2020 Oregon   

Corroding a Concrete Foundation
By Hossein Alizadeh Gharib, Tehran, Iran

“American universities, which have long attracted world’s best and brightest students from abroad, are facing intense competition from European Union, China, Taiwan and Hong Kong;…[While] university enrollments are surging in England, Germany and other countries; sharp decline in foreign students in American universities is attributed greatly to post-September 11 delays in processing student visas.”

Sam Dillon, “U.S. Slips in Attracting the World’s Best Students” New York Times, 12/21/04

I was born on September 4, 1966. Some special Septembers also I remember quite crisply. September 11, 2001 is one of them. The day that thousands of hopeful souls lost the hope to see their loved ones, and many kids slept the night thinking their dads or mums were just gone to a “trip”.

No chain of events may have changed our world the way that this single event has done. It not only shattered the concrete and steel of Twin Towers, but, as every passing year is going to show, also triggered corrosion of the concrete foundation of a nation whose pride and strength were based on science, creativity, and the ability to attract the best minds of the world. It was a blow to the basic foundation of a nation one of whose founding fathers, Benjamin Franklin, was a man of science himself.

September 1975, a typical golden afternoon: Father brought us again another issue of New Frontiers magazine which was published and distributed by the US embassy in Tehran. He, as a chemist who worked in a pharmacy, was among the few elite who were privileged to receive the magazine in their work. We were a middle class Iranian family of the mid 70s, living in a typical mid class neighborhood at west central Tehran. Receiving this may also have meant we were rubbing elbows with the higher class who were normally more a target readership for such a publication.

My brother Farid and I hurriedly took the large format color magazine and began to skim through the pages. This and the Scientist magazine were among the best ones we had the luck to read frequently, I as much as my 9-year-old’s vocabulary permitted.

One special day in September 1975: Farid had taken me along to the International Trade Fair. We were a little bit late. It was the last day of the fair. It was near sunset when we reached the place. The first we wished to visit was the US pavilion which we knew by such publications. The doors were closed shut and the inside was lit by a dim light at the far end of the large roofed space. In this light we saw something which looked like a human figure with helmet and space suit on. Farid and I pressed our faces against the glass window to see more, but the light was not enough and we were not sure what it was inside. Our breath was making vapor halos on the glass, making it more difficult to see. The fair was going to be closed, but we waited an hour more at the closed door of the US pavilion, trying to figure out what we are seeing. We were both space fans and could not miss this rare chance to see something special from the Apollo era.

It was our last chance.

By next September, Farid was in a hospital for a minor heart problem. His heart was getting a little bit larger than normal. September 1977 came and Farid died at the age of 17 during a football match. During those last months he looked more handsome than ever (he was the best of us). and I guess maybe had his first date. I noticed he looked more tidy than normal and his haircut was different. We never found the chance again to know what it was that we saw in the dim light.

The United States: A wide spectrum of many happy people, a land of never ending opportunities, the Liberty Statue, White House in a green foreground, highly skilled engineers working at the space program, lovely colored textbooks, and New Frontiers magazine, all shrouded in golden sunlight, all these were things that fired my childhood imagination about the melting pot which was known to me as “America”. I kept this dreamland view until recently quite alive. Many things happened since then. As the scripture (Mathew 24.6-23) says, heard were the news of battles close by and the news of battles far away. Countries fought each other, and kingdoms attacked one another in my region of the Middle East, and maybe never mankind hated my far away dreamland as today. But I closed my ears to the extreme voices of hatred who shouted in media, “Look, here is your promised land, there it is! Look!”

My childhood dreams like a frozen creature from an ice age were kept intact— that is, until I tried to act upon them. Then, what I thought I knew about the things collectively known as American values (human rights, democracy, pioneering spirit of entrepreneurship, individualism, etc.) from such outlets as magazines and libraries, gave way to another, harsher reality, the one I experienced first hand in American embassies across the Middle East.

My childhood heroes continued to be Benjamin Franklin, Neil Armstrong, Richard Feynman, Albert Einstein, George Gamow, and Robert Goddard. These were among the thousands of people which America should have been proud to be represented by in the world. But my world began to crack.

