2006-06-30 - 3:00 p.m.
Last week I didn’t have a plane ticket back to my city from the T-stan capital, so I took a long, hot, dusty, dirty, and expensive taxi ride home. Nine hours in the car through the unbelievable desert that consumes 80% of the country’s landmass. I was displeased about having to come back to Turkmenistan in the first place—this land feature wasn’t helping matters.
There aren’t really any semblances of “rest stops” or “Micky Mack’s Fruity Juice Gas-n-Go” here, so if you stop in the midst of your journey, it’s in weird little homes that are plunked in the center of T-stan’s arid and empty heart. Who lives there? What people would choose to live four hours from any large city where they can get supplies in the middle of the desert, where the temperature is easily 10 degrees higher, no neighbors, no anything? Just a sole electric line holding you live to people in other cities. What are refrigerators doing here?
So we stopped at this small little traditional hut in the middle of the desert, strung up with electricity and two teenagers asleep on boiled sheep's wool carpets. One awake girl was in charge of selling cold tonic water.
While I sat in the hut, gritting the sand in my gums, recounting the days left I have before I could return home to my boyfriend and a washing machine, I see outside, through the small doorway, a three year old stark naked standing in the middle of a sandpile staring at me. No shoes. No shirt. No service.
He wandered around with a little metal cup and tried to fish some water out of a pail (sandy, gritty, dirty). In the midst of bending down, two other little boys (5, 6 years) ran out and started kicking the naked one in the privates and bottom until he stood up and began crying. While crying, they continued to kick him in every soft area and beating him over the head. They laughed and laughedandlaughed, walked away, and waited for the naked one to go for the water again so they could begin the beating.
One of the taxi drivers asked watergirl, "What boys are those?" and we came to find they were all her brothers. And she just lazily pulled another sweaty bottle of water from her refrigerator running on magic power while a naked three year old standing in 120 degree direct sunlight got beaten.
And I count the calendar backward from September again and again and again again.
