Courtesy Around the Campfire
Iranian American Youths Gather for Fellowship, Sharing -- and Politeness

By Tara Bahrampour
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, July 7, 2007

The campers had played dodge ball, sung along with the guitar, horsed around. Now it was time for a hot-blooded battle of ta'arof, the Persian art of hyper politeness.

Ta'arof, which involves both parties insisting they are not worthy of the other, is in constant play in Iranian society -- people refuse to walk through a door first, cabdrivers refuse to accept payment as passengers beg them to, hosts must offer pastries even if guests don't want them, and guests must say they don't want them even if they do. But at Camp Ayandeh, a leadership camp for Iranian American teenagers, ta'arof is one of several games and workshops that address growing up between two often-conflicting cultures.

The camp, which began last summer in Massachusetts and was held this year in Fairfax County, was the idea of a group of Iranian Americans in their 20s who run an organization called Iranian Alliances Across Borders that focuses on the Iranian diaspora. Almost 30 years after the Islamic revolution, many young Iranian Americans have grown up in a place that for their parents is a foreign land. And Iran is sometimes a foreign land to them.

In the ta'arof contest, contestants stood face to face and passionately argued -- over a dinner check, a digital camera or a car, with participants insisting on paying, or bestowing the item on the other person, belittling themselves all the while.

"I am a grain of salt in the ocean," said Ameen Soleimani, 15, of Rockville, holding out keys to a 2002 Mitsubishi.

"The ocean?" said Roshan Alemi, 17, of McLean. "I'm not even in the ocean."

"I would love to be your tire as you drove this," Ameen insisted, pushing the keys forward as other campers hooted.

Ta'arof can be hard to translate, and campers said they are careful not to do it around their American friends.

"If an Iranian friend says, 'Oh dude, that's a nice shirt,' I'll say, 'You want it?' and they'll say no. But with my American friends, if I said, 'Do you want it?' they'd be like, 'Yeahhh!' " Ameen said. "I don't do it around American friends, because then I'll lose all my stuff and my parents would be like, 'Why do you only have two shirts? Where'd your computer go?' "

Many of the 49 campers, ages 14 to 18, were born in the United States; a few moved from Iran as children. Some speak Farsi at home or live in large Iranian communities in such places as Potomac or west Los Angeles. Some have a parent who is not Iranian, and some speak little Farsi or come from towns where few people know about their culture.

After just a few days together at Hemlock Overlook Regional Park, the campers acted like lifelong friends, playing and talking in a patchwork of Farsi and English that only those from both worlds would understand.

Inevitably, politics came up. One group decided to draw an American flag and an Iranian one to display today, the last day of camp, when parents would pick them up.

"But the Iranian flag's, like, controversial," one camper said.

"Why?" another asked.

"If you put the sheer-o-khorsheed"-- the lion-and-sun symbol of the Persian monarchs -- "they'll say the shah group is funding this group, and if you put the Islamic Republic sign, they'll say the Islamic Republic is funding the group," said Mazyar Kahali, 17, of Cupertino, Calif.

The campers dropped the symbol and just wrote "Iran" on the flag.

Even picking a logo for the camp brought up issues. "We were thinking of anar," said IAAB Webmaster Amy Malek, using the Farsi word for pomegranate, a ubiquitous fruit in Iran. "But a lot of the images looked like bombs, so we were like, no."

Camp Ayandeh, whose name means "future," costs $595 for the week and is funded by a grant from PARSA, a California-based Iranian philanthropic foundation, and private donors. Discussions ranged from Persian names (hard for non-Iranians to pronounce), body hair (hard for Iranians to get rid of) and dating (anathema to many Iranian parents) to medical school (expected of many Iranian kids).

Many found that what sets them apart from their non-Iranian friends is what bonds them with fellow campers. Such as growing up with parents who lived through a revolution or who ban dating until age 18.

"The only thing that I wish is that we'd had something like this growing up," said Danesh Mazloomdoost, 28, a counselor who grew up in Lexington, Ky., and lives in Baltimore. "This is the most alive I've felt for a while."

Aida Sadr, 19, a counselor, spoke of the awkward feeling of not knowing whether to kiss someone in greeting, like an Iranian, or shake hands, like an American. Her generation, she said, ended up "doing a mix of handshake and kiss."

Nassim Abdi, 29, a University of Maryland PhD student who is studying teenage girls in Iran, visited the camp and said she was struck by how carefree the teenagers were, compared with their counterparts in Iran -- and how relaxed boys and girls were in one another's presence. When she attended camp in Iran 15 years ago, "happiness was not the first thing you thought of," she said. "It was more about morality, being a good person."

But campers and counselors who have attended school in Iran said friendships there were deeper. "Here they have 10 best friends, and when one doesn't work out, they say, 'We grew apart,' " said Mazyar, who moved from Iran five years ago. "But in Iran, you have a best friend from when you're 5 and you still have when you're 40."

Some teenagers begged to go to camp; a few were pushed by their parents.

One boy last year "showed up wearing all black with headphones on. He would not talk. He said, 'My mom sent me,' " said Shirin Hakimzadeh, IAAB's co-executive director. "The first thing he said when he got back home was, 'You have to put me in a Farsi class this year, and my younger sister.' . . . The mother called and said, 'What have you done to my child?' "

For campers from areas with few other Iranians, it was hard to go home last year, Hakimzadeh said. "Some of the problems that they've gone through, the racism that they were facing, the bullying, the teasing, it really turned into an emotional thing. . . . It was like, 'Here's a group of strangers who have totally fallen in love with me for the week, who I'm totally comfortable with, who can pronounce my name,' and then to go back to where they're more isolated. It's heartbreaking."

But most weren't thinking about that during their week of camp. They played hopscotch with a mix of English and Farsi numbers. They named their counselor groups after Iranian foods such as chaghaleh badum (unripe green almonds) and kookoo sabzi (herb cutlet). They learned Kurdish dancing. On the Fourth of July, they ate Iranian kebab catered by an Iranian restaurant.

And the ta'arof competition? By the final round, competitors were cringing on the ground, each trying to crouch lower than the other. The winner, Rassah Ostadhossaini, 15, of Fairfax, beamingly accepted a gold cardboard crown -- though of course she didn't deserve it.