Why I Built This
I was seven years old the last time I was in Iran.
It was 2007. I remember the smell of bread and gasoline in Tehran's streets. I remember my grandmother's apartment in Ekbatan. I remember fragments of a world I didn't know I was saying goodbye to.
I'm twenty-five now. I haven't been able to return for nineteen years.
My mother fled Iran at fourteen when the Iran-Iraq War destroyed Abadan, the cosmopolitan oil city where she grew up. She was one of 600,000 people scattered as refugees. She rebuilt her life in America, married my American father, became a concert pianist.
I grew up American, but carrying these fragments — sensory memories of a place that's now inaccessible. My grandmother eventually made it out too. But Iran itself? That door closed when I was seven.
I watch my mother's country from the outside now. Through news reports. Through advocacy. Through a platform I built because watching isn't enough.
The diaspora has something powerful — access to the American political system, freedom to organize, resources to build tools. We can do things our families in Iran can't. We have a responsibility to use that.
Iran Freedom Hub exists because I refuse to accept permanent separation from half my identity.
This platform helps the diaspora fight for an Iran we can return to — where freedom doesn't mean exile, where the next generation doesn't lose nineteen years.
I was seven. I'm twenty-five.
I'm done watching from the outside.