The Street kids of Ulaanbaatar

(NOTE: sorry folks, but i changed my blog over to something called BETA blog, which has enabled me to change my font colour to blue, very useful, but now i can't post photos! i'm hoping this will be sorted v soon because i have some good ones from the weekend...)

Yesterday I took some homeless kids out to dinner. One of them was gently hassling me for money as I was going home, but I’ve seen them around my building before and I know they are pretty nice kids. So I arranged to meet them in half an hour, four of them, to go to Zochin Buuz – a local café that serves cheap Mongolian food.

When I came outside in half an hour there was noone there, I was a bit puzzled. I stood at our meeting point for a minute and then saw my favourite kid come running towards me, and behind him…. a whole lot of other people! Including a gangly teenager, a girl, three different kids and two of the original kids, and a baby – being carried by a man in a wheelchair!

Oh boy! The kids were so happy and smiling I couldn’t say no. the man in the wheelchair didn’t come with us, but there we were 8 of us walking along the street towards the café.

When we got there this other kid, an early teenager who was very pushy and rude and gruff and with a loud hacking cough… joined us. He was different to the others. He was aggressive and unpleasant. I said that he wasn’t with us to the waitress, but he sat down anyway and the other kids were too nice or scared to tell him to get lost.

Before we ordered I told them that we had a total of 10,000 (about $10) to spend. So the rough kid bosses everyone about and unbeknownst to me orders buuz for everyone and then two massive serves of roasted ribs for himself. This brought the budget over 10,000. I was annoyed with him, as were all the other kids. When his ribs arrived he was sooooo disgusting in the way he was eating, like an animal – gulping and slurping and tearing the meat apart with his hands and slopping food onto the table. I tried to tell him that he should share with the other kids, but he wasn’t having it. He also ordered buuz for himself. After eating some of the ribs he ordered one of the waitresses to bring him a plastic bag and told one of the kids to put the ribs in the bag. He then proceeded to slurp some cabbage salad off the table and drink the rest of my juice!

While he was eating it was so disgusting and all the kids were looking at me and we shared little giggles between us about how gross he was. Whenever he was away from table (demanding something from the waitresses) they looked to me, concerned and showed waggled their little fingers at me which means ‘he’s a bad person’. I should have said ‘meddish-tei!’ which means ‘I know!’ emphatically. But I nodded and tried to give them a reassuring look that I knew they weren’t like that.

They were so lovely and looking after the baby, feeding him one buuz at a time, and giving him apple juice to drink. Sharing the care duties. They would all be under 10 years old apart from the gangly teenager. They all ate very carefully and politely.

After stuffing his face, the rough kid started pulling buuz off the other kids plates. Little shit. I stopped him taking one, but he just took one off another. Then we he decided to leave, he went and got another plastic bag and told all the kids to put their buuz that they hadn’t yet had time to eat into the bag. I was so angry at what was going on but powerless to do anything about it… and these kids were obviously scared of him. It was a real shame and kind of spoilt the moment. But I am sure they all had plenty to eat and I will always pleasantly remember those lovely kids and how much they appreciated the food and how they said ‘thank you’ in their best English as they left.

The experience of the interaction with the rough kid highlighted how tough it must be living on the streets. A real animal brutish-ness ruled that table today and I felt completely out of my depth. I have no idea how those other kids survive and remain so good-natured. I admire them deeply and I hope that they have somewhere nice and warm to sleep tonight. I can’t even imagine what it must be like and I recognise that I am way too privileged in this life. I can’t make resolution in my mind about why I have so much and others have so little. And I don’t know what I can do about it except small things like this.

There is a large population of homeless people in Ulaanbaatar. There are the usual reasons that you get homeless people in any city – mental illness, economic stress, alcoholism etc. But apparently there was a massive accumulation of homeless people that started at the time of the changeover from communist state to democracy, in the early 1990’s. Mongolian friends don’t talk much about how difficult things were but small snippets that I have been told are that things completely fell apart. People lost their jobs, there was no food to be found in the shops and many people were pushed to the edge and beyond. Alcoholism exploded and homelessness was created.

In wintertime Mongolia is a very very harsh place to be homeless. Homeless kids in Ulaanbaatar live in the underground heating tunnels. So many of them have burns on their skin. It’s a very sad situation. There are some services to help these kids, but so many of them can’t get help or don’t fit into the system and end up living on the streets permanently, if they don’t get chucked in jail. Mongolians are generally suspicious of people that live on the streets and often tell me that they are ‘scared’ of them. There is not much sympathy on offer from the average Mongolian. I think it’s a cultural thing. Children or those who can’t take care of themselves are meant to have families to take care of them. If they are outside of that, people are suspicious or don’t know how to treat them.

