Tajikistan, in central Asia, was once one of the smallest and poorest republics of the USSR. In the last twenty years it has moved from communism to capitalism, from atheism to a rediscovery of Islam. Reporter Khayrulla Fayz returns to his village to discover what life is like for people there now. He talks to cotton farmers in the fields where he picked cotton as a child, meets migrant workers forced to leave their families to find work in Russia and asks the new entrepreneurs about the challenges of doing business there. When Khayrulla was a boy he spoke Russian and looked up to Lenin as the father of the nation. He finds out who the new heroes are for the younger generation carving out an identity for this newly-independent country.