My Persian Friend

I’ve been wanting to talk about this, but I feel weird just telling people about it because it’s very intense, and it also makes me start to cry when I talk about it. But I feel that a firsthand story like this, especially with the lack of news coverage in the US, needs to be visible, not just on my notepad where no one can read it.

In early January, a 22-year-old Persian (Iranian) language teacher, who I will call Leon for privacy purposes, connected with me on social media. We had a Zoom consult, at which time he expressed a strong desire to work with me. However, due to US sanctions, he would be unable to pay me. Instead, he offered to teach me Spanish, German, French, or Persian. 

I wasn’t feeling a strong urge to learn a language, so I normally would have declined, but a few things made me change my mind. The first was that in the portion of the consult where I test how well a potential client can sense and heal trauma using my methods, he excelled. Knowing that he would be easy to work with, I was further swayed by his friendly demeanor, his desire to heal, the fact that he is young and highly intelligent, and the fact that he lives in what he calls a terrorist dictatorship, which he is actively planning to escape from.

I normally feel helpless to affect the plight of people in difficult situations like this, other than giving money to organizations that claim to be helping. But here I had an opportunity to directly help someone in a way that was meaningful to me, so I chose to take it, and hopefully learn Persian in the process. We planned our first session for January 12th, the following Monday.

When Monday rolled around, I waited on Zoom for Leon to appear, but he did not. When I went to message him on WhatsApp, I saw that he had not accessed the app since Thursday, January 8th. He didn’t respond to any messages for the next two weeks, during which time I discovered that the Iranian government had taken down the entire country’s internet so that the world could not witness the massive bloodshed that was occurring.

On January 31st, I met with Leon again. His account of the things he witnessed was so awful that I incurred secondhand trauma by hearing it, and I had to do healing work on myself afterward. Here is what he said.

The country was roiling with protests because the national currency was essentially worthless, the economy was failing, and the government’s rule was tyrannical. The protests had intensified in late December and were now reaching a peak. As the weekend approached, millions of people across the country took to the streets.

On Thursday the 8th, Leon’s stepmother went to the protests, and Leon and his father stayed home. A few hours later, she called to tell him to stay home because the military was using deadly force against the protestors. 

“They’re shooting people.” She was stuck in the middle of the chaos. 

Then the internet and cell service was cut across the entire country. Leon couldn’t call or text anyone.

“I couldn’t take it anymore,” he told me. “I put on a surgical mask and a raincoat, and bought some cigarettes.” He bought the cigarettes to combat the teargas he expected to encounter, which didn’t make sense to me, but apparently it works. Then he went to the protests.

A huge crowd was chanting “Death to the dictator! Our leader is a murderer! His rule is illegitimate!” He saw protestors of every age, from 8 years to 80 years old. Then the shooting started.

“They were using war bullets, designed to kill people,” Leon told me. The soldiers were also firing shotguns with widely dispersing pellets into the crowd, which blinded and wounded large numbers of people.

People on all sides of Leon were hit by bullets. His neighbor’s 12 year old daughter was killed. Everyone was screaming and running away from the gunfire. “I never knew I could run that fast,” he said.

But then, as the soldiers were reloading their weapons, the crowd started marching forward again, chanting their slogans, knocking over street signs and garbage cans to block vehicles, lighting things on fire.

Then the soldiers opened fire again, and the protesters who didn’t die ran away. When the soldiers stopped to reload, the people marched forward again. This continued until Leon broke away from the group because he’d been hit by teargas and couldn’t see. He lit a cigarette, and as the smoke drifted into his eyes, his blurred vision became clear. He noticed a man and his wife also incapacitated by the gas, and used the cigarette to help them as well.

Then he went home. He’d been out for a total of four hours, from 7pm to 11pm.

When he returned home, he was alone in the apartment. He sat next to the window, drinking wine and chain-smoking cigarettes, listening to the gunfire, unable to contact his father or stepmother. 

After an hour or so, his father came back. He had been searching for his stepmother, but hadn’t found her. He paced anxiously around the room until Leon insisted that he drink some water.

A short time later, his stepmother walked in the door, and his father fainted with relief. When he woke up, he chastised Leon and his stepmother for endangering themselves.

The next day, they went to stay with friends. Leon stayed with his father’s billionaire Catholic friend, who is Assyrian (an ethnic minority in Iran) and speaks Neo-Aramaic, the modern version of the language spoken by Jesus. This friend gave Leon a room in one of his many villas and said he always had a place in his home. The juxtaposition between the bloody protests and the luxurious villa retreat seemed jarringly surreal to me.

After a week or so, Leon and his family returned home. 

An estimated 36,000 people had been killed in the protests. 330,000 had been wounded, many of whom were now permanently blind from shotgun pellets. Soldiers who had refused to shoot their countrymen were sentenced to death. Doctors who helped wounded protestors were sentenced to death. People who reported the bloodshed to news media were sentenced to death.

I asked Leon, “How did you feel when you were at the protests?”

He said, “I felt so proud of everyone – all united, even the children. I especially admired couples who went to the protests together. The thought of my girlfriend being killed is much scarier than just me being killed.”

“But weren’t you scared?” I pressed. “Why did you go out when you knew they were shooting people?

He spoke deliberately: “The only things I’m afraid of are powerlessness and uncertainty. I love this city. I love these people. I had to do something,” he said.

“Why did you keep marching back into the bullets?” I asked.

He said, “Imagine that you are sentenced to life in prison. You will die there. Or, you can try to fight the guards and maybe escape. What would you do?”

Then we talked about what might be done to fix the situation. Leon was not particularly hopeful. 

“After World War II, Russia, Britain, and the United States divided up Iran, and 7 million people starved to death. If you look at Afghanistan, Libya, and Iraq, foreign military intervention usually leads to lots of civilian deaths. The US is talking about bombing our government, but I’m not sure if it’s a good idea,” he said.

I said, “At least with all this bloodshed, the world knows your government is illegitimate. They can’t possibly stay in power after this.”

“We’ve been protesting and getting killed for the last 16 years,” he replied. “Will anything ever change? It’s like having a tumor in your brain that’s grown so large that surgery to remove it might kill you, except the tumor is in the brain of 93 million people, and the surgeon wants to use bombs to remove it.”

Leon’s plan is to finish his degree, marry his girlfriend, get a job as a language teacher in Germany, and get out of Iran. I’ve been helping him heal the underlying sources of fear, uncertainty, and doubt that get in the way of executing this plan. It’s going well so far. And I’ve learned some Persian, too.