Once Upon a Time in the Middle East!

Mr. Ameri greeted my parents with his loud voice and distinct accent as he entered our house with his wife and children. Mr. Ameri and his family visited us at least once a week. In addition to being our next door neighbor, their house did not have a phone line, the wire ended at our house and the phone company had yet to extend the line to theirs! So every week, the Ameris would walk over to our home and call their daughter who studied in the state of Oklahoma in the United States. The calls usually took place early morning and since the connection wasn’t very good, Mr. Ameri who already had a loud voice, had to speak even louder to ensure his daughter in America could hear him well. Mr. Ameri, an Arab-speaking Iranian, happened to be the wealthiest man in our neighborhood, his wife was one the most elegant woman I have ever met, her beautiful jewelry dazzled, and the fragrance of her perfume filled the air like freshly cut roses!

 

 

Our Arab neighbors were just one part of the diversity of our neighborhood. On the other side of our house, were the Hakoopians, who were Armenians and whose kids we spend lots of hours playing with. Scattered all over our neighborhood were families from nearby regional cities of Abadan, Masjed-Sulayman,  Khoramshahr and other parts of Iran, from Tehran, Esfahan, Mahabad, Tabriz, Arak, Shiraz. Then there were our Americans and European neighbors who kept to themselves but were nevertheless part of our neighborhood's landscape . And amongst the movement of people in and around our house were the Lor laborers and the Arab watchmen.  

The ethnicity, cultures and belief systems represented in our little piece of the Middle East, resembled the diversity that you might find in neighborhoods in United States and phone-lines or not, would have been the envy for many around the world.

Maybe one day all the leaders and all the peoples in the Middle East from Tehran to Baghdad, Damascus to Beirut and Amman to Riyadh will try to emulate my neighborhood and appreciate its beauty and understand the true benefit of its diversity. Until that day, I will sit in Washington, DC and think about it like a story that starts with, “Once Upon a Time…”