On Tour with Amnesty International Mongolia

This week I went back to one of my favourite pastimes – training young people to be campaigners! Amnesty International Mongolia very kindly invited me along to help them with some training they were doing in two schools in Mongolia, and I couldn’t refuse – I was active as a student with Amnesty back in the UK, and so was exited by the opportunity to help a similar Amnesty youth programme spread in Mongolia. Thus, I packed my bags and headed out with Otgo, Samboo and Gerlee for what proved to be an interesting experience…

We went to visit schools in second and third biggest cities in Mongolia, Erdenet and Darkhan (both to the north of Ulaanbaatar). The plan was to go to two schools and give a select group of the children training on volunteerism and campaigning. It was hoped that this training would lead to the creation of self-sustaining school campaigning groups (groups of children who would be running Amnesty campaigns in the local community). The training would give the young people the skills they would need to run a campaigning group effectively, and built up to one final activity – the youth would go out on the streets and do a campaign for real!

Erdenet – the first group we worked with, and as it turned out, the best. This was a fantastic group of young people who were a real pleasure to be with. The young people were really friendly and welcoming, and were very attentive during their training. They were very enthusiastic as well! One of the groups ran a campaign designed to get shopkeepers to stop selling alcohol to children (much to the displeasure of some shopkeepers!), whilst another group did a campaign about the global arms trade. My Amnesty colleagues and I left Erdenet with mixed emotions – we were sad to say goodbye to a group of really nice young people, but we believed that we had been successful – they should continue campaigning into the future. More generally speaking, Erdenet was a lovely place. Perhaps I was swayed by the blanket of white snow that was covering everything, but it just seemed such a nice, friendly city.

Darkhan – so far so good, but the group at Darkhan was more difficult! The children we ran a training for were from one of Mongolia’s top private schools, and the difference between them and the Erdenet state-school educated youth was instantly visible. Here follows a rant, for which I apologise in advance…

The children’s initial reaction was to be critical of the message we had to bring, and would always have excuses ready as to why they shouldn’t be helping the community out. We regularly encountered statements like “people who are poor are lazy, they can’t be helped”. Also, I was shocked at how rude and arrogant some of the children were. One example was when one young man spilt tea all over the floor and yet did not clean it up. When I (the white foreigner) went to clean it up he said I shouldn’t as it would bring shame to him and his class. Instead I should wait for the cleaner to come and sort it out…

I suppose it’s things like this that really stuck with me, but I shouldn’t let it cloud over the positives from the Darkhan training. The youth did some good campaigns (after a lot of persuasion), and the local media came to do a story on how young people were doing work for the local community. Thus, Amnesty/volunteerism in general got some coverage, which can only be a good thing.

Now I’m back in the big city of Ulaanbaatar. Otgo and I both said it was sad to end our adventure and return to our computer screens in our offices, but I can’t do training all the time I suppose!