For Mongolia’s Displaced Nomads, City Life Brings Broken Hearts And Burning Lungs

Forced to abandon their ancient herding lifestyle, rural Mongolians struggle to manage in the smog-choked capital city.

This is the second installment of a two-part series examining the hardship nomadic herders face in a fast-changing Mongolia.

ULAANBAATAR, Mongolia ― One afternoon in the mountain pasture where her family had grazed their livestock for as many generations as anyone could trace ― about 800 miles west of this polluted capital to which she was forced to flee ― Ishtsooj Davagdorj accidentally ran her sheep and goats into those of another herder, one she’d never seen before. He was from another remote village. As their animals blended and bleated, she blushed. Her heart fluttered.

“He was handsome,” Ishtsooj recalled one afternoon in mid October, a coy smile flashing across her face.

This was roughly two decades ago. Back then, her parents had hundreds of head of livestock but few children to help with herding. They liked the man. Before long, Ishtsooj was married. Children would soon follow. These were happy times in Mongolia. Tall green grass grew on the ocean-like steppe, allowing the herders who still made up the majority of a population smaller than that of Los Angeles to roam a country nearly the size of Mexico. The fall of the Soviet Union, with which Mongolia aligned but never officially joined, brought democracy to a rural nation landlocked between Russia and China.

The family lived simply in a traditional ger, the stout cylindrical tents, framed with wood and usually covered in white cloth, sometimes called yurts in English. Their animals ― the ultimate sign of a nomad’s prosperity ― numbered more than 400, with sheep, goats, yaks and horses, and as many as four two-humped Bactrian camels used for milk and for transporting their belongings across the northern reaches of the Gobi Desert.