Summary: To help out my friend with trial-running her company's new community-based tourism service, I visited the ger districts for the first time. We got to visit three households and experience a home cooked lunch, traditional art-making, and Mongolian games. As someone who has been thinking about disparity in Mongolia, it was an eye-opening experience for me to visit the districts and also an opportunity to dispel some misperceptions I had about the area.
One of my friends from the Princeton in Asia program has her post with a non-profit organization that operates projects with the ger districts. Ger districts are residential areas on the outskirts of Ulaanbaatar city. As my friend put it, they represent an in-between of the countryside and the urbanized city. These are people from the countryside who dwelled in gers and relied on subsistence living who moved to join the city; the catch is, city-living is far too expensive, so they've built these ger districts around the actual city.
Many residents have a plot of land surrounded by wooden fences with their ger or a mobile home. The districts lack a running water system, sewage system, and central heating. Air pollution in UB is really bad, but the ger district residents face the worst of it because they have to burn coal constantly during the winter to stay warm.
Her company is testing out a community-based tourism service, where tourists visit with households in the districts to have an authentic experience with Mongolian life. So we volunteered as guinea pigs to trial-run the tour.
Walking Tour
We first started off by having a walking tour and looking at the community resources in the districts. Every household sends someone (usually the children) to fill up water tanks at the water kiosk. They can either pay in cash or through a kiosk-specific card. Since gers and many of the mobile homes do not have a running water or sewage system, residents will get cleaned up at a community shower center.
First Household: Lunch
The first household we visited was a family of 3 young children. The hostess has been a long-time partner with my friend's company, first starting off with their sponsored reading program where parents read to their children at the community center. She prepared seabuckthorn juice, buuz (Mongolian dumplings), and milk curd snacks for us. The best way I can describe seabuckthorn is it tastes like herby orange juice. Milk curds can be a hit or miss for me because I’ve had some that were too sour or too hard like jawbreaker candies. However, these were the best ones I’ve ever had. They had a good balance between sweet and tart and were very easy to chew. Later, she taught us how to fold buuz. It was more difficult than I thought, so I was surprised and also embarrassed when she told me her five and six-year old daughters can fold the dumplings too.
Then, through a translator, we got to ask some questions about her life. She told us that before her third child was born, she used to work as a waitress at a restaurant in the city that I am familiar with. It was then that I learned that around 60% of the city lives in these ger districts. That was mind blowing to me because I always assumed that those I saw walking around in the city lived in the city - whether it’s the high rise apartments or old buildings like my dorm. But it turns out that many, if not most, are commuting to work from these districts.
Second Household: Traditional Art
Our second visit was with a professional Mongolian paper cutting artist. It's an art style where the artist uses surgery-like scissors to cut paper into beautiful shapes that are later used to create a picture. The picture below contains her artwork; all of these were made through cutting black paper with scissors (even the feathers, the horse's manes, and the individual strands of grass).
She told us we would try the easier version, which was cutting a butterfly. It was not easy. I thought she would just fold a paper in half and cut an outline of a butterfly, but no, she made antennas, eyes, intricate patterns and holes in the wings with such precision. We tried to copy what she did, but obviously they did not come out as well as hers did. In the picture, the third butterfly was the artist's rendition. I thought my friends did a really good job, but something looked very wrong with mine (second butterfly).
Then, we tried Mongolian calligraphy. Before they adopted the Cyrillic alphabet, Mongolians used a traditional written language. In fact, during my visit to China back in January, I saw Mongolian traditional writing at the different palaces and landmarks I visited.
Third Household: Mongolian Games
For our last household, we visited the ger of a recently retired man who showed us how to play Mongolian games. A lot of these games revolve around sheep anklebones. The way he explains it is that every year, families have a pile of sheep bones (just because sheep is consumed a lot here), so naturally, they created games with them. Turns out that many of their games are actually brain teasers. I spent so long on one of them - there are two anklebones tied to a larger sheep bone by a string, and the goal is to move one anklebone to the other side - and I could not solve it for the life of me.
However, the game that I enjoyed the most was the one that was very similar to a game of jacks. Except, instead of having a ball and jacks, you had a metal bracelet and fifty sheep anklebones.
Conclusion
Economic disparity in Mongolia has been something I’ve been thinking about for a while, and learning about the daily lives of those living in ger districts was such an eye-opening experience. Those who don’t have cars have to commute 2-3 hours a day to their work, and the amenities that I have like running water, heating, etc. are not available to them. It’s especially alarming considering the context of elite corruption. Just last week, the Wall Street Journal published an article on how the former prime minister of Mongolia is getting investigated for skimming a mining contract to buy $14 million penthouses in Manhattan. I just wonder what all that money could do for these districts.
At the same time, I think it is very easy to generalize these districts and mark them as "poverty areas." But visiting these households, I learned how rich their experiences and how strong their sense of families can be. They're not a symbol of disparity but unique neighborhoods that are so much more than that.
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