Captive in Iran (12 page)

After roll call and breakfast, a guard called the names of everyone who had visitors. We waited an hour for the small, dirty minibus that took us across the prison complex to the visitors’ building. Because we were outside, we had to wear
chador
s and dirty prison slippers that were far too big. The bus was so small that I had to stand with my head bent over. We were packed in like cattle. The road to the visitors’ center was lined with trees and lush flower gardens.
Visitors must think Evin is a beautiful place.

We went inside and down a long staircase into the basement. After another wait, we were called into little booths separated by glass from the visitors on the other side. Family members were already seated, so prisoners rushed in like a herd of buffalo to find their visitors as quickly as possible because we only had ten minutes.

Our sisters, Elena and Shirin, were waiting for us. What a blessing it was to see them! We did our best to act happy, avoiding stories of what life in prison was really like. For the first time, we heard that our sisters had asked Mr. Soltani to be our lawyer. He was well known for his fierce opposition to human rights abuses and was a very effective attorney. In order to represent us, he had to have our written consent. He had been to Evin Prison twice already to have us sign the form, but was not allowed to see us. Hoping to get around the officials, he sent a female assistant. She got as far as the office of Mr. Sobhani, the prosecutor. When the prosecutor denied her permission to see us, she demanded that he put his denial in writing. Mr. Sobhani refused, saying it was against the law for him to deny our lawyer permission to see us so of course he couldn’t write it down.

There was still the matter of the bail he had set for each of us: two hundred million tomans (about $100,000). Miraculously, our sisters had been able to secure mortgages on family property and were seeking to have us released until our trial. When Mr. Sobhani learned they had come up with the bail, he insisted he had never authorized bail in our case and refused to accept it.

After our visit, we talked with two friends who worked in the prison advisory services office about getting permission to see our lawyer. A woman there named Mrs. Soroosh seemed very interested in us and in Christianity. We thought if anyone could help us, she could. But after reading our file, she told us sadly, “I’m very sorry, but I can’t help you at all. In most political cases, and in a few rare unusual cases like yours, our office isn’t allowed to help the prisoner.” It was a fresh reminder that what happened to us was in God’s hands alone. Whatever crazy rules existed in this place didn’t seem to apply to us.

MARYAM

Easter was coming on April 12, and in honor of our Lord and His goodness, Marziyeh and I decided to fast from Good Friday through Easter
Sunday. Silva joined us in this. The three of us formed what we called “our community.” Each day, we spent the morning together praying for the inmates, for ourselves, and for a renewed vision of how to serve God better while we were in prison. Our fasting created a sensation in the ward. One woman in particular, a fanatically religious Muslim from the holy city of Qom, had never said a word to us. When she learned of our fast, she said, “Good for you, girls, you are really pure. Pray for us.” Everyone was talking about our fasting and praying. Many women asked us to pray for them. On Easter Day, the whole ward congratulated us. Some people gave us presents they had knitted or made at the craft center.

The most miraculous gift of all came from Silva’s mother. During a contact visit after she had taken Easter Communion at church, she brought Silva bread dipped in wine at the Communion rail to share with us. It is impossible to put into words the feeling of taking Communion secretly together inside an Iranian prison. What sweet fellowship our community shared with Christ Jesus that day! It’s unlikely we’ll ever experience another Easter as precious and full of meaning.

Our fasting was an outward expression of our faith that the other women could understand more easily than Scripture or theology or principles. It encouraged prisoners who had been hesitant to reach out to us before to make contact.

One day during break, a tall woman named Shahin approached me in the courtyard. “I have wanted to talk to you, but was afraid,” she said. “When I saw you alone in the courtyard, I told myself I had to speak to you today.” She was trembling with fear, constantly looking around to see if anyone was listening. “What I have to tell you is completely private. No one else must know about it.”

