Beyond the Vapour Trail Read online

  Bunya is a little boy in Grade Two … Kyi Minn took one look – he’s a doctor – and said, ‘this child has asthma’. This nine-year-old is smaller than a seven-year-old like Ciarán. He’s pigeon-chested from asthma, stunted, malnourished and struggles at school because he’s hungry and can’t think (he’ll probably never develop his brain to full potential now) … His father was killed in a tractor accident, so his mother, from the minority Mon tribe, moved here, but struggles. We’ll put him in the sponsorship program, but someone will probably get his picture folder and say, ‘He doesn’t look needy to me!’ Another unsponsored boy, twelve-year-old Narit, a quiet boy with deep eyes, was the one who singled Bunya out, so we told him he was a good friend to have!

  The food here is a little different, but the spices conjure a thousand colours in your mouth! Spicy here is right on the edge of my capability - so like eating bullet chillies by the mouthful. I’ve survived eating jellyfish and crunchy bits of god-knows-what, but I was stumped for the first time at lunch. I let Urywan choose for me, and came unstuck at her choice of congealed duck’s blood soup! I ate some … it was a restaurant, otherwise if it was the community I would have eaten it all to be polite(!)

  Ok, that’s my monotribe for now …

  Brett

  From: Brett Pierce

  Sent: 17/07/02

  To: Kathleen Pierce

  Subject: Re: Ratchaburi, somewhere near a quiet place

  … Last few days spent collecting people’s views on how the project has assisted, the needs, etc.

  But the people are fascinating. Met an old lady at the weaving loom. Ten days’ work for immaculately decorated cloth for dresses or whatever - $12. One looked like black with gleaming gold, but when you looked closely it wasn’t gold thread, but different colours of yellow. $20. Another lady was making tea leaves from a local bush - heating them and folding them by hand. All very proud of their work. Took a photo of an old man with his grandson: ‘I have many grandchildren, but this is my favourite,’ he says, running his hands through his hair. ‘His mother died when he was just one month old.’ His father remarried, but the boy stays with them every weekend. There’s a fragility about the boy. Another dad who’s obviously a labourer and with a smile on his sun-beaten face like he gets the joke that no-one else can see, and a fag on his mouth, balancing a tiny boy, eggs and other stuff on his motorbike. I like shots of paternity. I’ve shot about two rolls, but not sure anything’s got a wow factor. Did photograph three men ploughing with iron buffaloes - the replacement for the buffalo. (You’d think I’m here to take photos).

  Hey, a few lines is really nice. It’s like being thirsty and getting a drink of you.

  Brett

  From: Brett Pierce

  Sent: 18/07/02

  To: Kathleen Pierce

  Subject: Floating thru Ratchaburi market

  Hi u.

  That’s a beautiful thing to say, that I am an important part of your being. That kind of glows inside me.

  They took me to the floating market this morning. It was so different, the quiet water, almost no tourists, the grace of the canoes and the colour of what they carried. The faces. When we left to go there at 6 a.m., there was a mist in the air. You know how sometimes they make a film clip black and white, and then colour a single object, say, red? Well, early this morning the saffron-robed monks were walking through the mist with their begging bowls -like something unworldly -like colour against colourlessness.

  Interesting that on the way home I saw a monk talking on his cell phone - technology and tradition meet and kiss.

  You’re so beautiful. Thanks for being you. Must go -I have a training session - back to Bangkok tonight.

  Lotsa love

  Brett

  From: Brett Pierce

  Sent: 02/07/02

  To: Kathleen Pierce

  Subject: Bangkok

  Hello u.

  Well, I’m packing to go home. This is just an email for free.

  Last month a Burmese guy jumped on a school bus in the project area where I was and shot a lot of kids. Some of the killed and injured were in our program … Some of the survivors will be maimed for life. I read in the paper today they worked out who he is. I wonder if he has?

