Mongolia: Cracks in the Eternal Blue Sky (eBook)

Daily Life in Mongolia

Daily life in Mongolia is governed by winter, pollution, health and sanitation concerns, and availability of food. Let me tell you how we experienced that.

Winters are extremely cold in Mongolia and most importantly, they seem to last forever, well over six months every year at least. Mongols classify the coldest parts of winter, from 22 December to 12 March, as nine sets of nine days. When we say, ‘it is freezing’ or ‘it is really cold today,’ Mongols would reply and implicitly refer to one of the periods of deepest winter. In the second ninth, for example, vodka freezes. In the fourth ninth, the horns of a four-year old ox would freeze and fall off. In the seventh ninth, hilltops appear from beneath snow. Every set of nine days has its own characteristics. Every Mongolian will explain to you exactly which ninth is ruling the waves.

This is not too dissimilar to how weathermen describe the extraordinary range of different types of rain, which inevitably and sadly falls on every sad citizen of my home country of Belgium during winter, and indeed during autumn and spring. And usually in summer as well. In not too dissimilar an experience, when I wrote this in my fourth Mongolian winter, I would have said my unbiased preference was for the ninth ninth of winter, even though the conditions are brutal.

In 2016, Ulaanbaatar’s first snow fell on 5 October with the last snowfall on 15 April the following year. The first snow of 2018 greeted us on 22 September, while the last snow of 2019 arrived on 5 May. However, the winter of 2018 - 2019 was unusual in that there was no snow at all in many parts of Mongolia, including Ulaanbaatar.

In November 2016, just a month after Brigitte had joined me in Ulaanbaatar, we drove two hours east of Ulaanbaatar to the Terelj National Park for a weekend in a small lodge. The Land Rover’s gauge told us the temperature was - 36oC. In January 2018, we saw and felt temperatures of - 42oC. There were still horses and cows walking on the snowy fields and icy road. Perfect for pictures!

During the winter of 2020, when we were no longer living in Ulaanbaatar, temperatures dropped to - 40oC and local friends wrote to us that the wind chill factor meant it felt like - 50oC. There were many reports of policemen and even friends with frostbite. Social media were replete with pictures comparing the temperatures in UB with “tropical” Antarctica - winning the competition, they probably implied.

From the end of October until the end of March, temperatures typically hover around - 20oC at midday. Due to the sustained high atmospheric pressure, there is no precipitation during winter except for a small amount at the beginning and end of the season. In early 2020, the electronic circuit of my Land Rover broke down and we could not use the windscreen wipers anymore. It took the Land Rover importer six weeks to import the replacement part but not once during that period, did we actually need to use the wipers. Imagine such a scenario in one of our beloved European countries!

As the girl from Mongolian Properties told me when she was showing me apartments: ‘It is just cold’. It is as if the whole weather system comes to a deeply freezing standstill in October and does not start moving again until mid-April. Many wealthy Mongolians escape to South-East Asia – to Singapore or Bangkok – during the harsh winter months while some travel just for the New Year period.

The cold itself is harsh but manageable. We used the expression ‘there is no bad weather, only bad clothing’. However, it is not fun with babies and toddlers in Ulaanbaatar in winter, even when they are properly dressed. Mongolians would say: ‘It is much colder in a Singapore air-conditioned office at 21oC degrees than it is in the Mongolian countryside at - 35 oC’. ‘Mongolian bodies are not made for artificial cold,’ they sometimes added.

My predecessor had told me that if you drive a diesel car, such as our Land Rover, and leave the car to go wolf hunting (yes, that appears to be quite common here), the diesel fuel would freeze, and you would not be able to start the engine again. You would die. The solution, locals and visitors alike would typically say, is to always travel with two cars and have at least one of those two engines running all of the time.

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There is no other adequate word for the winter pollution in Ulaanbaatar than “disastrous”. The poor people who move from the countryside in search of a better life live in what are called the ger districts, which are on the outskirts of the city. A client told me: ‘They sell their animals and buy a second-hand Toyota Prius for 500 US dollars’.

