The information in this article was drawn from the important and awesome work of some of my colleagues during ACMS fieldcourse. Shout out to Zaya, Batoo and Orchilon for their drive!
Women’s experience of migration from rural to urban areas proves to be particularly challenging in ways that differ from men’s experience of migration.
In the interviewees’ experiences, the decision to migrate was taken primary by the husband and his relatives, including the husband’s sister. Women’s daily activities in rural areas include caring for livestock, caring for the family, and caring for relatives. D’s* family had migrated three times, initially going to care for her husband’s parents who were ill and old. At that time, she was pregnant and ten of them lived all together in a ger with her in laws and the relatives’ kids. For her, it meant that the income was spent on her husband’s parent’s medication and very little money was left for family living. Even if she was pregnant at the time, she had little time to access the health services needed.
D’s* experience of migration highlights the particular gendered challenges that come with the decision of moving. The challenges that women faced throughout the process of migration can be divided in four stages: during the migration, initially after settling down, short-term and long-term. When speaking of the migration process, one of our interviewees mentioned that the moving process took about 20 days: they were moving their herd as well as their belongings. Apart from helping with the migration process, women are expected to care for children and cook – two tasks that our interviewee described has hard to perform when moving. Moreover, money was running short both during and after the move, which limited her capacity to care for children. After initially settling down, one of our interviewees mentioned that it “felt like someone else’s place” and that her family “felt like outsiders”. Other initial challenges include little access to information, lack of support and lack of access to social services. On the short-term, registering children in school proved to be difficult. On the long-term, women continue to experience difficulties even after moving to an area in the hopes of improving their living conditions. Some of these difficulties include accessing adequate health care & fighting the isolation that comes with living in a new area.
PASSEGGIO 