"She was again conscious of some new idea, and was not sure whither it would lead her."
"Pull out from the depths those thoughts that you do not understand, and spread them out in the sunlight and know the meaning of them."
E.M. Forster (1879~1970) ~ "A Room With a View"
Sometimes, when faced with a triumvirate of pervasive thoughts swirling around a sole, central nucleus, it seems uncouthly sacrilegious to ignore a potential message hovering in the lofts and fathoms of one's subconscious. Though it is easy to argue the possibility of fate or existence of coincidence, I beg to differ; everything that ever is or was has always been meant to be, whether or not it rests in our good graces. And in this instance, I think grace ~ and a call to arms of a sort ~ has everything to do with it.
For my birthday this year, a dear friend gave me a book precious to him: Annie Dillard's For the Time Being. Not to be devoured in a single sitting but rather in microscopic, scarcely manageable nibbles, this delicate sepia-toned, falling-apart paperback has yielded vast, indomitable landscapes and breathtaking unfurlings of the soul, the human heart, the spirits of all things both conscious and non.
Startlingly, of all places in the world for Dillard to consideringly lose herself ~ at least in the opening passages of the book ~ is one which has been quietly haunting my consciousness over the past half~decade: the harshly mysterious, ancient land of Mongolia. Once upon a time, when we had more time for television, we used to watch rather religiously The Lonely Planet, also familiar to North Americans as Globe Trekker and Pilot Guides. More than just your garden~variety travel show for off~the~beaten~path traversing, it was informative, often amusing at the expense of the travel hosts, and addressed ~ often in no small detail ~ the current issues and plights of residents in visited regions.
The most memorable episode I remember was when impish host Ian Wright visited this richly-hued kingdom of blinding deserts and ice-capped mountains, sleeping in a yurt, wandering through the cosmopolitan capitol of Ulaan Baatar, and hunting with nomads and eating a marmot ~ an experience about which he remarked, "Later, I learned they're carriers of the bubonic plague, and no amount of cooking can kill the disease."
Yet it isn't necessarily the uneasy marmot-ingestion that remains lodged in my mind as the defining moment of that episode so much as another topic addressed near the end: while it is absolutely impossible to deny the obscene proliferation of horrific survival conditions for children around the globe, the plight of Mongolian "hole" children ~ those who spend sub-zero winters huddled close to warm~but~toxic sewer pipes underground ~ has deeply bothered and remained with me these past five years.
"'I am half~sick of shadows,' she said."
Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–1892), "The Lady of Shalott"
In a deeply unsettling article by Kristine Weber, "Out in the Cold: Street Children of Mongolia" (1997) profiles the living conditions ~ and reasons for the downwardward spiral of social structure ~ facilitating the demise of these children living in such a remote region on the planet:
"To Americans, Europeans or Africans, Mongolia seems about as close as a colony on Mars and indeed it is a remote country. From Beijing, Ulaan Baataar is a two-day train ride, mostly through the barren Gobi desert. Its small population (about 2.2 million) and relatively undeveloped economy have gained it little attention from Western media. And its location, sandwiched between Russia and China, has given Mongolia little opportunity for self-definition this century.
But five years ago, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, Mongolia broke free from 70 years of Russian domination. The communist structure was thrown out and free market reforms were introduced. To a few shrewder Mongolian businesspeople, the explosion of capitalism has brought prosperity. But the boom has also left fallout ~ the country's youth. Along with the decline of the communist economic structure went most of the country's social welfare money and programs for young people.
Mongolia was one of the only countries that, for many hundreds of years, had strong restrictions on drinking. But after 1945 we gained the right to drink. Vodka was brought in from Russia. Around 1960 many young people were going to Russia to study and at that time I began to see drunks on the street. Russia cultivated this habit here.
During communism's reign in Mongolia, the Soviet Union dominated politics, education, culture and economics. Under pressure from Stalin, the Mongolian script was ousted and replaced with Russian. More than 700 Buddhist monasteries were destroyed and an estimated 40,000 to 100,000 monks were killed.
