It’s seven in the morning, but the frosty Mongolian
steppe is still pitch black. With a thick blanket of clouds
covering the starry sky, darkness is pierced by the hundreds
of eerie lights emanating from the eyes of a large sheep herd.
They stare at whoever dares to come out of the ger – the
nomads’ traditional yurt – into the icy open air, some 35oC
below zero. Their woolly faces are covered in ice. They have
survived these bitter temperatures by staying very close to one
another; this morning, they are huddled behind a wooden
enclosure in the middle of nowhere.
But Shuukhaz, a lean 17-year-old, is not afraid of the cold.
Wearing just a thin jacket and no gloves, he brandishes a
flashlight and starts the daily routine in the barn where the
family’s cows and horses spend the winter nights. The eldest
of the family’s two daughters, Margad Erdene, soon joins
him to milk the animals.
With the first lazy sun rays splintering through the
clouds, a spectacular landscape takes shape. Arid mountains
become imposing shadows on the horizon, a white carpet
rolling up to them. There is nothing else to interrupt the
stark vastness.
“The closest family we know of is about 30 kilometres
away,” says Damb Batnasan, the children’s father. His wife,
Batsuren Tsetsegmaa, is making soup for breakfast in the
rudimentary kitchen, burning dung to heat the ger. “We are
also the youngest couple around,” she adds. The couple will
turn 30 soon, but Damb is not optimistic about their way of
life: “I believe nomads will disappear with our generation.”