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The People Who Live in Tents: Mongolia's Return to Traditional Ways
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19891 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
Date : |
4 / 1992 |
3,230 Words |
| Author
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Michael McNierney
Michael McNierney is a haiku poet and free-lance
writer/photographer living in Boulder, Colorado. |
Resting our horses and pack camel, and our own weary bones, on a hill-top in the semiarid steppes of western Mongolia, we watched as a single horseman in the valley below guided a herd of cattle toward the Bulgan River. A little higher to the east, we could see smote rising from his family's ger (felt tent). The wooden door was closed, but around it three naked children played under the warm sun of the autumn afternoon. Two camels grazed a few hundred feet away, and farther off was a herd of forty or fifty horses. There was nothing in the scene to date it to the 1990s, or even to the twentieth century. One could be forgiven for thinking that life had not changed in Mongolia for a millennium.
But the reality was far different, as we would soon discover. We rode into the camp, tethered our horses and camel, and walked into the ger unannounced, without knocking, as is the Mongol custom. Ours was a mixed party of foreigners and Mongols: Roy, a Scottish farmer, naturalist, and ornithologist; Sean, a British musicologist and our interpreter; the leader of our expedition, Ann, an American farmer and journalist now living in Scotland; myself, as cartographer and photographer; and our Mongol guides and animal handlers, young Khatanbaatar and middle-aged Khoojin.
If our hosts were disconcerted by the unexpected appearance of this very unusual group, they did not show it. We were met with the same shy friendliness, dignified courtesy, and intense curiosity that we experienced everywhere we went in Mongolia. Our guides had chosen a reasonably prosperous family for us to visit. Had we blundered into a camp of poorer folk, we might have caused them severe distress, as the tradition of hospitality would have required them to offer us the best of their food and drink even if it meant their going without after we left.
Our explanation that we were a reconnaissance group for the British organization Operation Raleigh (a sort of cross between Outward Bound and the peace Corps), which was planning a large expedition to Mongolia in a couple of years, elicited expressions of delight at meeting people from Amerika and Angli. Not for the last time, we were told that Mongolians had been taught all their lives that Westerners, particularly Americans, were the incarnation of the evil capitalist, bent on world domination. Now, with Mongolia's recent turn to glasnost, they were able to red more openly about he West and, with our visit, to meet Westerners face to face and discover that we were people like them (though one man smilingly complained that we were hard to tell apart as we all looked the same). That Roy and Ann raised
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