There is one government-run home and school for homeless children in Ulaan Baataar - The Trust Center. But both services and staff are questionable according to some activists and government social workers. Many of the children I spoke with lived at Trust at one time or another but decided the streets were better. The reasons most commonly cited ~ beatings and sexual abuse by both teachers and other students." (Weber, 1997)
Hardly surprisingly, one of the ways girls ~ many as young as eight years old ~ survive is by selling their bodies to whomever they can find on the street, their humanity reduced to nothing but dry vaginas and undeveloped breast tissue. As a result of no education and few social programmes to aid them, the notions of safe sex and birth control are completely devoid in their minds, as exhibited by thirteen~year~old Sarantunga's confusion when speaking with Weber: "I don't understand how a baby could get inside of me because babies are so big and I'm so small," she said looking puzzled. "Last month I got my period for the first time and I didn't know what it was and I got really scared and started crying. Now I know I can get pregnant but I still don't see how it's possible."
Speaking to an Australian aid worker volunteering in the bustling capitol city to care for these children, Ian Wright asked what could be done to help. "Literacy," she succinctly proclaimed. "If these young children, especially girls, have a chance to be educated, they'll have more options and can better find work that won't force them to rely on prostitution, begging, and stealing. If they don't get these options, they'll continue to catch STD's from men up above through peddling themselves and rape. They'll then bring diseases back down with them to the holes, infecting more kids down below, likely become pregnant at some point, and create more sick street children. We see it everyday, and it's desperate."
Mike Litke, for abcnews.com, also covers the tragedy of Ulaan Bataar's manhole children in a chokingly moving article entitled "Woman Fights for Mongolia's Street Children," in which he profiles an extraordinary volunteer in this excerpt:
More recently, Mongolia has opened its doors to dozens of non-governmental agencies who have provided food, clothing and care to the homeless. And, according to official government figures, the number of children on the streets has declined from about 4,000 to an estimated 2,000. But even if it's 200, or two dozen, it would still by a 'shocking outrage' to one tough, outspoken, and very unlikely guardian angel for the lost and abandoned children of Mongolia.
Her name is Christina Noble, a survivor of the gritty slums of Dublin, Ireland, who has devoted her life to the care of abandoned and abused children. For years, her Christina Noble Children's Foundation worked miracles in Vietnam -- building orphanages, schools, hospitals and saving hundreds of thousands of children from destitute lives on the streets.
Today, Noble has become a fixture in Mongolia, where she tirelessly lobbies the Mongolian government to protect the rights of children. Alternately scolding and flattering officials, she is determined to show by example that protecting children is the hallmark of a civilized society. And ever so slowly, she is making progress.
On this night, she has brought her mobile medical clinic into the center of Ulan Bator to lure kids out of their manholes for some basic health care ~~ treatment for broken bones, sewer burns, chronic skin diseases or worse. Bundled in a baby blue ski suit and a flamboyant white boa, her shock of blond hair glowing under the street lamps, Noble hunches over a narrow manhole on one of Ulan Bator's busiest thoroughfares.
It is freezing and she is weak from her own recent cancer treatment, but she stands like a rock, grabbing and hugging each child scrambling up from the sewer tunnel. A dirty pair of hands and a grimy face emerges: A young boy, wary at first, breaks into a grin as he sees Noble. He scrambles out and into her oversized clutch. 'I love ya,' she shouts in her heavy Irish brogue. 'I love ya, darlin',' she says, planting a kiss on his forehead. Then, another child emerges. And another. And another. At least 20 from this one manhole. Noble is there to hug and kiss every one as she escorts them into her medical van for a few minutes of warmth, a Band-Aid or two, the gentle touch of a doctor cleaning an infected wound.
'Look at 'em, just look at 'em,' she says. 'Ach! Look at the sores. Look at the skin diseases. They'll die from infection. They'll get gangrene and have to have legs amputated.' As she describes their plight, Noble becomes more emotional, more emphatic. 'Many of these kids also have syphilis, gonorrhea, chlamydia,' she says. 'Some have all three. A lot of these children won't survive the winter. And yet, they would rather die on the street and in the manholes than to face the horrific beatings and abuse that they have run away from.'
