Filthy, aggressive and dressed in rags, the street children of Ulan Bator are the victims of a Mongolian society riven by domestic violence and torn apart by breakneck social changes.
Typically aged between five and 14, the children roam the streets of the Mongolian capital in search of scraps of food or shelter for the night.
"My father and my brothers used to beat me all the time for no reason after they had been drinking. I couldn't stand it anymore so I just left," said Bayarmagnai, a sharp-looking 12-year-old boy, at Ulan Bator's detention centre for street children.
The centre was created to hold 50 children for a period of not more than two weeks, but it frequently holds more as it takes time to resettle children in one of the centres run by a host of international charities.
There are around 15 international organisations working on programmes for an estimated 4,000 to 5,000 street children in Ulan Bator, out of a total population of 800,000.
However the number of youngsters on the streets has risen as nomadic herder families ruined by the second appalling winter in succession abandon the countryside for the city.
Mongolia is a country going through a very painful transition.
After 70 years of Soviet control and subsidies, the country 10 years ago embarked upon the road of democracy and free market reforms. But the journey from command to market economy has come at a terrible social price, and unemployment is currently around 40 percent of the active population.
"Sixty percent of the kids come from the countryside," said Peter Bryan, who runs a project set up by the Christian aid group World Vision.
Unable to pay the necessary 50 dollar fee for residency in Ulan Bator, most of the new families who arrive in the capital find themselves without work, living in traditional felt tents known as gers on the edge of the city.
Without the permits they have no access to schooling or health care.
"For many children it is less dangerous to be on the streets," said Sister Marie-Dominique, of the French Catholic order Congregation Fraternite Notre-Dame, which opened the first charitable hospital in Ulan Bator.
More than 20 percent of the patients are street children, most of them victims of severe beatings by their parents or other adults.
"Mongolian society is extremely violent because of alcoholism," said Sister Marie-Dominique, recounting the story of a baby with a fractured skull who had been thrown against a wall by his drunken father.
She said many of Mongolia's poor take solace in poor quality alcohol from China laced with methanol which often makes the drinker "mad" with rage.
The situation is particularly grim in the underground tunnels which house the city's hot water pipes. Here some of the 40,000 people who live in Ulan Bator without shelter exist in filthy conditions as temperatures above ground drop to minus 40 degrees Centigrade.
As well as violence, the children also frequently have skin diseases and burns caused by contact with the water pipes, which carry pressurised water at temperatures of up to 130 degrees Centigrade.
Between 200 and 300 children live permanently inside the tunnels during the winter or in the city's parks during the summer. Others find shelter in the stairwells of buildings or go home at night after spending the day on the streets begging.
"Now there is also more child prostitution," said Peter Bryan, complaining of frequent sexual violence, a subject still taboo in Mongolia.
"I was raped by my stepfather and I have lived on the streets for the past three years," said Oyuntuya, an 18-year-old given shelter by World Vision who dreams of rebuilding her life as a clothes designer. |
