MONGOLIA: Economic Transition Gives Rise To Streetchildren

By Suvendrini Kakuchi Reprint | | Print |

Suvendrini Kakuchi

ULAN BATOR, Jul 6 1998 (IPS) - Nyamochir’s family lives 200 km away from the capital, but the scrawny 14-year-old is never far from home these days. That’s because he prefers to live on the streets, specifically inside a six-metre deep hole that actually holds part of Ulan Bator’s heating system.

Nyamochir shares the much coveted shelter with 14 other boys, most of whom are older than he is. Cardboard placed close to the water pipes for warmth serves as beds during the night. For food, they scavenge the garbage, although an occasional handout provides them some sustenance as well.

“My stepmother beat me everyday after my father died,” says Nyamochir. “So I left my home three months ago.” He wound up in Ulan Bator, where a group of older boys took him in. They are now teaching him how to survive the harsh conditions of city street living, including fending themselves against rival streetgangs.

Streetchildren are perhaps the last sight a visitor might expect in a country with only 2.3 million people and where many still have to go on horseback to get from one point to another.

But ever since Mongolia embarked on a free market economy almost a decade ago and then formally renounced socialism in 1992, social workers say the country’s number of children living on the streets has been rising.

According to a survey by the National Centre for Children (NCC), there are at least 1,028 streetchildren across Mongolia’s few cities – the result, say social workers, of the social upheaval stemming from the country’s painful economic transition.

Under the socialist system, there had been a safety net that had taken care of the people’s education and medical needs, and had provided jobs. But government subsidies are no longer available, a change that has had a heavy toll on the weak — particularly the children.

Social workers say more and more youngsters are being driven out of their homes by desperate parents who are now unemployed and can no longer feed them.

“During the socialist times, the gap between the rich and the poor was not wide,” say Uranbileg Bergen, a project officer at the NCC, which gets support from the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF).

“The transition has created many social problems and the numbers of children living under the poverty line is growing,” she adds. “If we don’t tackle the problem soon we will have as many as 70,000 children living on the streets.”

The political and economic changes are also having a profound impact on the children’s health. Among the children under Bergen’s care, malnutrition and serious diseases such as tuberculosis are common.

But with the NCC providing the needed care, they are still lucky. One of Nyamochir’s friends has a wracking cough but has not sought medical help. “I sometimes cough up blood,” says the tough- looking youth.

Almost 40 percent of the state budget is spent on social development but experts say more than half of that sum goes towards heating expenses and transportation leaving very little for education and health.

Many Mongolians complain that the government is not paying enough attention to their basic needs, and prefers instead to pour in money into business and industry at the risk of creating social unrest in the country.

Last year, though, the government for the first time allotted a 150 million tughrik (174,000 dollars) budget for streetchildren. The money is spent on a prevention and rehabilitation programme that includes feeding and teaching the children, as well as counselling destitute parents who have abandoned their children.

A sponsorship programme seeking foreign foster parents who will give a 20-dollar monthly support per child has been started.

Social workers say alcoholism is a major problem in poor families, making it difficult to guarantee the safety of children who run away and then are brought back to their parents. One social worker here says a boy they rescued had his hair burnt by his mother who was under stress because of family problems resulting from alcoholism.

Programmes should thus also be geared toward providing safe shelters, say social workers. But convincing streetchildren to live in such homes poses yet another difficulty.

As Bergen points out, many prefer the streets, where they have all the freedom to do as they please and the opportunity to make quick money. It is also hard to create a family atmosphere in government or privately run homes.

“There is the concept that children have been sacrificed for the economic transition policies of the government,” she says. “(But) as the numbers of poor children grow, people are worried about growing crime and feel at a loss.”

Nyamochir and his friends, for instance, avoid the police most of the time for they beg or steal for a living. Often, they also deal with unscrupulous men who use the boys for cheap, sometimes illegal, work, taking advantage of Mongolia’s juvenile laws that rarely slap long prison sentences on child criminals.

The NCC says 80 children are now being charged for serious crime such as rape and murder. Many young girls who live on the streets, meanwhile, work as sex workers. Some as young as 13 suffer from venereal disease.

Bergen also notes that the new economic system is causing a new kind of stress on children as they have begun to crave for material goods such as fashionable clothes and electronic goods.

“During the socialist times children wore uniforms to schools and there was not much difference between rich children and children from poor homes,”she says. “Now we are hearing of many cases where children are refusing to go to school because their clothes are not good enough.”

For his part, Nyamochir would probably be only too glad if he could have clothes that are not as threadbare as what he is wearing now and which can hardly keep out the cold of the winds blowing through Ulan Bator’s streets.

Nyamochir, who says he polishes boots for a living, says he wants to learn how to read and write. But the big boys he hangs around with will not allow him to go to a centre where he can attend classes. He figures his future is bleak, and that he will probably end up in prison.

For now, though, he and his coughing friend are trying to focus on where to get their gang’s next meal. Says his friend, “We don’t have enough money to buy even candles for our hole.”