Go Fly a Kite.....

Community service.   I have thought a lot about it this weekend: what  exactly is community when you live in the country?  The community at our ger is, as you would imagine, a collection of neighbourhood families, visitors and tourists.  It is also, however, a whole collection of animals - both wild and domestic and, in fact, it is the animals by and large which provide those  moments that take your breath away...the animals and the geography itself. As is usual anywhere, in order for the status quo to be maintained, the animals and the geography, from time to time need a little service from the people.

The Tuul river by our ger is an absolutely breathtaking corner of the world.  Unfortunately, a lot of people think so.  

Throughout the summer people come to the banks of the beautiful Tuul river close to our ger to camp.  Unfortunately, Mongolia is much like it was in Canada 40 years ago or so, and the local population doesn't really have a concept of taking your garbage home with you. It all ends up just piled up beside where they were camping. Unfortunately, this is true everywhere across the country, not just by the river. Often if you are out in the "wilderness" of the steppe you will come across a bottle or two or a whole pile of garbage where people have obviously camped. Unsightly isn't the word...it is quite a bit worse than that.   Additionally, at our ger, literally hundreds of animals head to the river every day to drink - large mounds of glittering wrappers, plastic bottles and broken glass are not the ideal environment for any animal (well, and people too!) and so we decided that one of the things we could do to help out the community this weekend was  help clean up.

 

The steppe is a big place to clean up... this is just one of many piles we assembled...

While we were cleaning, a group of  Mongolian tourists were making khorhog - heating river stones in a fire and cooking mutton  with the stones in that milk can  you see in the background....and watching us rake, pile and pick up any and all trash. They didn't appear all that impressed that we were there "intruding" on their day by cleaning up our river frontage....in fact, they seemed bent on creating their own rather impressive pile of garbage!

 The local tourist camp was pressed into service with their flat deck...yes this garbage was all collected from our little beach.  It is a real problem in  the Mongolian countryside.  Trash is strewn about everywhere and the local community doesn't seem to have any infrastructure in place to take care of it. It is something that really has to be addressed somehow. 

 The next morning I was up at dawn and keen to head down to the river to get some lovely shots of the now clean riverbank....

 Dawn on the steppe is pretty special...

 The bonus for the morning, however, was that there were about 6 kites at the river bank and I was able to get some truly lovely shots of them "frolicking".

 This one is my favourite!  I don't think they were really "frolicking" though...

 ...more like battling for territory and chasing each other  out of the trees....The irony, however, is that the kites were there picking up the scraps of dead sheep  that had been discarded, along with a huge pile of bottles and wrappers, by the people who the previous day had been watching us clean up. Lovely for me to be able to get these great photos, but it was so discouraging to see that big pile of garbage on the river bank where just yesterday the guys had worked so hard to clean...especially since I knew that the people who had left the mess had watched us clean.  


Then something miraculous happened.  The people from the previous day came back.  They were setting up another khorhog - which I thought was pretty keen of them seeing as, at this point, it was only 7 a.m.  As I was walking away, I happened to glance back and saw a truly heart-warming sight.....

Yup - that's right.  They were picking up their garbage from the previous day and putting it into garbage bags.  Beautiful!  And so, maybe the biggest community service for the day was not to the local people or the local animals as we had intended...maybe the greatest service was providing an example and impetus to this family from the city.  Maybe they will incorporate keeping the countryside clean into their lifestyle.  I sure hope so.