Word: bayarsakhan
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Dates: during 2003-2003
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...almost noon, and Bayarsakhan looks as if he has just woken up. His jaw hangs slack, and his face is marred by fresh gouges?the result, he says, of tripping onto barbed wire the previous night. It's -25?C, yet Bayarsakhan is wearing only a turtleneck sweater and wool pants, oblivious to the cold. He has nowhere to go, no job to occupy the bitter day ahead. So he stands here idly, amid a dense cluster of shacks, while haggard cows pick through garbage piles. After all his wanderings, the 30-year-old nomad has ended up here...
...Even after receiving more than $2 billion in overseas aid in just over a decade, Mongolia is struggling mightily. Four years of horrendous weather has devastated the former Soviet satellite and has driven thousands of herders like Bayarsakhan off the steppe and into the capital. By some estimates, Ulaanbaatar's population has doubled to 1 million in the past decade, overwhelming the city's limited capacities and further hampering the country's tortuous transition from a collectivized economy to a free market...
...former herders like Bayarsakhan, the transition to city living has been wrenching. He grew up in Gobi-Altai province to the south, where his family had raised livestock for generations. Four summers ago, however, a severe drought was followed by an early frost, then a brutal winter with high winds. Mongolians have a name for this: the dzud. The historical norm has been roughly one dzud every half-decade, making for a tough season before more-manageable weather returns. But it's now happening for a fourth consecutive year. The dzud means less grass grows and animals can't fatten...