The Air Seems Different Here
A U.S. veteran, his Iranian-born wife, and their two young sons on leaving Hawai'i, the weight of complicity, and finding a home in Uruguay
It’s been just over six months since we stepped off the plane at Carrasco International Airport with our three year old son Omid and his then not quite two year old brother Azad. We knew we’d be arriving at the tale end of what had been a very cold Southern Cone winter, but after a decade and a half in Hawai’i, the temperature was still jarring.
This was part of our new reality, part of the trade off we made to no longer be complicit. In our living room in Punta del Este, my wife Bahar sprinkles water on a plate of lentil sprouts. Although today is the autumnal equinox here in Uruguay, in the Northern Hemisphere, including Iran, it’s the first day of spring. The Persian new year, Nowruz, which means “new day” in Farsi, has been celebrated for thousands of years. With these lentil sprouts, the sabzi part of our haft-sin display, Bahar tries her best to honor that tradition. Her name is the Persian word for spring and anyone who has met my wife will agree it’s the perfect name for her. She was born during springtime in Tehran in the early years after the revolution when there was still a glimmer of hope. For Bahar, every day is a new day, and in every moment, no matter how dark, a reason to smile. She radiates life and love and hope. Amazingly, because of humanity, not in spite of it.
We had already started the paperwork, already gotten fingerprinted, already broken the news to our loved ones that we were leaving, before the bombs started to fall on Iran last June. We had decided even before the steady uptick in fighter jets training to kill in the skies above Hawai’i last spring. If we weren’t already sure that we were making the right decision, this would have removed any doubt.
Bahar fled Iran with her mom when she was a baby, bouncing around the world for the nearly five years her dad spent as a political prisoner. She went to preschool in Honolulu, kindergarten in Germany, and ultimately grew up in Northern California after her dad escaped and her family was reunited. As an adult, she moved back to Hawai’i, which is where we met in the spring of 2014. We got married a year later, on Nowruz, eleven years ago today. Shortly thereafter, we set out on a four month journey that was part honeymoon, part scouting mission. Although we’d traveled vastly different paths to get to where we were ideologically, we were on the same page as we started looking for a new home outside the U.S..
We fell in love with the Azores, the beautiful Portuguese archipelago that’s known as the Hawai’i of the Atlantic, and planned to move there until emigrating proved more difficult than we’d imagined. Ultimately, we decided to stay in Hawai’i. We took a friend up on his offer to become caretakers of his five acre homestead on Moloka’i, the island where I was living at the time we met. With a population of less than eight thousand people and no traffic lights, Moloka’i became our home together for the next decade. We grew a lot of food, rescued a lot of animals, and tried our best to be good neighbors to those in our community struggling as a direct result of colonization and the ongoing US occupation. More and more, we saw pain and suffering. More and more, our hearts broke.
Around the time Bahar and I met, I had become a war-tax resistor. Together, we lived our lives divested from the system as much as possible, but to merely exist in such a system is to be complicit in human suffering. Since it’s very much a forced complicity, I have so much compassion for those unable to leave. I also have compassion for the 18, 19, 20 something year old men and women in the US military and don’t fault them for going to war in Iran anymore than I fault myself for going to war in Iraq. Undereducated, naive, blindly patriotic, I genuinely believed I was doing something good when I willingly enlisted. I believed I’d be helping my community, my country, and all the poor souls not fortunate enough to have been born in the greatest country in human history. I really believed that.
I knew nothing about the reality of US history, nothing about Iraq or Afghanistan, nothing about Iran. It wasn’t until I met Bahar that I learned about the US helping overthrow a democracy in Iran in 1953, helping ensure democracy didn’t return after the revolution, and helping arm both sides during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980’s. The sad, difficult truth I have to live with is that I willingly served what Dr. King called the greatest purveyor of evil in the world, and I would have willingly put my boots on the ground in Iran if that’s where I’d been sent two decades ago. Iran or anywhere else.
Bahar’s parents, who left San Francisco in 2018 to live nearby their only child in Hawai’i, are currently making their final preparations to join us here in Uruguay. She talks with them every day and most days it’s a video call so they can see their grandsons. What had been normal, light-hearted conversations catching them up on all the new parks, beaches, and playgrounds we’ve taken the boys to, has turned into a daily update on the health and wellbeing of Bahar’s aunt’s, uncle’s, and cousins in Iran. Twenty, or is it twenty-one days of war now? With an internet blackout in Iran, calls are infrequent. My father-in-law’s oldest brother called him a couple days ago. Everyone in the family is still alive, though over a thousand other people have been killed in Iran and over a thousand other people have been killed in Lebanon in just the past few weeks. More and more bombs drop every day. The air and the rain are toxic. Anxiety is high.
I wish so badly Bahar’s parents were already here. I wish flights weren’t getting cancelled because of skyrocketing fuel costs. I wish they didn’t have encounter unpaid TSA agents, or their possible ICE replacements. They’re so excited to get here but it literally can’t happen fast enough. A major storm is currently hitting Hawai’i for the second time in less than a week, and the flooding is catastrophic. Some of our friends’ homes are already under water and a massive 120 year old dam, owned and neglected by Dole (the pineapple company) is on the brink of collapsing. As if that’s not all enough to worry about on top of moving to the other side of the world, Bambino, their elderly Chihuahua who was scheduled to make the journey here as well, died this past week. His tiny heart gave out.
