She seemed so vulnerable and unable to cope. Her prematurely-wrinkled face told of hardship. With six mouths to feed, I could not help but think that she would never manage. We gave her about $20 assistance. She left planning to use it to purchase animal skins which she would in turn sell at a higher price. We lost contact with Battsetseg for 3 years. This week I saw her standing outside my office when I returned from a Rotary Club meeting. I recognized her and invited her in out of the cold. She had waited an hour in -27C temperatures to see me. I listened to her story. She had coped for 2 years selling skins, but had now invested in a small radio telephone and she would stand all day on the side of the road at a busy intersection allowing people to phone and pay her for each call. There are no public telephone booths as you may know them in your country, so many poorer Mongolians brave the freezing sub-zero temperatures to make a living this way. She had a telephone that was paid for, and although December was a normal month, she received a bill for double her normal one. She showed us her printout and claimed that most of the calls were not hers. They had cut her phone when she could not pay. She now had no way to feed her kids. She knew of no one else but ADRA to turn to. We advised her to have a new code put on her phone as we had to do with our office radio phones to prevent other callers pirating it. We loaned her the $85 on a monthly repayment scheme. She went and paid the account and returned the receipt to us. She was radiant. Gone was the insecurity and fear that was previously evident. She showed us her new system of writing down each call and checking it against the monthly printout. She had learned fast from our staff that had helped to set these control systems in place.

"This is the kind of fast day I'm after: …free the oppressed, cancel debts." Isaiah 58 (The Message)

Llewellyn Juby - March, 2005