Lily was late, but apologetic. I met her in the lobby of my Tehran hotel. She was out of breath from the long walk and the long bus ride from central to North Tehran, the area where the rich live in today's Islamic Republic of Iran. She says she's barely able to make ends meet, working two jobs. She's a travel agent and cleans a house for a rich expat in the petroleum business. "The rich up here look down on us," she said. With her sincere round eyes and all-black attire, she hardly looks like a revolutionary. But she hates the government.
I visited Iran last month as part of a delegation of travel agents and journalists in an effort by the government to promote tourism to Iran. They issued our visas in days at the airport. This has never been done for Americans before.
I was flattered that she wanted to see me. But I soon realized she wanted to tell me things. She wanted to tell me about her life in today's very misunderstood nation of Iran.
We turned onto a major boulevard, choked with traffic, where I noticed policemen on the street and in a green-striped van. "There, over there, you see them? They hassle us if too much of our hair is showing, or if our manteau (jacket) is too short. I hate them," she said. "I hate this regime. Our new president started that, those special police who go around arresting women if they don't like what they're wearing."
Like many of her peers, she feels suffocated by the Islamic Republic's strict rules about dress, the press, freedom of movement and even the websites she looks at. Their over-the-top preoccupation with keeping the rest of the world out is making her and many of her friends weary and depressed. "Everybody pretends to be religious, but nobody really is, they just pretend. I really hate what has happened here, hate the way they can just come up to me and question if I am with a boy or if I am breaking one of their rules."
Iranian men and women live under a strict set of censorship rules as well as restrictions on many aspects of their lives. More than 400,000 websites are blocked. Try to surf to Facebook and you get that familiar little Farsi text saying no, you can't go there.
Many Iranians would love more than anything to travel to the U.S., but when they take an expensive trip to Dubai or Turkey to apply for a U.S.A. visa, they usually come up empty. In a classic tit for tat, Iran makes it as hard as possible for Americans to get visas to come here. It can take two months, and that's a shame, because there is a huge tourism potential. Iran is dirt cheap and the antiquities are unparalleled. And the people love Americans. Really.
A common sight is people waiting by the sides of the roads for 'freelance' taxis operated by men who work day jobs and drive people around to make extra money. One day I watched a long line of men holding pots from home waiting for a few scoops of a porridge they'd eat with pita bread for a cheap breakfast. Clearly, despite the oil boom, people—those who aren't powerful or rich—are scratching to get by here, while President Ahmadinejad does his best to scare the wits out of potential foreign tourists with his rhetoric about Israel and hostility toward the U.S.
Yet nobody I met here agrees with their fiery leader. They just ignore him.
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Young Iranians live in the same world as we do: they can access that world via websites (using proxy servers) and satellite TV. They realize that most of the rest of the world enjoys far more freedom and much less dogma from their leaders. As I took another sip of fake beer, I asked her about alcohol, another prohibited item; the banning of it grates on the young. "If they find you with alcohol or if you're drunk, they lock you up for a few days," she said. "But plenty of people drink, but only at home when the curtains are closed."
We pass one of Iran's thousands of blue collection boxes; the logo on the metal boxes shows a figure of a crippled man holding a child. You see these boxes at every highway rest stop and on most major boulevards. I asked her who gets the proceeds of these charity boxes. "Khamenei, Ahmadinejad, Rafsanjani, but not the poor," she said. "We never hear about anyone actually getting any money from those; they keep it to themselves. They do whatever they want. They have big bank accounts in Switzerland; they keep lots of our tax money there."
I asked her about her parents. Her father, she said, died after being sent into the Iran-Iraq war in the '80s as a worker in a chemical company. He wasn't even a soldier. "The Iraqis gassed them, and about 10 years after the war he got cancer here," she said, holding her throat. At 32, she shares a two-bedroom apartment with her two brothers and her mom. Their rent just went up $100 a month; now it's $300 a month. The average salary here in Iran is about $6,800 a year. They struggle, she said. A place of her own isn't even worth thinking about.
We were just tucking into our pizza when the waiter came over and whispered to Lily in an ominous sotto voce. She pulled her headscarf higher up, covering more of her hair. "He said that the police were here yesterday, hassling women about covering up. If they catch people showing too much hair or wearing something they don't like, they can shut the restaurant down."
Even the satellite dishes are hunted down by helicopter, like our state police looking for pot plants. When found, they are confiscated and the owners fined. Don't want anyone watching too many episodes of Desperate Housewives, now, do we?
I asked her if she'd vote against President Ahmadinejad when he runs for re-election again in seven months. "Nobody votes," she said, "they throw our votes away. There is no point in it. I just hope something happens that's different. "