To offer an alternative to children, the Christina Noble Foundation has built a refuge for children here, called 'Blue Sky Village.' It is a cluster of traditional Mongolian nomad tents, called 'gers,' spread across several acres. At any one time, about 50 children call Blue Sky Village home. And a few others come from poor communities nearby to spend the day. At the refuge, older children from the streets and younger ones who might have ended up in the manholes are given a normal life. They are well-clothed and well-fed. They are given education, recreation and respect.
Noble says she knows the government of Mongolia is struggling economically, but more needs to be done. And she's increasingly confident that the authorities will learn from her example.
Mongolia's children, she says, deserve nothing less.
'For God's sake,' she pleads, 'Give the children back their childhood. Give them back their life. Let them laugh. Let them sing. Let them cry. We have a tsunami, we have an earthquake, and the world goes rushin' in,' she adds.
'Well, this is a disaster, too.'"
"Beside the land of Chaldea is the land of Amazonia, that is the land of Feminye. And in that realm is all woman and no man; not as some may say, that men may not live there, but for because that the women will not suffer no men amongst them to be their sovereigns."
Sir John Mandeville (published circa 1357~1371)
Consider the following: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Behind every great man, there is a great woman. History was written by men. Behind every legend, there is fact.
If the current situation in Mongolia poses an acute source of pain and aggravation to the people and governmental officials, there is certainly a distinct source of pride they can glean from their shared heritage. If asked to cite great historical figures from that country, the most common default response might easily be Genghis and Kublai Khan, riding their hordes of fearsome warriors and richly-ornamented horses across the Gobi desert to conquer the west. (My father told me long ago about the resourcefulness of the Mongol fighters: underneath their armour, they would wear the finest-woven garments of silk as a baselayer for warmth and protection against the elements. And, if an arrow were to pierce through said armour and embed itself, the heads were easily and cleanly extractable, causing less shredding and damage to the flesh. "They were very, very clever," he would say.)
Perhaps even more astounding than the military triumphs and empire~building acumen of the distant Mongol armies was a more subtle, delicate connection linking the east to the west, the past to the present. TV yet again plays a role in my excitement, and the striking event also took place the same year as The Lonely Planet: Mongolia episode. As part of a series entitled, Secrets of the Dead, PBS aired a documentary called "Amazon Warrior Women." In it, the outstanding recent work of Dr. Jeannine Davis-Kimball ~ a former nurse and cattle~rancher who pursued her graduate and post~graduate studies in archaeology after her kids had grown up ~ is profiled. From the PBS website:
As a graduate student studying Iranian art, Jeannine Davis-Kimball knew basically nothing about ancient nomadic peoples, and she never imagined her career would eventually be focused on the enigmatic warrior women who once wandered the Eurasian steppes some 2,000 years ago and provided a historical basis for the myth of the Amazon. Then she happened across carved stone reliefs in one of the palaces of the Archaemedian dynasty, which ruled Persia from 559 to 330 B.C. The reliefs depicted scenes of nomads paying tribute to the kings. In contrast to others honoring the rulers, these people were distinctively dressed, wearing soft boots and tall hats, and they were leading horses. Davis-Kimball was intrigued by the figures, and she thought she knew where she might look for them. 'I suspected that I might be able to find some traces of them if I were to go out to the Eurasian steppes,' to the north of the Persian empire, 'because that is where you would find nomadism,' recalls Davis-Kimball, now the director of the American Eurasian Research Institute and its subsidiary, the Center for the Study of Eurasian Nomadism, at the University of California at Berkeley. 'Nomadism is based on animal husbandry, primarily raising sheep and horses, and you don't find that in cities because the animals have to have pasture land, wide open spaces.'
