Today, every third child in Mongolia is poor. Thousands of children work to support their families, competing with adults for petty work. Thousands of street children are the result of homelessness and family breakdown.
As the lottery that is my job with the Emergency Section in Save the Children drew its numbers in July, it turned out it was a Roll Over week and I had the bonus ball. I was being sent to Mongolia for three months.
I’ve spent too much time moaning about the snow this winter. Watching this Sky News coverage reminds me that I don’t know how lucky I am. Right now in Mongolia, a humanitarian disaster is going on. It’s getting limited media interest, but that doesn’t mean that thousands of people’s lives aren’t being devastated. We’re responding thanks to our Childrens Emergency Fund.
My wife and I with our two grand daughters have just returned from visiting Save the Children projects in Mongolia but I am not going to comment on that in detail since I can’t improve on Kayleigh’s and Michaela’s brilliant blogs. I will however use it to introduce answers to the questions on the “Every One blog extravaganza”. A group of Brits went out to visit a project run by Mongolians with the aid of a Belgian-Venezuelan ocupational therapist, the whole lot soon to be taken over by the Japanese. A veritable mini global village!
When i got back home i noticed all the small things that we take for granted and how important they are to people in Mongolia. Clean water, food, showers, shelter, school and even pens and paper! And how big our house is in comparison.
In the morning we all went shopping. I wasn’t feeling to great, i think due to the intense heat and how it was quite stuffy although, i do enjoy shopping 
After we had walked back to the hotel we went for lunch with many of the save the children staff and also some of the children from the child protection team. Masaka, one of the Japenese workers from Save The Children Japan couldn’t join us unfortunatly so we quickly said goodbye before hand.
After getting up at 5 in the morning it turned out that our flight back to Ulaanbaatar was delayed! They had apparently been experienceing some bad weather of heavy rainfall and strong winds. This even caused death and destroyed homes in some areas.
We bought lots of souvenirs in the centre of Ulaanbaatar in the morning, and then had a dinner in a restaurant later with the staff from Save The Children and also members of a child protection programme, who were mostly children themselves.
First we went to see a rehab centre for disabled children located inside a hospital. It was 2 small rooms containing all the essential equipment and was filled with many people. One of the rooms was where the physical therapy took place and the other was a place to sit and had work that the children had done on the walls.
We got up bright and early around 5am so we could get the plane back to Ulaanbaatar. When we got to the airport we found out the flight had been postponed till later in the day because of very rainy and windy weather in Ulaanbaatar.
Day 6- We woke up at 3 as we had a flight to Bayan-Ulgii. Extremely tired, we got into the carwhere our driver played some very relaxing mongolian music and also sang to it. It seemed very surreal fo some reason. When we arrived at the dirport we were taken into the VIP room it was very cool.
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