The Meaning of the Boulder-Dushanbe Tea House

Dear Jahanshah,

Thank you for helping me to reconnect to those wonderful experiences earlier in my life when my bride and I taught middle school English to Iranian children in the Peace Corps from 1969-1970. I do have some cherished memories and experiences to share with you and your readers in the collective spirit of mutual understanding, friendship, and peace that you have established in your blog.

Before I begin, I wish to extend my undying sympathy and support to all Iranians during this difficult time. One thing that I learned since I sustained a traumatic brain injury two years ago is to always “look up”—to be optimistic and keep hope alive about the future in Iran…and life. Here are some of the memories that the trauma of my injury will never erase:

Like many Iranians in the late 60s, I found myself isolated in the middle of a societal triangle with these three sides: religious fundamentalists, Communists, and monarchists. I felt no connection—and in fact a true disconnect—with all three sides. Prior to joining the Peace Corps, my wife and I were solid Kennedy Democrats and working class youth. Like many of my baradaran and khoharan, I saw the Shah as an unsympathetic and misguided leader who made no effort to help the under classes, from which my students and even neighbors came. 

I believe that one incident clearly reflects why I felt that way. About 4-5 months after arriving in our Peace Corps town, I thought that I should send a letter to my mother about how we were doing , what it was like living in a foreign country, our health, and all that. I decided instead of writing a letter, I would dictate an oral letter to our tiny Sony cassette player and send her a tape. So I talked for about an hour about how interesting out town, students, and life was; how we heated our house (a kerosene space heater) ; what we ate (a combination of western and Iranian food;  how we got around town (walking or taxi), what we did in the evenings (read, went for walks), and some cultural features of our lives (like the concepts of a hayat and  a hoz, the  chador, the teria downstairs where we bought sweets, and the process of making kabob, for example.)

Three days after we mailed the tape in a sealed package at the post office, there was a knock on the door. “The Chief of Police wants to see you right away,” a stern man dressed in a suit and tie said. After trying to understand chera for some time, we followed the gofer to the chief’s office, where a man in high boots (no whip) sat behind a huge desk and held my mother’s cassette tape in his hands, looking at it as if it were contraband drugs.

“Our two countries are friends, you know. Why did you send bad information about our country? “he said, staring at us. “We have to help each other and not do things like this.” The Chief went on for more than a half hour lecturing us about our behavior.  As it turns out, the Chief of the Post Office, upon my posting the cassette, immediately notified the Chief of Police what I had done, causing him to call for the suspect’s tape and one of my colleagues at school, actually the (Iranian) head of the English department, to translate every word on paper so that the authorities knew what kind of information I was passing on, and to whom?

We were devastated, confused, and a bit upset. We wondered what kind of country we were living in-- was this typical treatment that Iranians got from the government agencies? We had said nothing at all that we considered negative about Iran, the people, or the government.

When the Ayatollah Khomeini succeeded in his revolution about a decade after we left, I felt neither sympathy for the Shah nor support for the new powers--not only because of the US Embassy hostage event, but even more so because of the same reasons I held the Shah’s group in low esteem—frequent horrific secret police actions like torture and neglect of the ideals that I learned under the Kennedys like freedom, democracy, equal rights for women, and compassion for the poor and minorities. I carry these views into the present and will into the future as well, but I will keep hope alive. Zendebad the birthplace of my only son! Zendebad Iran!