Daily Life in Turkmenbashy's Golden Age (20 page)

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.
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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.
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Picked, packed, and shipped across the borders each fall, it was the country’s second most important export after fossil fuel-related products.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 factories, 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.
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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.
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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.
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Since I’d arrived in Turkmenistan, Niyazov had again banned child labor in the cotton fields. Few of my Turkmen friends believed the ban would be enforced; they’d heard it all before. Natalya told me, however, that this time it was for real. At least in Abadan, city hall had declared that neither teachers nor students were allowed to pick cotton on school days. On Sundays, students were allowed to pick and teachers were required to, the result being that most teachers paid students 25,000 manat (about a $1) to go in their places. Natalya, however, said she liked to go do it herself sometimes. In mid-September, I arranged to go with her.

She banged on my door about 7:30 a.m. and woke me. My friend Alei (a Peace Corps Volunteer) was visiting and we’d been up late drinking and talking. She waited by the door while we got ready, warning us we were going to miss the bus. We hurried across town and joined a crowd on the street near Dom Pionerov, where men with clipboards and lists of names were loading buses with teachers and students. Natalya had a few quiet words with one of the men, who studied his clipboard, crossed off three names, and told us to climb onto an ancient, orange crank-start bus. Once the bus was full, it bumped slowly along the road to a farm outside Geokdepe, hugging the shoulder, cars whizzing by.

The cotton plants were waist high, lush and green. We piled out of the bus and waded in among them. Our group was half teachers and half students, half men and half women. The youngest was Rahat, a serious 12-year-old boy with short black hair. 
We all spread out and started picking. 

There was no shade, but it wasn’t too hot – probably just in the high 80s. I stripped off my shirt and picked with the sun on my back. Each tuft of pure white cotton was partially hidden inside a tough, spiky pod. I had to be careful not to jab my fingers. Soon, though, I got the hang of it, and started moving down the rows, picking with both hands, stuffing my apron full of white gold.

The work wasn’t hard. It was just boring. I spent a lot of time chatting with people across the rows. I talked to several people – adults and children – about the new law banning children from picking cotton. They were all against it, arguing that parents should be allowed to decide whether their children went to the fields. Sometimes families needed money badly enough to pull their little ones out of school and send them to pick cotton; it was none of the government’s business, they all told me. For a long time, I talked to a physics professor from School No. 8, a bookish man with salt-and-pepper hair. He wanted me to explain why the American women’s soccer team was so much stronger than the American men’s soccer team. I couldn’t help him. He also wanted to talk about the US government response to Hurricane Katrina. He was astonished that “the most powerful country in the world” couldn’t manage to help its own people clean up after a rainstorm.

About noon, Alei, Natalya, and I took a break for lunch. We sat among the rows on our cotton sacks, which were mostly full and made excellent cushions. We’d brought a picnic: hard-boiled eggs, baked potatoes, dried sausage, bread, and sweet rolls. After eating, we lounged in the sun and rested for a few minutes. Then we picked some more.

Instead of choosing a row and picking it from end to end, people jumped from place to place, searching for the bushes that were heaviest with cotton. There were no quotas or supervisors. Most people picked at a leisurely pace. A few older people, though 
either because they needed the money more or because they had retained a work ethic from an earlier age – picked furiously, filling sack after sack.

When the day ended, we hauled our bags over to the boss, who weighed them on a hanging fish scale and then had some boys dump their contents into a shallow trailer. The scores: Natalya, 15 kilograms; me, 12 kilograms; Alei, 5 kilograms. The boss, a sun-browned Turkmen man of about 30, wearing a light-blue button-down shirt, paid me 5,000 manat for my day’s work – about 20 cents.