I am now 38 years old, a freelance science writer, print and TV journalist, and a researcher in geology. My love is yet in Astronomy and Space Sciences, something which I have from my deceased brother, but being a practical person wishing for things more down to earth I combined this love with my interest in Geology and the result was something which is called Astrogeology, the study of large and small planetary bodies and their geological interaction with planet Earth through direct impacts. The subject is known to the public through the recent surge of interest in Dinosaurs and the fascinating story of their extinction possibly through an asteroid impact on Earth some 65 million years ago.

So it is in this way that since 1996 I am engaged in a geological search for the possible meteorite craters of Iran, using aerial photographs, satellite imagery, and various geological and geophysical methods. By then I ran a business of selling pistachio and other dried agricultural products which I used as a more sure way of income (by mere writing you never can make a living nowadays in Iran. Writing was always, and is yet more so today, a dangerous adventure) and by selling the business I used the capital to do something which should have given value to my life; something which I may only have had the patience and interest to do in this Iran which has a lot of unexplored geology. This search is something which brings me to earth from my heavenly love for the stars, galaxies and the possible other universes beyond. As you see, as ever, I am yet a dreamer.

This privately funded search up to now has resulted in the discovery of a number of geological structures which possibly are produced by the impact of large meteoritic bodies, and which can make a valuable contribution to understanding the past history of our planet in geological terms. Beside this I have discovered a large number of eyewitness accounts in the huge collection of the Persian historical manuscripts which have recorded some of the crater producing events and some other atmospheric blasts due to meteorites which can be compared to the 1908 Tunguska event. These last ones are categorized in experts’ jargon as geohazards; threats to terrestrial life in local or global scales which deserve further study. The importance of this may be better understood by knowing that it has only been about 30 years that space based infrared sensors are employed in detection of meteoroids (chunks of space rock and ice) impacts worldwide. My discoveries spread over a time span of over 1000 years.

Not much far away from my childhood dreams of writing books, now I have 5 published and 4 in-print books to my credit in Persian (my mother language), and as a freelance science writer have published a huge collection of scientific works in journals and newspapers here in Iran and because of this I have won the Journalistic Excellency Award for the year 2000 in Iran before my weekly column in the newspaper Hamshahri was shut down for expressing support for the pro-democracy student uprisings of 1999. Beside this I have some published works in US and elsewhere and one of them has won the Boeing-Griffith Observatory’s Science Writing Contest Award for the year 2003. I am also a contributor to a number of scholarly publications, including Columbia University’s Encyclopedia Iranica, of which up to now 11 volumes are published in the United States.

You may be interested also to know that I am now working on my first English book which is about the meteor and meteorite lore in the Hebrew and Persian sources.

Because of these achievements I was helped by my late friend, Mrs. Kathleen Mark of Los Alamos, N.M., author of Meteorite Craters, U. of Arizona Press, to win a rare competitive scholarship by the renowned New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology in Socorro, New Mexico, to be enrolled for a B.Sc. course in Geology and one of the professors of this US university , Dr. Penelope J. Boston; a NASA scientist; also has offered me a student job in her lab to cover the rest of living and education expenses in the US.

I got to know Mrs. Mark when back in 1997 I wrote a letter to University of Arizona Press for a copy of Meteorite Craters. My letter apparently was passed to the author and she wrote me an answer along with an autographed copy of her book. Introduction of Microsoft Windows 98 along the more widespread availability of Internet in Iran put us in more frequent contact which over time developed to deep friendship. Getting to know my life story and how I lost my chance for education in the stormy political climate of Iran after the so-called Cultural Revolution back in the1980s, she, first without telling me, made a visit to Socorro, New Mexico, for talks with university officials who showed interest in having me as their student. Receiving my resume and school papers the school granted me the rare competitive annual scholarship of $36,000, Mrs. Mark’s (until recently anonymous) private grant and Dr. Boston’s on-campus laboratory job included.

Armed with my hefty resume and the I-20 (which is the admission letter for foreign student to be submitted to US embassies worldwide) and scholarship letters, I thought it will not be so difficult to obtain a US F1 student visa.

I was so wrong.

