Susan Bradbury is a soft spoken acupuncturist, someone you can usually find in her hole-in-the-wall office in Bellingham, WA, taking her time with patients. To sit a moment with her, she is so gentle that you would never imagine her trekking the wildest frontiers of Mongolia, working to end poverty and hunger and to renew an endangered culture.

But she lives a second life. Just days after her return from Mongolia, Susan told us the story of her month long journey across the roadless tundra. She shared with us her amazing submersion into an ancient culture, and the projects she launched that just might save it.

Her journey took her into the outback, visiting traditional nomadic homes, (yurt-like tents called “gers”), and then to the cities, where extreme poverty exists side by side with skyscapers and corporate businesses. Several years ago, a three year bout with severely low temperatures killed many of the nomads’ livestock. The losses forced the Mongolian gypsies into the cities, where they face daily hunger on the streets, begging and engaging in drugs and alcohol. Now that the freeze has passed, there is an opportunity for the nomads to return to their lives, to restore their herds and to go back to the full and healthy lifestyle they knew before – but only with help.

Under her non-profit umbrella, The Sound Essence Project, Susan has taken these people into her compassionate heart, and as you will see, is creating programs that assist them in thriving more than they did before. For the month long trek in July 2006, she took along documentary filmmaker Eero Johnson, and a friend, Laura Jimerson.

In her own words: the journey itself, and then the projects, below.

The Adventure:

“We started out riding horses and staying in our tent. We moved to a Russian van when we went into the countryside of Arkhungiso. There were ten of us in the van. It was Eero, Laura & I, and the driver, Pimba, our older woman guide, and her son Huvskul, his girlfriend Girlay, their granddaughter Namuka, Gana the second translator, Bayama our main translator. There were seven Mongolians and three Americans.

[The first translator, Bayama, had earlier cancelled, so they hired Gana. Bayama came back after deciding to bring along her family, and the little troupe had two translators. Bayama later proved to be a Godsend.)

They don’t know we’re coming. They just take you in and there’s the vodka, there’s the hor-hok, there’s the food. They always have prepared hot milk and tea at the drop of a pin. They have that 24 hours a day. And they have these bowls and in the bottom of the bowl looks like cheese that has dried for years. And then on top of that there’s fresher cheese and sometimes there’s fresher butter and sometimes there are pieces of bread. You’re always supposed to take something and break off a little bit. They always have that. And then they always have bowls of candy.

One time we were in this little building with another group of 12-15 people after a rainstorm hit near a big rock called Tailga Rock where we were riding yaks.

[“And we were riding yaks" she says, like it was riding a bicycle!]

There was a big rainstorm and we all headed into a kind of shed. We were sitting around makeshift tables and our group started singing songs. And then they almost dared the other group to start singing songs. So they’re singing songs back. And, before long, the whole place was singing songs. I just loved it. Everywhere, when we were driving, there were all kinds of Mongolian songs. The driver would sing and all the kids would sing. It was very sweet.

We went places where they’ve never seen Americans. The kids stared at us and then it was “okay, we’re part of the scenery now”. Where the elders would just keep looking at us like, “I can’t believe there’s people with skin so light and eyes so blue.”

Last year I went to the Bead Bazaar and got all kinds of beautiful beads and handed them out. This year I did that and I also got lots of little crystals and things for gifts. They absolutely loved it. Some of them would get thread somewhere off their ger with a knife and thread it through and then have their friend or loved one tie it as a little necklace. Men and women alike, it was wonderful.

We really had some interesting times. Lots of people and lots of singing, dancing. There might be somebody tired and who sleeps on the bed in the ger, but everybody else is singing. They’re not going to stop because someone is tired. It’s fascinating.

Tim [Susan’s husband] had bought me a beautiful water filter, it’s ceramic. I was really concerned about having trouble with water. But the river was so dirty, that after pumping, the whole ceramic filter was caked with this black stuff. And then, how do you wash off the black stuff? You’re washing it off with the dirty river. I’m thinking, “look at what we’re doing, we’re washing off the dirty black stuff with the dirty river. What good is that?” Its so crazy!

Once I was huddled in my shawl and all around me there’s buttercups. There’s a tone in these yellow buttercups and the way the wind moved, I just would look at them and it totally brought me to a place of peace. And then a yak stayed by me for three or four hours going moo – moo. This yak and then this grasshopper stayed right next to me. It was just incredible. I kept looking at the grasshopper thinking, “am I hallucinating? That thing hasn’t jumped for hours.” And just the buttercups and the nature, it was so comforting. Even though, it could turn, and there would be thunderstorms and lightning bolts, there was still a comfort in nature, that you felt like you could trust it.

