Daily Life in Turkmenbashy's Golden Age

by Sam Tranum

  Though I still wasn’t allowed in the local schools, I now had my own classroom. The Internet center didn’t have Internet, but at least it was a clean, quiet, well-lit room with a conference table and chairs. One day, browsing through a thin book that a Peace Corps Volunteer named Ray had published, the result of a poetry club he’d organized for in Ashgabat his English students, I found a poem about a zoo by a student named Trina Asadi: “Observe the effect of captivity/ In the sad eyes of a hawk and an owl/ In the timid faces of a fox and a jackal/ In the sorrowful groan of a lion and a bear/ You cannot make them happy in a golden cage/ They live and die for freedom/ So value their free nature and their freedom/ Look at the always chewing mouth of a camel and a goat/ And avoid living just to chew.” I decided to start my own poetry club and publish a second volume of Turkmen students’ English language poetry.

  I rarely read poetry and never wrote it, but I didn’t see that as an obstacle. Ray had published a handbook on how to start poetry clubs for English students. With a copy in hand, I convinced my friend Sasha, an Abadan girl who had just returned from a year abroad, to help me find some interested students and get started.

  The poetry club usually had only three or four students, young teenagers from School No. 8. We’d sit around the table in the windowless Internet center, the door closed to block out Eminem or Usher or whatever the Red Crescent youth volunteers were playing on the stereo, and work together on cinquains, pantoums, haiku, alphabet poems, and acrostics. The kids struggled to rhyme foreign words, stretched their brains to find synonyms, and often broke into giggling fits at the resulting group poems: “My best friend is my dog/ It barks from day to night/ We call him crazy frog/ He is always in a fight.”

  On days when I wasn’t working with my poetry club or teaching my bosses’ mistress how to use a computer, I taught basic English lessons. My class had three students and when we started, none of them knew more than “hello” and “okay.” We worked slowly, building vocabulary, learning basic grammar. One day we were standing in a circle practicing the words for clothing.

  “Shirt,” I would say, and everyone would point to a shirt. “Dress,” I would say, and everyone would point to a dress. About 10 a.m., Aman swung the door open and beckoned for Shemshat.

  “Ah, here’s a good example,” I said in English, gesturing toward Aman. “He’s wearing a ‘suit,’ a ‘costum.’ Everybody say suit.”

  Aman looked confused for a second and then really, really angry.

  “I’m a suka?” he yelled in Russian, using the word for bitch. “Fuck you, you’re a suka!”

  He stormed out with Shemshat in tow. Everyone else in the room had heard the difference between ‘suit’ and suka. When Aman slammed the door, they looked at each other for a second, stunned. Then they started laughing. Aman didn’t talk to me for a week, even after Aynabat took him aside and explained what had happened.

  ***

  In addition to the classes I was teaching at the youth center, I started teaching classes in Ashgabat. I wanted to put my Three-Part Plan into effect, and figured I’d have a better chance of escaping notice in the big city, where no one knew me, than in Abadan, where I was under surveillance. Also, my plan required Internet access, which was available to English students in Ashgabat but not, of course, in Abadan.

  With help from another Peace Corps Volunteer, I taught classes at Internet centers in Ashgabat on how to use the eBay to sell Turkmen crafts to Western consumers. I gave talks on how to use Web sites to attract tourists and their dollars to home-stays and tours of local attractions. I took a road trip to a tiny village called Yerbent, a few hours into the desert from Ashgabat, and tried to convince the residents that they could make some extra money offering home-stays and camel rides (they thought I was insane and wanted nothing to do with me). I began working with a woman named Mehri, who’d spent a year in high school in the US, to organize a nationwide debate tournament for English students. We wrote a debate team coach’s handbook, used it to teach about a dozen Peace Corps Volunteers how to start debate teams, and then sent them back to their cities and towns to organize teams and start preparing them for the tournament.

