by Linda Neil
She’d been at the school for a couple of years and I was on my first visit. I’d been invited to give some writing and songwriting workshops at the school, and to accompany a group of CIS students on one of their annual international field trips. These trips occurred in a school hiatus called Project Week, during which the students travelled to various parts of the world and performed civic-minded projects for those less fortunate than themselves. Knowing that most CIS students came from wealthy families, I imagined that many people in the world could qualify as less fortunate. In Cathie’s opinion, though, Project Week was a good consciousness-raising opportunity for these kids, many of whom held multiple passports and expected to further their education at Harvard or Oxford.
Our group had elected to visit Mongolia and help the Christina Noble Children’s Foundation. On the outskirts of Ulaanbaatar, the foundation had built the Blue Skies Ger Village for kids in need, and the CIS students would be donating and erecting a ger. A ger, or a yurt, is a demountable home that can be cooled in summer or insulated in the long harsh winters for which Mongolia is especially famous. I thought it was an ingenious design, perfectly suited to the nomadic animal herders of Mongolia, who travelled in search of pastures to feed their livestock.
I was going to Mongolia as an observer and archiver of the trip. I was also gathering material for a possible radio documentary. Consequently, on the morning my sister packed the fresh strawberries, I was more concerned that I had remembered all the equipment I needed: my recorder, a supply of discs and batteries, a microphone, and headphones.
I was more intrigued than worried about the trip, though I was quite prepared for most of my preconceptions to be overturned. I brushed up on my rudimentary Mongolian history – on Genghis Khan, for instance, who conquered Eurasia in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, after leading his battalions of horsemen from the desert all the way east to Constantinople. He was also, I discovered, the hero of a 1950s film called The Conqueror, a schlock-fest starring John Wayne and produced by Howard Hughes. Did the maverick Hughes see himself, I wondered, in Genghis Khan? The Mongol leader was either reviled as a genocidal maniac or revered as a great nation builder – or, in the case of The Conqueror, ‘loved by women, respected and feared by men, worshipped by his people’, a rugged movie hero played with Fu Manchu moustache and leather breastplate by a notoriously right-wing American actor.
*
After travelling via Incheon airport in Seoul, we arrived at Ulaanbaatar early in the morning. As the plane taxied along the tarmac, I saw the name of Mongolia’s main airport in giant letters across the top of the concrete terminal: Chinggis Khaan International Airport. I was surprised to see such public proof that Genghis Khan was idolised in the same way that John F Kennedy had been in the US – as a great historical figure and an inspiring leader. I pressed my nose against the plane window and peered further into the rolling fog, recalling what a Chinese acquaintance in Hong Kong had told me the night before.
The western view is never the complete view. When the west declines, their narratives will no longer dominate and a new, less incomplete history of the world will be written.
We left the plane, sleepy and dishevelled, and stumbled to the terminal through dispersing fog. At the transit centre we were processed by taciturn guards dressed in Russian-style military uniform, an unexpected juxtaposition of Asian heritage and European influence. The guards, both male and female, appeared severe and not exactly inclined to expedite our passage through immigration, despite the presence of twenty or so tired teenagers from Hong Kong. Finally, a bleary-eyed translator arrived, and by dawn we were bussing our way to the centre of the city.
The next surprise came when I opened the curtains of my room at the Lotus Hotel just past dawn. On the street, Soviet-style buildings fanned out like concrete blocks in a military compound; in the cold light they looked ominous, a flattened-down totalitarian’s dream. It seemed another incongruous integration, a jolting reminder of Mongolia’s twentieth-century history, its so-called Russian era.
I was sharing a room with Cathie, and equally incongruous as the impression of Moscow from our hotel was the breakfast we shared: Weet-Bix, So Good and a couple of freshly sliced strawberries. Cathie placed the rest of the strawberries in the bar fridge. We would have to ration them, we agreed, if they were to last for our stay. There was to be no sneaking of strawberries during the day or for late-night snacks – a few each per breakfast would see us through to our return to Hong Kong. In the drizzle that hung around outside, Ulaanbaatar did seem the kind of place where nothing fresh could possibly be found, where anything sweet and delicious would only exist in dreams or fables of other exotic lands, just as Mongolia existed in the dreams of faraway countries like Australia. Through the misty keyhole of Ulaanbaatar, my first impression of Mongolia was that of a harsh place, with a legacy of faded glories.
In the lobby, refreshed after a post-breakfast shower and nap, I met an Australian named Jack. In his cream jacket, blue trousers and scuffed brown shoes, he looked like he’d be at home at an RSL. But his cheerful face and bulging wallet told me he’d struck a deep vein of joy and profit here in Ulaanbaatar, and he laughed generously throughout our conversation at the hotel bar. Jack was working with an NGO facilitating mining projects in western Mongolia. There were a lot of men and women like him in the country, he explained, from Australia, Canada and America, working at some vague consultancy job aimed at establishing mining ties with Mongolia. The country was eager, even desperate, for income with which to develop its nascent nationhood. As soon as the Russians had moved out, western companies had moved in. I would be told this several times during my visit, as if to confirm that the only alternative to the iron-fisted patronage of the Soviets was the velvet-gloved exploitation of the capitalists, who vigorously courted Mongolia as it opened up its economy.
