The move which 53-year-old Ganbat has painfully resigned himself to is only a distance of about ten kilometres. But for this Mongolian herder, who has now lost all his animals in the snow disaster – “dzud” - that has afflicted the country since late last year, leaving the barren hillsides to settle in the tiny county town means the end of life as he has known it.
“I was born here, grew up and have lived my entire life out here, but now I have no other option,” he says, as we sit with him and his wife in the family’s ger, or nomadic felt tent.
Families such as Ganbat’s, who have lost everything, are scattered all around this county on the fringes of the Gobi Desert. Local authorities say around 40 per cent of the more than 100,000 animals kept by herders in the county have perished. That’s well over the percentage nationwide, which stands at around ten per cent of the national total of more than 40 million livestock.
The IFRC has launched an emergency appeal for 1 million Swiss francs (992,000 US dollars or 744,000 euro) to assist the people who suffer the most.
Shocked and numb
As we travel further among the gentle rolling hills, still flecked with snow patches and drifts, we meet Narantsetseg, 45, who looks shocked and numb as she stands outside her ger and cradles her two-year-old son. Her family also plans to move to the tiny county town of only about 500 households, where they will face a new and unfamiliar life without their animals.
“I don’t know what we are going to do there,” she says, adding that they are likely to move on to the capital Ulaanbaatar in a year or so, to join her eldest daughter who is living there.
The Mongolian Red Cross Society believes that a proportion of those who begin this internal migration will eventually gravitate to the capital’s ger districts, where they face new and daunting challenges in adapting to an urban way of life.
Extended family
For now though, as we walk around the handful of shops that the county town offers, a couple of rented trucks pull up - one carrying hay, the other possessions, including a motorcycle and a ger, belonging to an extended family who have also lost all their 1,000 animals and are migrating to the province’s main town an hour away.
So far only one family, who have lost nearly all their livestock in this dzud, have moved to the county town. But the local Red Cross branch secretary, Khongorzul, says she expects all the 70 herder households that are now without any animals to follow suit.
Visits to a couple of families who moved to the little town in the past two years after harsh weather claimed all their animals, provided contrasting impressions of their ability to cope.
Poverty and hardship
Sitting in their ger, 45-year-old Nyam-Osor and his children seem despondent and weighed down by poverty and hardship. “There’s no way I can find any other work, because I can’t read and write and have no other skills,” he says.
But as children darted in and out of 42-year-old Dashdorj’s ger, the atmosphere couldn’t have been more different.
“I hope that some of my children will go and get good jobs in the city, although my eldest son really wants to be a herder,” said Dashdorj. He makes a living for the family from doing odd jobs such as helping with cleaning, slaughtering and working on preparing the cashmere which is Mongolian herders’ most lucrative product.
His experience seems to show that if those families who follow in his footsteps to the town are resourceful and willing to try their hand at new things, they can make a go of their lives there. Red Cross Red Crescent assistance will also aim to assist those who have lost their animals in finding new ways of making a living. But there’s no doubt that even so, many migrant families still face formidable challenges ahead .