  My most successful venture during this period was a class I called “Global Citizenship.” I’d chosen a vague name to avoid attracting unwanted attention. My friend Maral, an overeducated 20-something from Ashgabat, agreed to help me teach it. Few students signed up, probably because they had no idea what the class was going to be about. On the first day, we had only five teenagers.

  We taught our students about democracy in the US and invited them to draw comparisons with Turkmenistan’s system, which Niyazov insisted was also “democracy.” The size of the class tripled. We talked about the importance of participation in civic organizations and local government. We talked about the concept of human rights and about which rights were included in the U.N.’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). I pointed out the passages in the Rukhnama where Niyazov had guaranteed Turkmen citizens many of the rights from the UDHR and suggested they ought to hold him to his promises. Maral taught a session on what the Quran said about women’s rights.

  About half way through the 10-week class, I was at the Peace Corps office checking my mail, when one of my supervisors appeared beside me. She told me she’d heard about my class and reminded me that as a Peace Corps Volunteer, I was supposed to be politically neutral.

  “Your class is exactly the kind of thing that Peace Corps Volunteers can get sent home for,” she warned me. “Be careful.”

  Although I’d long been half-hoping to get thrown out of the country, when the opportunity presented itself, I balked. I tracked down Maral and told her I was going to cancel the class.

  “They’re going to send me back to the States if I don’t,” I told her.

  She looked at me for a long moment.

  “Do you know what could happen to me for teaching that class?” she asked me, and then walked away, leaving me to think about the answer.

  Shamed, I decided to continue the class.

  Even though I wasn’t allowed to teach in the schools, I managed to keep myself busy throughout the fall with my various classes in Abadan and Ashgabat. I was excited and energized in a way I hadn’t been since Ovez had asked me to try to fix School No. 8’s heating system. I felt like I was making myself useful, addressing the real problems that the country was facing (albeit in small ways). I began to feel like I’d outsmarted the government. They had tried to shut me down. They’d probably thought they’d succeeded. But I’d just gone underground.

  ***

  I soon found out, though – yet again – how naïve and arrogant I was. The KNB had, of course, noticed what I was doing. They began to send me messages. First, a KNB man called one afternoon and told Aman to make sure I would be at Red Crescent the next morning. He said he needed to talk to me. I waited all morning in Aman’s office but the man never showed up. So I went on with my classes as usual. That happened twice more.

  Then, one evening about 9:30 p.m., Ana knocked on my door to tell me someone had come to see me. I’d been lying in bed in my plaid pajama pants and a t-shirt, reading. I put on some flip-flops and shuffled out to the garden gate where a 30-something Russian man in a suit was waiting for me, flanked by two pimply Turkmen conscripts in uniforms. The Russian said he needed to check to make sure my visa and registration stamps were all in order. He refused to come inside, preferring to wait on the sidewalk while I fetched my passport. He paged through it again and again, examining each word and each stamp. I stood there in my t-shirt in the late fall chill, shivering. After about 20 minutes he thanked me for my time, told me to call him if I needed anything (he’d never introduced himself), and left. I went on with my classes as usual.

  After a few more weeks, one of Catherine’s students came to find me in my Internet-less Internet center. Although I’d been unable to work with Catherine at School No. 8 all fall, I’d still visited her regularly. She always seemed happy to chat with
me, make me tea, and try to feed me. That had to end, her student told me. “They” had told Catherine to stop associating with me, or risk losing her job. I went on with my classes as usual, but it was starting to dawn on me that I must have pissed someone off.

  I had imagined that if I ever went too far, an angry policeman in a uniform would show up, slap me in handcuffs, and either beat the shit out of me our take me to jail. It would be unpleasant for a while, but when it was all over, it’d be something to brag about. And what could they do to me? I was an American. It never occurred to me that the KNB might take a more subtle approach. (Though it should have – in most situations confrontation is much less acceptable in Turkmenistan than in the US) As autumn turned to winter, my circle of friends and acquaintances slowly, mysteriously shrank. Soon, the only people in Abadan that I had any contact with were at home and at Red Crescent. The more my world closed in around me, the more isolated I got, the more frustrated and paranoid I became.

