Herding cows across a wasteland that was the bed of the Aral Sea, Jenisbai fears for the future of Uzbekistan's semi-autonomous republic of Karakalpakstan.
"It's really hard - we make about two dollars a day from the cows' milk," says Jenisbai, 25, who helps support five siblings in the former fishing town of Moynaq.
The shrinkage of Central Asia's Aral Sea has devastated Karakalpakstan, a 165,000-square kilometre (65,000-square mile) territory that is part of Uzbekistan but has its own language, flag, anthem and constitution.
Critics say that Karakalpakstan's ability to cope is hampered by reluctance on the part of Uzbekistan's hard-line government in Tashkent, headed by President Islam Karimov, to let the region become too strong.
Decades of poorly managed cotton farming along the Amu-Darya and Syr-Darya rivers have reduced the Aral to less than half its size in the 1960s, leaving a polluted dust-bowl where cows and goats graze on scraggy shrubs amid rusting trawlers.
"Russians, Japanese, Uzbeks have all promised help, but nobody helps," says Perdebai, a guard at Moynaq's defunct fish cannery, which closed last year as the sea had receded 150 kilometres (100 miles) northwards.
Of particular concern are the health effects of the environmental disaster on Karakalpakstan's 1.5 million population.
Water supplies are unreliable, farmland has turned to salt and each day an estimated 200,000 tonnes of dust blows from the former sea bed across surrounding areas - factors that exacerbate a leap in rates of drug-resistant tuberculosis.
"The system is broken - the environmental disaster has led to unemployment and poverty and tuberculosis is linked," Micky van Gerven, country manager for the aid agency Medecins Sans Frontieres, said.
For many residents however tuberculosis is either a taboo subject or just one of many other hardships they face, including torture by the security forces and restrictions on doing business in this Soviet-style economy.
In Karakalpakstan's towns though, conditions are fuelling discontent with Karimov's government - a key ally in Washington's anti-terrorism campaign - and even talk of full independence.
"Ask anyone - they'd all like to be part of Russia or Kazakhstan or independent, but not Uzbekistan," Yerelai, a taxi driver, said.
Others identify Karakalpakstan more closely with the neighbouring former Soviet republic of Turkmenistan, from which it is separated by a border known for sporadic violence, such as the shooting by border guards earlier this year of a 26-year-old Uzbek citizen.
Roza, a nurse-turned-traditional healer who criss-crosses the border between burial sites dating from the fourth century BC and the Zoroastrian faith, is one of many who hark back to Soviet times and border-free travel.
"They closed the border for days after the shooting - everything's got harder," she said.
Those hoping to boost Karakalpakstan's prospects say that tourists could be lured by its cultural attractions - not only ancient desert cities but also a museum in the capital Nukus that holds some 80,000 pieces of dissident Soviet art from the 1920s and 1930s.
Karakalpakstan's Deputy Governor Gafurzhon Radzhapov says he supports such ideas.
"We're working to improve living conditions - there's growing interest in developing tourism," Radzhapov said.
But such statements may not convince residents who are often left without heating during bitterly cold winters while Tashkent exports Karakalpakstan's substantial oil and gas reserves.
As for the Aral, it is expected to all but disappear in a few years apart from a small northern section in neighbouring Kazakhstan that is being dammed off with help from the World Bank.
"The future looks very difficult," a community figure in Karakalpakstan said. " We have to think not only about the ecological question but about economic and political ones".
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