It all felt faintly unseemly, the enthusiasm of business to ‘help’ Mongolia grow. Even Jack conceded this, as well as the need to ‘tread carefully’. Mongolians, he sighed, were a proud people. Subsequently, there were already rumblings in the population, uneasy at how quickly the government had signed away its rights to the country’s potentially enormous wealth. There was also talk of winding back some of the more outrageous and lopsided agreements with the western mining giants, with their deep caches of cash and expensive cadres of lawyers and experts.
I told Jack I was interested in discovering what I could about contemporary Mongolia, and in particular Ulaanbaatar. Jack gave me his card, telling me there were two English-speaking Mongolian women at his office who would be interesting for me to talk to.
You can read all you want about Genghis Khan and dream about the horsemen who made it all the way to Constantinople, he told me gruffly. But a fascinating history won’t feed the people of this country. You can understand that walking down any street in Ulaanbaatar. The things most people know about Mongolia happened nearly a thousand years ago. And all this place wants to do now – all it needs to do – is look forward, not backward, and grow. Grow up! And that’s a whole other story. That’s where we come in. When the Russians walked out the Mongolians needed someone to help them and that’s what we’re trying to do.
When the Russians walked out. I wondered what exactly those words meant. I hoped someone would unpack the seemingly casual phrase for me before I left. How could a nation that had been so dominant in Mongolia simply walk out? What were the processes of their departure and what were its consequences?
*
When I am recording sound for a documentary, something transforming, and in some instances mysterious, takes place. Just as Christopher Isherwood became a camera in his Berlin stories, I feel I become something other than myself: a listening device through which pass information, emotion, exploration, conflict, colours, textures and light.
As I stamped along the footpath outside the Lotus Hotel that morning, waiting for the chartered bus to take our group to t
he city premises of the Blue Skies Ger Village Project, I could tell I would need extra focus in Ulaanbaatar. The city challenged and discombobulated me, and I would need to harness my strength to make sense of what I was witnessing. But I also felt, and hoped, that concentrating such energy here in Mongolia might reveal something unexpected, something clarifying, about not just the world but my world too.
When we got to the building, I set up my recording equipment and felt myself become that other me, the aural witness to an experience I would later re-stitch into sound montages. These montages might then make meaning from the fragments I carried home with me, these shards of Mongolian sound and light, embedded like jewels in my tiny discs.
The CIS kids gave out clothes and toys as I roamed the rooms and corridors, recording the sounds of this children’s sanctuary. If the foundation’s aim was to provide a feeling of safety to children who had never known such a thing in their lives, then Christina Noble and her team had succeeded. I was struck by the courage of this place, existing in this cold, difficult city.
The manager of the premises was a stocky nugget of an Irishman called Eoin, who knew Christina Noble from Dublin. He had spent time as an orphan on the streets, as she had, and believed passionately in her work. Sitting across his desk from me in his small, well-organised office, Eoin spoke candidly but guardedly, as if the obvious privilege of my life would make it impossible for me to relate to or empathise with the children in his care. I knew first-hand about first-world guilt: how it can create an intellectual understanding of an ‘other’ in relation to yourself, and at the same time a ‘compassion disconnect’ between you and the rest of the world. Sometimes there is simply no way to envision oneself in another person’s circumstance – the imagination just can’t travel that far.
I wondered if Eoin resented the time spent talking to someone like me. I imagined he had encountered a lot of people who were initially overcome by sympathy in Ulaanbaatar, but whose promises transformed into the embarrassed silence of unanswered emails and unfulfilled pledges when they returned home.
I had been one of those people and I knew how easily it happened. So I didn’t make any promises that day. I just listened as energetically as I could to Eoin’s words, admiring his tough, clipped sentences, his street-smart perspective, and the way he’d learned to trust action, not words, no matter how kind those words were. If Ulaanbaatar was one of the toughest places in the world to be an orphaned child, then he needed to be that tough too.
In between responding to numerous requests from his assistant, who popped in and out of his office as we spoke, Eoin explained some key aspects of Christina Noble’s philosophy and the specifics of his Ulaanbaatar experience. As he spoke in his deep staccato growl I could hear the children laughing. It wasn’t broad or confident laughter; instead it was tentative, nervous. But it was laughter, nonetheless, or the manifest potential of it.
The CIS students were doing their best to get involved. They knew, though, that their own security would never be jeopardised in the way these children had been endangered all their lives. They knew that at the end of the day there was a bus to take them back to their hotel. They knew that when they had finished eating and playing and exchanging notes on the day’s activities, they could take the lift up to their rooms, where freshly made beds waited to receive their weary bodies. But still, I thought, it wasn’t meaningless that we were there. I refused to believe, in this courageous, unlikely place, that any act bringing two impossibly separated worlds together was futile. I listened again to the hopeful sounds of the Mongolian children at play. It might have been only a brief moment in our shared disparate histories, but it was at least something that we had made the long journey to arrive here.
Against this counterpoint of gentle, anomalous laughter, Eoin continued.
