As news of Iran's election uprising swept the world last week, I spent hours furiously dialing the phone, trying to get through to my friends and relatives in Tehran. The internet and the evening news provided minute-by-minute accounts of the unfolding protests and violent crackdown, but I had no sense of whether my loved ones' daily lives were also unraveling. Many of friends and relatives have children, and I was desperate to know how these little people were faring in the midst of such very adult chaos. Were they still going to school, or playing in the street?
When it proved almost impossible to get through on the phone, I resorted to email. And when my friends' replies started trickling in, I felt inordinate relief. They reported that their kids were still going to classes as usual, and that the scenes of burning streets broadcast on television were confined to particular areas where protesters were clashing with police. "The kids are still playing soccer at the end of our alley," one friend wrote to me. "Life in our neighborhood is the same as always."
Eventually it grew easier to call, and in conversations I learned that school wasn't even in session. Some parents had their kids enrolled in summer classes, and those were being held as usual. This year, I was told, the authorities had ended the school term earlier than usual to accommodate the June 12 election. Apparently things work this way in Iran every four years when the country holds a presidential election — the term ends early so that children are safely ensconced at home by the time voters head to the polls. Why this is no one can quite explain, as until this June Iranian elections were tidy affairs. Children often went along with parents to voting stations, and the exercise felt like one enormous administrative task.
But Iran is a country where politics are fluid, and in this instance holding an election during summer school holiday seems like brilliant state planning. On week days Tehran is locked in the most heinous traffic imaginable — traffic so snarled and unrelenting that it makes rush hour in Los Angeles seem light in comparison. Extricating children from school is a daily anxiety that parents manage with the aid of taxi shuttles and long walks. For over an hour after class lets out, the streets around the city's numerous schools are flooded with young girls in maroon-colored hoods — the authorities recently relented and now allow elementary-school age girls to wear veils in colors like cream and powder blue, rather than the grim greys and olives of years past --- searching the car-jammed streets for parents or shuttles. Had the election protests erupted during the school term, it's painful to even imagine what would have transpired for kids and their terrified parents.
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