There are snow leopards but we never saw any. We would have loved to see one. Really, the scariest thing was the dogs, because they are all guard dogs. There were about 25 dogs barking all night long. They’re just vicious at night. The crazy thing is they just roll up in a ball and you can walk right by them and they don’t even move during the day. But at night they’re total guard dogs. The bull yaks can be kind of mean but we didn’t ever see any. 

Until you go there, you really can’t have a concept of how different it is. Eero was a complete trooper. I was really blessed with him. He was able to rally and go with it. And laugh. We laughed a lot. Some of it’s so stressful, you can cry or you can laugh. We all had our breaking point. My breaking point was near the end and we were in Erdenet. All I wanted to do was go back to the city. I wanted my little hostel. I remember I started crying. “I just have to get back“

They don’t have coffee in Mongolia. They have little packs that we would never drink here. They’re a little sip of coffee and mostly artificial cream with sugar. I mean you would never in a million years drink this when you’re here. When you’re there, every once in a while, if you’re having a rough day, Coffee King is like your comfort. It’s so terrible. Eero says "Do you think you'd feel better if I got you a little Coffee King. And so he runs and gets me this little Coffee King and he makes me a cup and all of a sudden I thought, okay, I can cope with that.

And then there were two other really crazy things that happened to me. I was washing my clothes by the river, and it’s a whole huge process. You’re taking your soap – and we had this biodegradable soap because we didn’t want to hurt the rivers  – and you wash your clothes and you’re scrubbing them. And I’m getting all the soap out, which is a big chore. You’re squeezing and squeezing. It’s a whole huge half a day just to wash your clothes. And then you’re looking for big stones that are hot, and the angle of the sun, and you put your clothes down. And then, after an hour, you go flip them and find other rocks so that they’ll dry in time because then it gets dewy and wet and usually rains every night.

So, I thought, it’s such a nice day. I think, I’m just going to jump in the river. Because I'm so hot after all this washing. I jumped in the river and this current that I couldn’t see – and I’m stark naked at this point – just sweeps me down the river and I yell! – Laura! Bayama! I’m totally out of control. And I’m trying to make my way to the edge and I get to the edge but I’m just shooting down the edge. And there are no big rocks to hold onto. There are just these little rocks. And finally they run fast enough in front of me and grab me and pull me out. And I’m bruised down my leg and my arms. And I already was bruised in my thighs from riding the wooden saddle.

Well, I stepped into the river and I sink up to my knees in mud. And not only that – I’m a couple of steps ahead of Bayama and Laura – I absolutely cannot move and I’m thinking: Oh, my God, is this quicksand? And I’m saying to them: Does it look like I’m sinking? If I am sinking, run back and get the horses and get the cowboys and get a rope and come get me. Well we established after a couple of minutes that I wasn’t sinking; I just couldn’t move. And then, finally, I decided I had to abandon my sandals and wiggle my feet out of them. And I got like one leg out but then, trying to get back to them I got stuck again. And I finally got to the edge and they pulled me out. And then I had to put my arm down to get my sandal. I’m thinking: Oh, my God, this is early on. And I need these Teva sandals because the rivers are so rocky. Plus it’s so hot during the day. So, now I’ve got mud up to here. So much for the bath. I mean, you just get humbled on all fronts, I think. It’s water, it’s food, it’s your privacy.

The Sound Essence Projects:

The other project was putting six students through college. We added a new student this year. (five received scholarships last year) We met the Reindeer people last year and they said they needed help this year with one of their daughters. Just the gratitude of these students and the family and how much their self-esteem has risen – the whole family’s self-esteem has gone up. This year we interviewed each one of last year’s students and asked them how school is going, are they having problems, are they still on the same major, have they switched? (We want them to have total freedom.)

Once the students go to college, they have an opportunity for jobs and they can help support their families. It is totally extended to the grandmas and grandpas and babies. The ripple effect goes out to many more people than just the students.

Wall Jacobs out of Denver, CO, has a leadership program called the Zorig Foundation. He funds it completely himself. Every year he gets about 80 applicants. You have to have finished four years of college, and, if you’re one of the 20 chosen, for a whole year he puts you through a leadership program. You can still be working, but you do some classes at night, some weekend classes. It’s to teach them to be leaders in their own country, and with their own people.

Zorig was a very big advocate for democracy and, when things were really heating up in Mongolia in ’88 – ’89, about communism and democracy, there was a group that broke away from communism and said: “We want to be democratic, we want to vote, we want to have more say in our lives.” He was murdered, I think, in late ’89 or thereabouts. And by November 1, ’89 his sister Oyan, who I met with, started a foundation in his name. When you walk into the building, the first thing you see is this great big picture of him. It just gives me goose bumps. She is dedicated to helping youth become leaders.

