Daily Life in Turkmenbashy's Golden Age (12 page)

At the dinner table that night, I told my host family what had happened. Olya was sympathetic. Misha thought it was hilarious.

What can you expect? The Turkmen have taken over the country. If the Russians were still running things, this never would have happened,” he said.

My bedroom was small, but there was space for the loom at the foot of my bed. So I went back to work, adding a millimeter or two per day. When anyone in Abadan asked me how my carpet was coming, I told them I’d given up. I was starting to learn that in Turkmenistan, it’s best not to attract attention.

11.

In the Golden Age, There Are No Cold Schools

The school-heating project went well at first. Since Aman wouldn’t let me use the phone at Red Crescent, I would make up excuses to leave the office and sneak home to call embassies and non-governmental organizations in Ashgabat, looking for one that was interested in funding the project. I needed $10,000 for materials. Ovez had promised that the school district would provide the labor. While I was calling around, I learned about every available grant program in Ashgabat. The British Embassy, it turned out, was interested in paying me to paint a health-related mural. The American Embassy had a whole bunch of money for Internet centers and nobody to give it to. The Japanese Embassy had just started a grant program and didn’t know what it wanted. Neither the Saudi Embassy nor the Iranian Embassy offered grants at all. After a few days on the telephone I found what I was looking for: a non-governmental organization called Counterpart Consortium was interested in my project.

I submitted a preliminary proposal, which Counterpart accepted. At first, local officials were supportive. After all, pretty much everyone in town had a connection to one of School No. 8’s 1,000 students or 200 teachers. The mayor promised me that city engineers would help Bayram diagnose the problem with the heating system and draw up a plan to fix it. The principal of the school invited me to her office and thanked me profusely for agreeing to help. I was a local celebrity. Everyone was cheering me on. It felt great.

Then things started to go wrong. I formed a small parent-teacher association to oversee the grant writing and, later, the work on the school. This was a complicated and somewhat risky venture in a country with no freedom of assembly. Aman refused to let the group meet in the dining hall at Red Crescent so the members met in private apartments, moving each week to avoid attracting attention. When the KNB caught on and forbid them from meeting anymore, they talked on the phone, instead.

Then one day, the mayor summoned me to his office. He was a meaty, gray-haired man in a dark suit. Like many government officials, he wore a gold pin of Niyazov’s face on his lapel. First he asked me to read the manual for his new cell phone, which was in English, and teach him how to use it. We spent a few minutes taking photos of each other with the phone. Then he put it in his drawer, thanked me, and leaned back in his chair.

“We no longer need your help,” he said. “School No. 8 is warm.”

“Excuse me, but it’s not. I was there yesterday and it was freezing cold.”

“Well, today it’s warm.”

When I pressed him a little bit, he explained that he had simply ordered someone to turn on the heating system. Apparently, for 12 years, no one had bothered to flip the switch. I rushed over to School No. 8, to see if it had, in fact, been that easy – just pressure the local government a little bit and,
voila
, the school had heat. Inside the school, the steam heating pipes were rattling and hissing. The whole building smelled like hot paint. I found Catherine in the principal’s office and she was grinning.

“You did it,” she said, and gave me a high five.

Our excitement lasted only a few hours. We waited and waited but the school never warmed up. Over the years, almost all the radiators had been stolen and the pipes that carried hot steam through the building were full of holes. The heating system made a lot of noise but couldn’t warm the building by more than a degree or two. Also, the city had diverted the steam to heat the school from a nearby apartment building, which left dozens of families freezing in their apartments. The next day, everything went back to normal: the apartment building got its heat back, and the heating system in the school stopped making such a racket.

A few days later, I went to the weekly meeting of Abadan English teachers that Ovez had given me permission to attend. It was just the Quartet and me. We sat in a cold classroom at School No. 8, drinking tea, and talking in English. The subject, of course, was the school-heating debacle. Their general attitude was: well, what did you expect? Still, they had no intention of giving up – or letting me give up. They were not intimidated by either the KNB or city hall. After all, they had been teaching for nearly 25 years and remembered all the scowling men in dark suits that were causing us such trouble as bratty little kids; they knew their mothers.

Rumia, the most jaded, cynical member of the Quartet, retold the story – which I had heard countless times – of how she had engineered a short, all-expenses paid trip to America for a group of her students and just hours before their flight was to leave Ashgabat, the government had decreed that they couldn’t go. After that, she’d given up on ambitious projects. She just taught her classes and kept her head down.

“When I thought this was going to work, it made me believe it might still be possible to do good things here,” she said.

I decided to stick with the school-heating project until the bitter end. There wasn’t much more I could do, though. The mayor had bowed to reality and admitted the school was cold – an important step – but he still refused to give me official permission to fix it. He told me to write the grant, get the money, and do the work, but he would not provide me with the all-important signed, stamped letter of permission. So Counterpart (wisely) would not accept my grant proposal. Without the letter of permission from the city, I could have ended up winning the grant, buying $10,000 worth of pipes and radiators, and being refused permission to install them.

I spent several days shuttling from Ovez’s office to School No. 8 to Counterpart’s office to the Peace Corps office to city hall, trying to find a way to convince the mayor to pull his stamp out of his desk drawer and apply it to my proposal. At home, I’d wait until Olya and Denis got home from the paint factory – Denis was helping his mother out, since her secretary had disappeared – and then fill them in on the day’s absurdities.

“Are they kidding?” I would rant. “They must be fucking kidding. This whole country must be fucking kidding. The fucking secret police shut down my PTA meetings. I spend my days pleading with city officials to let me give them $10,000 to make their children’s school warm. This must be a joke.”

Misha would just lie in front of the TV, clicking his dentures.

“What did you think would happen?” Denis would ask, laughing.

“If they don’t want your help, don’t help them,” Olya would say.

