Remembering the PS752 Victims: Bahareh Karami Moghadam

Bahareh: A Tireless Experimenter 

For Bahareh Karami Moghadam, a PS752 Passenger

By Ali Karami Moghadam

 

We were brother and sister. Bahareh was the eldest by a year and a half; I was born in the fall of 1987, she in the spring of 1986. 

We were close friends and always knew what was going on with each other. Before going to university, we shared a room and all of our games, laughter and tears took place side by side.

Bahareh and I are from Astara but we grew up in Tehran. Our summers were spent in the grand old courtyard of Grandpa’s house. The forests and nature stole into Bahareh’s soul. I remember my mother putting a suitcase in the backseat, and both of us consumed by a playful rivalry to get into the car first. Mother would ask us to not fight; there was enough space for both of us. She had dedicated her life to us. Our father worked in the Social Security Organization.

Bahareh was a perfectionist. Any shortcomings left her unsatisfied. She had to play the violin perfectly. She had to draw the lines of a picture exactly as she wanted them to be. If she didn’t know a word in English, she had to learn it. She had to check everything so to speak with zero mistakes. By 16, she was already fluent in English and proficient in karate, volleyball, drawing and swimming. Always the top of her class in school, no one was surprised when she enrolled in the University of Tehran’s chemical engineering program. 

In 2009, a year had passed since graduation and Bahareh was still looking for work. The country wasn’t doing well. I still feel a fire ignite in my heart when I read her writings from that time. She wrote of how difficult it was to be a woman in Iran. She hoped for a miracle to save us. When she realised that hope was leading her nowhere, she decided to leave Iran. She got an offer to study at North Carolina State University in the United States.

“Ali, are you sure I should leave?” she said one day. “If I leave, you’ll be alone. Mother and the others will be alone.”

Bahareh left, and we knew she couldn’t visit for five years. With her gone, our house felt like it does on Friday evenings: sad and quiet. Her departure had a strange story: the visa came late, but she arrived right in the middle of Martin Luther King Day, which allowed her to make it to the university. 

She didn’t tell us anything about the difficulties she faced in her new life. On Skype, all we saw was a girl who was always smiling. She graduated on time, and right after receiving her MA in environmental engineering, she found a job with Black & Veatch, one of the largest engineering firms in the US. 

After five years, after she had decided to move to the branch office in Toronto, she came back to visit Iran. But before we knew it, she was back in Toronto again. She loved that city. It was easier to visit Iran from Canada. 

For five years, Bahareh lived in Toronto. For about the last year and a half she worked for the government in York Region. Bahareh was known for her smile. Her colleagues in York Region remember her as someone who always started her Monday morning with a smile.

She was a perfectionist, but also an experimenter. She wanted to try new things. In January, she jumped into the frozen Lake Ontario; in the summer, she slept in jungle camps; she dented her fingertips trying to play the guitar and the ukulele; she tried boxing; she ran in charity marathons; she danced with Bachata groups. She helped organize the Tirgan festival and mastered Azerbaijani dances. I am sure the smell of her food charmed the guests. I am sure when she looked out of her window, she’d observe the clouds cut in half by a passing plane. 

“If she had survived, she’d have become another Mother Theresa,” her friend said. 

On many weekends, Bahereh would go to a center for disabled people to teach and offer support. 

Before her last trip back home, she had told a friend: “I worry for the Iranian people. What can I do for them?”

On her last visit to Iran, she helped to build a children’s center in one of the most far-flung and deprived areas of Sistan and Baluchestan. They named it after her: Bahareh. 

She had friends all over the world. Friends came from all over Canada and the US for her memorial service. Richard, her landlord, told us: “I can’t believe an immigrant had so many friends and was loved by so many.”

Bahareh was our photographer. Many of our memories are forever lost in her hard drives and phone. Brian, the husband of a friend of hers, once said: “I was looking for a picture of Bahareh, and I realized it was Bahareh who always took all the pictures.” 

Her dream was for me to live close to her one day. She had the same wish for our parents. She had a deep love for her family. But she also cared about humanity at large, human rights and women’s rights. This was why she had fled Iran. 

After ten years away from home, she had only just got into her stride and was making new life decisions. She had come home to Iran to see her family, her relatives, her friends and the country itself. She’d always come back for Persian New Year in March. This was the first time she had come in January: the cursed January of 2020. 

At the end of this trip, she didn’t want to go back. She was worried about war. After the missiles were fired, I imagine Bahareh would have thought of two things first: her family and the people of Iran. 

On the afternoon of Wednesday, January 8, Francis de los Reyes, a professor at NC State, wrote a bitter message for her engineering students. She spoke of Bahareh Karami Moghadam, a former student who was due to return from Iran but whose name now appeared on the list of 176 people killed onboard a plane headed to Kiev. The plane had been shot down by two missiles shot by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’s Air Defense Systems. 

Bahareh had graduated in 2012, but her former professor still said she should tell new students about a predecessor they had never met. Speaking to the National Post, she said of Bahareh: “I use her as an example. It’s not easy to go to grad school. It’s not easy to come from a foreign country and figure out how to thrive. She did all that. She survived.... I am so proud of her.” 

 

Translated by: Arash Azizi

Edited by: Hannah Somerville