Gates

My legs hurt. My butt hurt. And other parts of me were so sore, I winced whenever I sat down. Too many hours of squash? It felt like it. . . . but, no, it was too many hours of my big American butt in a small Mongolian saddle. I had ridden for hours to see the thousands of years old ‘deer stones’—Mongolia’s version of Stonehenge—and now I was paying for it.

As some of you know, I recently traveled to Mongolia to pick up my mother who has been serving in the Peace Corps for two years. In fact, I started typing this from the Peace Corps office in Ulaanbaatar or UB, the capital of Mongolia. But what does a country almost half-way around the world from New York have to do with squash? Well, besides squash butt and horse riding butt feeling uncomfortably similar, more than one would think.