By: Johnny Baltzersen, CICED
‘We visit the children every week. Then they get new homework and corrected homework assignments back, and we talk to them about how they’re doing and see if they need extra help,’ Saraa and Tunga tell us on Sunday morning on a slightly crackling Zoom connection from Children’s Ger.
All schools in Mongolia have been closed since the beginning of February. Daily TV lessons have been established in all school subjects, but the lessons are very compressed and many students need extra help to understand the material. If there are no parents to help, then teachers have to step in.
It’s not just homework that Saraa and Tunga benefit from. Children in Children’s Ger usually have lunch and a few snacks at school. For the poorest children, it’s often the only thing they get to eat.
‘Every two weeks we distribute food to the most disadvantaged families. We buy in bulk, our regular cooks distribute the food, and then we go around to all of them. It’s also a good way for us to stay in touch,’ Saraa and Tunga say.
Each month is distributed to a total of 10 families with 48 children:
80 kg meat
75 kg flour
30 kg rice
30 kg noodles
70 kg of potatoes
20 kg carrots
20 kg white cabbage
60 kg aarts (a Mongolian and highly nutritious quark)
15 kg sugar
Saraa and Tunga have enough to carry.
Most of the children in Children’s Ger are not only from poor backgrounds, but also from homes struggling with alcohol abuse and other excesses that are not conducive to a good childhood. It’s nice and reassuring to have weekly visits from Saraa and Tunga.
In Mongolia, there are no complaints. Not about corona either, but it’s hard for the children not to go to school and see their friends. Apart from shopping and other strictly necessary traffic outside the home, you should stay at home. So there are no playdates.
And when you don’t have much to do at home, it can be a real drag. Toys and games are not a big thing for poor families.
On June 1, Mongolia celebrates International Children’s Day, and to mark the occasion, children need toys and games to make life at home a little more fun.
Subsidies for toys can be paid into:
MobiliePay: 543910 – message: CG toys
or
Merkur Andelskasse: 8401-1148263 – message: CG toys
PHOTOS:PHOTOS: Packing and handing out. And despite the corona pandemic, flowers must be put in the boxes so that it looks nice when the children return to school after the summer vacation
