Daily Life in Turkmenbashy's Golden Age (13 page)

The fact that the government had near-complete control over all information available in Turkmenistan and used this control to provide the people with lies and half-truths, created an interesting situation. No source of information was definitive. Books, magazines, newspapers, radio shows, television news, and government officials were all likely to provide bad information. So people were more likely to believe what they heard from neighbors, family members, and acquaintances. Conspiracy theories and rumors were treated as if they were just as valid as government statements and news reports (which may well have been the case). Foreign information sources were also assumed to be unreliable. People figured that if domestic news reports were filled with lies, then foreign news reports must be, too. The result: Aynabat was just as likely to believe her neighbor’s assertion that dog meat had cured her mother’s tuberculosis, as a report from the World Health Organization that found that dog meat would not cure tuberculosis.

My Internet center project was meant, in some small way, to improve this situation. On the Internet, at least, people have some control over the information they consume. They can choose sources they find trustworthy, and they can check one source against another. Despite government restrictions on Internet use, I thought there was a good possibility I would be able to open an Internet center at the Red Crescent office in Abadan for two reasons: the Red Crescent office in Ashgabat had Internet access; and the telephone company, when I had asked, said they’d be glad to provide me with Internet service.

I got Geldy to help me write the proposal for the Internet center. (As part of his new job in Ashgabat, he visited Abadan once or twice a week, so it had turned out, despite my fears, that he hadn’t abandoned me entirely). When I handed Aman the finished proposal, he skipped to the last page – the budget. After shopping around in Ashgabat, I had decided I needed $600 for computers. That amount, I had found, would get me two new desktops that would be fast enough for my purposes. Aman didn’t even know how to use the computer he had in his office. To him, computers were just status symbols, and he wanted as many as possible.

“You need to double the amount you have budgeted for computers,” he told me. “You can’t get a decent computer for $300. I won’t approve this.”

After listening to Aman call me lazy for months, after having him harass me for trying to fix School No. 8’s heating system, after having him blackmail me for office equipment, I was fed up. I had tried to compromise, to get along. I had given him an inch and he was trying to take a mile. I grabbed the proposal from Aman’s hands, crumpled it up, and threw it into the trash.

“I’m not writing any more grants for Red Crescent,” I told him, and stalked out of his office and across the hall to the kitchen. Geldy, who was visiting from Ashgabat, was drinking tea with Vera. I was furious, pacing back and forth in the kitchen.

“I’m quitting,” I told them. “I can’t work for that fat, greedy man anymore. I’m going to ask Peace Corps to move me to a new job.”

Vera got up, walked down the hallway to her office, and shut the door. She didn’t want to get involved. Geldy lit a slim cigarette and put the teapot on to boil.

“Why do you take everything so seriously?” he asked me, smiling. “Don’t let the undertaker make you so angry.”

He made me a cup of coffee and convinced me to call my supervisor at Peace Corps and ask her for help with Aman, instead of asking for a new job. My supervisor was a Turkmen woman named Sachly. She was about 30, elegant, and unflappable. I walked home (since Aman still wouldn’t let me use the office phone – “his” phone), called her, and told her what was going on. She agreed to come out the next day and try to smooth things over. I got back to Red Crescent just in time to catch Aman on his way out of the building, holding his car keys in his right hand. I told him to expect a visit from Sachly the next day. His face turned red and he stepped close to me, so that we were almost chest-to-chest.

“What did you tell her?” he asked.

“That you’re a bad boss,” I said looking down at him. I was easily a head taller.

“Why did you say that?”

“Because you are,” I told him. “You’re a bad boss and you’re greedy.”

He pushed past me, got into his car, slammed the door, and roared away. I went inside, packed up my things, and walked back to my apartment.

***

The winter had been cold, dark, and hard. I felt like I hadn’t seen the sunshine for months. There were dead fish hanging in my bedroom. I’d been thrown out of carpet weaving class and accused of stealing a national secret. I’d spent weeks begging the government to let me heat School No. 8. My boss was trying to blackmail me by refusing to let me do any work unless I bought him office equipment. Why should I keep trying to help these people? I thought. It was their own damn country. Let them rot in it. I stalked home, looking at the ground, ignoring the kids yelling “hello! hello! hello!” at me, considering the pros and cons of taking a marshrutka to Ashgabat and getting on the next plane back to the United States.

My mood soon changed, though. When Olya and Denis came home from the bazaar, arms full of groceries, I told them what had happened with Aman. Olya poured some tea and put a plate of cookies on the table. Denis dealt us each six cards. As we sipped and munched and played, I griped. Olya sympathized, Denis laughed at the absurdity of it all and mocked me for thinking things would turn out differently. Soon, I was laughing, too.

Sachly arrived at Red Crescent at 9 a.m. the next day: slim and attractive, with long black hair and endless patience. Aman welcomed her with a greasy grin and motioned for her to sit down across from him. They talked for a half-hour in Turkmen, which I didn’t understand. Aman would go into long explanations, pointing at me, and raising his voice. Sachly, unmoved, would reply to him soothingly, quietly. In the end, Aman agreed to approve my Internet center proposal (with its original budget) and also a proposal I’d written to paint an anti-smoking mural at the town’s main bus stop. It was as if Sachly had hypnotized him. She declined his offer of a cup of tea, thanked him, got into her spotless white Peace Corps SUV, and disappeared down the road to Ashgabat.

13.

