Neighbors

In a dusty city in the center of the country, I leave the family I'm visiting to attend a conference. A few children roam the streets, and a cow, and the eternally-blowing plastic bags that litter this area. Beyond that, there's not much sign of activity -- as per usual. Although it's near a regional center, this town is pretty sleepy, as are most in Azerbaijan. I walk along the rock-strewn dirt road to where it intersects with blacktop, a distance of about a few blocks, and continue on to my conference.

I return three hours later, to an amazingly changed atmosphere. I can tell something big is going on, even before I get around the corner to my street. When I get there, I see two massive trucks: a dump truck pouring the black pebbles that will become an asphalt paving, and immediately behind it, a steamroller flattening the stuff into a street surface. The entire neighborhood, it seems, has turned out to watch the event.

What I don't see is just as interesting. The rock-strewn dust of the lower surface has not been cleared, or levelled. There is no gravel or other base. Not even the trash on the street -- plastic bottles and bags, paper, cow droppings -- has been cleared. They're simply paving over all of it, as quickly as possible. They've already finished a good few hundred feet, and in an hour, they've linked up our road with the paved one down the way.

I ask a gentleman standing there how this came about -- I hadn't heard any rumors of development before I left.

"Oh, a relative of a neighbor knew a guy. He was paving somewhere else in town, so he stopped by here." There's nothing more to the story than that.

By the next morning, kids are already chipping chunks of the blacktop off with rocks.