In a foreign culture or any unfamiliar society, the simplest things can frustrate the stranger. Things accomplished easily at home conspired to defeat me during my twenty-one months in Iran. I never knew when some unexpected trial would test me.

"What did you do to the wall?" Usef asked when he walked into the living room of my little house behind the school.

"I wanted to hang a picture, but I guess I made a mistake."

I had a small picture of a scene in Oregon and I wanted to hang it on the wall behind my table. Tape failed to stick to the chalk coating on the walls, so I decided to hammer in a hook. I found a nail, about two inches long which I thought too large for the picture, but it was the only nail around. When I pounded it into the wall, a mass of chalk and dirt about the size of my fist fell out and landed on the floor. I tried to pound the nail in a little higher, so that the picture would hide the hole, but a second clod of dirt broke free, leaving an even larger hole. Everything I tried only made the mess worse.

"Give me the nail you are using," said Usef. "This is just a tack. You must use a nail if you wish to hang pictures."

Usef took me to the bazaar where we found an iron monger. He had me buy two spikes, each about a foot long. Back home I pounded one of them into the wall and dirt flew everywhere. Then Usef showed me how to make a patch with the material that had broken away, mixing it with water, and plastering it into the hole around the spike. I hung my picture, which covered about half of the damaged area, and never tried to put up more pictures.

In time, I learned how to cope with a society where the people build their houses out of mud and where they had never seen a supermarket. All of it, however, required adjustments in my way of thinking and my way of life. Just buying food took time. At home, one or two stores had everything I might need. In Ahar, each merchant sold different things, and getting everything took half a day or longer. Since almost nobody in Ahar had a refrigerator, I had to shop at least two or three times each week.

By winter I had established a routine. I did most of my shopping on Wednesday morning when I had no classes. One of the previous volunteers had left behind a large plastic shopping bag. And I learned quickly to save any paper bags I acquired and to carry them with me so that they could be reused. With the shopping bag and my accumulation of paper bags in hand, I set out into the maze of streets that led to Ahar's many shops.

First I stopped at a store not far from my house. The vendor there sold beans, and his seemed to have fewer rocks (from the size of peas to small pebbles) than the beans I found elsewhere. On the main street I bought carrots. Although shopping in the Middle East usually involves considerable bargaining, food items had a non-negotiable set price, determined daily at the morning wholesale market held near the river.

Near Ahar's traffic circle, across from the "Long Live the Shah" neon sign, a friend of Mr. Hashemi's ran a shop where he carried everything from stationary to batteries, dry goods, and books.

"He is a very honest man," Mr. Hashemi advised me when he suggested that I shop there.

I always found the shop crowded, and whenever I want there, I had to wait my turn. As people came in they would tell the owner what they wanted, but he ignored them, instead forming a mental line and taking everyone in proper order. I bought rice and honey from Mr. Hashemi's friend. The rice came in bulk, carefully weighed out on a primitive balance. He dipped the honey out of a large crock which sat in a corner near the door. First he weighed my container, added new honey, re-weighed, and then calculated the price. Unfortunately the honey came complete with its crushed comb, so eating it meant either consuming or trying to spit out bits of beeswax.

Across the street a villager operated an out-door vegetable stand. He sold potatoes, onions, and sometimes greens, depending on the season. During the summer he had eggplant, squash, and for a few weeks each spring, lettuce and radishes.

Near the bazaar I bought butter and eggs. In Iran, merchants made their butter by boiling yogurt and skimming off the top which produced a rather white oily substance which they spread on bread and ate with honey for breakfast.

"What do you want?" the merchant asked me the first time I went to his shop.

"Butter."

"How much?"

We were talking in Persian and I said what amounted to about one-half 'pound,' using the English word for pound.

"What is a 'pound?'" he asked. "I do not understand. How many grams of butter do you want?"

Like most Americans, I had never learned much about metric measurements. I thought fast.

"I will buy five grams."

I had no idea how much that might be. Without much reaction the man took a small square of waxed paper and laid it on his scale. He lifted a bowl onto the counter and, using a small knife, he placed a tiny dab of the whitish butter on the paper and weighed it.