Doubt

Soon, the winter ended and the weather began to warm. Blades of grass – pale and fragile – sprouted from cotton fields and empty lots and blanketed the craggy Kopetdag. Then came the poppies, like scraps of red crepe paper waving over fields of green. Wild pink tulips pushed up out of the mountainsides. Delicate leaves sprouted from the grape vine outside my bedroom window. Tractors grumbled along the roads on their ways to plow fields, to prepare them for planting. The bazaars began to fill with fresh fruits and vegetables. Winter jackets gave way to sweaters.

After Sachly’s visit, since I was no longer grounded by Aman, I went back to work. Although the school-heating project had stalled out, I still had permission from Ovez to teach in the Abadan schools. I gave English classes twice a week at School No. 1. I met with the Quartet weekly at School No. 8. I taught health classes wherever I could. It was good to be busy, to be around kids, who were not yet cynical, corrupt, and broken.

Although my day-to-day work was going well, my bigger projects were going nowhere. I had turned my two Russian language project proposals into English language grant proposals and dropped them off at the American and British embassies. But the American Embassy kept demanding rewrites of my Internet center grant designed to make it as politically inoffensive as possible. And the British Embassy had not made a decision on my health mural project and wasn’t returning my calls.

To take my mind off my frustrations, I organized another mini-camp (a “seminar”) at School No. 8. That, at least, was something I could accomplish. Geldy offered to get money from Red Crescent to help fund the camp. He also promised to teach a health class. When we gathered all 50 kids at the school and began, though, Geldy found an empty classroom, locked himself in it with a cup of coffee and a pack of cigarettes, and refused to do anything. I banged on the door and swore at him for a while, but I didn’t have time to deal with him. Besides, moody, selfish, erratic behavior was nothing new for Geldy. I was used to it. I gave up and found someone else to teach his class.

Geldy told me later he’d never had any intention of teaching. He’d wanted to get involved in the camp because he was deep in debt to the cosmetics company Mary Kay, and the woman who was trying to collect was beginning to scare him. He’d picked up a part-time job selling Mary Kay perfumes, to help pay his bar bills. The problem was, he kept giving away the perfume (to girls he wanted to sleep with), instead of selling it. When I told him about the mini-camp, he saw an opportunity to get himself out of trouble. I told him I needed 2.5 million manat for the camp (about $100). He wrote a grant to Red Crescent for more than twice that amount, gave me the 2.5 million manat I needed, and used the rest to get Mary Kay off his back.

That kind of corruption was common within Red Crescent and probably at other organizations in Turkmenistan, too. There was a system in place meant to keep it in check; anyone who received a grant was required to submit a spending report once their project was complete, including original receipts for everything purchased with the grant money. However, everyone had a friend in a store who was glad – for a small fee or a future favor – to print up a receipt for any amount. It was common practice to inflate grants, skim a little off the top, and buy receipts to make everything balance out on the final report. By doing so, people paid electric bills, funded New Year’s parties, and bought new clothes.

* * *

I was angry at Geldy. He’d used me. But it was hard to blame him. Corruption was a way of life in Turkmenistan at every level. Faced with a corrupt, oppressive, capricious, and marginally legitimate state, people ignored the laws and did whatever they could to get by. True, Geldy’s motives weren’t exactly pure. He didn’t do it to pay for heart medicine for his aging grandmother. He did it so he could maintain his bar-hopping, clothes-shopping lifestyle and pay for his expensive slim cigarettes. Still, how could I expect him to be the only honest man in Turkmenistan?

Although I understood why Geldy had done what he’d done, the whole affair just added to my growing bitterness, anger, and frustration with my situation, in general. At the dinner table, I would go on long rants about the situation while Olya listened sympathetically.

“They invited me to come to Turkmenistan,” I would fume. “They asked me to do this job. But everything I try to do, they shut me down. They would be happier if I just sat in my room and did nothing – but I won’t do that. I didn’t come all the way to Turkmenistan to sit and do nothing.”

I began to wonder why Peace Corps was in Turkmenistan at all. I have never been able to figure it out. American foreign policy in Turkmenistan has always seemed a little bit confused and undirected. When the Soviet Union fell, the U.S.’s first concern was to deal with Russia and Eastern Europe. Relatively little thought was given to Central Asia except to send Peace Corps volunteers there in 1993. Then, in the mid-1990s, Clinton administration officials publicly outlined a policy for the region that focused on economic and political reform, conflict resolution, energy security, and enhancing commercial opportunities for US companies. By the end of the decade, US energy companies were scrambling for opportunities to get in on the production and distribution of Caspian Sea oil and gas and the Clinton administration was doing its best to help them.

Turkmenistan has some of the largest reserves of natural gas in the world. Energy companies tried to find ways to move the gas to major markets. The Clinton administration opposed north-and south-bound pipeline routes, hoping to curb the regional power of Russia (to the north) and Iran (to the south), by reducing their influence over Turkmen gas exports. That left east-and west-bound routes. Unocal considered a route (immortalized in Michael Moore’s movie
Fahrenheit 9/11
) that would have gone southeast through Afghanistan to Pakistan and India. Other companies worked with the Clinton administration on plans for a pipeline underneath the Caspian Sea and across the Caucasus to Turkey. Meanwhile, the Niyazov regime’s atrocious human rights record was more or less forgotten. After a few years of trying to balance financial considerations, logistical realities, US government policy priorities, and Niyazov’s bizarre and capricious behavior, the big energy companies lost interest and more or less withdrew from Turkmenistan.