Under a Broken Sky

It'

s almost noon, and Bayarsakhan looks as if he has just woken up. His jaw hangs slack, and his face is marred by fresh gouges—the result, he says, of tripping onto barbed wire the previous night. It's -25°C, yet Bayarsakhan is wearing only a turtleneck sweater and wool pants, oblivious to the cold. He has nowhere to go, no job to occupy the bitter day ahead. So he stands here idly, amid a dense cluster of shacks, while haggard cows pick through garbage piles. After all his wanderings, the 30-year-old nomad has ended up here in the ramshackle neighborhood of Chingeltei on the western edge of Ulaanbaatar, living in a frozen slum.

Even after receiving more than $2 billion in overseas aid in just over a decade, Mongolia is struggling mightily. Four years of horrendous weather has devastated the former Soviet satellite and has driven thousands of herders like Bayarsakhan off the steppe and into the capital. By some estimates, Ulaanbaatar's population has doubled to 1 million in the past decade, overwhelming the city's limited capacities and further hampering the country's tortuous transition from a collectivized economy to a free market.

For former herders like Bayarsakhan, the transition to city living has been wrenching. He grew up in Gobi-Altai province to the south, where his family had raised livestock for generations. Four summers ago, however, a severe drought was followed by an early frost, then a brutal winter with high winds. Mongolians have a name for this: the dzud. The historical norm has been roughly one dzud every half-decade, making for a tough season before more-manageable weather returns. But it's now happening for a fourth consecutive year. The dzud means less grass grows and animals can't fatten up before the winter snow buries the meager feed. Livestock starves, freezes or wanders off to perish in the blizzards. Officials warn that 2.5 million animals could die this winter alone.

Stranded in a roadless region of Gobi-Altai that had been rendered inaccessible by snowdrifts, Bayarsakhan's family herd of 500 dwindled to 10. After a while, the family even stopped disposing of the corpses, instead piling them around their ger—a felt-covered Mongolian dwelling—for extra insulation. They burned furniture to keep warm. "If you don't have animals," says Bayarsakhan, "you have nothing." To survive, he left everything he'd ever known for a place where people dressed oddly, behaved differently and used paper money instead of bartering. His wife and infant son came with him (he and his wife have since had a second son), as did his two brothers, one of whom also brought a wife and child. They rented 500 square meters in Chingeltei for $90 a month, then set up their ger. One brother found work selling coal. But with so many other former herders vying for jobs, Bayarsakhan can't find anything steady, so he sporadically joins his brother at a nearby coal market, where they buy bags for resale to locals. They make about $2 a day. "I don't know what would be better, being here or in the countryside," he says. "They're both hard."

Many new arrivals—some aid workers use the term internally displaced persons, a designation often given to refugees uprooted by war—become disoriented and depressed. Some take to cheap vodka; brawls are common. But Bayarsakhan says, "I can't afford to drink." Children here are malnourished and sometimes abandoned, says Didi Kalika, who runs a local orphanage. Some residents can't afford heat. Domestic violence flares. Families split. "There have been suicides," whispers Dulamgav, 63, who settled in Chingeltei last year. "The nomads are exhausted," says Rabdan Sambandobji , secretary-general of the Mongolian Red Cross. "If it were only a matter of food and shelter, they would eventually be okay. But these animals were passed down from generation to generation. If they lose them, they lose the meaning of their lives."

Meanwhile, out on the steppe, Jampur is stubbornly—some might say foolishly—clinging to the nomads' age-old way of life. He relishes the freedom of herding and raising animals. And now he has the strongest horse he's ever owned. Even so, he finds his lot desperately hard. At 67, Jampur's fingers are crooked, and he coughs constantly. He walks uneasily on legs bowed as if frozen in the saddle. Jampur spends all his energy tending to a diminishing herd. During the winter, he lives in Uvurkhangai province about 400 kilometers west of the capital. Nearly three-quarters of Uvurkhangai's 113,000 residents are herders. They circumnavigate a wintry land of desolate, hypnotic beauty where a lone horseman or vulture offers a rare burst of color. Few places have been so devastated by the dzud. One provincial official says the area's livestock population plunged from 2.95 million in 1999 to 1.86 million in 2001. Since then, a few hundred thousand more animals have died.

Jampur's ger sits at the base of a hill to protect it from the wind. Not far away lies a trail of cow skeletons that have been picked clean and now blend seamlessly into the snow. "Those were mine," says Jampur. "They died last winter. There was no meat on the bones, so we just took the skins and left the rest." Inside, his ger is warm and smells like a wet horse. There's a shrine with carved animals and Buddhist prayer maps, and a lightbulb and television are wired to a car battery. For weather reports, he relies on a 30-year-old Russian-made radio.

In the past year, Jampur has lost 20 cows, 10 horses and some goats and sheep. Yet he considers himself fortunate. "Some of my neighbors lost their whole herd and had to leave the steppe," he says, stuffing his water pipe with tobacco while his wife feeds dung into the stove with her bare hand. Jampur can't conceive of following them to the city. He knows there was a drought this summer and heavy snowfall early in the winter—the hallmarks of another dzud—and his animals, he admits, already look thin. "But we've made it this far," he says. "So we can stick it out."

In the 1980s Jampur visited Ulaanbaatar. "The buildings were so big!" he exults. "There were so many people, so many cars. It was beautiful, but I wouldn't want to live there. I don't know what I'd do for work." (Or food: "City people eat too many vegetables. There's not enough fat in their diet.") His teenage son left school after fourth grade to help with their animals, and Jampur wants him to remain a herder: "Those who inherit animals will stay herdsmen. Those who don't have no choice but the city."