"It is almost six grams," he said apologetically. "Is it too much?"

I am still surprised how quickly I mastered the metric system and how easy it was.

"I have made a mistake," I said. "I want five hundred grams."

The merchant smiled, winked at me, and measured out the rest of the butter. He wrapped it in a piece of newspaper, and handed it to me.

"Do you want some other thing?"

"Yes, I need six eggs."

Under the counter he had a large barrel filled with straw. In it he kept eggs, usually crusted with bits of manure, fresh from the hens that had laid them.

Whenever I went to the butter and egg shop, the owner always looked up and greeted me with the same question. "Do you wish another five grams of butter?" It became his favorite joke.

Next came the beef butcher. His shop sat on a side street paved with cobble stones and mud. I planned my day so that I arrived there about 10:00. That put me ahead of the rush that began an hour later when government officials and the bazaar closed for lunch, and when those men did their shopping. I did not want to arrive too early either. Meat sellers in Ahar butchered daily. They never aged the meat and they had no refrigeration, so whatever they killed they had to sell that day. If I got to the store too early, the damp meat weighed heavy. If I arrived too late, others had picked the carcass clean and little remained. The final bits appeared less appetizing because of the flies that accumulated during the day.

The lamb butcher	Inside of one of Ahar's bakeries, this one for flat unlevened bread. The one-eyed Russian baker is seen below.
The beef butcher

A different bakery with a different kind of bread

Benches lined the sides of the butcher shop, and men always sat on them waiting their turn with the merchant. The meat hung on a hook in one corner, next to a huge chopping block surrounded by an assortment of knives and cleavers. As each new shopper entered, he greeted everyone, noted his place 'in line,' and then he sat and watched the butcher's slow progress.

Meat buyers had three choices; fat, bone and meat. Rural butchers never differentiated between cuts of meat. In turn, each buyer stated what he wanted, and the butcher simply took meat from here and there on the carcass until he had laid out the amount ordered on a piece of newspaper on his scale. The government set the price for meat. I sat and patiently waited for my turn. While preparing an order the butcher occasionally removed or broke bones to expose new areas. As he hacked and chopped, bits of meat and bone flew about the shop which sometimes got a bit messy.

Only men entered the butcher shops. If a women came, she stood outside the shop near the door. Eventually one of the men would tell the butcher that a woman waited outside. He would stop, to the door, find out what she wanted, prepare her order immediately, take it out, give it to her, and return, picking up wherever he had left off on the last man's order.

One of Ahar's main squares. The electric sign, when lighted, said "Long Live the Shah"

 

Two shops in Ahar sold beef, although the meat might come from a cow, a water buffalo, or a bull; they did not distinguish. One store sold lamb. A fourth dealt in tripe, lungs and offal. Lamb had the highest prestige, and it cost twice as much as beef. All of it was tough and I assumed that the animals had worked until they dropped before they were slaughtered.

When my turn came, I ordered two kilos of beef, and a little fat. The butcher cut the meat, wrapped it in newspaper, handed it to me, took my money, smiled his biggest smile, and as I walked out of the shop, he summoned his best English and said, "Hello, Mister."

Next to the butcher I bought hot chocolate mix and powdered milk from a confectioner. The chocolate came in cans imported from Holland. I only bought if the store was empty because it came in boxes with red, white, and blue markings and the words "A free gift of the people of the United States of America," written on their sides in a dozen or so languages. Part of the American foreign aid program, much of the milk went directly to the black market and government officials pocketed the profits while the milk itself ended up in Iran's stores. Whenever I bought the stuff, the merchant pointed to the label, clicked his tongue, and handed it to me without comment.

Just after Thanksgiving, oranges arrived from the southern parts of Iran. Arranged in large piles in front of the various shops, they cost about four or five cents each. In addition the merchants had lemons and sweet lemons; the latter much like their sour counterparts in taste except that they were juicy and sweet. I have never seen them in the United States. In the fall, everyone had melons for sale, but by early winter they disappeared. Each product had its season; some things came and went quickly while others lasted for months. During the winter the vendors had only potatoes, onions, carrots, and oranges.

