Meet The Boy Who'll Spend Christmas in a Sewer,
Closer Magazine, Great Britain,
21 December 2002

Eight-year-old boy Soronzon is just one of hundreds of children who live in Mongolia's freezing sewers: Lesley Gibson reports

As millions of children tear glittering paper from expensive present and tuck into turkey dinners over the festive period, eight-year-old Soronzon will be sitting in a dark, squalid hole five foot underground, trying in vain to keep warm.

There will be no gifts and no hot dinner for this little boy. In fact, he will be lucky if he gets a meal at all.

For Soronzon, Christmas Day is just like any other. There is no such thing as a special event in his wretched life, because every waking hour he has to fight simply to stay alive.

He is one of Mongolia's hundreds of sewer children – homeless waifs who roam the street of the capital city, Ulaan Baatar, by day, and live in the dark, filthy spaces beneath manholes by night.

They sleep in the city's underground sewage and heating pipe system because that is the only place they can hope to avoid freezing to death in winter, when temperatures drop as low as minus 40oC.

Soronzon's eyes fill with pain as he tells me: "I left home because my father was beating me. I'm too scared to go back."

Although it is minus 26o C, he is wearing only trousers and a jumper beneath a tattered woollen overcoat too small to button up. He has no gloves or hat to keep him warm.

"I'm so cold," he says through chattering teeth. "And so hungry".

In the sixth foot by eight foot hole where he lives, 33 children and adults huddle together for warmth, their faces gaunt in the dim glow of three candles.

They live within sight of a five-star hotel, and on the road above their hovel, fancy cars race past concrete apartment blocks. It is shocking to see so much wealth so near and yet so far from their grasp.

As the children emerge one by one from the manhole, cars cast brief pools of light on filthy faces and ragged clothes.

They tell a painfully similar story – either they have been orphaned, or they have left home because of abuse or neglect. Such are the horrors they have experienced, they would rather take their chances as street urchins than return home. Yet not only is street life a constant struggle for survival; boys all too easily become sucked into crime, and girls are vulnerable to rape and even prostitution.

Tragically, though, children's homes are a luxury the Mongolian government cannot afford.

The country used to be a satellite state of the USSR, and when the Soviets withdrew in 1990, it slid into rapid decline

With no subsidies, most of the few factories not owned by the Russians and Chinese went bust, leading to massive unemployment, abject poverty, depression, domestic violence and family breakdown.

Of course, most street children neither know nor care about the economic, political and social problems of which they are victims.

All they know is that they are hungry and bitterly cold. Fortunately for Soronzon and his "street family", though, they are not entirely alone. For a charity led by a remarkable woman from the British Isles is doing vital work to ensure they have access to medical care, food, clothes and, for those who want to leave the streets, a warm, comfortable home.

Christina Noble, 58, who became known as the Angel of Saigon for helping street children in Vietnam, has set up a range of projects to help the youngsters of Mongolia, too.

The Christina Noble Children's Foundation (CNCF) sends doctors and nurses onto the streets at night twice a week to help the sewer children. It has also established a village of traditional Mongolian gers – the portable wood-and-felt circular homes used by Mongolian nomads – for orphans and abandoned kids.

Where possible, the foundation reunites children with their families.

In addition, the charity runs free hospital clinics for the city's poorest youngsters, helps the city's hospitals buy equipment, and sponsors boys and girls in the most disadvantaged families. This ensures their parents can afford to send them to school so they have a better chance of finding employment and escaping the poverty trap.

In Mongolia's boy's prisons, where 14-to 18-year-olds are locked up for mainly poverty-related crimes such as stealing food, the charity also runs a school to give the boys a better chance of finding work.

For children like Soronzon, the charity provides hope in a life that is otherwise hopeless.

I visit him and his "street family" with the night clinic – a truck filled with medical supplies and staffed by a doctor and a nurse.

The street children know and trust the CNCF staff and when the clinic rolls up at a manhole, those in need of medical help emerge to visit us.

Soronzon has a cold, which is hardly surprising. He is given appropriate medicine and multivitamin syrup, and told he can stay at the Blue Skies Ger Village should life on the streets become unbearable.

But he is reluctant to leave his street family.

An older girl, 16 –year-old Baigalmaa, explains, "we all look after each other. We beg for money and food, which we share."

Baigalmaa, an orphan, has been on the streets since she was 14. She reveals: "One day I returned home to find our ger had burned down, killing my parents, brothers and sister."

Her eyes fill with tears and she turns away, still too traumatized to talk about it

The government discourages the CNCF night clinic from handing out free food and clothing because it argues generous handouts could encourage children to live on the streets.

The charity works with the government and respects it policies, but will not stand back and let children freeze or starve.

So tonight, at least, the street children we've met will not go hungry. The strength, courage and humanity of these little nobodies in the face of such appalling adversity is humbling and deeply moving. But having to leave them shivering in their hovel is heartbreaking.

Next day, at the boys' prison school, one of the pupils says he is happier there than he was on the streets.

Like Soronzon, Bolortsetseg, 15, used to live down a manhole after leaving home because of physical abuse.

He has been jailed for three years for stealing food because he was starving. Shocking as that may be, he is undoubtedly better off in jail.

