No baths, no gas, no beds. The students slept on collapsible cots, the same contraption that I mistook for a lawn chair in GUM, the department store in Samarkand. Uzbekistan no longer belongs to Russia. But cotton monoculture is firmly entrenched. Irrigation networks drain the feeder rivers to the Aral Sea, and cotton flourishes in a desert.
University students pick it.
I teach English. And so life goes on.