Washington — Doris O’Dea remembers mornings in Isfahan, Iran: “I would wake up every day and would hear the [muezzin] calling people to prayer, and I thought, ‘Oh, my goodness’ — and I’d have a big smile on my face — ‘it’s another day. Who knows what’s going to happen?’ It was adventure. It was rewarding.”
For the lifelong New Yorker, Iran in the 1960s was a beautiful and exotic adventure, and the Peace Corps was her two-year ticket there. The landmark program is celebrating the 50th anniversary of its founding by President John F. Kennedy, who envisioned it as a means for Americans to give part of their lives to help people in other countries and contribute to world peace.
Nearly 1,750 volunteers served in Iran between 1962 and 1976. They worked in urban planning and teacher training, helped create community libraries, kindergartens and youth-development programs, assisted farmers and tried to curb pollution. Like many others, O’Dea taught English. And like most of the others, she said, she was young, eager and impressionable.
“People didn’t really think of their career at college in those days,” said O’Dea, who majored in English literature. “And that’s what you had, a lot of these generalists, who were kind of at loose ends, and the Peace Corps was a perfect place for you to kind of think about, later on in your life, what you wanted to do, and just have experiences.”
A speech at her college by the Peace Corps’ founding director, Sargent Shriver, prompted O’Dea to volunteer, and soon after graduation, she was off to spend the summer learning Persian language, culture, history and geography and the skills for teaching English as a foreign language. She said the volunteers were given stern warnings about the hardships they would face; fellow volunteer Lynne Meena said that of the 120 in their group, only 72 made the trip to Tehran in September 1964. Then, after a few more days of training, they received their assignments.
Some were sent, alone, to small, poor and isolated towns. Suzanne Bentley recalled the Iranian village where she and her husband, Ernie, spent their two-year Peace Corps honeymoon from 1968 to 1970: “We had electricity most of the time, we had running water, one spigot in our yard, mud roofs, no paved roads in the whole village, nothing.”
O’Dea and Meena considered themselves lucky as they headed to substantial communities with other volunteers: O’Dea to Isfahan, where she would teach at the university and a school for the blind, and Meena to the oil town of Abadan, where she would teach at the secondary school and become a TV star. She said the Peace Corps’ director in Iran told her: “By the way, there’s a television station down there. See if you can get on it.”
She did. In addition to teaching three classes of 40 girls each — “I loved them all,” she said — Meena met the director of the Abadan TV station, who told her she could have two minutes to introduce a 12-minute taped program called Let’s Learn English. “Miss Meena” would write the words for that day’s program on a chart and provide the Persian translation.
“People were calling and going by, saying, ‘We want more of this,’” Meena recalled. “So in about two or three weeks, he gave me five minutes. And by the end of the month, I had a half-hour.”
Meena said her looks — her grandparents were Lebanese — and her name led many viewers to assume she was Iranian. What’s more, with Iranians eager to learn English, the show was popular.
So for nearly two years, three days a week, she taught English on the air — live at first, and on videotape in the second year. Meena recalled passing a teahouse near the bazaar and seeing men in their 50s, 60s and 70s sitting with their glasses of tea, watching her on the TV screen and repeating after her: “Today I am buying chocolate. Tomorrow I will buy tea.”
When she attended a Nowruz party, her hostess, a midwife, was called away to deliver a baby and invited Meena to come along. When they arrived, the woman in labor was screaming that she was dying. “It was just loud and painful,” Meena said. “So she delivers the baby, and Maryam takes the baby out, and as soon as Maryam leaves the room, Parviz gets up on her elbows and looks at me and says [in Persian], ‘Oh, you’re Miss Meena!’ … And they named the little girl Meena. Isn’t that sweet?”
The volunteers were warned to avoid politics, but it sometimes intruded. “We had a Shakespeare course that we were teaching,” O’Dea said. “You … couldn’t teach Julius Caesar, you couldn’t teach that you could kill the king and still have honor in you. … We weren’t here to make a political statement. We were here to make friends and to do the best we could in teaching, so we just stuck to things like Romeo and Juliet that were nonpolitical.”
Both Meena and O’Dea said they had busy social lives, especially among the Americans and other expatriates living nearby. O’Dea said that, as a woman, she also could become friendly with her female university students but had to be more distant with the young men. O’Dea recalled creating a Monopoly game set from memory and inviting friends for a tournament. She also traveled with other volunteers: to Mashhad, Tehran, Yazd, the Caspian Sea, Shiraz and Persepolis as well as to Egypt, Jerusalem and Beirut.
Both said they loved Iran. “It was the nicest group of people I have ever met, both the Iranians and the volunteers,” O’Dea said.
“I think anybody’s who’s ever lived in Iran, you just wax nostalgic about it,” Meena said.