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
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
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