Former Icelandic minister helps build sheep barn in Mongolia

Former Icelandic education and children’s minister Ásmundur Einar Daðason and his father have helped build an Icelandic-style sheep barn on the plains of northeastern Mongolia. The barn opened on Saturday, mbl.is reports.

Daðason, who has travelled to Mongolia five times since his first visit 17 months ago, described the project in a Facebook post. Construction began in August. After arriving on Thursday, he and his father worked with Mongolian nomads and local builders to install fittings, feed troughs and pens.

Daðason is trained in agricultural science, and his parents are farmers. He said a conversation 12 years ago with Iceland’s consul in Mongolia, who later became a friend, eventually helped lead him to the country and the project.

“If someone had told me during the last parliamentary elections that two years later I would be building feed troughs in a sheep barn in Mongolia, I probably would not have believed it,” he wrote. Daðason said he had enjoyed discovering new things in an unexpected part of the world and getting to know people in Mongolia. “The adventure in Mongolia is only beginning,” he added.