It’s hard to believe they can laugh at all. But that’s the miracle – the resilience of children. And we get kids from the worst of the worst, who’ve truly experienced the kind of hell you wouldn’t even see in war zones. They have endured things you or I could not imagine. Some kids here were set alight by their parents because they couldn’t afford to keep them. Other kids were put out of their homes when their mothers married again, and were left to cope on their own in the cold. For the sake of the new husband, all remnants of the first marriage had to be abandoned. It’s a practice we are trying to gradually change, although the patriarchal nomadic life is deeply embedded into Mongolian culture and we have to tread carefully. That’s why our Blue Skies Ger Village is central to our work for children in Ulaanbaatar. The bottom line, though, is that all those who are abandoned have a home with us. Of course, not every child wants the routine we set up at the orphanage. Some kids come here and leave. Run away.
Where do they go? I asked neutrally, not wanting to express any shock which might betray judgement.
The streets. The rubbish dumps. They work for scraps in the night markets. I mean, these people are tough, the toughest people on earth, I sometimes think. You’ve heard of the kids who live in the pipes under the streets? We run our mobile medical clinic for them at night.
I hadn’t heard of them. These kids lived in gangs, going to and from their underworld through Ulaanbaatar’s manholes. Eoin told me they’d been the subject of an international photographic exhibition; it had caused a recent media sensation, briefly focusing the world’s attention – not always helpfully – on some of the worst of modern Mongolia.
Many of those kids spent some time here, Eoin further explained. But they feel, for better or for worse, that they’d prefer to build their own community. To be independent. To move as they feel. Most of these people are descendants of nomads, of horse people who roamed the plains. So maybe they prefer it underground. Some of them have been there for years. We can’t force them to do anything; all we can do is provide them with food or medical attention every night or whenever they need it. It’s not our business to make judgements or to enforce our rules on them. But that’s what I mean when I say they are tough.
As he led me out of the building, he promised to arrange for me to go out one night with the mobile clinic, so I could see how the tunnel kids lived, and understand why they might prefer it over the care of government shelters or orphanages. The next night, I took him up on his offer and witnessed children ascending from beneath the earth for food and hot drink before descending into their homes under the streets. Others have written about these street kids in Ulaanbaatar after living with them over the course of weeks. So I’ll leave it to their stories to illuminate the plight of these children, a plight I could barely understand or properly tell after two hours in the back of a mobile clinic.
*
Later that day I travelled with the CIS kids to the edge of the city. From its perimeter Ulaanbaatar looked as if it had been encircled by gers as part of some metaphorical encroaching of history. The nomadic homes seemed benign enough, with their colourful flags fluttering in the breeze. But their presence presented another incongruity of modern Mongolia: the nomads being transplanted into the city, their seasonally based lives taking on the rhythms of urban reality.
Mongolia seemed determined to preserve the heritage of its wandering tribes. But at what cost to the nomad, I wondered. The life they knew depended on constant movement, on harmonising with nature. How would they find a place in a new Mongolia, centralised in cities? How would the government legislate their position in relation to the oncoming mining boom?
That morning the name of the Blue Skies Ger Village was poignantly yet dazzlingly apt. The sky above us was the kind of cloudless blue you might dream up – crisp and so clear you could imagine it being peeled back like the top layer of a painting, revealing the workings of its creator’s hand underneath.
Temujin was one of the young men from the foundation helping with the Blue Skies project. I guessed he was in his early twenties, and he had the face of a future leader. He already seemed compassionate and
mature beyond his years as he surveyed the area around us. We stood together on a rocky incline looking over the spot where the ger was being assembled. I felt guilty not to be helping, but at that distance I had the luck to witness the process in its entirety. I could observe the CIS students’ tentative attempts to get involved. I could see the equally tentative yet gentle way the Mongolian helpers showed them how to push up the ger’s walls, how to install the vital layers of insulation, how to roll out the floors. Instructions were passed on almost inaudibly: it was a matter of showing and doing rather than telling.
Standing back as an observer also gave me a chance to talk to Temujin, who told me in halting yet clear English that he’d been born in the capital, and had lived there ever since. When I asked him if he minded me recording our talk, he only smiled and said he was a ‘typical’ Mongolian youth, proud of his country and its history. I tried not to show my surprise when he said he was only fifteen. This made him younger than many of the students I had accompanied to Ulaanbaatar. It was clear, though, that he had already endured a great many responsibilities, and he spoke with the thoughtfulness of a much older boy.
Yes, he told me shyly, his name was the same as that of the boy who grew up to be Genghis Khan. No, his parents hadn’t named him that; he had chosen it for himself when he was ten in the hope that he would become a strong leader of Mongolia one day, as the original Temujin had been.
He had worked since he was twelve, while still attending school. As well as assisting at the ger village, he was studying computer programming four days a week and working as a delivery boy on weekends. He was also training to become a DJ, which gave him much happiness and a feeling of freedom. His favourite music was hip-hop and he practised spinning his records every night in one of the small clubs that apparently thrived in the city. I told him what I had told others since I had arrived: that Mongolia was full of surprises.