The
three days last week I spent with Tu Ye, one of the loan officers at the CZWSDA branch in
Youqi, were spent
travelling between some local villages in order to attend centre meetings. Much
like the urban centre meeting we attended on my first day Youqi, rural centre
meetings are a chance to the loan officer to catch up with her customers as
well as for the customers to make their repayments, then once the repayments
have been made there is either a short training session, or group activity. On
one occasion I had the honor of listening as one group sung a series of
Mongolian folk songs. Lead by the head of the group they sang haunting melodies
which, although it might sound a little contrived, seemed somehow to echo with
the emptiness outside, the melody sounding so forlorn and encompassing that I
was completely stunned into a silence. The rural borrowers are genuinely
remarkable people, so warm and welcoming yet at the same time hard, like
weather beaten stone.
Three ladies from the of Qiqiga, including Ruqumuge, our host there, in the middle
In the
winter the temperature can easily drop below -25C, yet the villagers who live
out on the plains will get up every morning religiously at 4am in order to
start their days work, working solidly through until 9 or 10pm when they are
finally able to go to bed. As I mentioned before, when I rather naively asked
one village head what there was to do during the weekends, she laughed telling
me that weekends were only for people who lived in the city. Whole villages are
often dedicated to the one form of agriculture. Villages that raise crops
during the winter, will all but shut down in the winter, concentrating only on
keeping sheep or swine, the subzero temperatures making any sort of life or
work out on the planes all but impossible. The village I came back from today,
Masatala, makes nearly all of its living through dairy farming, each family
keeping between 5 and 10 heads of cattle. Every morning the whole village will
rise at 4am sharp to bring their cattle in for milking, the cows are then milked
again in the mid-afternoon. Each milking session takes a couple of hours, which
the villagers take in shifts. At 3.30pm precisely the entire group who’s
meeting I was attending left to go and do precisely that. It is a relentless
life seven days a week and 365 days a year, but it does have its benefits. The
regular income that the dairy cows provide is far more reliable and stable then
that provided by other forms of farming. When added to that the leverage that a
microloan affords, enabling the borrower to add another calf to the herd or buy
more animal feed for the winter, they are able to have a relatively comfortable
life, selling more and being able to buy more of what they want or need in return
The leader of a borrowing group in Masatala
outside her home. The corn behind her is used to supplement the feed for their
cattle during the winter.
Each
village meeting I’ve visited has had its own distinctive character, some
friendly and inquisitive, some more retiring and shy, whilst some groups have
barely paid any attention to me at all, instead busy nattering and joking away
barley acknowledging my presence, not that I would have wanted them act any
differently. The inner Mongolian women who live here all speak Mongolian as
their first language, a beautiful sounding language far softer and more melodic
then it’s distant cousin Chinese, I’ve been told that it’s the ancestor and
precursor of modern Japanese. They take pride in their Mongolian heritage,
claiming to be straight talkers, not being afraid to say what they mean, and I
know that they mean it. The village leaders are always strong confident women
who clearly aren’t in the habit of taking any crap from anyone. Even in the
more retiring villages the strength that these women have is easy to see, a
strength that is earned only through a life of hard work and labor. Even after
having spent only a very short time visiting these villages, I already feel
great deal of respect for the people living here.
The Village of Masatala, named after the mountain you can see in the back of the photo
Most
villages are each comprised of a dozen or so simple houses. Three of the four
meetings I have attended have been held in the group leaders’ home, the other,
in a village called Dushi, was held in a small village meeting hall. The homes
were made up of three or four undecorated and sparsely furnished rooms. The
main room is usually taken up by a large raised hard surface, under which hot coals
are placed keeping it warm during the winter. Often this provides the only form
of heating in the house, and in many rural homes acts as the bed where the
whole family sleeps together. I often meet older borrowers who’ve children have
chosen to leave the village in favor of a job in one of the nearby towns. This creates
an added degree of pressure for their parents who remain behind to cope with
the additional work. One lady I met, a lovely kind woman called Renqumuge, her children
had both moved to Daban, a nearby town, to marry or for work. She grew crops in
the summer and raised animals during the winter. Life was harder as it was just
her husband and herself left to do the work, I think that they must both have
been approaching their 60s. She told me that microcredit had given her just
that little bit more freedom, where she is no longer living hand to mouth and can
afford to plan and to sell what extra she can now produce. As I was leaving her
village we were stood looking out toward the mountains across the snow covered
grasslands in front of her house, I asked her if she would ever want give up
this life and follow her daughters to the city. She replied saying nothing, only
gently shaking her head and smiling out into the distance.
Renqumuge’s village
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