It is now 2 years that my visa request is rejected in US consulates in Ankara, Turkey and Damascus, Syria by bureaucrats who neither have any understanding of the merits of my scientific works nor any respect for the legal papers (including I-20 form and scholarship document from New Mexico Tech, document of the US $ 25,000 grant by my late friend Mrs. Kathleen Mark, who at the time wished to be anonymous, property ownership documents in Iran, letter of introduction from Dr. Penny Boston about my merits and an on-campus student job offer, and a similar letter from Dr. Professor Jamshid Hassanzadeh, a visiting geology professor to UCLA, and a job offer letter from the president of Geological Survey of Iran which guarantees my return from US after completion of my studies) issued by reputable scientific institutions in USA and Iran.

Here I will give you examples of my experiences with US embassies in different countries:

Ankara, Turkey, a $1,200 trip of 10 days for me by bus from Tehran, March 3rd, 2003: I am interviewed by a consular officer for the first time and at the end he told me since I am single and not married , there are not enough assurances that I will return after completion of my studies to my country so they can not give me the visa.

The clients of this embassy are mostly highly educated people who are chased by the same melting-pot dream which fired my childhood imagination back in 1970s. Almost all of them are rejected. Looking at their tortured faces after coming from the interview, one understands why many airline and bus agencies have made their office, for tickets back home, just on the same street the embassy is located. We must look like stupid dream-walkers.

Embassy was just a mere two minute walk from my hotel. In coming back to my Turkish hotel, I noticed that something (a coat hanger for my fine clothes, the only thing I placed out of my locked luggage in the morning) was missing from my personal belongings in my room. Apparently the dizzy refused applicants were seen as easy targets. Even the bellboys displayed a wide grin to refused applicants. The theft, though small, made me feel more unsafe. I spent a terrible night.

March 4th, 2003, US embassy, again Ankara: I enclosed a short note with my documents pointing out that even if I marry and leave my wife at home you will have the right to ask me how I am supposed to support her while I am away in the US ( since it will mean I am going to work illegally in the US and send money back home to support my family) and if I want to bring her along with me to the US she must apply separately which doubles the difficulty and by then also I must have the means to support her in US or she must find a job there, all impossible with a student visa). The subject of the note was something which I have should talked about all this in person in the first interview, but due to the gloomily heavy atmosphere of the embassy (none of the student or family union applicants were to get a visa that day) I was so dizzy that I forgot what I should have said in that first interview. I had also been advised in my student guide (handed to me by my US university) to never argue (or counter-argue) with a consular officer. The university people knew the kind of breed they may be.

I passed along with this note a US flag neatly attached to the flag of my country as a sign of friendship which I hoped would be well received. The reaction was stormy. A tall thin nervous lady officer told me all my documents, resume and published works (e.g. my life) were “nonsense” and rejected my visa application.

I naively had wished they could understand the well-intended meaning of the two respectfully joined flags from me, as I came from a country whose semi-official policy since 1980 (when I was just 13) was flag burning. I wished they would understand that I was not brainwashed by what I had seen since my teenage years– and that I remembered the cultural aspects (libraries and the journals) of the US embassies.

On my way back home, at the border when checking my passport I was asked by the border guards about the purpose of my travel and when I pointed to the big US embassy stamp placed on a strategically visible empty space, they questioned if I was treated respectfully or not. I tell the truth. They looked amused as apparently every bad experience with US embassy may have proved the official internal governmental propaganda against what they call as “global arrogance of the great Satan” to be true.

Back in the home I felt depressed and sad. My first exposure to American dream was so harsh that the shock crippled my work for a while. Yet, I remained a little bit hopeful that by providing the documents which may convince the consular officers I can work it out.

Ankara May 27, 2003: This was a lightning fast interview not only for me but for other students. I was again rejected, though this time I had been emailed in advance by the US embassy that I could apply again with my new documents, which included a job offer (upon the completion of my studies) by the president of Geological Survey who valued the importance of the pure science subject which I had selected for study against the current trends of applied geology. This time the elder officials who at least had been interested to listen to and read an applicant’s documents were replaced by much younger officials who in a blink rejected all applicants one by one in a row. The young boy who “interviewed” me only asked me if I was ever in Europe. The answer was no and I was rejected. It took less than 90 seconds. Afterward, I was dizzy for days.