Anyway, I hope that next time we can manage to avoid having that rough kid eat with us and have a more pleasant experience!

The sky today in Ulaanbaatar - August 23 2006 at 2.04pm 

Dalai Lama comes to Ulaanbaatar: The Dalai Lama is in town this week and today he is holding a ceremony in the Nadaam stadium. Buddhism is the majority religion in Mongolia, so this is a very special occassion. Apparently the Dalai Lama has been to Mongolia before, and one of my students told me that his biggest message is that people should not drink so much vodka. Very practical. Unfortunately, todays ceremony was spoken in Tibetan and then translated into Mongolian, so I was not able to access any spiritual enlightenment... 

Dalai Lama comes to Ulaanbaatar: Prayer beads were out.  

Dalai Lama comes to Ulaanbaatar: Many people in the audience were holding hands up for a blessing. 

Dalai Lama comes to Ulaanbaatar: This young lad was not sure what to make of all the commotion. 

Mongolian Trivia:

Some interesting things about Mongolia.

• There are 5,077 registered Non-Government Organisations. This is quite a lot given that the population is only 3 million. Many of them are dodgy tax set-ups, unfortunately.
• According to traditional Mongolian medical practices, the way to alleviate the symptoms of high blood pressure is to stroke a cat and eat 2 cloves of garlic every day
• Recently the ‘minimum of living standard’ [sic] was announced by the national statistics office of Mongolia. It is 42,800 tugrug per month. Thats about USD$42
• Two of the leading sumo wrestlers in the world are Mongolian. Their sumo names are Hakuho and Asashoryu. Many mongolians wrestlers are recruited to study sumo wrestling in Japan.

Warning, this comment is not related to the photo. Just an everyday comment: as it turns out in Ulaanbaatar every building loses hot water for 2 weeks, so that maintenance can be done on the water pipes. It is my turn at the moment and the water that comes out of the tap is so icy cold it feels as though its burning the skin. last night i had a 'bath' experience of sorts using a couple of small buckets of warm water (after heating the water up on the stove). It was a very satifying experience! i felt very clean afterwards and used so little water compared to a shower or a bath proper, i was amazed. I have been thinking since...perhaps i should clean like this all the time and stop contributing to world water wastage??? After all this is probably the way the majority of the world washes. Who invented the shower? what a silly billy! 

Mongolian Countryside: sometimes its hard for me to believe that the green lush landscape of summertime is the same country.But with the summertime comes rain... and there has been a lot this year (but i don't mind the rain..) 

Mongolian Countryside: this is one of my favourite winter time photos. It captures (for me) the essence of wintertime - even though its FREEZING cold and there's snow on the ground, the sun is still shining brightly and sky is big and blue.(Uvurkhangai province). 

Mongolian Countryside: This is a the Kherlen Gol (herlen river) which runs across a fair bit of mongolia. This photo was taken in autumn time, when i first arrived. We camped by the river. At that time the countryside was a beautiful glowing golden colour. 

Mongolian Countryside: i've seen many different moods of the mongolian countryside. This is a photo from the top of 'mountain' in Dundgobi province. Looks a bit bleak... This is in spring time, its possibly the ugliest time of the year, but there is still something hauntingly beautiful about it

Horsey photo no 5: most of the horses that someone owns will be 'roaming free' but are periodically rounded up and brought to camp. (usually done on horse, but this guy was lucky enough to own a motorbike). I'm not sure exactly how herders keep track of their stock, but somehow they do. i've heard that horse packs are grouped together around a stallion.. 

Horsey photo no 4: in the countryside, a ger will usually have a horse hitching line. several horses might be tied up here at a time. 

Horsey photo 3: in mongolia you are never too young to get on a horse 

Horsey photo 2: this is to illustrate how one sits in a mongolian saddle (or sort of sqats..) 

Horsey Info: This is a photo taken in Binder, Khentii aimag. Its a little rural settlement and people just ride on into town and hitch their horses up to something and wander around doing their business. this is a picture which shows the mongolian saddle. The stirrups are really short and the saddle seat is wooden. you can see from this photo that the horse is very sweaty (and still has his winter coat) 

Spring time ger in a dust storm

They say spring here is very temperamental. If you are a moody person, Mongolian people will call you 'spring'. On our trip of 5 days we had t-shirt weather and sun, cold wind, hot dust storms, rain and then on the way home a snow storm... oh yes, i can confirm spring in Mongolia is temperamental!

Sara skillfully making hurshuur. 

Sara and the new baby, in spring time. Dunbar remarked in wintertime that the baby would be due at the same time as the sheep and goats were due.