  “What the fuck is wrong with this country?” I asked Ana one evening at the dinner table.

  “I told you not to curse. Put 1,000 manat in the jar.” “Why don’t you people do something?”

  “You see what happens when you try, and you’re an American. Nothing will ever change around here.”

  “Nothing will ever change as long as no one stands up and does anything.”

  “Oh, listen to you. You talk big but the worst thing that could happen to you is that you’d get sent home to America. That’s no punishment. I’d love to get sent to America.”

  23.

  It All Comes Crashing Down

  Aynabat hurried over from Aman’s office to the Internet center to tell me I had a phone call from the Red Crescent office in Ashgabat. I walked back across the street with her and picked up the receiver, which was lying next to the phone on Aman’s desk. He lounged in his chair, reading the paper. He ignored me as I stood next to him and talked on the phone to a woman named Bahar whom I’d never met.

  “Can you come to Ashgabat today?” she asked. “I need to talk to you.”

  “Of course,” I told her. “I’ll be there in an hour.”

  I couldn’t imagine what she wanted to talk to me about, but I wasn’t surprised that she didn’t want to tell me over the phone. People were often skittish about talking on the phone, since they assumed someone was listening.

  I took a marshrutka into the city and found Geldy hiding in some bushes behind the white marble Red Crescent building, smoking a cigarette. Bahar had asked him to come to the meeting, too. He had no idea why, but he wasn’t concerned. He was always getting yelled at for something; I think he was used to it.

  When Geldy finished his cigarette, we filed into Bahar’s immaculate office and stood in front of her desk with our hands in our pockets, looking at the ground, like high school students waiting to be disciplined by the vice principal. She was a petite woman in her early 40s with short black hair.

  “The Ministry of Justice called me,” she said. “They chose your Internet center grant for a random audit. They said you never deposited the money in a bank. If you’ll just give me the deposit slip, I’ll pass it on to them and we can clear all this up.”

  Silence.

  Geldy and I looked at each other and then back at her.

  “We don’t have a deposit slip,” Geldy said. “We never brought the money to the bank. We just changed it and started spending it.”

  Bahar knew this would be the answer.

  Almost no one deposits money in Turkmen banks if they can help it. As I’d learned first-hand, sometimes the banks were reluctant to give the money back. Besides, depositing dollars in a Turkmen bank meant that they’d be converted to manat at the official exchange rate of 5,000 manat to the dollar instead of the bazaar rate of 25,000 manat to the dollar. So, depositing a dollar in the bank meant, in effect, losing 80 percent of its value when you withdrew it later in manat (the only option). True, it was technically illegal to change money at the bazaar, but it was like speeding – everyone did it and only a few people got caught.

  Unfortunately, we’d gotten caught.

  Geldy was facing two years in prison, Bahar said. She didn’t know what the consequences might be for me. Everything could be put right if we would just return the money to the US Embassy, start again, and – this time – obey the letter of the law, she said.

  This was complicated, since we’d already spent a lot of the money to open the computer center in Abadan. But after several weeks of phone calls and meetings with people from Red Crescent, the Ministry of Justice, and the US Embassy, it was agreed that we could return the money that remained. After that, the embassy could decide whether or not to grant the same money to us again, properly, through the bank. This deal kept Geldy out of prison (which made us happy) and effectively killed the Internet center project (which presumably made the Ministry happy).

  “No more grants, Sam. No more projects,” Geldy told me afterward. “Enough.”

  It was clear to me that the audit had not been random. It had been meant to send me a message to me: shut up and sit still. When it was all over I was angry, but I was also relieved. I’d been ready to suffer the consequences of my actions, but it had scared me when it had looked like someone else might be punished for what I’d done. Whoever decided to threaten Geldy with two years behind bars had surely thought of this; the government had outmaneuvered me again.