I was yet not convinced that this treatment of me is an institutional behavior and not individual incidents. But the damage was done. I could not work properly as before. My belief in what I thought of as American values was beginning to crack. What made it worse was that in the new situation I was not able to make any short range or long range plans of any kind. In such a situation doubt about your own merit as a human being and about your work begins to form. It kills enthusiasm and endurance, no matter how hopeful or optimistic you are toward a system.

I was now far from my disciplined daily work schedule. I lived on a day by day basis. Could not decide what I must do for the next step. My morale was ruined and I hardly was able to continue this way for long. A year of my life was wasted in this way.

May-June 2004, Austria and Italy: I am invited by a writer’s association in Austria to take part in a symposium in Graz. It was so relaxed and stress free to obtain the EU visa. They knew what they want from me and I knew what I must present. Two months of relaxation in Adriatic Sea coast, Venice and the Alpine summer weather was something I really needed. On my return back home I was almost completely confident that this time I can obtain my student visa from the US embassy since I now had what I thought was the golden key of an EU visa stamp on my passport.

Damascus, Syria, August 17, 2004: After hearing about a successful applicant in the past year who got a student visa in Syria, I decided to apply this time at the US embassy there. To be really sure that they might accept student visa applications from Iran, again I wrote an email and asked about it. The personalized answer from the consular officer was that it was indeed possible. So I went ahead with the new electronic appointment procedure introduced at the embassy webpage. The long land journey by bus to Syria took three days itself. I had to cover about 3000 km through almost the entire Middle East to reach Damascus. The desolate eerie-looking roads in eastern Turkey with frequent stops by the driver to bribe the Turkish police were the main reasons that made the journey last longer than it was supposed to. The situation in Syria was not much different; we were advised at the border that each passport containing a 50 Lira banknote between the pages will have the entry stamp much faster. I had Syrian visa valid for 30 days and had nothing with me to be worried about, but I felt it was wise to follow what others were doing.

Damascus: a lively inexpensive city of colorful oriental bazaars, and beautiful ancient Arabic and Roman architecture in the texture of everyday life. The embassy itself here in Damascus was also a new experience. First the Bald Eagle coat of arms was missing, but its large empty place was visible on the outer wall. And though the facing Italian embassy proudly displayed an EU and Italian flag, as far as I could see there was no Star and Stripes flag anywhere outside.

We had to come for visa appointment from 7:30 to 9:30 AM. I was there by 7 and gradually a long line was formed. The line was orderly and quiet, but it seems someone thought otherwise. By 8:45, after the local gatekeeper received a brief telephone call, we were instructed by him to go to the other street about 400 meters downhill. Waiting for half an hour there on the street and sidewalks, we then were told, this time by an American, to make a line again in the street, and walk all the way back uphill until we reached the gate. The humiliating head down march took also some minutes. Then after making a line and waiting some time again, one by one we were led inside. The reason? Maybe to clear the entry gate open for overslept embassy staff? I don’t know, but the whole thing and the way it was done made me recall the cliché prison camps in WW II movies. People who passed by the embassy street gave us strange looks on our head-down walk toward the consular gate.

All kinds of people, young and old, could be seen. Most of them looked more western than I, wearing ties and neat clothes. I was a stranger there and after a long 3000 km long journey I was far from feeling fine in my clothes, but more than a few people (and later some embassy employees) asked me if I am an American. Wearing casual clothes (black jeans and a navy blue jacket) I looked at them surprised. Judging from what I witnessed at the embassy gate I was hopeless that even this time I can get the visa and maybe this made me look indifferent and relaxed or perhaps a little bit arrogant. Was that enough to look an American?

Relaxed mood was something which I have never seen in US embassies, but the atmosphere I saw in Syria was more tense than anything I had ever experienced before. I saw old ladies shaking and displaying clear facial tics even before being interviewed. Looking at embarrassed faces of rejected people is a shock and little did I know that I soon was to be one of them. I noticed that losing the way to the door (from bewilderment, from shock, or the effort to cover tears, or all three perhaps) leading out is the most common symptom.

