City of Lost Children

Ten feet outside Aizam’s home is a music kiosk. The size of a tool shed, it’s cluttered with movie posters, cigarette boxes and cassette tapes piled flat and anonymous in precariously leaning towers. Pressed up against the glass, a man in an immaculate black suit smiles from a cracked plastic case. He is a famous man, a major entertainer known throughout the country.

The man is Aizam’s father. But the boy doesn’t brag about him. In fact, he has a hard time speaking of him at all, much less looking at his picture in the kiosk window.

His story is told in whispers when he’s not around.

Aizam’s parents divorced when he was 10. His mother remarried, but her husband threw the boy out on the street because he didn’t want a child who was not his own. Aizam returned to his father’s door, but no one answered.

Eventually he joined a group of children who lived in a manhole between a music kiosk and a movie theater. In the seven years since, he has seen his father several times walking down the street with his new wife. They stroll past and ignore him, as if he is not there.

“He has lost me,” Aizam says.

Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia’s capital city, sits on the wide, northern steppe like an anvil rusting in a meadow. Seventeen years after the fall of communism, much of it still feels like a Soviet backwater. Crumbling, monolithic apartment blocks dominate the western skyline. Coal-burning power plants foul the air. Lenin statues lurk in overgrown parks like forgotten transients.

An enduring legacy of the communist downfall is the phenomenon of Mongolian street children. With the breakup of the Soviet Union, the Mongolian communist state folded after more than 60 years in power, taking state-subsidized industries and jobs with it.

International trade, 95% of which was conducted with the Soviet Union and communist countries in Eastern Europe, fell sharply. Between 1990 and 1993, economic output decreased by one-third. Mongolia endured food rationing, shortages of basic goods and triple-digit inflation.

As the economy disintegrated, children were sent to the city by destitute parents in the countryside. Thousands ended up homeless, abandoned by parents who could no longer care for them or relatives who barely knew them. Alcoholism and abuse at home led many children to flee on their own. Periodic economic downturns forced more children into the street, as was the case in 2000 when bad weather and natural disasters killed 2.4 million livestock and saw economic growth drop from 3.2% in 1999 to 1.3% in 2000.

The government seems to vacillate between denying the existence of street children and wanting to help but lacking the resources to do so. Social workers have recently been introduced into schools to identify desperately poor children who are at risk of becoming homeless. The worst cases are often referred to non-governmental aid organizations that are better equipped to deal with the problem. But the problem of children already on the streets has gone largely unaddressed.

“It’s impossible to say how many street children there are now,” says Eamonn Thornton, director of the Christina Noble Children’s Foundation in Mongolia, which provides medical services, educational opportunities and shelter to street children and children in poverty-stricken families. “I believe their numbers to be in the hundreds.”

Children move about with such frequency that any sort of census is impossible. Some live permanently in holes, but many wander the streets for days or weeks before returning home to broken families. In the summer, when tourists arrive, the police occasionally round them up and take them to a detention center. Many end up in prison, while others disappear. Stories of children being kidnapped and harvested for organs to be sent to China are occasionally reported by the local media.

“None of the children I knew when I first arrived are still here,” Eamonn says. “I don’t know what happened to them.”

Next chapter: “A FIRST-HAND LOOK AT KIDS IN MANHOLES”