Daily Life in Turkmenbashy's Golden Age

by Sam Tranum

  One Saturday, Shokhrat convinced Aman to give him a morning off and took me to the new art museum in Ashgabat. He’d heard it had a real Rembrandt. The museum was built from white marble and reflective glass and topped by a turquoise and white dome – it was part of Niyazov’s new Ashgabat city center. There were no other visitors, but the museum didn’t feel empty because there were two docents loitering in every gallery.

  I liked the modern Turkmen art on the first floor the best. The paintings’ colors were bright, their lines strong, their subjects historical, and their tone martial. One showed a Turkmen mother in a koynek leading two strapping Turkmen lads into a Soviet recruiting office, to sign them up to go fight the Germans in World War II. Another showed the doomed Akhal Teke soldiers making their stand against the Russians at Geokdepe. There was also a painting of a company of Turkmen cavalrymen in full armor slaughtering Christians during the First Crusade.

  Shokhrat wasn’t interested in the first floor. He spent his morning with the European art on the second floor, wandering through the galleries, hands in his pockets, pausing in front of the pieces he liked. I joined him for a little while. The European works in the museum were nothing special. Most were attributed to “Unknown Artist.” Plaques next to the paintings offered descriptions in English, which were riddled with mistakes. A painting that showed a ship going down in a storm, for example, was labeled “Sheep Wheck.” I later pointed out these mistakes to the museum staff and offered to help correct them. They said they’d call me but never did. They probably decided that there was no need, since there were no translation errors in Niyazov’s Golden Age.

  After our visit to the museum, Shokhrat and I spent three weeks painting the billboard. We worked from a design I’d drawn up months earlier and submitted to Aman, Abadan city hall, and the British Embassy. I’d chosen an anti-smoking theme because smoking was a widespread public health problem in Turkmenistan, but also for strategic reasons. In 1999, Niyazov had banned smoking in public “in name of the health of the nation.” Violators were to be fined a month’s salary.61 This meant that smokers had to hide behind buildings and bushes so the police wouldn’t catch them. It also meant that an anti-smoking project was likely to be approved. Geldy helped me insert a paragraph into my proposal about how the billboard would support the wise policies of “the Great Turkmenbashy” and, sure enough, I got permission.

  The design showed a clean-cut Turkmen man stepping on an oversized pack of cigarettes. He was carrying a bag of groceries in one hand and a bag of clothing in the other. Turkmen text across the top of the billboard said: “Smoking a pack a day for a year will cost you 2,190,000 manat [about $88]. Don’t you have better things to spend your money on?” More text across the bottom explained the health risks. Then, in big red letters in the middle, it said “Quit!” Shokhrat painted the man; I was in charge of the pack of cigarettes and the text. Some of the Red Crescent volunteers helped us with the background.

  When we finished, Aman called city hall and told the mayor that the billboard was ready to be hung at the bus stop. Weeks passed and nothing happened so Aman called city hall again. This time the mayor said he needed to see the billboard – not a design, the actual billboard – before he could authorize city workers to hang it anywhere. So I tracked down my friend Omar, who managed landscaping crews for the city, and he assigned some of his men to help me. Eight of us carried the giant steel slab across town, sweating and cursing, and up the stairs to the second floor of city hall. We left it in the hallway outside the mayor’s office.

  Within a few days, it was hanging at the bus stop. Every morning, old Turkmen women in koyneks, young soldiers in fatigues, business men in suits, and children in their school uniforms, stood and stared at the billboard as they waited for their buses. There was nothing else like it in Abadan. My host family and friends congratulated me for finally managing to get something done. I made Geldy – who had insisted that the mayor would never, ever, hang the billboard – buy me a beer.

  17.

  This Is Not a Camp

  I am a slow learner. When I applied for permission to run a five-day event in Abadan after school ended, I called it a “camp.” I’d forgotten what Ovez had taught me: to avoid trouble, call it a “seminar,” an “event,” an anything – just not a camp. Being a plainspoken person, when I wrote a proposal for a week-long day-camp, I called it a week-long day-camp. Since I planned to invite 50 kids to meet me at the sports center every day to play soccer, volleyball, Frisbee, and kickball and then sit through short seminars on why it’s good to play sports and eat well and how not to get AIDS or tuberculosis, I called it a sports/health camp. At first, my indiscretion seemed to go unnoticed.

