A Profile of Christina Noble,
Daily Mail,
28 November 2002

Scavenging for food and numbered by illicit vodka, that live in the sewers of the most backward city in the world. Now, they have found a saviour – in a single mother of three from the Home Counties.

They emerge from the ground like rats, blinking into the lamplight. First two, then three faces peer out from under the manhole cover before they are on their feet, scurrying down the street, searching for food.

Dirty anoraks hang off their thin frames, their trousers are ragged and frayed and the soles of their shoes hang loose.

Welcome to Ulan Bator, capital of Mongolia, where tonight the temperature is minus 25 degrees. It is the kind of cold that pierces to the very bones, penetrating even the most efficient thermal layer, and sends the city's citizens hurrying to the warmth of homes.

For 14-year-old Dulguun and 13-year-old Saraa, however, the evening is only just beginning and they do not have a cosy fire to warm themselves by.

Instead, they will spend the freezing hours roaming the icy streets searching for scraps of food before returning to the place they call 'home' – a 6 ft filthy hold in the ground which they share with nine other children, and the city's sewage and hot water pipes.

There they will jostle for space on a couple of filthy rugs laid over the dank rubble, hoping, despite their hunger pangs, to snatch a few hours of sleep. That their 'home' is opposite the Ministry of Health is an irony doubtless lost on them.

All over the city the same scene is being played out, for their are hundreds, possibly thousands, of children of sleeping below the ground on this bitter November night.

These are the forgotten children, legacy of a country whose poor economy and inhospitable climate have left it with poverty as grinding as any African Third World state.

To hear their stories you must descend to them: above ground they prefer to try and make themselves invisible, to escape the cruelty of passers-by, who regularly spit and swear at them.

Climbing down a rusty iron ladder into the sewer, I am struck immediately by the unhealthy atmosphere: a fug of cigarette smoke mixed with the dank air of an unventilated space.

Lit by a single flickering candle in a glass jar, the dim light reveals a scene of Dickensian horror; little does huddled in corners, an empty vodka bottle lying among the cigarette butts. Many of the children are coughing.

Dulguun, a handsome boy whose tiny frame, the legacy of years of malnutrition, belies his 14 years, is the first to tell his story.

Through an interpreter, he explains that he was born in a village near the Mongolian border with Khazakstan, nearly 1,000m miles away, but his stepmother forced him to travel to the capital in search of work when his father died.

'I did not want to leave the village but my stepmother made me. We travelled a very long way to get here, and then, once we were here, she used to beat me with an iron bar. I was scared, so in the end I ran away.

'I have been here for two years, I have no money and nowhere else to go.'

His refrain is typical, and echoed by his 13-year-old friend, Zol, who tells how he was orphaned after his father died in a coal mine explosion.

'My mother had died two years earlier. I did not know what to do, so I came to the city. I had no food, no home, but I found this place and now my home is here.'

I notice that the soles of his shoes have almost completely come away. 'What can you do?' he shrugs.

'I cannot buy new ones.' But it only takes a moment for his mask of nonchalance to fall away. 'Tomorrow it is my birthday,' he says. 'Please can you get me some shoes?'

Next to him, 12-year-old Saraa is inhaling deeply on a cigarette.

She, too, has been in the sewer for two years, after running away from her home 50 miles east of the city. She will not say why.

'When I am 16 I will get work and then I will be OK,' she says.

Her dirty face and matted, cropped hair are testament to a life lived with no allowance for even basic hygiene. When I ask why her hair is so short, she tells me it helps to look like a boy. 'You get less trouble than the girls, less hassle from the men.'

What she doesn't tell me is that it has not worked – later I discover that, in face, Saraa has been raped by a street boy and has a sexually transmitted disease.

Her silence is shocking, but for all these children disease and abuse are a way of life.

Even the most robust are beset by respiratory infections and fevers, for the unhealthy of the sewers is a breeding ground for bacteria and without proper food hey have a few resources to fight them.

The children survive on little more than a few scraps scavenged from waste bins or begged from passers-by, and a couple have twisted limbs, bearing the tell-tale sign of rickets, a disease all but extinct in the West.

Later, I learn that many of the children already have liver problems from alcohol abuse: swigging from a cheap bottle of vodka, begged or stolen, is among their only comforts.

One 13 year-year-old boy, in the words of someone decades older tells me he drinks 'so I can forget'.

Mongolia's more affluent citizens prefer not to be reminded of these subterranean lives.

But tonight, at least, someone is taking notice. As customers pour into a city restaurant, a van hoves into view, its engine fumes turning to steam in the frosty air.

As it pulls to a halt and flings open its doors, the sewer children, sensing its rumblings above, rush from their underground dwelling and clamber inside.

