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Two years ago, Arsalan Saleh Fard had never heard of this Latin American metropolis. He would have been lost if asked to identify it on a map. But it is here, at times sleeping on a mattress on the floor, where the Iranian-born Saleh Fard was living a life in limbo. With no legal right to work and no permanent place to stay, the 25-year-old picked up under-the-table shifts at a barbershop to pay for his insulin injections and rent. He arrived knowing no Spanish and had picked up only a few phrases by earlier this year. Virtually all his in-person conversations, he said, came translated through a translation app on his phone. “I don’t know what to do,” he said in a June interview in Farsi, his native tongue, speaking to The Washington Post via an interpreter. “I am really lost here.” Saleh Fard, who was among the very first migrants deported to a nation he didn’t know, has spent longer in a third country than virtually anyone else. After he was sent to Panama by the U.S., the Panamanian...
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I remember years ago I had to drive a friend of mine who was heavily into substance abuse t a clinic to get clean. She was very opposed but thankfully couldn't put up much of a fight because she was cooked out of her mind on the way there. It was when we finally got there that it dawned upon her what was happening and she voiced her objection. "I don't need this." "Yeah you're fine."  "I don't need to go." "Stop whining." "I don't belong in there."  "You sleep an hour a night for like the last 3 months."  "I don't need to go."  "You're only going to be there for 2 months."  "I don't need this, you know I don't need this. Look at me, I'm fine."  "I'm doing it for your own good babe, I promise you. It's like school. You just got out of school like 6 months ago. It's like a year. It's like you were on a holiday for a year. It's okay. It...
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"It doesn't matter to me. I don't care if I know him and I don't care if I don't,"says T.J. Houshmandzadeh of his father. "At the end of the day, if I had done that to my kids, would I want to get to know them? Yeah, I would. But I wouldn't expect them to put the effort in. They know of me, but they don't know me. You chose to leave. I didn't choose to be born. If I get to know him, cool. But I'm not going to put in the effort. I don't call people back when they call me." Houshmandzadeh talked to his father for the first time this past summer, making the call to Iran, but he's not making any appointments for another one. His uncles liked the original Touraj, a college student when he met their sister, and over the years have encouraged him to reach out. "His dad was a nice man; he treated my sister well," Anthony Norman says. "He got called back to Iran. He had to go. His dad got sick. He wanted my sister to go ...
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In the early 2000s I made an attempt to learn Spanish. This was largely as a result of playing with and coaching a group of mostly Spanish speaking players. What little Spanish I learned before giving up on it I tried to use in everyday conversations. One day at work when I expressed that a girl I found hot was "mucho caliente" a coworker told me that I was saying it wrong and I really should say "muy caliente". I insisted that I was saying it correctly. He clarified that the way it said it was like saying in English that something was "a lot of hot". I indicated that I regularly called things a lot of hot in English.  
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Five years after join­ing Toronto Fire in March 2017, Edward Aza­deh tried to end his life, haunted by all that he had seen as a first respon­der, and by the dis­crim­in­a­tion he says he suffered because he is gay. “I came to Toronto Fire Ser­vices full of joy, con­fid­ence and health,” says Aza­deh.  He was drawn to the pro­fes­sion by the pro­spect of help­ing oth­ers. Sev­en­teen months after his sui­cide attempt, Aza­deh is still strug­gling — phys­ic­ally and men­tally. After he emerged from a med­ic­ally induced coma, it took him months to relearn how to eat and walk. He has been dia­gnosed with depres­sion and post-trau­matic stress dis­order (PTSD) and is unable to work. He can’t drive. He lives alone in a small, tidy apart­ment. The med­ic­a­tions he has been pre­scribed to calm his racing mind have left him with a speech imped­i­ment, for which he often apo­lo­gizes. “I find myself a shell of the man I was,” says Aza­deh. Aza­deh has filed a com­plaint against City of To...
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Back in the early 2000s one of my coworkers approached me with some photographs of her dogs and asked me if I wanted to see her puppies. The surprised look on my face and hesitance to answer made another coworker begin laughing out loud as she realized that I (and her) were wrestling fans and as such took her comment to mean something completely different. When another coworker heard of our exchange she said, "And you probably responded YES YES YES!!" The coworker who laughed passed away a few years later.  
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They both got up, paid their bill and headed towards the door.   A young lady approached from the other side, stole a quick glance and focused on a distant spot ahead of her.   Kurt had become very familiar with the procedure, the classic I-see-you-are-deformed-so-I’ll take-a-quick-look-out-of-curiousity-but-will-immediately-look-away-as-you-are-hidious-and-I-don’t-want-you-to-catch-me-staring-at-your-freek-face-so-I’ll-focus-on-whatever-is-straight-ahead-of-me-and-act-like-that-was-my-intention-all-along-and-it-has-nothing-to-do-with-your-face look.   She walked past them.   “Bitch,” Kurt mumbled.  
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Deena Ghodrati, known professionally as Deena G, is a singer, songwriter, and electronic/afro-house artist. She is also an actress known for Legend Has It. "For those who don’t know, I’m an Iranian, born and brought up in Botswana, and lived in Canada for the majority of my life. I have never lived in Iran and have only visited twice in my lifetime, when I was 2 and 8 years old. Despite living outside of Iran my whole life, the fabric of my being is woven with Persian tradition, culture and heritage, something that many of the Persian diaspora share in common. To us Iranians, being Persian defines a huge part of our reality and identity, and I’m proud to be one."   
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One day as we were sitting in geology class I began leafing through my binder. There were many drawings in it, mostly soccer related. I stopped on a particular page, my first, and probably only, page of notes from the previous semester’s dynamics class. At the top of the page I had written the name of the required textbook (Beer and Johnston) and underneath it was a full body drawing of the professor, Mr. Nateghi. There were some equations regarding velocity and acceleration and then what seemed like my own work in determining the equation in the Cartesian system for the polar coordinate equation r = 2(1+ cos θ). Further down the page I had written all the things I had sacrificed during the time that I had asked Gita out (the money spent on perfume and my haircut, my clothes, the time wasted on preparations, the televised 1991 European Cup Final that I skipped, etc.). Below that was a picture of a girl, unmistakably drawn by Ardi, with my name entangled in her hair, tiny hearts pouri...
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Iranian fashion designer, Nima Behnoud and friends engaged in experimental garment alteration which became emblematic of the youthful underground scene in Tehran in the ‘80s. Today the same hunger and fascination has turned into an organized clothing line, NIMANY. Now their dream is to use their brand to share their magical teenage years in Tehran. Quotes by Persian poets, highlighting the visual artistry of calligraphy, tell the story of their culture through fashion, inserting their art into daily life. He is the first fashion designer who implemented Persian calligraphy in the form of clothing. Despite stereotypes and recent media coverage depicting Iran as a nation of black shawls, he says that Iranians are very savvy when it comes to fashion, and as stylish as any fashionista in Europe or North America. “The current fashion scene is just as active as Milan or Paris,” he says. Even with government restrictions on dress, Nima says that Iranians...
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