  I found 50 campers who wanted to attend. I also found funding. The costs were pretty low because the sport center’s director had agreed to waive the entrance fee for our campers. Mostly, I just needed to pay for lunch for the campers and counselors every day. Geldy had managed to get a grant from Red Crescent Ashgabat because he worked in the AIDS program and the camp had something to do with AIDS education (I think he skimmed some money off the top to buy some new clothes). I contributed some money I’d earned from an article I’d written for an American newspaper about living in Turkmenistan.

  Geldy, smooth talker that he was, took responsibility for getting permission for the camp from Abadan city hall. I was in charge of the Peace Corps-related paperwork. We both failed. Geldy didn’t meet any resistance at city hall. He just couldn’t get an answer. I got an answer, but it wasn’t a good one. Two weeks before camp was supposed to start, someone at Peace Corps must have decided that it was too easy for Volunteers in Turkmenistan to run summer camps. So he or she started requiring signed permission slips from all campers’ parents and signed “memorandums of understanding” from each organization involved with a camp. The parental permission slips were no problem, but there was no way I was going to get officials from Red Crescent, Abadan city hall, and the sport center to all sign memorandums of understanding within two weeks. At best, it would take months of meetings, pleading, and frustration. More likely, they’d just refuse.

  When I took a marshrutka to Ashgabat to tell my supervisors at Peace Corps that I was canceling my camp, I got an unexpectedly pragmatic and useful response from a friend there. He reminded me of the lesson Ovez had taught me.

  “Sure,” he said. “Cancel your camp. It sounds like a good event, though.”

  He winked.

  The campers had already registered. We had the funding in hand and the venue reserved. Several other Peace Corps Volunteers had already made plans to travel to Abadan to work as counselors. So we decided to go ahead with it, even without permission. We figured that the worst thing that could happen was that the kids would get one good day at camp and then Peace Corps or city hall would catch on and shut us down. And one day was better than no days. So I continued with the preparations, making only one small concession to the American and Turkmen bureaucratic grinches. I’d been planning to divide the campers into four teams, which would compete for points on the sports fields and in the seminars throughout the week. I’d bought black, white, orange, and gray t-shirts to identify the teams. Now I took the shirts to a screen printer and had the words “This is Not a Camp,” emblazoned in English across the front of each one.

  This clever camouflage must have worked. A reporter and photographer from the state-run newspaper Nitranyii Turkmenistan came to do a story about the camp. The reporter interviewed me. The photographer separated the Turkmen girls in their ankle-length koyneks from the Russian girls wearing mini-skirts with g-strings showing above their waistlines. Then he spent an hour posing the Turkmen girls with some Turkmen boys so that they all looked like they were in mid-soccer game. In the end, the paper ran a snapshot I’d taken of the campers grinning in their “This is Not a Camp” t-shirts. I was sure someone at city hall would see the paper and catch on, but nothing happened. Then some of the staff from Peace Corps visited the camp. I was sure som
eone was going to ask for my memorandums of understanding, but nothing happened.

  In fact, the camp went smoothly. Each morning, we met at the sport center and spent a few hours playing under the burning sun, in the 105-degree heat. When I was planning the camp, I’d forgotten to take the weather into account. Geldy had helped me with the planning but he didn’t play sports. He’d assumed that anyone who was crazy enough to run around in circles for no reason would be just as happy doing it under the summer sun as at any other time. We all drank water by the liter and looked forward to our turns on the indoor volleyball court. Geldy sat in the shade chain-smoking, watching us sweat.

  There was only one hitch during the whole camp. The campers were dominating the sport center every day. They used the volleyball court, the soccer field, and the two paved parking lots (for Frisbee and kickball). On the third day of camp, a fat Turkmen man with a three-day beard and a whistle around his neck pulled me aside. He looked like a coach, but he didn’t introduce himself.

  “You’ve used the sport center long enough,” he said. “My team needs it. It’s time for you to go.”