On down the street I bought lump and granulated sugar. Then I went to the bakery for bread. Rural Iranian bakeries made three kinds of bread. They baked stone bread by throwing a runny batter over small hot pebbles. Occasionally the dough engulfed one of the rocks, and I would find it while eating the stuff. A thick yellow bread held lots of vegetable oil. It tasted good, but tended to slide through me like a laxative. Usually I bought 'lavash,' an unleavened bread about an eighth to a quarter of an inch thick. It came in large oval sheets about a yard long, and I bought it from a talkative one-eyed Russian baker who generated clouds of white flour dust when he slapped his sides and greeted me. He helped me roll up the sheets of bread and stick them in my bag. Cookies baked in Ahar also had lots of shortening, so I only bought boxed cookies from Tehran, made in factories set up by the British.

I stopped last at the shop of Mr. Lazami. A dark shifty-eyed man, he sold milk and yogurt. His son attended one of my classes, and that meant that I had to spend time telling him why the boy always received bad grades, which never made the father very happy.

"He does not work very hard," I suggested.

"You must make him work harder. Make the boys learn. You do not beat them enough." Lazami smiled showing off a mouth full of rotting and missing teeth.

I bought two kilos of milk which Lazami measured out into the container that I handed him. In Ahar the raw, whole milk came from cows, sheep, goats, and water buffalo, or some mixture. As soon as I got it home I heated it to near boiling for a few minutes to pasteurize it. It always had a strong, wild taste.

A bowl of mast or Iranian yogurt complete with cucumbers and the trimmings.

I never found out where the tap water in Ahar came from, but it had a slight odor and whenever I boiled it, it left a crust in the pot. So I bought Coca Cola or Seven-Up or some other soft drink. Ahar merchants carried most popular American brands. And I had to buy kerosene; usually fifteen to thirty liters weekly. All of this easily took a full morning and provided considerable exercise.

"Look at the strange coin that I got from Mr. Lazami," I said to Usef one afternoon in the Pahlavi faculty room. I noticed the coin when Lazami included it among my change. Darker and thicker than regular coins, its design seemed mottled and indistinct.

Usef dropped the coin on the floor where it made a peculiar dead sound.

"It is not a real coin."

"I'll throw it away."

"No. You must take it back to Lazami. He is giving it to you because he believes you will not know. When you give it back, he will understand that you know. He will do it again if he thinks you can be fooled."

After school, Usef and I visited Mr. Lazami, presumably to give him some good news. His son had passed a test in my class that day and he appeared to be doing better.

Then I said, "When I was here today, I forgot to buy one thing."

In the corner Lazami had small bags of candy. "I need this which is just ten rials."

I handed him the coin. He looked at it for just an instant, then smiled with his toothless grin, winked, and said, "Thank you."

"God damn that Lazami all to hell," said Usef as we walked home.

Usef felt pleased with himself, having outsmarted Lazami. Whenever he was happy, he loved to practice swearing.

Mr. Hashemi, sensing a little homesickness on my part, decided that I needed something in my house that would remind me of Portland. Just after the first of the year he walked into the faculty room, unlocked the case that housed Pahlavi High School's books, opened the glass door, and took one of them out.

"This is an encyclopedia," he said showing me the book. "I am reading things about the city of Portland in Oregon."

He ran his finger along from right to left over the squiggles and dots that constituted the Arabic letters used for writing Persian (Farsi).

"It is saying that the people in Portland are loving flowers, and that there are gardens in every home."

"Well," I admitted, "there are a lot of flowers, but maybe not in every home."

"The book says that the people of Portland love the rose flower."

"We're known as the City of Roses," I added.

I knew that Hashemi was working his way toward a point. I had seen him read the book before. And I was already familiar with his very Iranian habit of working carefully toward the goal he had in mind, rather than just coming out and saying whatever was on his mind.

"It is good to like flowers," he said wistfully.

"I suppose so."

"Are you liking flowers?"

"I guess."

"Do you like the flower called the geranium?"

"A flower is a flower."

"This is good."

