NPR ^ | June 7, 2008 | Davar Iran Ardalan
A Monument to an American’s Selflessness in Iran
by Davar Iran Ardalan
Weekend Edition Saturday, June 7, 2008 ·Imagine finding out that a nomadic tribe has named a mountain after your grandmother. My mother and I learned just that when a relative phoned to say the storied Bakhtiari tribe had so honored my grandmother, Helen Jeffreys Bakhtiar, to commemorate her public health work there in the 1950s.It’s quite a legacy for a woman born in Weiser, Idaho, at the beginning of the 20th century. Located in the central Zagros Mountains of Iran, near the ancient city of Isfahan, the area around Kohe Helen or Helen’s Mountain, is home to a wide variety of species, including brown bears, leopards, wildcats and eagles. Iranian environmentalists have marked the mountain and the surrounding forests as a protected area.In the 1950s, Helen was a lieutenant commander in the U.S. Navy. She traveled to Iran to serve as a public health nurse as part of President Truman’s Point Four Program. The rural improvement project sent American experts in agriculture, health and education to work in villages in less-developed countries. Traveling by jeep to remote villages, the daughter of conservative Baptists from Boise lobbied tribal elders on the need to educate women about health care. In one instance, Helen single-handedly convinced a reluctant village cleric to allow local women to attend her prenatal class. She also spent time in a village called Koshkerood, or “dry river.”In a 1958 interview, Helen recalled, “When we finally left the village, the people said to me, ‘You have given us hope.’ And when our engineers put a shallow well in this village so the people would have proper drinking water, they said, ‘And with water, you have given us life.’”My grandmother worked primarily with the people of the Bakhtiari tribe in the mountains of southwestern Iran between the cities of Ahwaz and Isfahan. The Bakhtiari are made up of two main, loosely organized nomadic clans: the Chahar Lang and Haft Lang. One of her life’s highlights was accompanying the Bakhtiari on their biannual migration across snow-capped mountains and the icy waters of the Karun River to find pastures for their flocks of sheep and goats.…
