War. Corrupt governments. Political oppression. Physicians are immune to none of these. To escape them, many come to the United States. ľֱ is profiling some of them, capturing their stories, from the challenges -- having it all and then losing it all, planning and executing a dangerous clandestine escape, gaining U.S. entry -- to the rewards (and new challenges) of finally becoming a doctor in the U.S.
Adel Bozorgzadeh, MD, escaped from Iran twice.
He was expelled from medical school and was considered a "dissident" by the new Iranian regime that was routinely jailing people from the university. So, Bozorgzadeh obtained a fake passport, hired a guide to help him cross the Iranian border into Turkey and told his parents he was going to leave the country to pursue his dream of becoming a doctor. He was 21 years old.
Bozorgzadeh would end up crossing the mountainous border between Iran and Turkey twice -- once after being sent back by the Kurdish majority party.
"Out of the 51 people, 50 decided to go back to their homes in Iran," he told ľֱ. "And I was the only one who decided to cross that mountain again." But there was more adversity to follow -- and unexpected kindness from a border guard -- before he could realize his dream.
Following is a transcript of his remarks on the video:
This really takes us back to the Iranian Revolution when the year was 1979, and I was a student in the National University of Iran's medical school. That was a very tumultuous year where obviously we went through a revolution that affected every aspect of life as we knew it back then. The new regime obviously was a geographical dictatorship that under the veneer of religion and religious laws was affecting every aspect of people's lives across the board.
My own affiliation is mostly that of the nationalist groups and the nationalist movements. Unfortunately, the regime, as it strengthened, did not tolerate any voice of dissent and started suppressing all the groups, and at times, brutally so. Eventually, this extended to a point where people like myself, with the views that we expressed, were not tolerated at all.
Now we were stripped of our social rights. We were jailed. We were executed and a large group of us, the dissents, eventually wound up leaving the country. One day I sat at a kitchen table -- I'll never forget that day with my family -- and told them that I want to go to the United States, and I will finish my education there and I will be a surgeon in the United States. Everyone looked at me with their jaws dropped and said, "How?" I was about 21 years old.
I eventually secured a fake passport with perhaps a total amount of money that, at the time, amounted to maybe several hundred dollars. I left the country with a guide that I hired to show me how to cross the mountain between Iran and Turkey to enter Turkey as a refugee. Eventually, it was a late fall morning in a remote mountainous area of Iran. I got out of the car and said goodbye to my parents, and walked to the mountains with a guide and started climbing the mountain.
A few turns in the mountain, I looked at the skylight of that village -- it was the last Iranian village -- and tried very hard to commit that to memory. From there, we moved towards pursuing our destiny. I moved on in the mountain for several days, eventually a large number of other groups of people, maybe all together about 50 other people, joined that group that were organized by the people that were helping to move people around in the mountain.
We eventually got to a point where we were ready to cross the border between Iran and Turkey and to enter Turkey. All of a sudden, at a early dawn time, we heard the bullets piercing the morning sky and a bunch of people jumped on me. Initially I thought that they were, perhaps, border police, but soon it appeared that they were all thieves and I was a subject of a robbery. They essentially took all the money that I had and the money that I actually sewed inside the jacket that I had, and the bag that I had. Everything was gone. It was essentially me and my blue jeans, and maybe a total of about maybe 50 cents in the small pocket of the blue jeans.
Eventually we went and we sat in the cars that they had arranged and drove about a mile or two in the mountainous roads. The destination was Istanbul, Turkey, but we were soon stopped by the border police, and then they took us all in a police border station. The captain of that station was interrogating everyone reached to me and said, "Well, where are your baggages and luggages?" I explained to him that I was robbed in the mountains. He was very upset. He was extremely upset. He was just like he couldn't really ... it just came to him as a shock that in my district here someone dares to come and do this. Not only that, but on a human level, he really felt sorry for a young man leaving and escaping atrocities we were challenged with, yet being still inflicted by this type of incident.
So he processed everyone else and send them on their way to a border town. It was called Van, V-a-n. He just basically came, and he kept me there. Eventually, he kept me there for about seven days. In those days, he launched a massive effort to find the people that robbed me. One of the things that I told him was that the robbers were holding a double-barrel gun in my face and their hands were shaking where they were searching and taking my jacket off, and taking my belongings off and stuff.
Someone called him and called in Turkey, called the name Tamor, "Come." I thought the name of the guy must have been Tamor. He went and he arrested all Tamors [LAUGHTER] as far as he would in that area, and brought them and lined them up. Eventually, he found the guy who did the robbery. By the time he had spent all the money, maybe several hundred dollars in exchange -- it was still a substantial amount of money in the local area -- he goes and he finds all the people that he had spent his money for. Like the bar, for example. He went he bought drink for all his friends. He went to the bar owner and said, "Look, he stole the money from this young kid that is traversing the area and that's not right," and eventually got the money back from the bar owner. He went to the company where the thieves rented a car and got the money from them, and put all of that money and gave all of it back to me, and then processed me. [LAUGHTER] After about seven days or so, sent me out.
They actually took us back through the mountain and extradited us back, and then we went down the mountain and eventually were captured again by the Kurdish Democratic Party and the Mojahedin Party. They thought that we were spies of the government. They took us in their jail for about a couple of weeks, and they processed all of our information and they decided that, "Well, you guys are free to go," wherever we want to go.
Out of the 51 people, 50 decided to go back to their homes in Iran and I was the only one that decided to cross that mountain again. I stayed in the area, made connections and found another person that could guide me through the mountain, and went and came, and this time around got lucky and traversed the entire length of Turkey, going from east to west, and crossed at the Bosphorus Bridge into Istanbul, Turkey. I heard that United States would accept refugees and went to U.S. Embassy in Paris and put that application for migration or for political refugee status to come to the United States. That application would take a year and there was no guarantee that they would accept me.
So, I continued my work and I continued to study at the Sorbonne University and eventually about a year later got a letter that, congratulations, you have been accepted to come to the United States and this is what your thing is. It was a very happy, happy, happy day.
I started applying for several schools without a bachelor's degree and I eventually got accepted to George Washington University, and started my medical school there, and finished my medical school and moved on to residency, and eventually did a rotation in transplant surgery during my surgical residency at Pittsburgh University.
At the time, I felt like I had a connection with the patients that were in need of a transplant. They were so sick and everything, and the life was just all so stretched. Their zest for wanting to live and not to give up, and their courage of seeing themselves and what they were and still wanting to live better, and taking the risk, and going all the way, and putting themselves through what transplant was reminded of myself, reminded me of where I was coming from.