  From my hotel I can look down on the trees, and there are these tiny squirrels in the tree tops, on branches so thin they bounce, oblivious to anything above them. I also saw them for sale in the market. Think of American squirrels, only picture the fur as dark -brown & grey & very soft. Now go much smaller, like curled asleep in my hand, tail wrapped over its face and over its back. Or younger ones that just fit inside your palm. Strange how people see something beautiful then have to possess it - catch them and cage them so we can coo over them and project anthropomorphic characteristics.

  Sometimes you have to see something beautiful and just let it be. I think that’s you for me. I think you’re beautiful, did you know that? And it’s hard to think of you having a life without me - like wondering what you’re doing on a Friday night, wishing we could share a bottle of good red. But it’s nice that I can enjoy you from a distance.

  Raving again, aren’t I.

  CHAPTER 16

  Mongolia

  Mongolia. For much of my life it just sat there on the map, a shape nested between China and the USSR. Teasing. Snatches of history, a reputation of rampaging hordes, but its present hidden in the Soviet bloc, with little to nothing ever said about it. Then in 2004 I found myself at the airport, about to enter a country that wouldn’t quite fit any of the rest of Asia as I understood it.

  When I started to interact with people in the city of Ulaanbaatar, I became confused. I mean, it doesn’t get more Asian than Mongolia, surely? The faces seemed so distinctly east Asian to me. Yet the Soviet-era architecture, the big city squares with propaganda-evoking statues, those CCCP-looking trolley cars – even the people themselves, their conversations, their sensibilities, seemed to be the most European of all I had experienced of eastern Asia. I might have been in Georgia and heard the same stories and attitudes.

  Except I wasn’t in Georgia. I was more than six thousand kilometres away – another world.

  My local colleague, a young woman in her late twenties, talked about the experience for ordinary people when the Soviet system collapsed. It’s difficult to comprehend the scale of change. It was much more than a shift of politics. An entire complex mega-economy just disappeared when the Soviet Union disbanded. Many industries could no longer function because they had depended on the other Soviet republics.

  It had also been a way of navigating the world. Young people had their whole future mapped out and suddenly found their map was worthless. They felt lost. No state, no assured future, and many had new qualifications for industries or professions that no longer existed. For young people it was bewildering enough. But for many older people, the world they understood, perhaps the only job they knew, disappeared. During communism in Mongolia, most families lived just above the poverty line. After the collapse, most were stranded without relevant skills or regular incomes. The dislocation hit my colleague’s father hard. His job was gone. His world was gone. He committed suicide. She had to pick up the pieces and build a new life without her father. Now she was working with us, doing a type of work she had never dreamed existed.

  We were considering a new project in Selenge, so we began the long drive to investigate it. The town lies almost directly north from Ulaanbaatar, at the very top of Mongolia. I captured my impressions of driving through the countryside in an email home.

  From: Brett Pierce

  Sent: 27/07/04

  To: Kathleen Pierce

  Subject: Mongolia

  … From a distance everything appears covered in a soft green carpet, perhaps a little threadbare up on the rolling hills, hills that try to form peaks, but can’t quite manage it.

  But then up close the green is textured, in so many shades it forms its own vocabulary, with a completely different dialect of greens
when under the cloud shadows. It shimmers with colour, reflecting blue sky or hints of the brown earth colours beneath; or paint-spattered with wildflowers, violets, yellows, blues or whites. They tell me in a few weeks it will be choking in yellow. Millions of butterflies, moths and grasshoppers dance amongst it, with little ground squirrels darting out of sight. No trees. There are no trees.

  Then it hits you: there are no fences either. As far as the eye chooses to wander, the land is open. It belongs to everyone and to no-one. The road and the telephone lines can’t seem to agree on the best way to town, so they part ways frequently, giving an uninterrupted view. It makes you want to take a horse, and just keep riding until you are sated with the sense of space. And there are horses – smallish. Sometimes ridden by those herding the cattle, or herds of goat and sheep that glow against the landscape, backlit by the sun.

