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 government gave him a temporary humanitarian permit with no path to stay permanently and no option to work legally. He says he couldn’t go back to Iran, which he fled after facing persecution and an arrest warrant for his role in political protests — the only charge on his record. His conversion from Islam to Christianity could land him a death sentence in Iran, and he had no savings to move elsewhere.

Months went by with Saleh Fard trapped waiting for something to change: He started taking Spanish classes but quit a few months in. The instructor spoke only Spanish, Fard said, and he couldn’t keep up. He spent most of his time working the job he picked up at a barbershop, where he earned about $200 a month, enough for food and other basic expenses. A handful of times, he had to suddenly pretend to be a customer in the shop when government inspectors entered, so he wouldn’t get in trouble.