Mongolians use the anklebones of goats and sheep to tell their fortunes. Each side of the bone represents either sheep, goat, camel or horse. You roll them like dice and how they fall so decides your destiny.
The fate of Mongolia’s legendary nomads living in the Land of the Eternal Blue Sky and the animals they herd is looking increasingly sealed. Winter in Mongolia is turning evermore long and bitterly cold. Summer is becoming shorter and more parched. This leaves animals without enough food and the herding way of life without a future.
A dzud is an emergency related to extreme cold or snow. “Animals freeze or starve because they can’t graze. Thousands can be lost in a day,” says Fr. Pierrot Kasemuana, director of Caritas Mongolia. “The dzud is a whispering emergency, it doesn’t kill a lot of people but it causes a lot of harm. Before, it was once in a generation, now it is every year.”
Herders are packing up their ger tents and moving to the towns, especially the capital Ulaanbaatar, where poverty and pollution await them.