  Scattered around are the gers, the homes that look like white round tents. Grey smoke hovers in the air around the tiny chimneys, like it isn’t sure where else to go.

  The towns, when you finally pass through one here and there, are so Soviet, with apartment buildings so tawdry they are fascinating. Pipes from the power station bring the heating. The sun stays up forever – short nights now a hint of the dark winters later, when it hits minus 40 …

  That evening in Selenge it just didn’t feel like nine-thirty. The light pouring in my hotel window was so bright that I decided to take a walk. I wandered through open spaces between the concrete apartment blocks all laid out in their orderly rows, imposing patterns on the complex windswept landscape. Imagine a concrete apartment building in an L-shape. Someone sat in a Soviet office and arranged lots of Ls in a suitable pattern on their plan and called it a community. Paperwork shuffled around in a bureaucratic flow until the L-shapes were built. Way out here. Some random sections of the buildings were painted blue – so perhaps the requisition for paint ran out. One lucky window on each floor got a narrow balcony of sorts, with what looked like packing-crate timber to stop people falling off the edge.

  A group of little boys with swords of grass were also outside tonight, playing out some game in their imagination as I wandered past. I climbed some girders and it attracted their attention, and they were now joined by two girls. The stranger became the most interesting thing in the ordinariness of their neighbourhood. They were shy but clearly wanted to see who I was and how I would respond. It was all there in their smiles and their bright, oh-so-beautiful Mongolian eyes. I was bored, I love kids, but I had to hesitate in a way most women wouldn’t have to think twice about. It’s a dark thing now, being a man, being viewed as a threat to children. I had nothing to do, they wanted to engage, yet I had to think like the parent I am – would I be comfortable? Since I was in full view of hundreds of eyes from the apartment blocks around, I decided that being out in the open was OK.

  So we talked. Except we had no words. Children everywhere are the best teachers; you never feel embarrassed at your lack of language. I used my digital camera to connect – taking some photos, showing them, giving them my camera and allowing them to take shots. I learnt where they lived, they discovered I came from Australia and they knew what kangaroos were.

  … I go for a walk, but soon children crowd around my camera and they laugh as we try to converse. We work out how old they all are, where they live. We play basketball. They want me to come back tomorrow. All this without words. They play through the long, long summer days where the sun stays until 11 p.m., as payment for the lost and dark frozen days of winter.

  The following morning, two men from the education department escorted us to various government offices. Each visit involved the bringing of tea, the exchange of business cards, and the inevitable interruptions from phone calls that left me sitting back examining the dingy offices. It’s odd the way phones take priority. Wherever you are, in a plush department store in Melbourne or the far north of Mongolia, a random phone call takes precedence over the person who went to the trouble of coming in to speak face to face. From our visits we learnt about the challenges facing children and their communities, health issues and government priorities.

  We had lunch with the education department officials, who accompanied us to all the meetings and barely spoke a word all day. Cold borscht in an old wooden building, a gloomy dining area with old plastic flowers on each table. The two men sat at their own table, withdrawn and quiet. Finally it was time for our meeting with them, but they didn’t take us to another dingy office. Without any explanation, they took us out of town.

  We drove into the mountains, or perhaps they were more like softly folded hills, decorated with the occasional rocky outcrop and peppered with conifers. As we approached the summit we left the vehicles and hiked to the top. Suddenly we could see over the other side, where a gentle flowing river jigsawed the valley below to find its way through. The mountain range on the other side, they told me, was Russia. My first glimpse of my grandmother’s country. The valley below us was the border, no-man’s-land, the red line on my childhood atlas.

  We approached a large tree with blue ribbons tied around it. Beneath it stood a hand-laid pile of stones, with a ceremonial birch post set in the middle. The post was also wrapped around with blue cloths, and the top had flowing hair – I assume it was horsehair – and on the very top a metal helmet with a spike, adorned with red markings. We had come to an ovoo. A ceremonial place.

