A little bit of randomness

I just got back from eating with Baika at California Restaurant. He and I spent a lot of time together when I was here last year; he lived in Denver, parts of California, and Iowa for about 10 years before returning to Mongolia last year. He works for Eagle TV, a major independent news source for the country.... and oh, how he is always up to interesting things, doing good work:

On Friday, he's meeting a reporter from the Wall Street Journal who's coming to do an article on human trafficking among herders in the countryside. Apparently Mongolia has one of the highest numbers in the world of human trafficking victims (per capita? I'm not sure)... as I understand it, many nomadic herders have loans with Mongolian banks to get through hard winters, etc. With the world prices for wool, furs, and other products on the decline, many herders have been going bankrupt -and for collateral, the banks are seizing their livestock, herders' only means of livelihood.

Right now it's unclear to me if the families feel forced to 'sell' their daughters, or if the young girls are being kidnapped by outsiders... either way, in these fairly dire circumstances, according to Baika, these herders' young daughters are being smuggled to Southeast Asian countries. When the girls arrive, they're forced into getting plastic surgery, and then find themselves trapped into 'repaying' the expenses of the procedures ...through prostitution.

So Baika's taking this WSJ reporter and crew to interview the herdsmen and their families, to talk about the difficulties they are facing due to the global market's collapse and the series of especially cold winters in the past several years that have devastated their livestock. He half-jokingly suggested that I come along, and I, of course, jumped at the opportunity. So now I'm considering going along with them as they interview for the story. Not bad for a first weekend outing, right?

The crazy thing about Mongolia, and one of the reasons why I love it, is that, while it's a very rough place, as I've told many of you before, it's also a place of so much possibility. In my mind's eye, I see the open steppe, not just as a physical place, but as a metaphor of all that is this country. What do you want to build? What will help improve the lives of the people in your community? Want to start an organization that gives scholarships to gifted young artists in rural areas?... decide to expose corrupt politicians? Become passionate about it, and if you're in Mongolia you can easily become the founder of a new cause... While it can't stay this way forever, the 'ground' is open to anything- and so much.

The U.S., by contrast, is simply saturated with causes. The openness of the Mongolian steppe, contrasted to the density of Manhattan. Sure, with enough thought and creativity, new causes spring up every day, but what's old news in the U.S. is truly fresh and original here.