At the time, more than twenty years ago, American libraries and museums didn't have much, if any, information on nomadic cultures. At museums in Kazakhstan, however, Davis-Kimball, who had been a nurse and cattle rancher before entering graduate school later in life, gained new insight into nomadism in general and specifically into the people who'd once occupied the southern Russian steppes. She soon began excavations of the kurgans, or burial mounds, of ancient Eurasian nomads, and became the first American woman to collaborate in archaeological investigations in Kazakhstan.
Map Of Davis~Kimball Excavation Sites
© The Center for the Study of Eurasian Nomads
'Everything that I excavated was very interesting because it all added to our knowledge, but my first big find was at the 1994 excavation at Porkovka,' located in Russia near its border with Kazakhstan, 'when we discovered artifacts indicating there were women there who were very important within the culture.' Finding warrior women who played a prominent role in the nomadic society came as a total surprise to Davis-Kimball, and it led her to focus her career on the investigation of the warrior women of the Russian steppes and other cultures. 'I had no idea that these women existed. In history and in art -- for instance, in the stone reliefs of the Persian Archaemedians -- there is no indication that women have any particular status. In fact, women are sort of invisible, because history is always written by men.' But Davis-Kimball has found that in reality, warrior women were quite common among ancient Eurasian societies and also among other nomads. 'Our new evidence shows that women have always had a pretty prominent place in nomadic societies,' she says.
History's first mention of a race of warrior women is found in Homer's Iliad, an account of the Trojan War, probably written in the 8th or 7th century B.C.. Homer's Amazons, a race of fierce women who mated with vanquished male foes and kept only the female children they bore, were believed to occupy the area around the Black Sea. Amazon women also crop up in Greek myths.
The works of the Greek historian Herodotus, written around the 5th century B.C., describe a group of female warriors who lost to the Greeks at the battle of Thermodon. Herodotus' Amazons were taken prisoner and put on ships, but overwhelmed and killed the Greek crew. Unable to sail themselves, the women drifted to the shores of the Black Sea, to the territory of the Scythians, a nomadic culture of Iranian descent. The women, Herodotus says, intermarried with the Scythian men, and convinced their new husbands to move northeast across the flat grassy plains, high mountains, and searing deserts of the Russian steppes, where the group eventually evolved into the Sauromatian culture.
Starting around the 4th century B.C., Sauromatian culture evolves into the Sarmatian culture, also a nomadic people that make their livelihood raising animals and versed in the art of war. The culture, which had been expanding its territory, soon shifts its focus. 'They become raiders and traders, with forays to the west to interface with the Romans, and they relocate to cities and to areas along large trade routes,' Davis-Kimball says. 'Their wealth increases. We see that in their burial items. We see strong, powerful women, but their role changes. We find burials of women that still retain cultic artifacts, indicating that they were a priestess of some sort, but there is much more gold and more secular ornamentation ~ more golden cups, more golden jewelry, elaborate things ~ and less weaponry. This type of evolution is a normal manifestation of culture.'
The first direct evidence for warrior women of high status on the steppes of southern Russia comes from excavations of burial sites of the Sauromatian culture dating from the 6th to the 4th century B.C. Judging from their grave goods, Sauromatians were nomadic, experts in animal husbandry, and skilled in warfare.
From the 2nd century B.C. to the 2nd to 3rd century A.D., the Sarmatians migrate to the west and north of the Black Sea, and eventually invade Dacia (now Romania). In the 3rd century A.D. the Sarmatians are invaded by the Goths, and in 370 A.D. they are overtaken by Huns and either killed or assimilated. Jeannine Davis-Kimball believes that remnants of the integrated Sarmatian population can still be found in the descendants of that conquering horde of Mongols. The Mongols relocated from southern Russia to western China and western Mongolia 150 to 200 years ago, where they reside today. (www.pbs.com)
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What irreversibly shifts Davis~Kimball's discoveries from the realm of sheer excitement to magnificent unbelievability are threefold: Firstly, she successfully matched fabric remnants found in an excavated Amazon warrior's burial chambers to the weave, base material, and colour of fabric still in use in the nomadic groups she traced into Mongolia. Secondly, there were distinct characteristics of nomadic dress depicted the paintings of Amazons on some ancient Greek vases, exhibiting a fairly persuasive correlation to the ceremonial garb still worn by some Mongolian tribes even today.
