Word: mokhtaris
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...started in 1989 at Kianshahr's Badr Center in Shahre-Rey, a sprawling, mostly working-class suburb of Tehran, whose population is 30% Afghan. Iran Mokhtari, now 57, was one of the first recruits. Although she had only a primary-school education, she was taught the information that she needed to pass on in her community. Stopping at a home on her street, she rings a neighbor's doorbell. "Open up. I'm your health volunteer," she says, and instantly, the door is buzzed open. Inside, she tells 26-year-old Azizeh Mohammadi that she should come to the health...
Surrounded by her sons and daughters, in-laws and grandchildren, the handsome 56-year-old matriarch, Marhemat Mokhtari, talks animatedly about the old feudal life in one of Iran's poorest areas. Fifty years ago, Khomein was controlled by landlords. A peasant who herded sheep was paid 30 rials, the equivalent of half a dollar, for a year's work. Tenant farmers who came to the area were given quotas to meet: often their entire crop of wheat was for the landlord, with nothing left over to make bread of their own. Mrs. Mokhtari remembers that the Ayatullah...
...desperation, the Mokhtaris moved to Tehran 30 years ago. They have done better than most. Until four years ago, twelve members of the family lived in a one-room shack at the bottom of an abandoned ravine, surrounded by scrap, refuse and old tires. They struggled and sacrificed their way from the bottom of the ravine to the top of the hill. They built a two-story house with a Mediterranean-style courtyard, with electricity to power a TV set, a hi-fi and an air conditioner. Mrs. Mokhtari is proud of the honest work of her sons, who helped...
...same time that she yearns for an Islamic republic guided by the Ayatullah, Mrs. Mokhtari is grateful for the new liberties for women that gave her three grown daughters the opportunity for an education and good jobs. She has no illusions about returning to the rough but simple life of Khomein a half-century ago. "We know the problems that any modern society faces," says Mrs. Mokhtari. "There is no way that we are going backward. The main trouble was that the government of the Shah was so corrupt. What we couldn't take was injustice...
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