In March 2008 I was hired by United Nations-TV to shoot two documentaries in Mongolia; one about the Tsaatans, Reindeer People, who live close to the Siberian border, and one about the juvenile judicial system – or the lack of it.
Driving for days through the untouched landscape of Mongolia made me instantly fall in love with the country. It’s vast and it’s empty. Mongolia is still dominated by a semi-nomadic life style and very sparsely populated. We’d spent days without seeing any soul, but when we did, we were instantly invited to join them for salty milk tea in their yurts. Nomads, their mobile live style, ability to adapt and their capacity to endure loneliness always fascinated me. While they don’t call any particular patch their own, nomadic people seem to have a deep, spiritual connection to their land.
My instant fascination with the land and its people may be rooted in my own semi-nomadic existence. From early childhood on I considered myself rootless and later in life I lived out of my car when I had one. Now I live out of suitcases and airplanes. I like to be on the road, watching landscapes and people pass, change their shapes and colors, morph into opposites. The new and unknown excites me.
Back in Ulaanbaatar, the capitol, I met Baaskaa, a then 16–year old boy. He volunteered to tell his story on camera, and even so I didn’t understand a single word, I felt drawn to him. He seemed special. At such young age, he was very sincere, caring and interested in the world around him. Yet his story was a grim one. Baaskaa ran away from home when he was eight years old, escaping the abuse of the man who was supposed to take care of him. The things Baaskaa remembers most of that time were hunger and hard manual labor while his father sat around, nursing the vodka bottle which Baaskaa had to buy every morning. When Baaskaa overheard his father bragging that he’d found “his son” on the street when he was a toddler, Baaskaa decided to leave.
Back home in NY, I was unable to forget about him. Baaskaa had shared with me his plan how he’d escape his homelessness. It was a good plan, but it was obvious that he needed some support. Four weeks after my return, I was back in a plane to Mongolia. With the help of my Mongolian friends and contacts, I found a herding foster family for him, bought a yurt and everything else he needed to get started and enrolled him in a vocational training program. All of this was so “easy” that I thought we should do it again. I am not rich (not even that well off), but the amount of money needed to turn these kids’ live around is small, in comparison to what we get!
Now, two years later, my Mongolian partners and I have helped five kids. We developed a successful system that combines the Mongolian tradition of herding with modern education. We provide the children with livestock, so they have growing assets and a chance of accumulating savings. Once they are stabilized and have learned to be part of a family and community, we enroll them in school. We watched them gain weight, grow in height and become playful kids who developed a sense of belonging.
Before I knew it, I had built a family in Mongolia, who I visit twice a year. The kids call me their long distance mom and I call them – well, my kids.
To read the full story, please go to my website: http://www.eternalblueskyofmongolia.org/