(For greater detail on the excavated site, click on this fun little activity popup from pbs.com.)
Thirdly, one of the nomadic groups followed by Davis~Kimball has a young member, Meiramgul, with striking blonde hair and lighter eyes ~ different from the rest of her clan. Since the Amazons were reputed to have travelled far distances, intermarried with men outside of their ethnic group, and were described to be of lighter complexions, Davis~Kimball decided to conduct a mitochondrial DNA test to see if there was any possible genetic link between this fair~featured nine~year~old expert horserider and the warrior priestess whom she had discovered in Kazakhstan. (Along with practical weaponry, the warrior priestess also had buried with her ornate gold earrings of possible Greek origin, and her skeleton featured bowed legs ~ potentially from a lifetime of riding and highly indicative of a nomadic, survivalist lifestyle.)
Stunningly, it was a perfect match.
Thus, without even the initial intention of necessarily genetically connecting the excavated warrior~priestess to a modern~day descendent, Davis~Kimball successfully made the discovery of a lifetime; she unearthed an ancient warrior ~ a high~statured figure as evidenced by her finery and funerary organization ~ in Kazakhstan buried with artifacts resembling those found depicted on vases found in Greece, with the same DNA as a little girl now growing up in the steppes of Mongolia, thus cementing long-held theories about migration paths of the Amazons we now know to have actually existed.
Were I Davis~Kimball after doing such incomparable work, I think I could die happy knowing I was blessed in making an invaluable contribution to science, history, and linking legend to fact: that I helped to confirm the existence of a powerful matriarchal society that otherwise could've been dismissed as nothing short of fanciful legend.
"The immense hazard and the immense blindness of the world are only an illusion."
~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (in a letter to a friend, July, 1923)
My fascination and niggling sense of purpose with Mongolia hit the tipping point just after my birthday, when BJJ Mastah gave me his copy of Annie Dillard's For the Time Being. Featured on the cover in sepia tone is a photograph of the Gobi Desert. And as soon as you reach page eight of the book, after several clear~sighted (yet still heartbreaking) medical accounts of children coldly documented with severe physical deformities and mental deficiencies, Dillard suddenly plunges us into the depths of stark Mongolia, riding with eyes squinted atop the lean shoulders of French philosopher/ paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin in June, 1923.
"August, 1923: Once more they pitched their tents in the desert, in a circle of cliffs. Here they camped for a month, in the southeast corner of the Ordos, where the cliffs were gray, yellow, and green. Here the great eroded loess hills met the sands a river laid ~ the river called Shara~Osso~Gol. And here they found the world's first evidence of pre~Neanderthal man in China. (People had lived in China long before Neanderthals lived in Europe.) The man of the yellow earths, Teilhard named him, for loess is a fine yellow dust. They found his traces in the Shara~Osso~Gol's twisted canyon.
First they struck Neanderthal tools ten meters down: scrapers, gravers, quartzite blades. Then they dug through 164 feet of sand before they revealed an ancient hearth where Paleolithic people cooked. Their blackened hearth near the river made a thin layer among cross~bedded dune sands and blue clays. No hominid bones were there, but some tools lay about, and the hearth was indisputable ~ the first human traces north of the Himalayas."
Then:
"Now * Is it not late? A late time to be living? Are not our generations the crucial ones? For we have changed the world. Are not our heightened times the important ones? For we have nuclear bombs. Are we not especially significant because our century is? ~~ our century and its unique Holocaust, its refugee populations, its serial totalitarian exterminations; our century and its antibiotics, silicon chips, men on the moon, and spliced genes? No, we are not and it is not. These times of ours are ordinary times, a slice of life like any other. Who can bear to hear this, or who will consider it? Though perhaps we are the last generation ~ now there's a comfort. Take the bomb threat away and what are we? Ordinary beads on a never~ending string. Our time is a routine twist of an improbable yarn.