When I promised to keep her secret, Shahin said, “I am a Christian too. I’m a member of a house church. At first, I was so excited about Jesus that I told my family. After they turned against me, I kept going to church in secret. I’m in prison because my husband and I owe my brother money. He could forgive me, or at least pay my bail so I could be with my daughter, but he wants to keep the pressure on my husband to pay the entire debt. A friend of mine in prison told me about you and said I should ask you to pray for me.”

Her friend was Ziba, a woman we knew who lived downstairs because she’d been arrested on prostitution charges, but who worked upstairs on our floor during the day. Ziba had separated from her drug-addicted husband, but couldn’t get a divorce without his permission. After going to live with a female acquaintance, she had noticed various men coming to the apartment who said they were relatives. One day, the police raided the apartment. That’s when Ziba learned that her host was running a prostitution ring from her apartment and had planned to bring her into the business. She had now been in prison for three months and had no way to raise bail. Her only hope was from an elderly neighbor of her sister’s. He offered to pay her bail in exchange for sexual favors in a
sigheh
, the Islamic temporary marriage. So far she had refused, but she was getting desperate to see her young daughter.

“Please pray for me,” she asked. “I feel completely hopeless.”

“If you repent and have faith, God will help you out of this situation,” Marziyeh assured her. “This is a test of your faith. If you choose the
sigheh
, it means you have not relied on God.”

“But I’ve been in here for three months,” she said, dejected. “What could possibly change that would help me?”

“God’s works are amazing,” Marziyeh answered. “He may help you in ways you never imagined. But first He is testing you. I think you should pray for help, and also pray for that neighbor of your sister’s who made the offer to you.”

“Do you think he would ever change his mind?”

“For God, nothing is impossible. I feel that you will be released in two weeks’ time.”

Skeptical though she was, Ziba prayed faithfully for the ability to forgive her sister’s neighbor and for his heart to change. We prayed for her too. In the end, Marziyeh’s timeline was just about right. One morning, Ziba came running to us beaming with joy.

“I just phoned my sister,” she said. “You won’t believe this! Her neighbor came to her to say he was sorry for suggesting the
sigheh
and asked for forgiveness. To get God’s pardon, he has offered to put down a deed to property as bail so I can get out and see my child. He said he regretted his earlier demand, but he couldn’t explain why he had changed his mind.”

“I think this has happened because of your faithful prayers,” Marziyeh said. “Don’t forget your promises to God. Don’t forget to put your faith in Him.”

“I will never forget!” Ziba said, lightheartedly. “And I will never forget your kindness and the hope that one day you also will be free.”

“Don’t worry about us,” Marziyeh assured her. “Our time will come.”

Within days, Ziba was released. She wished us good-bye with hugs and tears. We never saw her again.

Soon after Easter, Mrs. Imani, the woman who seemed so crazy and was always desperate to use the telephone, gave us new evidence of what many prisoners really thought about Islam. She was one of the extremely pious inmates who seemed to despise us for being Christians. She fingered her prayer beads and read the Koran for hours at a time. Now, Mrs. Imani was beginning to suspect that what she’d heard about Christianity was not true, and she asked us for some real answers.

“Is it true, as I’ve been told, that Jesus Christ believed in Islam? Is it true that Jesus was a prophet who promised the coming of a more complete religion after him? Is it true that a person can believe in Islamic principles and say the Islamic prayers five times a day and still believe in Christ?”

“No,” I said, “none of that is true.” She had also been given completely false information about baptism, Communion, and other things. We had seen this so many times in our ministry, how some Iranian leaders, desperate to hold back the tide of Christian belief, had systematically spread lies to keep people from learning the truth.

“I thought this might be the case,” she admitted. Lowering her voice, she went on. “I have two children in school in the Ukraine. They have become Christians and receive so much joy from Christian worship and Christian prayers. What they described didn’t sound like what I had heard about Christianity.”

For several nights in a row after that, Mrs. Imani asked a lot of questions about Jesus and His church. “I love the church,” she said at last. “I think
Christians are much better than Muslims. As soon as I get out of prison, I’m going to the Ukraine and going to church.”

