The world needs to wake up to the macabre reality of poverty in Mongolia, writes DAMIEN DAWSON.
For the past six months I have been filming a documentary covering human trafficking and poverty in Mongolia.
Last month, my cameraman and I walked into the Ger districts that are scattered across the hillsides of the capital city of Ulaanbaatar and that house more than 80 per cent of the capital's inhabitants.
The districts, named for the traditional Mongolian dwellings that are built with whatever the occupants can find or afford to use, have stood on the hills for so long that shops have sprung up among them in a manner like the shanties of Brazil and Indonesia.
In winter, the temperature falls to minus 25deg. These communities do not have running water or sanitation. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of people share pit toilets and wells. The infant mortality rate in this country of just over 2.6 million is 13%.
But among those struggling to live there and in many other places around the country, a terrible secret is being kept.
The hills around Ulan Bator are home to the poorest people in Mongolia and are also the sites of cemeteries, where the bodies of the young and old rest. But the dead are not at rest, nor are they being respected.
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