Mongolia’s really small in a way. Once you’re there and you start proving yourself, that you’re really committed to being a help, everybody opens up their door to you. I was talking to Kim Howard who is married to a Mongolian woman and has done a lot of good for the country helping children with elementary school. He said: “Have you talked to Oyan?” She’s the one that heads up the Zorig Foundation, and she’s head of parliament.

She didn’t even want to be in politics, but she has just risen to the top. Now she’s slated to be one of the next prime ministers. And I was able to meet with her because of this Kim Howard.

The next challenge is Zug. They lost two million animals between 1999 and 2001. Terrible storms. The freeze. A lot of them lost their whole herd. They had to go to the outskirts of Ulaam Baatar and they don’t know how to live anymore, because they can’t herd, they don’t have their regular life. So, they turn to drugs, prostitution, begging on the streets. And they’re not passing their stories along. And then there’s a small group, the kids that leave to go to the big city because they think that that’s the chosen land and their life will be easier and better.

There are some that do still pass the stories on. But people are dying all the time with these stories that never were recorded at all. There was one women [storyteller] that I really wanted to go see last year and we weren’t able to get to her, I was going to go to her this year. But she died this last winter. And, so that’s just a perfect example of that whole history just vanished. We want to do a couple of things: document it for posterity for the Mongolians and for all the Mongolian libraries and then make a documentary ~ to just inform people in the world about this country that sounds curious to so many people. A lot of people have no idea where it is, that it’s surrounded by Russia and China. With the United States influencing it too, it’s amazing that’s it’s been able to maintain itself. This little country is so important.

So my push is to do what we can in our small little way, sustaining the culture so it remains the way it is. The way that they’ve always lived out in the countryside, that the people want.

Ulaam Baatar is the big city. There’s only 2.5 million people in the whole country. Ulaam Baatar has about 800,000 people in it, so it’s huge comparatively. But it’s a funny city because you’ll see somebody riding a horse or people walking around with their Dells. You’ll see people in three-piece suits and Mercedes Benz and old junker cars. They’ll be a nice building and then a really dirty building. And sometimes you’ll have to walk in ankle deep garbage to get to the nicest hotel in town. It’s just very weird. The statues of Lenin and Stalin for example, while it’s a democratic country at the moment. It’s full of so many paradoxes. And there are gers in town. The heart of the town is buildings. And then on the outskirts there’s like a shantytown. The Rinpoche thinks there are 200,000 people living in gers around Ulaam Baatar.

It’s really interesting. In the countryside, nobody has fences. Everything is just wide open. In the outskirts of the city it’s very different. They have little villages but everybody has fenced yards. I don’t understand it. You can look and see a ten story building and a little ger next to it. Somebody just pulled up and set up camp. It’s so crazy.

They come to the city where’s there are cars and lights and noise and no animals, and they don’t know what to do. The venerable Rinpoche that we work with helps some of these people. They can’t help them all but they have taken on 33 families where they feed the kids breakfast, lunch and dinner, and try to help the adults. They get clothes for the kids because everything is dirty. They don’t know how to wash. They don’t have any running water – even in the countryside you can at least go to the river. But in the city there’s nothing. So, it’s big shift for them. Some of the people get into alcohol or prostitution, or stealing and it’s a real shift of their culture.

We have another project that isn’t off the ground yet. The Rinpoche feels if we can do some solar and it would make it really wonderful in these gers. The problem is, in the wintertime they burn coal. The whole city is like black dust and they’re creating this terrible environment under the little confined felt roofs.

I also really want to do a tree planting project this year. Father Gabi has an orphanage in Erdenet, a town that has about 60,000 people. We’re really connected to Erdenet because we’re doing our micro lending project there with the women. There is a big mine there. They totally decimated the land in 30 years. The man from the Congo, Father Gabi is just a kick. His goal is to keep kids with their family – even if it’s a dysfunctional family – and to support the kids and try to support the adults. What happens to some of the kids is they hear Ulaam Baatar is the promised land. They jump on the train, they get to the big city, and they end up begging and then they end up living in the sewer pipes, and they don’t know how to get back home.

He just built a library this last year. And they started growing potatoes and carrots and a little bit of onions, feeding the kids more vegetables, because the diet is so lacking in vegetables. We want to help them with trees. We’re thinking some fruit trees or even some blueberries, because they have blueberries in Mongolia, and they can make jam. You can’t plant until the end of September. So we met with Father Gabi and we met with the orphanage and picked out the sites to plant trees, large trees, and pine trees and blueberry bushes. I organized my last couple of days for him to drive to Ulaam Baatar, which is about six hours away, and pick up all of this and take it back to his staff. We worked on a brochure with Wanambisi (ECO Garden, Kenya) on how to plant it. Wanambisi helped us figure out that you need to dig a hole and put manure and then soil and then mulch and then soil and then manure and then mulch, and then have the roots really deep and then take water bottles – because there’s lots of plastic water bottles laying around because they don’t recycle – and cut them off and then cut a little hole in the bottom and put the water bottle in and fill it up with water. Father Gabi is one of the few people that has a well. He has a well for the whole surrounding area, not just the orphanage. Wanambisi said we could take a water bottle and cut the top and bottom off and slice it down the middle and then put it around the tree to keep the varmints away from it until it gets strong. So, we’re trying an experiment. We’re going to do that this year.

