Solongo

Solongo lives in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, and graduated from her nursing degree in 2017. A friend of mine reached out to friends at the hospital where Solongo worked, to see if anyone wanted to participate. I then found Yalguun, a Mongolian to English translator through another friend, and we set up the first interview on Zoom. The connection was not great and the delays meant that the conversation was jumpy, which made waiting for each other’s translations difficult. Solongo also told us that she only had 20 minutes for the interview, as she was about to begin a night shift, so the interview took place while she was in the staff room in the hospital.

She worked for two years after finishing her studies at the National Centre for Cancer Research and then she moved to work at the Mongolian Japanese Hospital, which had just opened. She started off in a different department and then moved to ICU in 2019 and worked there for the whole of the pandemic.

She said when she first moved to the ICU, she had a patient who was very ill, but he was good with the staff. His family, however, were “really chaotic” and would say horrible things about the nurses. She found this experience so difficult that she considered leaving the ICU and working elsewhere, but in the end, she decided to hold on and be patient. She stayed where she was, and the patient died shortly afterward. She said it was helpful for her that in the hospital where she works, most of the doctors and nurses were quite young, between 25-30 years old, and they supported each other at work and got along well.

I arranged the second interview with Solongo through Yalguun, but Solongo didn’t send over any photographs. I suspected that aspects of the prompts and exercises may have been confusing and that a second conversation would help to clarify the tasks for her.

During the second meeting, she was also at work; this time she told us that she was in the middle of a 24-hour shift. She had taken some images at work and at home, but she wasn’t sure if she had “done it correctly.” Some photos she had taken at work were of minor procedures, but she was unsure if they were correct. She told me that her wish to do the photography properly had become a bit of a burden, so she was happy when I reiterated that there is no wrong way of doing it. I could sense that a combination of tiredness from long, often overnight shifts, and her desire to do these exercises “correctly” was stopping her from sharing the images with me. Time limitations when we met and the process of communicating through a translator meant that I was unable to discover more about the nature of her working life.