  The education department men opened up some bags and took out bottles of water and two serious-looking bottles of vodka, because vodka is serious here. Suddenly they were relaxed, animated, and ready to do business.

  The first glass of vodka was poured on the ground, a libation, followed by one straight down the hatch. I found myself experiencing the curious mix that was contemporary Mongolia. The Soviet sensibilities meant a meeting with the department and some decent vodka, syncretised with Mongolian shamanism, the ovoo worship that was officially banned during the Soviet time. As I drank the vodka, I became aware for the first time of the subtlety of the taste, and have enjoyed it ever since. More than that, I felt that I was on the inside for just a moment. Whatever business was to happen, all those stiff and formal conversations were put aside in a moment of camaraderie that felt, even to me, much deeper and more important. And the wind shook the pine needles above us in a sound that was heard by their ancestors.

  In the winter Mongolia is a different world. The men in particular lose fingers, toes and limbs through alcoholism. They wander completely drunk into the snow and are sometimes retrieved alive, but frostbitten. If they aren’t found within about two hours they are dead. It is seriously cold. Alcohol abuse since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990 has damaged the lives of countless families – a symptom of the hopelessness of collapsed industry and no options. It’s estimated that one in five men in Mongolia binge drink on a weekly basis. These statistics are disturbing enough, but our work showed me the slightly more confronting side: the human stories that are never captured in statistics.

  It means the collapse of families.

  Back again in the capital, Ulaanbaatar, I met some of these broken families. And sometimes children alone, no family able to be found. Life in Mongolia when your world falls apart can be harsher than the climate. Imagine a seven-year-old child you know. Now imagine them left alone on the streets of the world’s coldest capital city. Exactly what does a seven-year-old child do to survive more than twenty-four hours?

  From: Brett Pierce

  Sent: 29/07/04

  To: Kathleen Pierce

  Subject: Re: Mongolia

  Today I visited the street children’s centre and had my heart broken. In summer they find them on the streets. In the freeze, they find these children under the city, in the dark drain holes where the hot water pipes run. One little girl I met was two. They found her standing on the streets with a bag of clothes, and a note. Justin, my South African interpreter, had to stop talking because he cried when he tried to translate the note. He walked out, came back ins
ide and told us. It just said: ‘Please take care of me.’ I took photos of another little girl, maybe 5-6, who is crippled. They also just found her on the street. They don’t know who she is, so they call her Solongo, which means rainbow. And she smiles like one. Another little 3-year-old has marks of abuse all over her tiny body. When they first arrive some cry for what they’ve been through, some are angry, some are withdrawn. But they respond to love and constancy. Some of the first children to ever come to this ‘lighthouse program’ have just graduated from university.

  This Lighthouse Centre is a beautiful program. As I interacted with the children I wanted to give up my job and bring my wife here to love them. Everything else just seemed small and unimportant. I remember crisply the hunger in their eyes to be noticed, to be actualised, for an adult to look at them to say, in a connection, I see you. You matter.

  These children are found on the streets because families have completely collapsed under the strain of poverty, alcohol, violence and despair. Within a few years of the Soviet collapse there were so many street children that it became a problem for the government. World Vision began this program, finding children on the streets or climbing under the streets in winter to pull them out to shelter. Then came the process of trying to rebuild their lives. First you find out their name – if they are old enough to tell you. Their parents’ names, if they know. The search to find the family, usually now themselves on the streets somewhere.

  The reality of that little two-year-old hit me with a thud. How low a place must you have reached as a mother – or father, I don’t know – to take your two-year-old child and pin a note to her saying ‘Please take care of me’? How completely hopeless must life become before a parent thinks that this is now the best chance for their child? I imagined the parent telling the child to stay there, then hiding, just out of sight, waiting for someone to take her. And then everything that follows inside you for doing that.