Daily Life in Turkmenbashy's Golden Age (19 page)

She told me stories about working in the carpet factory in the Soviet days, when all the mechanical looms were up and running and the factory floor was packed with 1,800 people. (When she took me to visit the factory, there were only a few dozen employees and a handful of looms working; the rest of the shop floor was dark and covered in dust). She told me how her father had come to Turkmenistan from Georgia after the 1948 earthquake with a construction crew assigned to help rebuild Ashgabat and had never left. She told me about the men she knew in town who had been on one of the many teams sent from across the Soviet Union to help clean up the mess in Chernobyl, Ukraine, after the nuclear reactor there melted down in 1986, and how some had came back sterile and others had later had deformed babies.

She was a great storyteller, animated and ironic. I loved listening to her, but at first, before I had built up my endurance, she gave me a headache. My brain just couldn’t handle three-and four-hour stretches of conversation in Russian. I’d plead fatigue and try to go hide in my room and read, but Ana would just follow me and keep talking. Eventually, I learned to be direct. “Ana,” I’d tell her. “You’re hurting my head. Stop talking to me for a while.” She would turn to Sesili or whoever else was in the apartment and continue her story without missing a breath.

***

With the summer ending and my summer camps over, it was time for met to get back to work at Red Crescent. The weather had cooled a little and the sun had lost its burning edge. The temperatures were still in the 90s, but when I was outside I no longer felt like the sun was boring a hole in the top of my head. At the back of the bazaar, old men sat on carpets in the shade and played chess or backgammon or checkers. The gardens outside my new apartment building were lush and full. Crinkly orange squash flowers bloomed, heavy purple-black eggplants gleamed, red peppers ripened, bees swarmed around bunches of grapes. I could see why Olya had been so enchanted by Turkmenistan when she had visited from Siberia back in the 1960s. In late summer, at least, it really was a land of plenty.

At Red Crescent, nothing had changed. When I arrived one morning at 8 a.m., I found Aman lounging at his desk, reading his newspaper. He grunted a greeting at me and told me I needed to write a new work plan. Vera, Aynabat, and Shokhrat, who were sitting in the kitchen drinking tea, asked me about my summer travels. We sat and chatted for a while and then they went back to work. It took me a few days to get my bearings. I visited Geldy in Ashgabat and Ovez at the school district headquarters. I made some phone calls to embassies and nongovernmental organizations to check on my various pending grant applications. Eventually, I got an idea of what my fall was going to look like. There was some bad news and there was some good news.

The bad news was that, with the school-heating project dead, Ovez had rescinded my permission to teach at the schools. That meant I had very little to do. I couldn’t resume my English classes at School No. 1, my weekly meetings with the Quartet, or my health classes. The good news was that it looked like I might soon have something else to occupy my time. Before I’d hit the road for camp season, the American Embassy had approved the grant I’d written with Geldy to fund an Internet center at Red Crescent in Abadan. I’d submitted the grant and the letter of approval to the Ministry of Justice. Now the ministry had approved the project and it was time to pick up the money and get to work.

I met Geldy at his Red Crescent office in Ashgabat one afternoon and we went to the American Embassy to pick up the cash. The building was fenced in and guarded by irritable men who were always blowing whistles at loitering pedestrians and lingering drivers. It was not a welcoming place. The first time Geldy and I had gone to meet with the grants officer, she’d greeted us in the guardhouse, next to the metal detector, and refused to allow Geldy into the building. A bulletin board on the outside of the fence informed passersby that American embassies in Central Asia were targets for terrorism and that, therefore, standing near one put the reader at risk. This time, though, they allowed us inside. We passed through security, entered the building, and picked up $2,050 in cash. As we left the building, Geldy handed it to me.

“Hold onto this. You know me, I’d just spend it,” he said. “I’d go to Thailand for vacation or something. And then I’d have to fake the grant report and you’d be angry at me and I’d feel bad.”