"At least here, it's warm and I have food and a bed," he says. "And I'm learning to read and write and use computers – I'd never been to school and hadn't even seen a computer before I came to prison."

Jobs may be scare in Mongolia but, thanks to the CNCF, at least desperately disadvantaged children like these now dare to hope for a better future.

Christina, a twice-divorced mother-of-three, knows what it's like to be a street child, for she was once on herself.

One of eight children of a poor family in Dublin, here mother died when she was ten and her factory worker father spent his earnings on alcohol.

She ended up living rough, even eating cardboard to stave off her hunger.

Eventually she boarded a boat for England, where she married and had three children. When her marriage ended she put herself through college and set up a successful catering business in Surrey. Her second marriage failed.

Christina could have settled down to a comfortable life, but was haunted by a vivid and recurrent dream. In it, she was helping street children in Vietnam.

In 1989, aged 44, she boarded a plane and followed her dream.

She set up a charity and by 1997, it had changed thousands of children's lives. The fair-haired, green-eyed Westerner known to orphans as Mama Tina could have sat back and admired the fruits of her labour – but instead, she was gripped by another compulsion. This time, it was Mongolia she couldn't stop thinking about.

"I don't know a thing about Mongolia," she admits, "but, crazy as it sounds, I felt compelled to go there. I knew there must be children who needed help."

Just as with Vietnam, she followed her instincts. When she arrived in Ulaan Baatar early in 1997, she found children living down manholes, in conditions worse than rats. In winter, some froze to death.

She decided to buy some land and create a village of traditional Mongolian homes as a sanctuary for the children.

But turning her idea into reality was far from simple. In those days, the government rounded up street children and held them in a detention centre.

When Christina visited the centre, she was appalled.

"There were about 320 children there and to say it was like a scene from Oliver Twist would be an understatement," she says. "There was no heating, even though the temperature outside was below minus 20oC. There was ice inside the windows and the children were terribly thin, hungry and shivering with cold.

"In a downstairs cell, I found several children who had been beaten black and blue. I shall never forget the sheer terror on their faces. I was horrified and absolutely furious."

Christina stormed upstairs and screamed at the detention centre's director. It was to be the start of a dangerous campaign for Mongolian children's rights.

It culminated with many of the children escaping and fleeing to Christina's flat, and her organising a press conference so the children could tell the national media their pitiful stories.

A layer was employed to help the children give statements to the police. The centre's director, who'd carried out the beatings, was arrested.

Over the next few months, Christina was ruthlessly intimidated in a vain attempt to deter her from continuing her good work.

"My flat was ransacked and I was beaten up," she says. "But I was determined to help the children win justice."

Eventually, she did and the director was jailed.

Many of the children found new homes in the Blues Skies Ger Village, and others were reunited with their families.

Since then, the CNCF has worked with the government to ensure street children are treated humanely.

Christina's work laid the foundations for the multi-functional project that is helping the country's most needy youngsters in so many ways today.

There is no doubt that Christina's own childhood has enabled her to identify with the families she is now helping, and to respond to their needs.

This is touchingly clear during a visit to one of the families whose children the CNCF sponsors.

The family of six live in a one-room shack in a shanty suburb. They are all huddled together in overcoats because they cannot afford heating.

Their only food is a pile of bones and two eggs. Their only furniture is a single bed, with a couple of soiled mattresses stacked beneath it, and three tiny stools. A picture of the Virgin Mary hangs on a wall.

The mother says the most important thing to her is that all her children can go to school so they can have a better future. Thanks to the CNCF, she can afford to buy 8uniforms, books and stationery for them all.

Christina decided the CNCF should buy the family a new bed, clothes and food immediately. They are given the equivalent of £100 – little by Western standards, but for this family, a life-changing sum.

The mother looks at us as if we are angels, then her face crumples and she weeps with disbelief, gratitude and joy, and thanks us repeatedly.

"I am an orphan," she says. "No one has ever helped me. I can't believe you strangers have done this. It's a dream come true."

We send the couple into the city to buy all they need, the only condition being that a CNCF social worker visits soon to see they have spent the money wisely.

The family will also be given a ger – the CNCF has a scheme to provide gers for families in the worst accommodation. People who have already benefited include a mother and five children found living in a draughty shed, and a family living under a staircase in an apartment block.

But it is at the Blue Skies Village that we see the biggest transformation in the children's desperate lives.

Here, up to 40 orphaned and abandoned children live in "ger families" of six children and a "ger mother". She is usually a widow or a single mother, and looks after the children as if they were her own.

The circular gers, which are similar to tents, are warm, clean and comfortable inside, and are cheerfully painted in traditional orange and blue. They have pull-out beds that convert to sofas, and a stove in the middle for cooking and heating.

The village is hoe to children whose backgrounds would bring tears to a glass eye: Bolormaa, five, and her younger sister and three elder brothers saw their mother and father stabbed to death.

Batzorig, three, and his four sisters were found alone in a small shed with the icy wind whistling through. They hadn't eaten for days, since their single mother had died.

But today, these children are laughing and playing as if they haven't a care in the world, and hugging us affectionately.

Christina says, "Just look at them now, clean, warm, healthy and happy. Who would have thought they'd been through so much?"

Like millions of other children throughout the world, they are excitedly preparing for a festive party.

At last their suffering is over, and they can finally have a happy Christmas.