  I had no idea who he was. He could have been the coach of the Turkmen Olympic soccer team. All I knew was that he was rude and he wasn’t the director of the sport center. So I decided to bluff him.

  “Okay,” I said. “I’d be glad to get out of your way. I just need the proper paperwork. You know how it is. You bring me your letter of permission to use the sport center and it’s all yours.”

  He never came back.

  * * *

  After my sports camp was over, I packed my things and hit the road. I’d agreed to travel up to the northeastern city of Turkmenabat to work as a counselor at my friend Leo’s English immersion camp. I’d also signed up to be a counselor at a Model United Nations camp at Chuli. After living at those overnight camps for about a month, I was planning to return to Abadan and spend a week commuting to an arts day-camp in a village near Ashgabat.

  The first stretch was an eight-hour ride from Abadan to Turkmenabat. The taxi that took me from Ashgabat to Mary was not air-conditioned. The driver had lied to me, to all of us – there were four passengers packed into the little Lada. As we bumped along the by-now-familiar road through Anew, Dushak, Kahka, and Tejen, I sweated and dozed in the heat. It was 110 degrees out. Children sold cold drinks at checkpoints: water, soda, and chal, a mixture of camel’s milk yogurt and soda water, which is sour and refreshing. I drank bottle after bottle of water. I felt sorry for the poor conscripts standing at the checkpoints in the burning heat. I kept my eye out for Denis.

  In Mary, I changed taxis. This time I chose a roomy Toyota and made the driver prove to me that the air conditioner worked before we left the city. We rode north through the Karakum. It was remote country. For three and a half hours I saw almost nothing outside my window except for rolling sand dunes dotted with saksaul and camel thorn. The desert was pristine and beautiful, the sand fine and soft. I watched it slide by my window, wishing we could stop so I could get out and go for a walk. It looked so quiet, so peaceful, I thought.

  When we reached Turkmenabat, I found that it was a ribbon of a city hugging the south bank of the Amudarya River. In length and character, the river was a lot like the Mississippi. It was capricious, though. It had always flowed northwest out of the Hindukush, past Turkmenabat, to the Khoresmian oasis, near the present day city of Dashagouz. Its course from there varied over the centuries. Sometimes it flowed north to the Aral Sea, providing that salty pool with the majority of its water. Other times, it turned southwest, leaving the Aral thirsty, filling a huge lake called Sarykamysh, and spilling over into a channel that led to the Caspian.62

  When the Spanish ambassador Ruy Gonzalez de Clavijo visited the area in 1405 A.D., the river flowed into the Caspian and had done so for quite some time.63 By the time Anthony Jenkinson, an English traveler, visited the area in 1558 A.D., the river had changed its mind and turned back toward the Aral Sea.64 It may have been the natural wanderlust of a mighty river cutting a course through nothing more constraining than loose sand that caused it to turn south in the 14th Century and head back north in the 16th Century. It is also possible that when Chinggis Khan conquered Khoresm in the 13th Century, his army’s destruction of its dams and irrigation systems convinced the river to abandon the Aral for the Caspian and that the reconstruction of the waterworks corrected the river’s course.

  The city itself was once a stop on the Silk Road. The 10th-Century Arab geographer Mohammed Abul-Kassem ibn Hawqal called it “a fertile and pleasant little town, of great importance by reason of constant passage of caravans.”65 It used to be called Amul, but after the Mongols destroyed it, it was rebuilt as Charjou. By the time I arrived, Niyazov had changed its name to Turkmenabat and it was just another provincial capital, just another Soviet-era, pre-fab concrete city.

  The camp was held in a three-story brick boarding school in the middle of the city. It had been built in the 1970s and had aged well. It was shabby but clean. There were classrooms on the first floor and bunkrooms on the second and third floors. A high brick wall separated the school, some sports fields, and a dining hall from the surrounding neighborhoods. The 80 or so campers were divided into “cabins” named after American states. I was assigned to the Alabama cabin, along with an Alabaman Volunteer named Mike. We gave our kids temporary “camp names” related to their adoptive state (Martin Luther King Jr., Redneck, Blackeyed Pea, etc.) and taught them Alabama history and geography.