Actually, Hashemi did not understand that while I enjoy flowers, I am more or less ambivalent about raising them.

"Today I will have some geraniums taken to your house for you."

Years before Hashemi had the custodians to plant a large flower garden in the area between the front of the high school building and the wall that surrounded its grounds. He watched over it carefully, and I often saw him hovering around one or another of the janitors giving directions on how to care for the plants. As the cold weather came on late in December, the garden died back and lost its luster. Hashemi had Old Hotami dig up the geraniums and put them in pots. Up until then I never knew, or even wondered, where they put the pots.

Late that afternoon, while I sat working on the next day's lessons, Hashemi and Hotami came to my house. Hotami held one of the large pots with its geranium. The two men walked in, and with Hashemi directing, Hotami put the pot on the large sill of my window. Over the next two hours Hotami and some of the other janitors brought geraniums to my house until the window ledge could hold no more. In all, they brought twelve. The rest of the geraniums appeared in the windows of the school.

"They are beautiful flowers," Hashemi beamed. "You will enjoy them all of the time. They are making you feel that you are at home."

Hashemi walked from flower to flower, touched each one, checked it, picked off a few dead leaves, and continued telling me how good it was that I loved flowers.

"You are to be giving each plant one-half cup of water on every second day," Hashemi explained, speaking very deliberately. "It is important that the plants are not having too much water, but just enough."

Giving the plants the required water took time, and proved to be a chore that I occasionally forgot. But I tried. I talked to the geraniums. I played music for them. I picked off their dead leaves. In spite of this their general health deteriorated.

A few weeks later Mr. Hashemi came to my house again. He had been standing outside looking at the geraniums, shaking his head. He gave me a lesson on how to water the plants, and he pulled off the rapidly accumulating dead leaves.

"They are not looking happy," he said trying to be cheerful. "Are you giving them water on every second day?"

"I do the best I can."

"They are looking very sad." He carefully inspected each of the twelve plants.

Mr. Hashemi and I (on right) walk near the Ahar Sheikh

Off and on over the next two weeks I often saw Hashemi's shadow outside my window as he walked in front of my house, looking at the geraniums, shaking his head. Once he knocked and then came in and watered the plants, although I had just done it that morning.

Finally, one afternoon, I found Old Hotami knocking on my door. He stood there with a big grin on his face, said something I could not understand, and pushed by me into the house. He picked up one of the pots and carried it off across the yard and into the school. One-by-one he and the other custodians carried away the geraniums.

They put the plants with the others in the windows of the schoolrooms. As if to spite me, they picked up through the winter, and by spring they looked quite healthy. Mr. Hashemi never spoke to me again about roses, flowers, geraniums, or Portland.

Mr. Hashemi did, however, bring up the issue of British English again. Persian, which uses the Arabic alphabet, is written from right to left. The letters do not exactly sit on a line but are placed more or less as if an imaginary line ran through the middle of the script. The boys in the English classes attempted to produce English letters in the same way, often carefully drawing them, starting on the right side of each letter and sitting them haphazardly over the lines. They frequently transposed letters, and more often wrote them backwards. The letters 'C' and 'S' proved unusually hard and seemed interchangeable. None of the students could differentiate between a written lower case 'L' and a written lower case 'E.' Since the boys did not know the basic forms from the joining strokes, they included unnecessary elements, and as a result they caricatured English script whenever they wrote anything in their books.

I decided that a simplified script, much like printing, with some of the letters joined, would be easier. After Mr. Hashemi saw a sample of his son's homework, he came to me in the faculty room.

"You must teach the boys British writing. American writing is good, but British writing is better."

So I returned to the more complicated cursive form, but in time managed to simplify it a bit which helped. I repeatedly learned that I could go only so far making changes.

I tried to teach each boy how to write his name in English. Then I drew a sample of a page on the blackboard, and showed them, using my name as an example, how to put their names at the top of their homework papers in both English and Persian. I told them to fill out their papers exactly as I had done mine. Out of a class of about forty-two, one boy did it correctly. Most wrote their names in Persian only, at the bottom, as they had always done. Some wrote their names in Persian at the top. Six of them wrote my name in English and their name in Persian. Two wrote my name in both Persian and English. One boy became so confused that he left his paper blank.

