Report from Iran: Americans welcome here

Gracious. Welcoming. Well-educated. Outgoing.

Not your typical description for what some people consider a culture of terrorists.

That's because, Pam (Eliason) Haglund insists, Iran's populace is not a culture of terrorists.

The Kalispell woman has made it her mission to get out the word about the engaging folks she met this summer, the people who live on the fuse of the political world's dynamite keg.

"I think we're all world citizens," Haglund said from her director's office at Literacy Volunteers of Flathead County, "and there's opportunities for peace if we get to know each other. I try to live my life that way."

With her history of international travel that began on a hitchhike through Europe and a Peace Corps stint three decades ago, the lure of this summer's offer to be part of a nearly three-week tour through Iran was too much for Haglund to resist.

Some Whitefish friends who had traveled with her in Cuba - she visited there in 2000 and 2002 - knew of others who had toured Iran. The trip was arranged through a man who taught there before the 1979 revolution and has returned to the country 21 times.

Haglund's Whitefish friends heard a new trip was scheduled Aug. 15-31, and there was an opening.

She had only a month's notice to prepare for a country which never had been on her traveler's radar screen. But a penchant for visiting nontraditional destinations combined with her cultural curiosity in the pursuit of peace, and she signed up for the trip sponsored through New College of San Francisco.

Little did she know that, from the time her feet touched the ground in Tehran until the return flight lifted off from the same runway, the people of Iran were about to reshape her cultural consciousness.

Until HAGLUND'S Iraq trip, Cubans had proven to be the highlight of her world travels. Despite a contentious governmental relationship between the United States and Cuba, she found "the people were absolutely, positively wonderful."

They now hold second place in her heart.

"The people were so gracious and friendly," Haglund said of Iranians who approached them in the public square to strike up conversations with the Americans, offered their home addresses with invitations to visit if ever the tourists were in their towns, and were anxious to have their photographs taken with the foreigners.

"They always came up to ask what we thought of Iranians, what we thought of Iran," she said. "They approached us a lot. They wanted to know who we were."

In a group made up largely of liberal-minded people with Democrat leanings, Haglund said, the tourists often disagree with President Bush's policies toward Iran.

But she said most often she and her fellow travelers responded by saying simply that they don't always agree with their political leaders, leaving the door open for the Iranians to share their thoughts.

Exchanges were respectful and lively, with 20- to 30-year-olds most likely to initiate them.

Iranians highly prize education, she said, and many took advantage of this rare chance at a first-hand education.

With a U.S. State Department travel warning cautioning against travel in Iran, American tourists are noticed in the cities and villages they visited.

Haglund grew to appreciate the varying expectations between the cultures.

The chador, the head-to-toe covering that Americans often see as a symbol of Iranian oppression against women, is viewed quite differently in Iran. One young woman, a medical student, told Haglund she loved the security of it and felt safe wearing it.

"I like the freedoms we have," Haglund said, "but I would not want to dictate to others what their freedoms are."

Out of respect, women in the American group always wore head scarves in public. Over their slacks or skirts they wore a manteau, a lightweight blouse garment that reaches to the knees. Only twice, at holy sites, were the women asked to don chadors.

The beauty of the people contrasted with the heat of the desert, the twisted ruggedness of the mountains, the seaside, the corn-producing farm country, the rice, hay and strip-farming.

Temperatures reached past the 90s as the group flew out of Tehran and into Tabriz to the north.

From there, they took a bus to the Caspian Sea where rowboats floated them through a field of lotus pads.

They returned by bus to Tehran, then flew on to Shiraz in the south of Iran where their bus driver picked them up and looped the tour back north through Yazd in the Lut Desert, on to Esfahan, through Kashan, through the pilgrimage destination of Qom and back to Tehran.

Metropolitan bustle gave way to gentle village life and flowed back again.

At each stop, their Iranian tour guide made sure they sampled the best of each region - the honey, the spices, the lamb, the cucumbers and tomatoes, the rosewater-and-pistachio ice cream that helped cut the desert heat in Yazd.

The group stayed in high-end hotels - Haglund admitted she would have preferred more common quarters - but even on the streets, "I never, ever felt unsafe," she said.

Photographs were not allowed at airports. Visitors could take photos in mosques, on the other hand, but Haglund refrained out of cultural sensitivity.

The architecture in those mosques - and hundreds of other structures built on a civilization that rose to worldwide pre-eminence in 500 B.C. - took her breath away.

"The space their architecture creates is awe-inspiring. I'm not religious, but if I felt like worshiping God …" her words trailed off as she could only shake her head. "That feeling under those domes …"

One, the Allah Allah mosque, is covered on the outside with the word "Allah" worked into a geometrically repeated artistry around its tower.

At a religious school, backpacks hang outside the door, decorated with Sponge Bob Square Pants, Mickey Mouse and other Western icons. Obituaries are posted at open-air markets, bearing photographs only of the men. Statues throughout the cities pay tribute to their revered poets. A domed ice house provides space for ice harvested in the winter in the mountains to be packed in straw for use throughout the summer.

And everywhere are fountains and pools and channels of water flowing from the mountains. Haglund photographed a wind tower that catches the wind and channels it downward across a standing pool, providing a super-sized swamp cooler for the entire building and surrounding court.

"They love water," Haglund said of the desert people who appreciate the natural world's gifts and deprivations.

She plans to keep telling her stories of Iran and its people to everyone who will listen.

"It gets such bad press. Iranians are seen as the axis of evil, and that just is not my experience," she said, convinced that personal stories can go a long way toward overcoming negative images.

"I don't think the people should suffer from the stereotype of evil, from the actions of a few bad apples. Of all the places I have traveled, these are my favorite people.

"They would find out who we were, they'd act a bit surprised, then I bet 90 percent of them would say 'Welcome to my country.'"

And it's a country worth experiencing firsthand, Haglund insisted.

"It's fabulous, fabulous. I would recommend it in a minute."

Reporter Nancy Kimball can be reached at 758-4483 or by e-mail at nkimball@dailyinterlake.com