  I thought that once the Internet center was dead, the incident was over, but the fallout continued. Aman, that greasy vulture, saw his opportunity, took one of the computers from the Internet center, where I’d been using it to teach basic computer skills to Shemshat and the youth volunteers, and set it up on his desk. He didn’t bother to plug it in, since he didn’t know how to use it anyway.

  “You don’t need both computers,” he told me, grinning. “You don’t even have Internet access.”

  The next morning, I was typing up my students’ handwritten poems (I’d promised them I would publish them as a booklet) on the remaining computer in the youth center. With no windows, dim lighting and walls painted to look like they were made from rough-hewn stones, the place felt like a dungeon. Shemshat breezed in, took off her jacket, and laid her purse on a chair. Her eyebrows were plucked almost out of existence and she was wearing a koynek that was appropriately ankle-length, but way too tight to have been called modest.

  “You can go now,” she told me.

  “I’m a little busy here,” I said, without looking up.

  “No, Aman says that I’ll be working here in the mornings now – not you.”

  I turned away from the computer and looked at her for along moment. Then I understood. I was furious, but I was also not surprised. I shut down the computer, just to be mean. Shemshat wasn’t terribly bright and I hoped she’d forgotten how to turn it back on. I packed my things and left. I’d been kicked out of the youth center I’d built – by the boss’s mistress.

  There was nothing I could do. Geldy was in Ashgabat so he couldn’t help me and, besides, he was trying to lay low. I could complain to Aman’s superiors in Ashgabat, but that probably wouldn’t do much good since they were still upset with me for bringing the Ministry of Justice down on them. Six months earlier, I would have stormed into Aman’s office and told him off in my broken Russian. I was tired, though – worn down. I just left the office and never went back.

  I moped around the house, reading, writing bitter letters home, practicing my guitar, and driving Ana and Sesili crazy. I’d refused to follow the rules and the system had targeted me and shut me down. The worst part was, there was no one to fight back against. No police squad had burst through my door and dragged me off to sit in jail or be deported. The state bureaucracy had simply wrapped around me like a boa constrictor and squeezed until I was isolated, ineffective, and demoralized. Flailing around wouldn’t loosen the boa’s grip; it would just wear me out.

  I couldn’t teach in the schools because Ovez wouldn’t grant me permis
sion. I couldn’t run classes or projects outside the schools because the KNB discretely visited anyone who wanted to work with me and told them not to. I couldn’t visit my former colleagues from School No. 8 because they’d been forbidden to associate with me. My job at Red Crescent had imploded thanks to the Ministry’s “random” audit. My life in Abadan had been squeezed down into Ana’s four-room apartment and back yard. The only work I had left were the courses I taught in Ashgabat, which had somehow gone unnoticed by the authorities.

  * * *

  Without my job at Red Crescent Abadan, it was unclear what would happen to me. After all, I couldn’t just sit around Ana’s apartment until it was time for me to return to the US. Sachly, my supervisor at Peace Corps, offered to try to smooth things over with Red Crescent, to get me back to work there somehow. I refused. I’d had all I could take of Aman and the government in Abadan. I asked for a different job. Over time, I’d become increasingly ambivalent about staying in Turkmenistan – and now I was truly torn. On one hand, I felt I wasn’t wanted and was deeply frustrated and furious that while I’d been trying to help Turkmenistan, officials of the government that had supposedly invited me had been doing everything they could to make my life difficult and make sure I didn’t accomplish anything. Each time I was at a breaking point, though, ready to get on a plane home – thinking “To hell with Turkmenistan,” since it clearly didn’t want my help – I would have some small success that would encourage me to stay. And then everything would go wrong for months and I’d be ready to leave again. I thought maybe things would be better in a different place, at a different job. While Sachly and her boss considered what to do with me, I stayed home and sulked.