Back In Vienna

Interesting seatmate on the Vienna flight.

Shahin was a tall, friendly American who spoke with a hint of an East Coast accent---New York? He lives in Switzerland and was returning after a visit to his wife, who is an American doctor teaching in one of Johns Hopkins satellite institutions.

“I don't guess she'll be moving to Switzerland; her license isn't transferable without a lot of retraining,“ I said.

“Plus, she doesn't speak German.“ Which can be a handicap if you're trying to doctor German speakers.

Shahin goes back and forth from Switzerland to Baltimore every three weeks or so. He owns an e-learning company specializing in training executives. I told him I've been to Vienna 13 times in 6.5 years and he said: “I do that every six months or so...“

Shahin mentioned he follows the Baha'i faith. This religion was started in Iran and its adherents have been prosecuted to one degree or another since, including members of Shahin's family, who emigrated to America when things started getting really hot for the Baha'i.

He told me that several members of his family had been killed and his parents couldn't return to Iran because they too were on the hit list. So they began immigration proceedings. They were living in New York but moved to Pennsylvania to be near a lawyer there who'd taken on their case---only to remove himself from the case when the Iranian hostage crisis happened. PLUS, the asshole took all their money and wouldn't give it back.

So they moved to Maryland where they heard people were having luck getting green cards as political refugees. Shahin's father blew his life savings on the previous asshole lawyer so decided to defend himself before the judge, after extensive study of their case (the lawyer had retured their paperwork, if not their money.) His father told about the asshole lawyer, their struggles since coming to the US, but mostly showed documentation about family members in Iran who had been killed.

The judge awarded the family their green cards on the spot.

It took several years before the family was able to finally attend their citizenship ceremony, but by then the father was very sick with terminal cancer. Nevertheless he insisted on attending, because after his long struggle he wanted “to die an American.“ The family got their citizenship and the father died a few months later, having become, sure enough, an American.

I enjoyed meeting Shahin. We talked about a lot of other things, things of note, but somehow or another the story of his family's long struggle to escape persecution made the biggest impact.

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Very overcast in Vienna, with light rain. A bit chilly.

For The Gary----results of today's data-gathering: P = 7 S = 1