In ger districts, there are also other types of dwellings than gers. In fact, only about one-third of people living in ger districts actually live in gers. Most of them live in wooden and brick shacks, which are poorly insulated. To try and stay warm, they burn more than 1.1 million tonnes of raw coal a year. Raw coal is unwashed and contains dirt and ash. If families run out of coal or do not have money to buy it, they put anything in their cast-iron stoves that will burn, such as paper, wood, plastic and rubber. They burn anything. As the New York Times wrote: ‘The tires on their cars, and their neighbours’ fences’.4

All this creates terrible pollution – among the worst in the world – and its peaks are the highest in the world. In the heart of winter, it easily reaches 60 times the level that the World Health Organisation (WHO) considers to be extremely dangerous to health. A friend quipped: ‘I think we are now in solid first position after Beijing overhauled its skies’.

In December 2015, the local international newspaper UB Post wrote: ‘The whole world buzzed about the ‘airpocalypse’ in Beijing and New Delhi in November when the levels of particulate matter reached 21 to 24 times the permissible threshold of the WHO. On 5 December however the recorded level of particulate matter in UB’s air was 25 times the WHO level. Our record-breaking pollution levels generated social media comments to “not breathe if possible”.’ Mongolia had won some kind of extraordinary competition and would continue to win for many years to come.

A visiting Dutch colleague insisted we had to be mistaken that levels of PM2.5 (fine particulate matter) per cubic metre occasionally reach more than 900 and are usually around 600-700 on cold winter days. He rejected that this was possible. The issue is that ger heating provides a convenient excuse for the government and municipality to deflect responsibility. In reality, Ulaanbaatar’s 500 very old buses also cause some of the pollution.

Air pollution in Ulaanbaatar © Brigitte Hannes

The city’s incredibly old and inefficient power plants contribute significantly. Their contribution is made worse due to the planning and construction of the power plants, by the Soviets and their Mongolian counterparts, in the west of the city. Unfortunately, in winter, as everyone in Mongolia knows, winds predominantly blow from the West and the Northwest, thus engulfing the whole city in pollution. In addition, there is the city’s old and inefficient fleet of cars. These tend to be ancient, imported and cheap Toyota Prius or the huge, omnipresent Toyota Land Cruisers.

In February 2018, the government decided to prohibit the use of raw coal from 2019 onwards. It was hoped that the population would move towards the use of briquettes of washed coal, which are far less polluting and about 40% more efficient. This decision had been postponed many times before for many years as the country’s politicians could not find a way to agree on who in government would get the contracts and the spoils.

It remains to be seen, of course, if the small industries that supply coal have the ability and financial means to invest in machinery and equipment to produce these clean briquettes. Heating in the ger districts is a very price-sensitive issue, not least as an increase of even a 100 Tugrug5 matters for the people living there. It depends on the purchasing power of the poorer households as to whether they can afford a cleaner heating solution.

The visible pollution in Ulaanbaatar did significantly improve in the winter of 2019-2020. There were still large and ugly bands of pollution on the outskirts of the city, but the government nevertheless proclaimed that pollution had reduced by 49%. Most citizens did not believe this story and, instead, flagged that less visible pollution (e.g., from sulphur) had increased. Whether the trend of improved visible pollution will continue remains to be seen. Sadly, I have my doubts.

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This smog correlates with spontaneous abortions, shorter pregnancies, and low birth weight. Young pregnant women would be acutely aware of these risks. They would often talk about the risk of losing their babies and install multiple air purifiers in their homes if they could afford it.

Mongolia’s health system is heavily hospital based. Many primary healthcare services are delivered through hospitals, with a heavy dependency on doctors and overall a shortage of other medical personnel. In rural areas, medical care is provided through family hospitals. Health insurance exists but it faces many institutional and governance challenges. The...