Only after I was once again inside the US consular office—and only after I had made the 3000 km, three-day journey to Syria through Turkey and again paying the $100 application fee (this time in cash) at the embassy– did the young consular officer, a girl, tell me that the US embassy in Syria had no “expertise” in issuing visas to Iranian nationals

I felt dumbly tricked.

I found myself groping for the way out.

In all my five times of exposure to interviews in US embassies, the few successful cases I have seen were: three family-joining-green-card cases, and two American citizen marriage cases (done in a snap). No, I don’t remember any visa issued on scholarly basis.

In all these interviews what made me surprised was the marked contrast between my childhood dreams about what an American might look like, along with my real familiarity with a dozen of ordinary fine, honest and righteous citizens from all over the United States who look as humane as we are, and the people who represented them worldwide in diplomatic missions. Maybe no other nation is so badly represented by her own employees.

September 14, 2004: my lovely dear friend Mrs. Kathleen Abbott Mark, of Los Alamos, a geologist who raised six children and wrote two books while serving as den mother to many of the world’s greatest scientists, including J. Robert Oppenheimer, Stanislaw Ulam, Edward Teller, and Hans Bethe, among others (all colleagues of her late husband, director of the laboratory’s theoretical division), for whom her home for nearly four decades was a virtual salon, died in Albuquerque’s Heart Hospital after suffering from a major heart attack. As her daughter wrote me,” She had hoped very much to see you as a student in Socorro by this time. I sincerely hope that it may still be in the cards”.

Something began to crumble in me. It seemed there is nothing remained to worth hoping or waiting for.

Within 24 days my mother also faced the same fate. She died after a heart attack on October 7, 2004. The deep respect and trust she had for my American friends, especially Mrs. Kathleen Mark (whom she called “Your sincere scientist friend”) was with her to the last day.

I live now completely alone. Everyday life is just a waste of seconds and minutes. I am far from the cheerful happy soul which I used to be.

I am told by my US university that my scholarship voids after 2 years of waiting by January 18, 2005 because they can not hold it anymore. My US professor is also not hopeful.

I am afraid to apply again. If I again apply and am rejected I may hate my dream altogether.

There is nothing remaining worth hoping for or waiting for.

Nonetheless, life must go on. My search for a university in an EU country, or Australia and Canada has already begun. Australian embassy even has opened a website specially directed at Iranian students.

The dream is yet with me: To fulfill the wish that my late brother and I had about that Apollo exhibit we saw in the fair in Tehran back in 1970s. To see the things which my crystalline childhood memory recorded but failed to grasp, and my adult eyes and brain can look on and understand.

I still don’t know exactly what it was that we saw that day so long ago. The answer may lie somewhere in Air and Space Museum in Washington D.C. My day has not come yet to solve this childhood mystery. Farid and I are yet behind the doors, pushing our faces on the cold glass.

The doors remain closed for us.

These days the pressure on me and my people is not anything less than before, but I think since my visa is rejected by the US authorities, as a writer and an activist I am here somehow respected as a “showpiece,” since what they should have spent a large sum of money upon, to brainwash us with anti-US news and propaganda, US policies have done without any cost for any totalitarian regime across the Middle East. Actually I have paid for all of these by my own time, my own capital, my hopes, and my lost dreams and values.

The policies in this way are sending false signals by showing the progressive reform forces throughout the Middle East that they are hopelessly all alone on their own, without any outside support. And when I know that I am all alone in my efforts and nobody supports or even cares about my beings, sure I will look where I am putting my next step with more reservation.

It is not out of fear or anything like that. I am carrying my own coffin for many years with me. Specters of death, prosecution, or loss of social status is an everyday fact which we have lived with since many years ago. When you have nothing to lose such things will not get so painful things to deal with in everyday life. It is like that one gets used to “life in prison” sentence.

Update: Since writing this article New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology has informed me that the scholarship which the late Mrs. Mark worked so much for can be made available at a later date. Mrs. Joan Neary, the executor of Mrs. Mark’s estate, has set aside the sum of $25,000 her mother wished to be used to help me defray the cost of earning a university degree. However, there is no prospect that the problem for scholarly visas will improve in near future.