The mountainous village embraced us with fresh, crisp air and a sign reading ‘Telowbin’ in Farsi.

Once in the village, a group of cheerful kids surrounded our two minibuses, making it very difficult for the vehicles to move ahead, while waving to and looking at us curiously. 

The scene seemed very familiar, reminded me of movies when a group of foreigners would enter some remote and isolated locations and receive warm welcome from the children. 

I was invited by a group of ‘Ordouye Jahadi’, an external community mobilization group from Shahroud University of Technology, to observe their 10-day activity in Telowbin and write a report on it. 

Although I had to cut my trip short and return after 7 days of stay due to some unforeseen circumstances, overall, the experience was enriching, invaluable, and rewarding. 

Ordouye Jahadi, established back in 2001 by the Basij Student Organization, aims at being a helping hand to villagers in the unprivileged regions across the country by providing services and trainings through groups of young volunteers who are university students, clergymen, and at times elder people. 

The volunteer groups help train the locals in improving their skills and knowledge, and aid them in various construction and development projects without any cost to the locals.  

Each Jihadi group provides assistance to the villagers in healthcare, animal husbandry, agriculture, and cultural affairs for a period of 10 days. The team may choose to return to the village to be of further assistance to locals in the same year, go back there in the following year, or just call the mission accomplished and have a fresh start elsewhere.   

It was our group’s third consecutive year, yet my first, in Telowbin, as they had made a pledge of aid to locals for five years.

Our team consisting of 50 female volunteers was settled in a boys’ school where we quickly discovered there was not enough water in the village.  

The first look of the village was very impressive. It faces the mountainous green forests of Mazandaran Province to the west, and from the east, it overlooks the Zagros Mountains.

According to Mohammad Esmaeil Vaziri, a local school janitor whose past three generations have lived there, the village was named Telowbin because from every hilltop, one can see the sunrise. 

In the afternoon of our second day, the beautiful village got covered in beautiful fog, giving the area a mystical, dreamy effect. 

On the very night, the village had its fair share of rain and a fall in temperature, having us wear sweatshirts and jackets, what seemed quite bizarre in the middle of summer.

Today, Telowbin is home to some 590 families or 2,300 people, having lost residents over the years. 

The village’s natural resources were impeccable; though soon we discovered the impact of environmental disasters both man-made and natural.

Despite having a good bit of rainfall years ago, the village now suffers serious water shortage. According to locals, from 2006 to 2014, global warming had taken its toll on the village as well. Drought and water overuse have dried up or dropped the water level in some of the springs. 

Two years ago, to tackle water shortage, locals dug a well to draw up water by a water pump from a valley where the remaining water of some springs merges together. 

Although the problem was solved to some extent, the water pump has to work against the gravity to draw the water up, resulting in loss of desirable water pressure. Besides, the water travels kilometers to reach the valley, washing dirt and mud along the path; at times it looks brown and murky, making it not quite potable.  

Today, a water tanker also takes water door to door in the village, allowing residents to store water in their metal tanks, not an appropriate place to keep water, on their rooftops. 

The village residents believe that with proper planning and technology, the spring waters can come to resolve the water issue of the village. 

Telowbin enjoys an unknown number of springs both in and around it, flowing from each hilltop or their proximity.  

According to Vaziri, a proposal was made and submitted to responsible bodies two years ago to construct a dam in the village in order to save the community from water distress, but they are yet to hear from authorities. 

Meyami governor Mohammad Mehdi Karimi, who was among those paying a visit to the Ordouye Jahadi group, however, was not optimistic about solving the water shortage in the village. He believed Telowbin residents have to use what’s available to them until all water resources are depleted.

“The village doesn’t have sufficient water, this is all water they have for consumption; their water resources are drying up,” the official said.

A few years back, Karimi said, there was a talk of relocating Telowbin residents elsewhere, a costly plan that eventually fell through.                              

Many locals we ran across complained about not having a wet room at home. According to Vaziri, roughly 50 percent of households are without a shower room in their residence. 

There used to be a public bath, a large bathing facility, in the village, but as of a year ago, it was shut down because of a hefty gas bill, amounted to 70 million rials ($2,000), making it not worthy running the facility any longer.

Now, locals have to take a bath in a bucket inside their house, a task which seems quite unthinkable to many of us. 

The community begged us to convey their message to authorities so that they could have their public bath back. 

In 2011, for the first time, a landslide occurred in the village which some residents relate to digging gas canals, a common belief which is difficult to prove scientifically.

That very same year, copious snow, a source of blessing for water shortage, doubled the effect of landslide and destabilized the fragile slopes of the village.  

That year some villagers lost homes to landslip, but fortunately the disaster claimed no life. 

Landslides remain a lurking shadow in the village, threatening the life of villagers particularly in the old houses, constituting 50 percent of the residences, Vaziri said.     

Ever since 1989, around 5 to 6 families per year have left their ancestral land permanently, of course against their wish.  

Water scarcity, threat of landslide, lack of income, etc. have all acted as grounds to dislocate villagers to either nearby cities or other villages. 