The doors open to reveal a makeshift medical clinic. Once safely inside, the children are examined by a team of friendly nurses, who give out medicine.

They would love to give food and warm clothing, too, but city officials forbid them from doing so, claiming it 'encourages' more children on to the street.

The van, a former army vehicle is run by The Christina Noble Foundation, a charity named after a 57-year-old Home Counties woman who, to thousands of the world's poverty-stricken children, is better known as 'Mama Tina'.

Thirteen years ago, this brave, warm-hearted woman gave up her comfortable middle-class life in Surrey to st up an orphanage for the homeless children of Vietnam.

At the time aged 44, the twice-divorced mother gave up her home, closed her successful catering business and said goodbye to her children, Nicholas, now 31, Helen, now 37, and Androula, now 35, to help the street children.

Christina went to Vietnam in 1989, with just £2,000 of her own money, no backing, no training in childcare and no knowledge of the country and it's language.

Her first major breakthrough came months later, when Enterprise Oil, then based in Vietnam, gave her £14,000.

But, with £34,000 still needed to set up the orphanage, Christina was forced to return to Britain and sell most of her possessions. She also enlisted the help of friends and family and began holding raffles, auctions and car boot sales to raise the extra cash.

Christina finally realised her dream in 1991 and her centre in Vietnam opened with 42 staff and six volunteers. Since then, her foundation has rescued more than 100,000 children from a life of poverty and abuse.

An exuberant, immensely tactile woman, a clue to Christina's passion for the street children lies in her own background.

Born in Dublin, her mother died when she was ten. Her father was an alcoholic and, as a teenager, Christina herself ended up living on the streets. Only when she moved to Birmingham to live with her brother did her lot start to improve.

'It's not just about money but about giving the children some love,' she says. 'Just a little bit of love makes all the difference. A little love and a little pride. It's the least they deserve.

Now she has decided to try and force the world to come to terms with the plight of the poor in a country just two hours' flight from the international business centre of Beijing yet almost completely overlooked by the West.

After visiting in 1997, intrigued to discover the realities of life in this till mysterious land, she was horrified by the poverty in Mongolia.

The inhabitants of this former satellite state of the USSR have struggled to survive since the Soviet withdrawal in 1990.

Outside the capital, on the plains that comprise much of the country's vast terrain, winter temperatures can routinely plunge to 40 degrees below freezing.

Most of Mongolia's 2.4 million scattered residents still live in traditional Gers, circular tents created from timber and bound by felt. Reliant on farming their meagre stocks of cattle for survival, poverty forces many of the families to flee the city.

Twelve miles outside the capital is a place that offers them and the children some hope.

Here, 40 children, ranging in age from two to 18, chatter animatedly as they prepare for breakfast.

Their village, known as Blue Skies, has been built by the Christina Noble Foundation to provide a home and education for as many as possible. It comprises six residential Gers, a kitchen and a new kindergarten, and is staffed by volunteers from Mongolia and Britain.

Among the Blue Skies children are five-year-old Amraa and his two-year-old brother, Baagii, who parents were murdered in a local dispute. Their extended family was too poor to take them in and they would have been left to the mercy of the streets if the foundation had not heard about their plight.

Both were suffering from malnutrition when they arrived, and Gaagii had rickets. Now both of them are healthy and flourishing.

Nearby, Anna, a six-year-old girl, laughs as she shows off her new dress. It is hard to believe that just a few months ago she was found under a stairwell, abandoned by her poverty-stricken mother.

To these children 'Mama Tina' is a saviour. Today, as she arrives for a visit, the excitement is palpable, and the children rush from the warmth of their Gers to be swept into her arms.

As she leaves, one of the children proudly shows her his new glasses, telling her in halting English: 'Before you came I could see nothing, now I can see the whole world'.

While Christina's charity is doing its best, its helps are all too aware that th e40 places in the Ger village only cover a fraction of the need.

While the city authorities estimate there are around 350 children living in sewers and dens below ground, those who have seen the reality for themselves believe the true figure to be in thousands.

It's unlikely all of them will survive into the new year, for although nightly temperatures are already bone-chillingly cold, as winter progresses temperatures are likely to plunge to minus 30 and just a few minutes' exposure can be deadly.

This, though, will prove no deterrent to the sewer children, for they must eat and there is no food underground. For them, basic survival is all they can hope for. Indeed, their desires are heartbreakingly simple.

As, earlier, I turned to leave the sewers I felt someone tugging at my trouser leg. It was 14-year-old Dulguun, who had a plaintive pleas.

'I want to leave here, to go home,' he says. 'Please, help me to go home.'