We both knew he was right. I pocketed the money.

To spend it, I had to change it into manat, so I did what Peace Corps Volunteers typically did when they had large amounts of dollars they needed to change (amounts too large for the bazaar ladies): I called George. He met me outside the Peace Corps office in a nice new Toyota sedan. He was a middle-aged guy with a mask of dark stubble, wearing an earplug in one ear, which was attached to a cell phone in a hip holster. He had a leather briefcase on his lap. He looked straight out the windshield as he spoke.

“How much do you want to change?” he asked.

“Two thousand,” I said, a little nervous. “And fifty … two thousand and fifty.”

He clicked open his briefcase and looked at the stacked bundles of 10,000-manat bills inside. Although 10,000-manat bills were the largest denomination available, they were only worth about 40 cents each.

“We’re gonna have to go to the trunk,” he said.

We got out and walked around behind the car. George popped the trunk. Inside were bundles of 10,000-manat bills stacked like firewood. He grabbed handfuls of the bundles, counting them as he dropped them into the bag I’d brought along. When he was done, we shook hands and I walked away with a grocery bag that looked like it was stuffed with a jumbo-sized bag of tortilla chips. I took it home and hid it under my desk, knowing it was a bad idea to keep that much money in the house. After all, my previous host family had robbed me.

I didn’t have many choices, though. There were safes available at the Peace Corps office, but they were meant for short-term use only. I didn’t know how long it would take me to spend the grant money, but it would probably be months. And I couldn’t take the money to a bank, since banks were completely unreliable.

Peace Corps wired my salary to the bank in Abadan every month and picking it up was often a hassle. Sometimes the bank was closed for no apparent reason. Other times the teller asked me to come back on another day because the bank was “out of money.” Since I was a foreigner, my withdrawals required the bank manager’s approval and, once, he had flatly refused to release my money. I returned every day for a week to try again, but the guard at the barred front entrance refused to let me in. Finally, I ran out of cash and just got fed up. I stood outside the door, holding onto the bars and yelling for the manager to come down and give me my money – which he did. All that was over $80; I wasn’t about to entrust the bank with $2,050. So I left it under my desk.

The first thing I had to do was fix up the Red Crescent “youth center,” which Aman had agreed to let me use for my Internet center. It was a three-room basement apartment in an anonymous concrete apartment building across the street from the main Red Crescent office, where I usually worked. It had no windows, no paint, no furniture, no heat, no air conditioning, and no lights. All it had was a strong smell of sewage, which emanated from a pipe in a hole in the concrete floor.

Aman had twice received funds from Red Crescent in Ashgabat to renovate the apartment so the youth volunteers who were always breakdancing and gossiping in the main office could use it, instead. Each time, he had pocketed the cash and sent a report to Ashgabat about all the wonderful progress he’d made and how much the youth volunteers appreciated it. Once, a monitoring team had come to see the results. Aman claimed to have forgotten the key to the youth center at home. They never returned.

Geldy and I drew up a plan for the renovations. We would install two new locks on the front door. Inside, the first two rooms would become a real youth center. We would fix the lights, paint the walls, hang some pictures, and put in some furniture. The third room would be the Internet center. It would have a separate door, with a separate lock. We would install two computers, each with its own desk and chair. The phone company, Turkmen Telecom, promised to install Internet service as soon as we bought the computers and connected them to phone lines.

Geldy would handle the accounting, paperwork, permits, and applications. I would teach the classes on how to use computers and the Internet. Together, we would start a debate league for teenagers. The kids would use the Internet to research the debate topics, which would improve their Internet research skills, their ability to critically consume information, their public speaking skills, and their knowledge of a variety of subjects. It was going to be.

19.