Our decision to leave was ultimately Bahar’s parents’ decision. Moving to Portugal while they were still in California would have been bad enough but there’s no way Bahar could have left them on a small island in the middle of the Pacific ocean. Especially now that they have grandchildren. Ultimately, they wanted Omid and Azad to grow up safe and healthy and happy with two loving parents who are also safe and healthy and happy. After we left Moloka’i for Honolulu a year ago, before they had even followed us over there, Bahar’s parents let us know they were willing to follow us if we moved to Uruguay. Bahar’s mom would have gone anywhere. Her dad, after exhaustive research, and knowing it’s a place that had long been on our radar, decided that, at 75, he’d be willing to uproot his life, move halfway around the world, and learn what will be his fourth language, only for Uruguay. Only for Omid and Azad.
After a couple miscarriages, Omid arrived in July 2022. His name is the Persian word for hope. A couple months after he was born, the Iranian people were rising up once again. The ayatollah was aging and frail. Upon his death, there would surely be a new day, things would inevitably change, so long as the Americans, the British, the Israelis didn’t ruin it, hope would prevail. A year later, in September 2023, Azad was born. His name means freedom, or ‘to be free’ in Farsi. He was twenty-seven days old on October 7th. The days, weeks, and months that followed were a blur. We spent a couple months holding regular vigils calling for an end to the genocide. That winter we hosted a 12-part Palestinian film series at our local public library, and we continued to sell Palestinian olive oil at our local Saturday farmers market, as we had been doing for years, to raise money to help farmers in Jenin plant new olive trees. We stared into our cellphone screens helplessly, in complete horror, as an open air prison long under siege, barely one third the size of the tiny island of Moloka’i, was completely obliterated. It became impossible to hold my newborn son and his one year old brother and not cry.
I missed the last film night while I was in Istanbul as part of the Freedom Flotilla Coalition. After a month surrounded by doctors and aid workers and all sorts of human rights activists, the former mayor of Barcelona, Che Guevara’s daughter, and Nelson Mandela’s grandson, people who were all willing to risk their lives to do the only humane thing there was to do, we were ultimately blocked by the Turkish government from even leaving port. Thousands of tons of food and medicine waiting on our ship and my own government sent diplomats to Turkey to threaten Erdogan into capitulating. At that point, I was ready to fly to Egypt to rent a boat, fill it with as much food and medicine as possible, and set sail for Gaza by myself. Instead, I flew back to Hawai’i completely dejected. I would have given anything to be able to bring even one bite of food for one person, so in their suffering, in their dying, they could have felt a little less alone and forsaken. I wanted to dig through the rubble in search of children no less precious than my own. I couldn’t continue to live under the flag of an empire causing so much pain and suffering in Palestine and so many other places around the world. We had to do something, in the short-term, we thought living in a city might help.
During our nine months in Honolulu, it was cathartic to march with thousands through the streets of Waikiki and to regularly be in community with so many other people who felt the same way we did. Unfortunately, every day as I pushed Omid and Azad in their stroller to the playground, beach, park, zoo, cat cafe, literally anywhere we went, there would be at least one or two and sometimes a dozen or more fighter jets, helicopters, or other military aircraft flying above us. Hawai’i is among the most beautiful places on the planet, but, especially on Oahu, there’s no escaping the fact that it’s basically one big military base. I wish I could have continued to exist beneath the red, white and blue flags of the American empire, continued to stand in solidarity with my native Hawaiian friends and neighbors in their struggle for sovereignty, but my moral injury wouldn’t allow me to. My wife deserves a husband and my children deserve a father. We had to leave.
Not therapy, not medication, not meditation, not long walks on the beach, not half a dozen plant medicine ceremonies, nothing has provided the relief that I’ve felt since stepping off the plane here in Uruguay. I had been searching for peace of mind for many years and have been sober for over a decade now in pursuit of it. Jon Kabat-Zinn once said, “wherever you go, there you are” and that’s true, I’m still here the same as I was in Hawai’i. The difference is, there are no war planes training above me now. None of my neighbors are cheering on death and destruction, or funding hell on earth for other people. They’re drinking mate while watching the sunset, and they’re funding healthcare and education, parks and recreation. I’m still acutely aware of the horrific things happening all over the world at the hands of the US empire, but it’s a relief to no longer be complicit.
Like so many others, Bahar’s mom had little choice where she landed when she fled with a baby in her arms. If there is courage in our decision to emigrate, it’s certainly a different type of courage, a courage comfortably nestled in the arms of privilege. While our reasons for wanting to leave are valid, we had the luxury to decide where in the world we wanted to live, where we wanted to raise our children. Bahar and I didn’t find some magical, mythical place. There’s a lot of natural beauty here in Uruguay, but there’s endless natural beauty from California to Colorado to Cape Cod. Certainly in Hawai’i. What we found is a country that isn’t perfect, but is human. More importantly, it’s humane. Uruguay learns from the horrors of its past, it doesn’t ignore them and continue to double down.
It’s beautiful to see what a society can look like when compassion is part of the culture and when resources aren’t consumed by war and oppression. It’s also heartbreaking to think about how easily the United States could have what Uruguay has. Everyone deserves this. I may never find true peace of mind, I’m not sure I would even recognize it. What I’ve found is a place that, even as half my heart is trapped beneath the rubble in Gaza, and even as bombs are dropped on the country of my wife’s birth by the country I risked my life serving, I can still breathe. The air seems different here in a way that’s difficult to describe, almost as if the trees are happier, almost as if they know they’re not hurting anyone. I look forward to watching Omid and Azad grow up surrounded by these trees.
This piece was originally published under the title “Hope” in Issue 03 of Unbordered Magazine.
Jason is a husband and a father of two young sons who recently moved to Uruguay from Hawai’i.
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