In October 2009 a teacher in a village school near Denov gave her class one question and one sheet of paper each. Thirty pupils, thirty sheets, twenty minutes.
What would you do if you had a thousand dollars?
She read them at home that evening and she did not throw them away. She put them in a brown folder in the bottom drawer of her desk, and there they stayed through two repairs of the school building.
Most of them are what you expect from thirteen-year-olds, and they are wonderful. "If I had a thousand dollars, I would buy a telephone with a camera and a motorbike, and I would give my mother the rest." "I would buy a fridge and eleven kilos of ice cream." "I would go to Dubai for one day and come back the same night, because my grandmother would worry."
One of them, in careful handwriting, says this:
"If I had a thousand dollars, I would buy a bus for our street. Not a new one. Then the small children would not walk seven kilometres in February, and my sister would not miss school when it rains. If the bus were ours, we could take the old women to the hospital in Denov on Fridays." — Nilufar S., 13.
Nilufar did not get a thousand dollars. She got a job in a bank in Termez, eleven years of it, and a neighbourhood committee that she joined and then bothered for two and a half years.
The bus is a 1998 diesel with a hundred and one thousand kilometres on it. It is white, it is noisy, and it has been carrying children along that road every school morning since March 2024, and old women to Denov on Fridays.
Her old teacher is seventy-one. In April she came to the school with a brown folder, found the paper, and read the last sentence out loud on the bus, standing between the seats, while thirty children looked at the floor and said nothing at all.
"If I were you," she told them afterwards, "I would keep that piece of paper. Somebody in this bus is writing one now."