Aram

Foothill Athletic Club

There aren’t many real swimmers in this sports club so when Aram came flying next to my lane, the primordial instinct to compete kicked in, but my breaststroke was no match to his butterfly. Shame! “I’m Armenian.” He said. “Yerevan?” I asked. “Actually I was born in Persia.” Here we go again. Persia (now unglamorously Iran) used to be very good friends with America during the reign of the Shah, before the Iranian Revolution and before the Ayatollah came into power. To avoid prejudice and bias many choose to hide their true identity, just like Aram. "Wanna race?" "Hell yeah!"

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Oil?

Shiraz

Persia (Iran)

Sepideh lives in Shiraz. She said in Farsi her name means before sunrise and that my name means sweetheart. "So am I a sweetheart?" She smiled and said, "Yes you are, because you always joke around to make me forget my country’s woes…." Woes? Persia is a proud country and rightly so. In its heyday, it controlled the world as much as the Romans did, and the Greeks did in their own time. It gave us Saadi and Rumi. "Now the world perceived my country as evil." She I said. "It’s uranium enrichment, right?" "No." She replied. "It’s oil."
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