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Next to the tennis courts, on the street named after a Russian poetic champion of the common man, a new building takes shape.  It is on the site of an old army complex, torn down several years ago to form an expansive dust bowl that doubled handily as a garbage pile and a playground.  Then came the machines: dusty and decrepit; they got rid of the garbage and imperceptibly began to build. 

 

A sign comes up: this garbage heap is the site of a new Academic Lycéum; these dusty brick walls the future walls of the Land of Knowledge.  It is part of the government's focus on education; all around the city of Samarkand new Academic Lycéums are springing out of garbage piles like the one on Nekrasov Street.  

 

"The youth are our future," reads a giant billboard in front of the new Samarkand youth center.  Emblazoned with images of a bright-eyed boy and a visionary girl, the billboard is meant to inspire trust in and enthusiasm for the new schools, the sparkling sports centers, the consolidated libraries.  Things may be difficult now; prices may be high and salaries low; teachers may be neglectful and students disinterested.  But there is a bright future up around the bend, coming in with the youth.  Today may be a garbage heap, but tomorrow is a shining pink Academic Lycéum, and who knows?  Maybe things will get better.

 

It is easy to be cynical about such slogans.  "Uzbekistan's future is a great country," mutter the signs on dilapidated bridges, while the bridges continue to release their chunks of sandy concrete into the river below.  "Uzbekistan is a sovereign democratic republic," pronounce the billboards on Tashkent streets, but the perceived need to remind citizens of that fact makes it less true.  Would drivers perhaps mistake Uzbekistan for a dependent Communist state; must they be reminded of the official status of their country?

 

So it is easy to scoff at the billboards that promise a great future and a glowing hope, embodied in the bright-eyed boy and the visionary girl.  But there is the difficulty with propaganda: it is too easy for enlightened Americans to spit it out entirely, but often there is some truth, even in the shrillest slogans.

 

"The youth are our future," says the government, and so it pours billions of soum into building large schools, equipped with plate-glass windows and Webcams, Pentium IV computers and inside taps.  But the people of Samarkand have seen; in a couple years, the buildings begin returning to their dust.  For plate glass gets scratched; paint chips mercilessly in the dusty "Afghan wind"; technology promptly goes out-of-date; and the taps, once so admired by visitors to the school, do not run on the low Samarkand water pressure. 

 

But there are the youth, the visionary and the hopeful; they linger in the dusty school courtyards, stroll arm-in-arm down the walking street, carry in buckets of water to clean the dusty classroom floors.  And they, unlike the schools, are not yet returned to dust.  Some future lurks for them, somewhere beyond the billboards and past the pink Lycéums.  They are this country's future, but what is it?  The pink schools are fast fading and the billboards are mum, but the eyes of the schoolchildren prove there is something waiting.  Who will tell them what it is?

 

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