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"Mamma, mamma!" A little boy with emerald green eyes is running up to me, opening his arms, ready to receive a bear hug. I look puzzled at my host, a balding guy with kind eyes and strong arms. His sister answers in his place. She’s the only one who speaks English in this room. "So sorry, he thinks you’re his mother. He hasn’t seen her in a long time. She works in Russia." I look into the sparkling big eyes of the little boy so full of joy and expectation and my heart breaks for him. When he finally realizes that I’m not his mummy he crawls up to his grandfathers lap, head hanging low, all buzz and energy evaporated from his deep green eyes. The room is stuffy, a trickle of sweat is running down my back. We are seated on a heavy Persian rug on the floor, a half eaten chicken and some pilau in front of us on a giant silver tray. The little boy's father, a lanky guy around my age, hands out vodka in tea cups, a sad smile plastered on his face. I had spent an endless day in a taxi together with four chain smoking Turkmen crossing an entire desert from Ashgabat to Turkmenabad. We were greeted by a hot desert wind howling through derelict soviet buildings lined up in their grey perfection of uniformity and characterlessness, seeming very much out of place in this climate. Statues of former marxist heroes towering menacingly over empty streets. The centre piece, a marble square, a sad copy of the white city of Ashgabat. Tired, the driver had offered for me to stay with him and his family, IF he could drive me to the Turkmen/Uzbek border tomorrow morning. 20 dollar - fixed price. And as it turned out the same price a room in a government hotel would have cost me. A taxi driver through and through. So that’s how I had ended up sitting on the plush Persian carpet drinking vodka with my new found family: The taxi driver, his sister, the English teacher, his unemployed son and the little boy with emerald green eyes. "You can take the boy with you to Germany, yes?" the sister asks in her rough accent, her expression unreadable. Her wrinkled skin the color of burnt toast, her eyes the same green as the boys, her fading hair pulled up in a knot. She must have been a beauty in her youth, but an overuse of make up and cigarettes made a her look worn out. Tired. "Life better in Germany!" And she is right. Life is in so many ways better in Germany. But I can’t. Well, I won’t take him. With a heavy heart I shake my head, "No, I’m really sorry, I can’t. - No room in my backpack." I try to smile. "Life no good here?“, I ask instead, though I can imagine the answer. "What about the government, do they not support you?" But as I speak I already realize that I overstepped an invisible line. I am met with a leaden silence. As an answer she just zips her mouth shut with her fingers and, in a universal gesture, throws away the key. One did not talk about life, let alone the government of Turkmenistan. Instead, she refills my tea cup with vodka, the heavy silence still filling the room. I sleep restlessly. A thin mattress on another Persian carpet in the boys room, toys scattered all around me, no air flow to ease the stuffiness. I wake with a pounding head and a dry throat. Time to go, to cross the border before the road blocks with trucks and endless paper work. One day left on my five day transit visa. "Ready?" "Ready!" The whole family is there to wave me goodbye. The sister, the grandfather, the son. The little boy propped up in the arms of his dad, waiting for his mum to return home. Lined up like actors in a surreal play about crazy despots in an unforgiving desert. And me as the only audience clapping and waving goodby as I leave the theatre hall, returning to my own traveling reality.