Did you know that 28% of America’s population are immigrants or children of immigrants? I am one of them. My dad comes from Iran and is a United States citizen. During the COVID-19 self-isolation, time has taken on a strange quality. Sometimes this pandemic feels like it has been going on for just a few days and other times it feels like years.
But try to remember back before the pandemic began, to January when the United States and Iran barely walked back from the brink of war. People have short memories, and it quickly became old news as COVID-19 struck the world. Remember, Iran was one of the first countries hit.
March is supposed to be the happiest time of year for all Iranians and the extensive Iranian diaspora. On the first day of spring each year, Iranians begin to celebrate their New Year (Nowruz), traditionally with plenty of visiting, gifts, and feasting.
As an Iranian-American child growing up in Virginia, I didn’t even speak Farsi, but our home reflected the decorations and dinners of this special time each year. For this holiday, sprouts are grown in a dish as a symbol of new life. You lay out a decorative table of objects that start with “S” in Farsi, including live goldfish. You eat herbed saffron rice and fish or kebabs as you visit each family member. This year, though, there was no visiting for Nowruz, as the COVID-19 death toll in Iran had reached 1,300 by March 18.
By May 5, 100,000 cases of COVID-19 were reported in Iran with 6,000 deaths. More recently, the New York Times reported that 10,000 health care workers in Iran contracted the illness. These estimates are probably low.
Iran was by far the hardest hit country in the Middle East and showed a high mortality rate. COVID-19 arrived in Iran earlier than many other countries, partly because of extensive trade with China.
Not everyone in Iran or even in the bustling capital city Tehran took social distancing seriously, but my extended family did. My aunt who I grew up with and my uncle and his wife are all senior citizens.
My father worried here in the States and kept in touch with them frequently as the disease began to spread. If anything had happened to a loved one, none of us would have been able to help them.
My cousin, Dr. Ali, is a front-line doctor in Tehran helping to manage this crisis. In Iran, you have to be the most elite student academically to even be allowed to study medicine. During this time, he has often been working 48-hour shifts.
Dr. Ali’s parents (my aunt and uncle) are senior citizens and haven’t been outside in 70 days. He visits them with his wife and their granddaughter once a week. Even during the visits, they remain separated; Dr. Ali and his family stand on the first-floor stairwell of their condo building and speak up to his parents who live a floor above.
My other aunt, my “Ameh,” has also stayed home. Her neighbors have sent their son out to get her groceries since the beginning. This is not an abnormal thing to do for someone in Iran. In fact, it comes very naturally. Iranians are generous, hospitable, and respectful of elders by culture. Throughout it all, my aunts and uncles have warmly continued to ask my dad how we are fairing, as if our situations were comparable.
In some ways, our situation has become similar. The biggest difference is that we are younger and we don’t live in such a large city. When COVID-19 really began to hit the United States, I felt like I knew what was coming as I had anxiously been following the news out of Iran.
Without getting into too much politics, there is a greater context to all this. No matter your opinion of Iran’s government or the United States president, COVID-19 arrived in Iran on top of sanctions. These sanctions are not supposed to affect medical supplies, but they do.
Sanctions on Iran disrupt supply chains and transportation for the production of medical supplies and even impacts humanitarian trade. To compound things, Iran’s commercial ties with China are largely due to China’s non-participation in the sanctions.
These foreign policies have lasting impacts. Fortunately, all of my family members are currently healthy in Iran and here in the United States, though sadly that has not been the case for some of the Iranian-Americans in our network. Still, I’m really grateful.
Nobody knows where precisely this pandemic is going. Will there be additional waves of the virus? Will there be an effective vaccine or treatment? What will travel and education look like in the months to come? I don’t have the answers and don’t know when my father will be able to visit our family in Iran again.
But I do want to honor the resilience of the communities wherever love is found. And I know this profound truth: our shared humanity across all barriers and countries will be what gets us through.