I complained to Usef. When he translated for the other teachers, they laughed. The told me that I expected too much. The boys had never put their names anywhere except at the bottom of the page. Taught to accept orders mechanically, and never to ask "why," the students simply copied and memorized their lessons.

The better students, even the older ones, exhibited the same inability, or at least unwillingness, to think. My experience with the English club provided an example.

"Many of the older boys would like to have an English club," said Mr. Hashemi one day in the faculty room.

"The boys would hate an English club," insisted Usef later that afternoon.

"The boys always enjoy attending this club, and it is good for them," continued Mr. Hashemi.

"The boys would be made to attend," said Usef. "Hashemi will make them go and they will hate it."

"Even my son would find an English club interesting," said Hashemi very thoughtfully.

"He only wants such a club so that his stupid son will learn enough English to pass his class. He hopes that if his son goes to your club that he will not be in trouble somewhere else."

"When Morgan was here, he had a club and it was a great success."

"He told Mrogan to start such a club, and it was terrible. Morgan hated it and the boys hated it."

"Morgan's club lasted almost all of the year," smiled Hashemi.

"After just two meetings, Morgan ended the club, and Hashemi was very angry because it was over." added Usef.

"Mr. Charchi can help you with the club," suggested Hashemi.

"He will try to make me be with you in the club but I will refuse," Usef added adamantly.

"I will send the boys to your house after school today so that you can start the English club," said Hashemi. Then he walked out of the faculty room, not waiting for my reaction.

"If he tries to start a club, tell him that you will be doing it tomorrow, or maybe next week, or perhaps never," said Usef with a smile.

"It starts today," I said.

"Today?"

"Yes, today. Hashemi said that the boys would come to my house after school."

"I will be going home," said Usef. "I am not being with any more English club. I am sorry."

When I heard someone knock on the door that afternoon, I thought it would be boys, but instead I found Usef.

"What brings you here?"

"Mr. Hashemi has told me that I must help with the club."

"Thanks," I said, knowing that Usef could not refuse his boss and that he did not want to be there. "You know that I couldn't do it without you."

When the boys arrived, Usef sat pouting in the corner. Four young men who I had never seen before and Hashem, Mr. Hashemi's eldest son, came in and sat.

"Tell them that this will be an English club and that we will do whatever they want to do," I said to Usef who translated.

"They say that they will do whatever you want them to do," he replied after two of the boys mumbled something in Turkish.

I suggested that we have tea and cookies, but Usef protested. "Do not serve anything. It is not a good thing for teachers being too familiar with the boys. I think it would be enough if we are giving the boys a lesson."

"But it is supposed to be a club," I argued.

"The boys will be happy with a lesson."

I brought out cookies and tea anyway, and told the boys the English words for each item. None of them touched the cookies, and two of them sipped politely at their tea while the rest got cold. Usef took nothing and sat stiffly in the corner with a stern look frozen on his face. The boys sat dumbly and looked at me.

I got out my book and we went through one of the lessons on English structure followed by some pattern drills. When I finished, they thanked me, got up and left. Over the following weeks I tried games, contests, discussions, and reviews of lessons which they had studied in their classes. All of these proved awkward because theoretically the boys understood the vocabulary, but in fact, they did not. They memorized the sounds and the sentences, but without comprehending meanings. No matter what I did, the boys just sat and waited for me to tell them what to do next. They never showed interest, initiative, or ideas of their own.

One by one the boys stopped coming. In six weeks it ended.

"It is unfortunate," said Hashemi sadly. "The boys enjoyed your club very much."

"I am so glad the stupid thing is over," said Usef pronouncing a benediction.

"When Morgan was here, the club lasted for a long time," Hashemi remembered.

"Your club lasted more than two times as long as the club of Morgan."

"Perhaps in the spring you can begin another club."

"He will try again and again to make us have such a club," said Usef. "And he will be making me help again and I will hate it."

I had the good sense never to mention the subject again, and that was the last English club in Ahar.