by Sam Tranum
“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.
During the previous winter’s school-heating debacle, I’d decided that trying to teach basic health classes to kids in Abadan was futile. Their real problem was not a lack of knowledge, but a combination of unemployment and bad government. When I’d taught lessons on tuberculosis the previous winter, for example, I’d found that the kids already knew what they needed to know: they knew what they should do to avoid contracting the disease; they knew the signs and symptoms; they knew that if they caught it, they should go to a hospital and get tested and treated. But it was unclear how much that knowledge would help them.
Niyazov had announced that he was going to close every hospital outside the capital. “If people are ill, they can come to Ashkhabad [sic],” he explained.66 Luckily, he didn’t follow through, but many of the kids I taught would not have gone to the hospital, anyway. Their parents were unemployed, underemployed, or underpaid; they avoided hospitals except in emergencies. I could teach lessons about tuberculosis all I wanted, but — even if the kids learned something new — it wasn’t going to do much to improve the public health situation. Going to Turkmenistan to teach kids basic health lessons was like going to a plane crash with a box of Band-Aids. What people in Abadan needed were more jobs and a new government.
I suspected that the Turkmen government would never get much less oppressive, even if Niyazov were somehow replaced as president. The country’s gas and oil wealth provided a huge incentive for elites to keep tight control of the government. If they allowed the country to become more democratic, they might have to share the profits from gas and oil exports with the people instead of keeping it for themselves. The gas and oil wealth also provided the means for the elite to hold onto power. With it, they could buy supporters and pay the KNB to intimidate opponents, all without having to rely on tax money from their citizens or aid money from the international community. Until Turkmenistan’s gas and oil reserves were depleted, or the West lost its taste for fossil fuels, fundamental change was unlikely. Still, incremental change is always possible – and I had to do something.
I spent a lot of time sitting on that hillside above Abadan, looking out over the countryside, thinking about what I could do that might be more useful than teaching health classes. My options were limited by Peace Corps’ requirement that I stay out of politics and by the KNB’s interference with even my most innocent projects. Neither government wanted me to rock the boat. Gradually, after several visits to that hillside, I pieced together what I came to think of as my Three-Part Plan. I would: 1) try to help people make money in the private sector, to reduce the Niyazov regime’s ability to intimidate people by threatening to blackball them from government work; 2) teach people to use the Internet to make money and to gather and distribute uncensored information; 3) hold classes on critical thinking, democracy, and human rights to get people thinking about alternatives to their current political system.
After sitting on the hillside for a while, plotting, scheming, and catching my breath, I’d get up, stretch a little, wipe the dirt off my butt, and start running back. If I’d left my shirt on the side of the road, I would pick it up along the way. Back at the apartment, I would pick a bunch of grapes from the vine in the garden, pour myself a big glass of cool water from the tap, and sit down at the table with Ana.
“How far did you go?” she’d ask me, taking a drag off her cigarette or a sip from her cup of coffee.
“Out to the mountains again.”
“You’re crazy. It’s bad for your heart to run that far. Why can’t you just go down to the sport center and run a few laps?”
“It’s beautiful out there.”
“What, the garbage and the cotton fields? You’re just going out there to look at those restricted areas. You are a spy, aren’t you?” she would tease me. People often asked me if I was a spy. I wasn’t, but I couldn’t convince them of that. They didn’t believe that I had left a good job in America to come to Turkmenistan and teach kids for $80 a month. They assumed that either I had an ulterior motive or I was nuts.
20.
Picking Cotton
Though Ana was puzzled by my running habit, she was even more puzzled by my attempts to find a way to spend a day picking cotton. The previous autumn, I’d tried and failed. The government required teachers to pick cotton, so I’d pestered the teachers I knew to take me with them. They’d thought I was kidding. They’d been forced to pick cotton all their lives and couldn’t imagine why I would want to do it on purpose. This autumn, I was more successful. The quartet of teachers at School No. 8 had known me for a year and they’d come to realize that I wasn’t kidding, I was just weird. So in mid-September, one of the two Natalyas agreed to take me with her to the fields. I was just curious. Cotton growing was such a big part of life in the country, I wanted to check it out, see what it was all about.
Nearly half the employed population worked in agriculture and half the farm fields in the country were planted with cotton.67 Picked, packed, and shipped across the borders each fall, it was the country’s second most important export after fossil fuel-related products.68 It hadn’t always been that way. For centuries, small amounts of cotton had been grown in Central Asia, but it was gray and coarse and there was little demand for it outside of the region. Then in the late nineteenth century, the American Civil War began and American cotton exports plunged, creating a global shortage. A group of Moscow merchants, afraid the shortage would hurt their businesses, asked the tsar to help them find a new source of cotton. The ruler’s desire to plant cotton in sunny Central Asia was one of the reasons for the Russian conquest of Turkmenistan. The Russians replaced the local variety with better quality American “upland” cotton. As World War I approached, the Russian empire – thanks to Central Asia – had become one of the world’s leading cotton producers.69
This might have been good for Russia, but it was bad for Central Asia. As more land was set aside to grow cotton, less was available for growing food. Orchards were uprooted and wheat fields converted. Turkmenistan became increasingly dependent on Russia as a market for cotton and a supplier of food. So, when World War I and the Russian Revolution struck in quick succession, Turkmenistan sank into poverty and famine. In addition to ending Turkmenistan’s food independence, cotton monoculture also sucked up prodigious amounts of water and degraded the soil. Nevertheless, as soon as they had consolidated their control, the Soviets moved to expand cotton production, aiming to end the USSR’s need to import cotton.70
After the fall of the Soviet Union, Niyazov continued to demand that Turkmen farmers grow cotton and the new nation produced more cotton per capita than any other country in the world.71 He also started building textile mills. Rather than sending their raw cotton to Russia for processing, Turkmen farmers began to send it to these new, local textile factories, which produced clothing for Western companies.
One of these factor
ies, which made jeans, was near Abadan. Young women who worked there sometimes ended up in Abadan’s hospital, coughing up blue goop. I visited a few and offered to get them masks to wear over their mouths while they worked. They refused, saying they were scared their boss would fire them for wearing the masks.
The keys to Turkmenistan’s cotton industry are an extensive irrigation system, an abundant supply of sunshine, and cheap labor. For years, Niyazov’s government forced teachers and students to skip classes for several weeks each autumn to pick cotton. This meant that students spent an average of only 150 days a year in school, well below the international standard of 180 days a year.72
Under pressure from the international community, Niyazov had publicly denounced child labor. Even after he banned it in 2002, though, his government “strongly encouraged children to help in the cotton harvest; families of children who did not help could experience harassment by the government,” according to the US Department of State.73 When this “encouragement” didn’t provide enough labor, traffic police reportedly took to stopping motorists, demanding they pay impossibly high fines, and then – when they couldn’t pay – suspending their licenses until they spent 10 days in the cotton fields.74
