An Educated Difference
It’s another of Mongolia’s 260 days of sunshine a year, despite being well below freezing. Llewellyn Juby, the director of the Adventist Development and Relief Agency (ADRA) in Mongolia, is driving us the 100 kilometres to the Maant Mental Hospital, which lies astride the railway into China, on the cold, deserted steppe. I want him to see the kindergarten we’d started in the facility.
I’m a little more comfortable than on my previous trip to Maant. That was in an old, hired Russian jeep. Then the weather had been -35°C, and as the passenger-side door didn’t close properly, I almost froze. This time I’m in our ADRA Land Cruiser, which has a heater.
As we travel the three hours over the frozen steppe, we sing Mongolian songs and eat fried Mongolian biscuits until finally the familiar, dilapidated white and green buildings come into view.
I felt hesitant, as you never know what you’ll find there. Would we see all the familiar faces? A local newspaper report stated that over the past two years, of the 150 people sent to Maant, 108 had died! The mental hospital usually holds some 180 patients, including 30 children. It’s a forsaken place.
We go into our kindergarten. Tuul, the kindergarten’s ADRA project manager, is a Russian-trained special-needs teacher, and she proudly shows us her work. On the walls are bright displays of students’ work, on the windowsill pink animals shaped from playdough. Students want to shake our hands and give traditional welcomes, all the while pointing to the latest evidence of their schooling.
The teacher, Tserentdolgor, is teaching numbers to the younger students, while an assistant teaches the Cyrillic alphabet to those a bit older. It could have been any classroom in the country. The horrors of the mental hospital, in whose grounds it is located, seem far away. These children have been discarded by society and dumped here for such reasons as extreme poverty, physical deformities or epilepsy, not necessarily mental disability or illnesses.
ADRA–Mongolia is presently the only agency working with children in mental hospitals in Mongolia. We’re running two similar projects, the one in Maant and another in the Ulaanbaatar Mental Hospital. The basic aim is to develop and treat the children through education.
This project is the result of a visit I made in July 2001. I’d heard rumours of the place, so went to see. I found children living in deplorable conditions in the hospital, to the point of being degrading and in violation of basic human rights. The conditions for adults were similar.
The children lacked nourishing food, not surprising since they existed on just 24 cents of food a day. They also lacked appropriate clothing for the extreme weather—it was common to see naked children among the adults, which is another issue.
Few patients had documentation—a legal requirement in Mongolia—and children born to patients hadn’t received birth certificates. This means, according to the government, they don’t exist.
The buildings were cold, with many broken windows. Beds were without adequate covering for the harsh winter, and it wasn’t uncommon to find two or more patients, of varying ages and genders, huddled in the one bed to keep warm.
However, our ADRA–Mongolia classroom is an island of hope in this sea of despair. To supplement the meagre diet provided by the mental hospital, the teachers dispense multivitamin pills.
Today, the children sing for us with enthusiasm and energy. This is a miracle for, a short time before, because of a lack of love, verbal communication and mental stimulation, they’d been hardly able to communicate or function independently.
Now the children are active both in the classroom and in their ward. Social skills are being taught with great success. Rapport has developed between staff and children. The teachers specifically comment on improvements in the students’ social skills and communication. Trust is also evident.
The head doctor comments that the biggest change in the children is that they now seem happy. And where a year before the children couldn’t dress themselves, now they go to school and take pride in their appearance.
ADRA has developed simple teaching methods to promote hygiene practices among the children, adapted from successful materials used in developing countries. Topics include hand washing, how to feed oneself, and personal and oral hygiene. The teachers are trained in teaching children these basic skills.
Many of the staff at Maant had no formal training, although they work as nurses or carers. One part of this project provides staff training, including in nutrition and diet, communication with patients, methods of caring for patients with mental-health problems, and developing other types of therapy.
The kindergarten project is continuing to work through the administration of the hospital and the Ministry of Health, which can be a slow and wearying process. A task force of international organisations and government people is currently investigating conditions in mental hospitals. As a result, some children have been removed to shelters run by international organisations. The hospital was told to give the remaining children a separate ward away from the adults.
There is still little understanding or tolerance of mental disabilities in Mongolia. Mentally or physically disabled children are still abandoned or hidden. These young people have little sense of self-worth, which is being addressed through such programs as its kindergartens in the Maant and Ulaanbaatar Mental Hospitals.
The ultimate goal of these projects is to integrate the children into mainstream society through community rehabilitation, something that is possible with the continued financial support of the ADRA community.
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