  We woke our Alabamans each morning at 7 a.m. and drove them in a sleepy herd downstairs to join all the other campers at the morning assembly. Then they spent their mornings and early afternoons rotating through a series of classes: journalism, English, etiquette, yoga – whatever the counselors wanted to teach and the kids wanted to learn. The late afternoon, when the sun had cooled a little, was time for sports. In the evenings, the Volunteers organized elaborate group activities. Lights out was at 10 p.m.

  The group activities were probably the most popular: a scavenger hunt, a quiz show, a live version of the reality TV show Survivor. My favorite was the carnival. We set up a midway on tables set up on a paved yard behind the school. Counselors wore costumes. I helped run a watermelon seed spitting contest from behind a table stacked with piles of sticky green and pink melon rinds. A group of girls ran a “kiss-o-gram” service, carrying pecks on the cheek (with plenty of red lipstick) from admirers to admirees.

  During the days, I taught classes. In my journalism class, I staged a fake murder and had my students write articles about it. I picked one boy to pretend to be a celebrity he knew everything about (he chose Eminem) and had him sit in a creaky chair for a half-hour while the other students pelted him in questions so they could write profiles. At the end of the course, we used giant sheets of paper and magic markers to publish a single newspaper, which we hung in the hallway for the whole camp to read.

  I also taught a class about the American political system. In the section on participation in government, I had the kids brainstorm about what they’d like to change about their camp. They decided that they wanted a later bedtime. I had them collect campers’ signatures on a petition and present it to Leo, one of the camp’s directors. Leo, who had a slightly cruel sense of humor, told them to stop disrupting classes by gathering signatures or he’d throw them out of camp. They were terrified. On the last day of camp, though, he pushed bedtime back to 11 p.m.

  Keeping one step ahead of 80 teenagers every day for two weeks was exhausting. We had to be up a little bit earlier than them every morning, wake them up, make sure they were doing what they were supposed to be doing all day long, send them to bed, and make sure they didn’t sneak out in the middle of the night. They were teenagers, after all. Turn your back on them for a moment and they’d be climbing in each other’s windows carrying bottles of vodka. If the day-to-day work of running the camp weren’t enough, we had to cope with two mutinies, an epidemic, and an earthquake, too.

&n
bsp; The first mutiny came early in the camp. In addition to Peace Corps Volunteers, there were local teachers working as counselors. (Helping to run the Alabama cabin with Mike and I, for example, was a 35-year-old English teacher named Berdi, who was obsessed with Dire Straits front man Mark Knopfler). One of them had apparently come to the camp just to get some time off from work and away from home. She refused to do anything useful, so the camp directors, who were Peace Corps Volunteers, told her to go home. Some of her colleagues were indignant when they found out. They brought it up at a counselors’ meeting after the campers had gone to bed one night.

  “You give us all this big talk about democracy and then you didn’t consult us when you kicked her out,” one said.

  “This is not a democracy,” Leo replied. I couldn’t tell if he meant the camp or Turkmenistan.

  A couple of the angry teachers left the camp the next day in protest. We distributed the extra work and went on without them.

  We had another rebellion when a well-liked but unruly Jewish kid with the camp name “Redneck” got sent home for repeatedly breaking the rule against speaking Russian (it was an English immersion camp, after all). Other campers made posters to protest the decision: “Counselors, Human Rights, One [More] Chance for Red Neck! [signed] From All Campers.” Teaching civil disobedience has its downside.

  The epidemic struck at night. I woke to find Black Eyed Pea leaving the cabin and most of the other campers already gone.

  “Where are they all?” I asked him.

  “In the bathroom,” he said, rushing out the door.

  I looked out my third-floor window at the whitewashed outhouse building behind the school. There were kids lined up five and six deep for a turn on the squatters. The boys’ lines moved much more quickly and several times I saw a girl who just couldn’t wait anymore run around to the boys’ side and push her way to the front of the line and into one of the stalls. Most of the camp had food poisoning. I was up for hours, forcing kids to drink water and re-hydration solution.