We have no chance of being here when the sun burns out. There must be something heroic about our time, something that lifts it above all those other times. Plague? Funny weather? Dire things are happening. In fact, we are witnessing a mass extinction of animals: According to Oxford's Robert M. May, most of the birds and mammals as we know it will be gone in four hundred years. But there have been five other such mass extinctions, scores of millions of years apart. People have made great strides toward obliterating other people, too, but that has been the human effort all along, and our cohort has only broadened the means, as have people in every century. Why are we watching the news, reading the news, keeping up with the news? Only to enforce our fancy ~ probably a necessary lie ~ that these are crucial times, and we are in on them. Newly revealed, and we are in the know: crazy people, bunches of them. New diseases, shifts in power, floods! Can the news from dynastic Egypt have been any different?" (Dillard, 1999)
The coincidences! The coincidences. The coincidences? Is there such a thing? What is going on with Mongolia? What can the message be?
What I am convinced of is this, at the very least: We are the same all along everywhere, at any point in time. North Americans, Mongolians, "man of the yellow earths," Amazons, ancient Greeks, Danes, Somalians. All we essentially want and need are intrinsically no different across the span of time, space, or distance: food, shelter, companionship, survival. Circumstances willing, we settle and build civilizations that rise and fall. Circumstances unwilling, we move like nomads, remain locked within our subcultures, and are forgotten by time as we are too busy living to erode our souls with unnecessary dramas. But we are all intrinsically the same. The point to which we can look into the past may be longer than others because of educational resources and technology, but we are all physically transient, absolutely finite. We are blips in the history of the earth, the earth a flash in the memory of the galaxies, the galaxies a droplet in the existence of Heaven. And yet... and yet...
There are children who are still being starved, raped, and beaten. There are children who died in the gas chambers of Auschwitz. There are children who being hacked to death in the Sudan right now. There are children who will die a thousand years from now when genetically modified foods completely fail us. And yet we are not completely hopeless... or helpless.
If a former street child from the bottom of Ireland's poverty-stricken slums can facilitate so much change in the lives of thousands of children in a foreign land ~ all while fighting cancers in her own body ~ what is causing us to feel so futile? Despite the fleeting, delicate nature of life and time, are we so drugged with comfortable complacency we are unable to enact some form of action in even the most microscopic of ways to elicit waves of positive repercussion in the life of even one? Yes, we are indeed finite, but our souls are infinite, and they only gain value when we stretch their infinite boundaries to help other finites in their quests for infinity.
Why Mongolia's tragedy should strike me so profoundly above other accounts of child poverty is a mystery, but can simply be put down to a matter of "calling." And the more I spend time pondering the realities and doing the research, the more deafeningly loud that Voice becomes. If, indeed, there is a call to arms to go make myself useful, then there are organizations to probe, people to contact, training to do, plans to make. To attest I am itching with a combination of trepidation and impatience to "stick my oar" into Mongolia is a bit of an understatement, yet I can only hazard a guess that the unwitting gift of Dillard's book was a divine reminder ~ or perhaps a re-awakening kick~in~the~butt ~ to start gathering up my tools and assess what I need to do to transform this potential call into a reality. What was first a lingering cramp in the periphery of my psyche is slowly but surely becoming an internal, mobilizing force. And it is this persistence of reminder and reference that convinces me of the strength of that vision and the drive to serve.
As I went from being first emotionally arrested by the plights of modern Mongolian children (the Lonely Planet) to digging into the captivating historical and archaeological connections between our immortal past and finite future (Amazon Warrior Women), a lovely way to inspire hope in the infant stages of this part of this life's journey can be found here in a revelation by Teilhard from Dillard's book:
"Throughout my whole life, during every minute of it, the world has been gradually lighting up and blazing before my eyes until it has come to surround me, entirely lit up from within."
Top photo credit: Mongolia, by Jerry Galea, comes from The Lonely Planet's website.
Bottom photo credit: Gobi Desert, Mongolia, from PnP!'s Flickr photostream.
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