Dissatisfied with the prospect of another summer lounging around, UCSD students Ryan Natan, Michael Kelly, Elizabeth ‘Bones’ Latham and alumnus Will Parson ‘mdash; together known as Team Great Job! ‘mdash; have made the decision to strand themselves somewhere between London and Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia.
It’s called the Mongol Rally: a pseudo-race for courageous, charity-minded adventurers. Teams drive cars that ‘mdash; according to rally rules ‘mdash; must have a one-liter engine (esentially no power) and cost less than $2,000. After departing from London, Team Great Job! will have less than four weeks to drive the nearly 10,000 miles to the home of Genghis Khan. The team’s route will take them through France, Germany, the Czech Republic, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Russia, Kazakhstan, back into Russia and, finally, Mongolia.
Team Great Job! has been hard at work raising the $2,000 minimum donation for their chosen charity: Mercy Corps, an organization that provides assistance to poor and rural peasants in countries like Mongolia so that they can stay economically viable. This includes teaching sustainable farming practices, building schools and allowing the community to subsist with the world and maintain their traditions.
‘They have pretty low overhead compared to a lot of other multinational charities,’ Sixth College senior Kelly said. ‘They’re very much focused on not doing the classical thing of bad charity to give stuff and say, ‘We’re solving the problem,’ but it doesn’t help them beyond the usual problem. This is a kind of sustainable project that people can try to use and continue to use after the charity is no longer there.’
According to Natan, a graduate student in biology, the team has raised 70 percent of the rally’s required donation, which they hope to surpass by at least $1,000.
With the help of their largest sponsor, UCSD’s own KSDT radio, Team Great Job! held a fundraising event at the Loft February 6, where they hosted local bands and artists and raised approximately $540 in raffle tickets. The majority of their donations have been aquired through word of mouth.
On May 8 at 5 p.m., Team Great Job! will be hosting a Thank Goodness It’s Friday barbecue fundraiser at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. All are welcome to attend.
As for the road ahead, Natan said the team is looking to remain as blissfully ignorant as possible. The students don’t have a car yet and are still trying to decide whether to go with a left-hand drive in London or buy their car on mainland Europe. Beyond looking into phrasebooks and a crash course in mechanics (Natan and Kelly cannot drive stick), they maintain that the fun is in the challenge.
‘I guess it isn’t exactly about where it goes,’ Natan said. ‘Honestly, before, I never had thought about going to Mongolia or Kazakhstan or Russia, but then just the idea that you’d be part of this greater organization of the adventurous ‘hellip; It’s kind of the phenomena of the cult and I want to be part of it.’
‘There is a large element of purposeful non planning,’ Kelly added. ‘We don’t want to think it out too much.’
Too much, Natan said, could mean anything from border-crossing failures to car troubles to getting lost in the desolate Russian landscape.
‘I like the idea that this is kind of not so planned, that anything can happen, that the whole point that the car is going t
o have to break down at some point when we’re going to have to deal with it,’ he said.
According to the Mongol Rally Web site, finishing is hardly the ultimate goal.
‘It’d be nice if we can get there,’ said Latham, an environmental systems graduate student. ‘I think there’s a 60 to 80 percent success rate. I think that’s one of my least concerns. I want to do it because it will make writing my thesis in the fall that much easier. It’s about recalibrating my mind and body in life, considering all the other challenges in life ‘mdash; including police, foreign places and, you know, the car breaking down.’
With this mindset, Team Great Job! will set off June 18, possibly to their doom. But considering the intense research atmosphere at UCSD, the team considers the Mongol Rally spirit a change for the better.
‘I think UCSD students need a little more adventure, a little more variety and a lot more charity,’ Latham said.
Readers can contact Henry Becker at [email protected].