My Three-Part Plan

In the United States it would have taken me a week to put together an Internet center. One day driving around strip malls, shopping at hardware, electronics and second-hand furniture stores, and I would have had all the materials I needed. A few minutes with a telephone and the yellow pages and I could have arranged everything with a locksmith, a carpenter, the phone company, and an Internet service provider. But with no phone, no car, no yellow pages, and a first-grader’s grasp of the local language, shopping was a challenge. It took me weeks to arrange everything, little by little, step by frustrating step.

I spent my mornings at Red Crescent or running errands for the Internet center. I spent my afternoons at home. Although I’d planned to live with the Burjanadzes for only a couple weeks while I looked for someplace permanent, we’d gotten along so well that they’d invited me to stay. One of my household chores was to bring home a loaf of fresh
chorek
every day for dinner. As summer ended and fall began, this became difficult because of a flour shortage, which brought high prices, long lines, and empty shelves at the bakeries. So after work, I would go from bakery to bakery, searching for bread.

At home, I’d hide the bread in a giant Tupperware so the cats couldn’t eat it (they loved fresh
chorek
) and sit down for a cup of coffee with Ana. Once the sun was low and the day’s heat had passed, I would change into my sweatpants, lace up my shoes and go running. The neighbor kids, who were always playing soccer in the street, would abandon their game and follow me, pelting me with questions as we ran.

“Do you have PlayStation in America? How much does it cost to play for an hour?”

“Do Snickers bars have more peanuts in America?”

“Why can’t you speak Russian right?”

“Have you ever seen a black person?”

“Do you own a car? What kind is it? How much did it cost?”

“Where are you going?”

At the edge of town, only a few blocks from Ana’s apartment building, they would usually turn back. I would continue on through a wasteland of sterile soil, crushed concrete, twisted bits of rebar, and piles of garbage. It was as if a whole concrete neighborhood had been demolished and the remains had been run over with a giant steamroller again and again until they were nothing but gravel.

Further on, the farm fields began. The cotton was ready: white puffs dripping from green bushes. There were no fences, hedgerows, or trees to divide the fields. The cotton stretched unbroken to the horizons. I ran on dirt roads, leaping irrigation ditches and dodging the occasional tractor. To my left, a sign on a barbed-wire fence warned: “Restricted Area.” A series of empty guard towers watched over what looked to me like just more farm fields. On hot days, I’d take off my shirt and drop it next to the road. I knew no one was going to steal it.

It usually took me 45 minutes to reach the base of the mountains. There were a half-dozen low blockhouses there, with rusty steel doors and no windows. The barbed wire surrounding them was slack and tangled and rusty, the guard towers vacant and rotting. The complex had once been an arsenal, I’d been told. It looked like it had been abandoned but I stayed away anyway – better not to be seen snooping around old Soviet military installations.

I would follow a path that turned right, skirted the arsenal, and climbed up into the dusty, treeless hills. Even this path was not entirely innocent, though. It kept its distance from the blockhouses and barbed wire, but snuck right up close to a group of bunkers dug into the hillsides. They were arched like Quonset huts and made from concrete, of course (the Soviets had apparently disdained all other building materials as bourgeois). Their doors were big enough to drive trucks through. Inside, there was only the usual debris found in hidden places at the edges of towns all over the world: empty liquor bottles, used condoms, and the remains of campfires.

On the hillside above the bunkers, I’d sit in the dirt and sweat and try to catch my breath. The countryside stretched out below me, forbidding and desolate. There were no shady forests or rushing streams. There were no meadows or ponds. There was just the strip of irrigated cotton fields and towns at the foot of the mountains and beyond that, open desert. Abadan was a clutch of dreary miniature buildings surrounding the red-and-white striped smokestacks of the electrical plant. It was so threatening and overwhelming when I was down there in it. From up on the mountainside, though, it looked fragile – a huddled settlement of crumbly concrete and dusty roads, dwarfed by the enormous emptiness of the landscape. It was easier to think up there on the hillside where I didn’t feel so outnumbered, so crowded, so followed, so watched.