I had a meeting with the Department of the Environment, and there’s a bill that’s going to plant trees across the entire north and south of Mongolia. I wanted to be part of that. There are such severe dust storms. The dust storms are picking up pollution in China, dumping it in Japan, Korea and Taiwan. My son’s working in Taiwan and he said the cancer rates are just going through the roof because of these dust storms that start in Mongolia. The government is starting a movement to plant more trees, because of the severe dust storms. In 1996 there was a huge fire that decimated hundreds of acres of trees. On this trip, we could drive for days and not see a tree. And the goats and cows have overgrazed the prairie lands, and that leads to more dust as well.

We also have a micro-lending project with the bakery in Erdenet. Everybody in Erdenet lives in Russian apartments. There are block houses and hundreds of apartments. Everything is really run down. The paint’s peeling everywhere. Only one woman has a stove or an oven. The rest of them don’t have ovens in this whole apartment complex, where the women are. She’s the only one that has an oven. So the women meet there every day and make bread dough. They make a sticky bun like rolls and some other rolls that they put sausage in. They bake them and weigh them and put them in these bags. Then they sell the bags out of little kiosks, smaller than this room and circular, in between the big Russian apartments. There are hundreds of people, each apartment has at least five people. Every day the women sell out. They can’t keep up with all the orders. They’re really doing well.

Now they need another oven or two. It costs about $200 for an ovenIt doesn’t make sense for us to ship an oven from here. We’ll buy the oven there. We’ll help them train more women how to do the bakery and to keep expanding on that.

So far we lent $500 to four women in January. Harmony Karp, who got her masters in micro-finance helped us with this. She said “ in third world countries, if you have a group of women, and one woman’s family gets sick or something happens, the rest of them can hold up the whole project and keep it going and then when she’s ready to lace back in, she’s still part of the whole thing.” She helped set up a very rudimentary system. And Bolor Smith [board member from Mongolia] helped us write out a very rudimentary kind of loan application. It gave me a different look at sustainability because they can get all of what they need there and then sell it there. That’s so much better on all fronts. And it’s so reproducible, every couple of blocks you can have another bakery. 

We’re also working on a documentary. Last year we filmed the Reindeer people in Lake Hovsgol, and this year we did Arhungai which is the dairy country. Next year we’re going to do the Eagle People up in Bionoki and then the whole thing will be ready to put together. There are only 40 Eagle People left in the world. They raise eagles until they’re about 10 years old and then they let them go. But they keep them in their house – golden eagles. They feed them and ride their horses with them on their arms. They hunt with them. Up where the Eagle people are it’s more Muslim, which is really interesting for Mongolia, because Mongolia is mostly Buddhist. In the north its closer to Kazakhstan so there’s a lot of Muslims, and a really strong Russian influence. You see totally different patterns in their purses, in their embroidery. There are a lot of camels up there, where there are not a lot of camels where we were in other parts of Mongolia. I only saw two this time and two last time. But up there it’s really prolific with camels. And they hunt all kinds of different animals to eat, with the eagles. They’re not herders as much. It’s much colder. I bought some postcards to study their faces, they look a lot different than some of the other Mongolians.

We met Alexi Kral, the Public Affairs Officer in the U.S. Embassy at Ulaam Baatar. A neat guy. He’s young. He’s probably late 20s – max early 30s. He has such a vision about education for Mongolia, and is working with nonprofits. The nonprofits and governments are starting to work together towards these common causes, which is really exciting. I think the government is starting to figure out that the people in the trenches have a lot worked out that they don’t have to reinvent. It’s easier just to team up. The team approach is fabulous. I love that collaboration. That’s what I think is so exciting. All the egos go to the side and you just collaborate. “What’s going to work the best? How can I make this happen?” And the synergy, when we’re all sharing information and encouraging each other to go on.   When I started being connected with the Rinpoche’s projects three years ago, they were very small, like we are and they were working bit by bit and now they’re growing bigger and bigger all the time, helping more and more people. Every once in a while you can get discouraged because it’s so overwhelming. And the poverty is so vast. But when you see the little ripples that have happened from the little bit that we’ve done, it’s so heartwarming. I just love that it’s accessible there. There’s no sense that Oyan is so important as head of Parliament that she wouldn’t meet with me. She wants to meet with anybody that might be helpful for her country. From a place of heart. She’s got a huge heart. All the people do.

www.soundessenceproject.org