But I was so convinced that what I was doing was right that I should help Abadan heat its school, whether it wanted my help or not – and that if I just stuck with it and bulled my way through, I could get it done, that I didn’t even consider following her advice.

After a frustrating week, I went back to the English teachers’ meeting. We sat around a table in Catherine’s classroom, drinking tea and eating hard candies. I told them I’d made no progress. They discussed the problem. Rumia’s former student, Kolya, worked at city hall. The Quartet agreed that he was our last hope. The next day, I called his office and asked for a meeting. He didn’t call me back so Rumia went over his head – she called his mother. Within an hour, he had agreed to meet us at Red Crescent.

When Kolya arrived, he greeted Rumia coldly. He was a 30-something Russian man in a black suit with floppy blond hair that spilled over his ears. He wore a golden Niyazov face on his lapel. He told us there was nothing he could do to help us. All the top city officials were scared to approve the project, he explained. Accepting aid from international organizations was hazardous; it could lead to arrest and imprisonment. Two years earlier, he had narrowly escaped going to jail for trying to get a grant from Counterpart to rebuild a playground in town, he said. It could also mean getting fired. Unemployment was at least 60 percent and the government controlled most full-time jobs.
38
 
That meant that the threat of being blackballed from government work was a powerful tool for social control, since it was really the threat of a lifetime of struggle and poverty.
39

“This is Turkmenistan’s ‘Golden Age,’” Kolya said sarcastically, referring to one of Niyazov’s slogans. “We don’t need help from foreigners. All our schools are already warm. All our playgrounds are already perfect.”

And that ended my school-heating project. It also made me question whether Turkmenistan needed me to teach children how to wash their hands and avoid getting AIDS, to try to heat its schools, or to give its children English lessons. After all, how much of a difference could I make when its oil-rich government was closing hospitals, denying the existence of AIDS, letting its schools rot, and leaving teachers’ salaries unpaid for months? Maybe what Turkmenistan needed was a new government, I thought.

12.

The Internet Center

All this time, Aman had been getting angrier and angrier at me. It began when Niyazov released the sequel to the Rukhnama and everyone in the Red Crescent office was required to buy a copy and sign a statement swearing they’d read it and loved it, but I refused. I pointed out that the book was only available in Turkmen so I couldn’t read it. But Aman didn’t see that as a valid excuse because, of course, no one else had read it, either. My efforts to heat School No. 8 had made things even worse.

Why are you spending your time trying to heat that school, when our office is still cold and I still need a new computer and a new Xerox machine?” he asked me one morning from behind his newspaper. “Do that first and then you can go out and start heating schools.”

From then on, he rejected all my requests. Could I go teach a class on tuberculosis at School No. 8? No. Could I take a vacation? No. Could I go home to use my phone to call Counterpart? No. As I sat at Red Crescent, I got madder and madder. My boss was blackmailing me. He was punishing me for trying to heat a school where 1,200 people spent their days instead of trying to heat an office where four people worked. There wasn’t much I could do, though, so I swallowed my pride and settled on what I thought was a pretty good compromise.

I wrote a proposal to open an Internet center at Red Crescent. It would be the only one in Abadan. My plan was to renovate an unused room, install two computers with Internet service, and run free classes for the community. The grant would cover the center’s operating costs for six months. After that, once people in Abadan knew what the Internet was good for, the center would start charging users to cover its operating costs. It would mean Aman’s organization would get two new computers and, after six months, a small business that Aman, I was sure, would find a way make a little money from.

It was an edgy project. Internet access in Turkmenistan was restricted. There was only one service provider – the government phone company Turkmen Telekom– and probably fewer than 10 public Internet centers in the country. A few organizations, including the Red Crescent chapter in Ashgabat, had Internet access, but the government monitored and censored it.

The government restricted Internet access because it hoped to cling to power by stifling political dissent, and isolating Turkmen from each other and from the world. That was the same reason the government controlled all the newspapers and TV channels in the country and ensured that the only “news” they provided was about all the wonderful things “Turkmenbashy the Great” was doing for the people of “independent, neutral, democratic Turkmenistan” in the “Golden Age.” It was also the same reason that travel, which could spread uncensored information, was restricted. In 2006, the Committee to Protect Journalists, an American NGO, named Turkmenistan the third most-censored country in the world, after only North Korea and Burma.
40
 
The same year, the French NGO Reporters sans Frontiers put Turkmenistan third on a list of top violators of press freedom in the world, after North Korea and Eritrea.
41

The government controlled nearly all information within Turkmenistan’s borders. The schools and universities taught students the official party line. The country had a few libraries,
42
 
but their collections were censored. When I visited the national library in Ashgabat, I found that its massive galleries had been mostly emptied of their contents. Their entrances were blocked with glass cases filled with copies of the Rukhnama and Niyazov’s other books. I found one gallery with a small clutch of bookshelves that were open to the public. In the back, in an area that was off limits, I could see a messy heap of books that reached almost to the ceiling. A friend of a friend worked at the library and claimed he was allowed to bring home armloads of them to use as toilet paper.

The only gap in the government’s control of information was satellite TV. For some reason – whether it was incompetence, inability, or intention – the government allowed nearly everyone in Turkmenistan to own a satellite dish. They could watch everything from BBC news to The Jerry Springer Show, Steven Seagal movies to MTV. Still, precious little independent domestic news was available. Even if the foreign press was interested in covering events inside Turkmenistan, government interference, intimidation, and obfuscation made it difficult to produce anything worthwhile or accurate. As far as I could tell, there was only one independent source of information about what was going on inside Turkmenistan that was widely available to Turkmen: a half-hour program called Azatlyk Radio (Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty) that was available via satellite TV. It was a Turkmen language broadcast and almost everyone I knew listened to it.