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Editor's note: Jim Jewell of Rooftop MediaWorks wrote this article to promote the ministry of LifeQwest, a Houston-based ministry that works in Mongolia.

As a huge red-ball sun sets through the brown haze, the frozen Mongolian capital of Ulaanbaatar, a sprawling city ringed by the majestic, snow-covered Hentiyn Mountains, prepares for another winter night. Many of the nearly 1 million people crowd into crumbling Soviet-era apartment buildings, heated by two immense underground power plants that belch smoke into the valley. Others huddle into hovels that climb the hills on the outskirts of the city, burning coal and wood fires to ward off nighttime temperatures that will sink to 30 degrees Fahrenheit below zero.

As dusk turns to darkness, boys throw themselves on passing trash lorries. They get first dibs on the new booty—metal, glass bottles, cans, and anything else that can be resold—at the dump. The garbage trucks race up a winding, gutted dirt road through neighborhoods of small, dilapidated homes barely visible through the smoky air. At the top of the hill is an apocalyptic vision of street urchins huddling around open fires, sorting through trash heaps strewn across a barren landscape.

Even with the temperature descending from frigid to glacial, the children are not bundled as Western visitors are—in polar jackets, thermal underwear, fur-lined boots, and Thinsulate gloves. The kids have only an extra layer of ragged clothing, or, at best, a light winter coat and thin gloves. Some have tennis shoes. A police officer tells the children how they can escape the cold at the child identification center. Members of a church group invite one of the boys to dinner, but he refuses, for unknown reasons.

When the temperature drops to unbearable levels, the underground system of hot-water pipes provides a subterranean labyrinth of survival throughout the frozen city. After 10 p.m., a former street kid led our group to several underground pipe junctions where children spend the night. In one, eight children—seven boys and one girl—were tucked into openings and crevices over, under, and around the huge water pipes. After spending the day in the open markets, it is at least a warm place to sleep. But the stench of sewage fills your nostrils and clings to your clothes. The children—some wearing dirty Nike swooshes—tuck their filthy hair under stocking caps.

"A decade ago, homeless children were virtually unknown in Mongolia," says Dean Hirsch, president of World Vision International, which has numerous programs in the country. "The minimal safety net of the Communist state unraveled after 1990, as the nation moved to a market economy."

For thousands of abandoned Mongolian children, the struggle is intense. The jobless rate is 20 percent and the average annual income per person is $390. Stop and look into the stairwells, sewers, and open markets and you will see them. There are an estimated 3,000 children living on the streets here, the victims of an economy in crisis and a society adrift. Following centuries of nomadic existence and 70 years of Soviet atheism, brutality, and neglect, Mongolia is in search of its soul.

As Mongolia lurched from the dreary certainties of communism to the risks of capitalism in the early 1990s, its children suffered. As government subsidies dried up, the "vodka culture" left by the Soviets kicked in—increasing domestic violence amid the country's array of social ills.

With the barely visible social-service structure unable to provide much help to street kids, expatriate Christian organizations and the fledgling national church started programs in the major cities.

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January 2005, Vol. 49, No. 1