According to Vaziri, around 20 percent of the villagers rely on agriculture and livestock as their main stream of income, and the rest of population has no continuous source of cash. 

The latter group has to either move, a few months at a time, to cities to work mostly as construction workers, when the weather permits, or help harvest crops for some lucky farm owners. 

The threat of illicit drugs is very real in the village. Poverty, unemployment, lack of entertainment, etc. have all led villagers, mainly men, to experiment with drugs and eventually become addicts. 

Use of opium has somewhat become a tradition. Senior citizens tend to use it in case of any ache in body.  

But that’s not all. Psychedelic drugs like crystal methamphetamine, known also as meth, have also found their ways into the homes of villagers, particularly targeting men, leaving women to take the driver’s seat.    

It is not uncommon in the village to meet a family whose wife works extra hard not just to run the household, but to put bread on the table, when the man of the house simply does nothing but drugs. 

I came to know Marzieh, who was the man and the woman of her family, while her husband was a stay-at-home dad, taking the chores out, of course. 

Marzieh made and sold butter, yogurt, curd, and other dairy products from sheep and cow milk in her husband’s shop, physically a very demanding job. 

Young girls of Telowbin are married off at age 12, 13, or as young as 7 in some rare cases, and the average age of marriage for boys is 17 to 20. 

The girls confirmed that not all marriages are forced but some are arranged. “Some girls, mainly in the new generation, have freedom to choose among their suitors,” they said. 

The custom of getting engaged far too early goes on in the village, as it has simply turned into a learned behavior; girls watch other young girls tie the knot and are afraid of remaining a frustrated old maid!

The young married women normally stay in their parents’ house a couple of years before living with their husband and walking into their own homes, which is usually a room in the residence of their in-laws.

Upon moving with their spouse, now, the young housewives are usually told to quit school by their men and/or in-laws, leaving them with no rights to further education and social circles. 

With no psychological preparation, not to mention physical strength, the young women have to quickly adapt to the role of a housewife, and soon a mother. 

Boys, too, stop going to school early on to be a helping hand to their families by either working on farms or plantation crops, or breeding and raising livestock.  

Many of the housewives have to grapple with psychological trauma of early marriage, raising a child, and at times, dealing with domestic violence, be it their husbands, in-laws, or both.  

An 18-year-old mother, Zahra, came to us for counseling while she had her 6-month baby in her arms.  Zahra had lost her mother when she was only two and at 13 her father had married her off. 

Desperate, she needed guidance on how to set herself free from the hands of her troublesome mother-in-law, who treated her like a maid for five years. Her husband would also beat her up for slightest mistakes, influenced by his mother. 

Bigamy  

Getting a second wife has also become a common practice among the men of the village. They incline to find and marry another woman and have more children with the second wife. Perhaps bringing on an extra emotional distress for women. 

 Divorce  

With an early marriage, not surprisingly comes a high rate of divorce. These days separation shows a growing trend in Telowbin. 

Forced marriages at young age, addicted and abusive husbands, lack of steady income, and so on leave women with no option but to file for a divorce.

The older generation has around 5-6 children whereas the rate has dropped to 2 to 3 kids with the rising generation; although viewing children as a source of income especially in poor families has remained intact. 

There is no pharmacy in the village. Some grocery stores in Telowbin, resembling a tiny shop in cities, deliver some over-the-counter medicine and painkillers.

Only one general practitioner serves the entire village. If that is not bad enough, he comes in just once a week, on Tuesdays, for only a few hours, from 8 a.m. till noon.

In wintertime when heavy snowfalls block roads, the doctor many not make it to the village, leaving the residents desperate. 

The village also has two behvarzes, rural health workers who work in the “house of hygiene”, a healthcare center, every day except for Fridays. 

On days the doctor visits Telowbin’s patients, he brings along some most commonly prescribed drugs with him, which a behvarz, taking up the role of a medical assistant and pharmacy technician, helps dispense the medicine to patients.

When there is no doctor in the village, should there be an emergency case, let’s say a motor bike or car accident, the residents will have to travel to either Shahroud, the closet city to Telowbin 110 kilometers away, or to another village, Nardin, within 8 kilometers from Telwobin, to seek medical treatment.    

With many problems cited and to my amazement, except for one young boy, all villagers, men, women, young, old whom I spoke to unanimously agreed they would always stay in the village, the land of their ancestors, their roots, and their place of birth.  

Abandoning it was never on the agenda and pretty much out of sight. Some youngsters who had left the village earlier returned, saying they would never consider leaving it again.  

However, the fear of landslide and water crisis remains very true. May God forbid, a blizzard or heavy rainfall can create catastrophic effects in the village, taking many lives and leaving the village a ghost town.  

I left the village, trying to reason out in my head why the village locals weren’t willing to give up and leave their village to larger cities. Suddenly a voice came, reaffirming for the same reason I returned to my country, IRAN, despite having much better living conditions elsewhere. 

I certainly hope the report would be an eye-opener to those of us, including myself, who don’t have the slightest clue about the destitute and unprivileged people of some of the villages, and perhaps many more in Iran. 

I lose no faith believing with each other’s help, we can make a better, not just Telowbin, but country.