For all her newfound passion for Christ, she didn’t change her outward habits. It was clear that inmates who seemed to be fanatical believers—praying, reading the Koran, and fingering their beads for hours on end—did so not necessarily because they believed any of it, but to gain favor with the prison officials. Acting like a faithful Muslim gave them the best chance of getting contact visits, leave, pardons, and other advantages. There were many inmates like Mrs. Imani who found Islam to be empty and false, but pretended to follow it in order to make their lives a little easier and to reduce pressure on their family, contacts, and social position on the outside. That kind of religious charade doesn’t happen only inside Evin Prison. It is a part of life in Iran.

Many of the prisoners went through the motions of Islam because they felt they had no choice. Yet every day we saw the power of Christ at work, drawing these broken, frightened, sinful people to Himself with a message of hope, strength, and forgiveness. More important, the prisoners felt His power too.

Marziyeh

There was a prisoner downstairs named Mercedeh, a rough-looking character whose arms were covered with knife scars. Ever since I’d first seen her during the Sizdah Bedar celebration in the courtyard, I had felt God calling me to pray for this girl. One day during a break, I noticed Mercedeh looking out at the courtyard through the window of her room. I introduced myself and told her I had been praying for her.

“Why do you do that?” Mercedeh demanded sharply.

“I don’t know. Sometimes God doesn’t tell me why, just that I should pray. I’ve been locked up for six weeks on a charge of believing in Jesus. Can you tell me something about yourself?”

As Mercedeh was telling me that she had been in prison a year and a half for armed robbery, another woman walked up behind her and interrupted, shouting, “Who are you talking to?” She leaned toward the window and said sharply to me, “Who has allowed you to talk to this girl?” Then she pulled Mercedeh away from the window and slammed the shutters closed.

A few days later in the courtyard, I asked Setare, another friend of Mercedeh, what was going on. Setare was in her early twenties and had hair
down to her waist, and her once attractive face had been ravaged by years of drug abuse. “The other girl is Nazanin,” Setare explained. “She is madly in love with Mercedeh and won’t let anyone else talk to her because she’s afraid they will try to steal her. Mercedeh never comes outside, because she takes ten sleeping pills a day and spends all day asleep.

“Mercedeh and I were best friends when we were teenagers,” Setare continued. “I hadn’t seen her in years until I ran into her in prison. Nazanin forces her to obey her and completely runs her life now. Mercedeh puts up with it because she says Nazanin takes care of her. Leave it to me. I’ll make sure you have a chance to talk to her.”

“What about you?” I asked. “What are you in for?”

“My husband and I are drug addicts. We got caught stripping cars for money to feed our habit.”

“Why don’t you quit doing that and get a regular job?”

“Who’s going to hire a drug-addicted criminal like me? Besides, I could never earn enough to pay for the drugs. I’ve tried to quit a thousand times, but nothing works. I can’t wait to get out of here and get my next hit of
shishe
[crystal meth]. For a few hours, it takes you out of this filthy world and all its filthy problems.”

“There is another way out, Setare, and that is relying on God’s help.”

“God? What God!” she said angrily, her voice rising. “When was the last time He heard our cries—the cries of His miserable people? We are in deep dung [but she didn’t say ‘dung’] and covered with sins! Where is God in all this?”

“My dear Setare, God hears you right now in the depth of your misery. He hasn’t abandoned you; you’ve abandoned Him. God loves you and has never left you alone.”

Setare stopped, a puzzled expression on her face. “Are you saying God can hear my cries and help me right now?”

“Of course He can.” I told her the story of my own faith journey and the circumstances that had brought Maryam and me to Evin. Then I prayed that Setare would have a bright future. She again promised to make sure I got a chance to speak to Mercedeh.

Because Mercedeh, Setare, and Nazanin had no friends on the outside to send them money, I bought some treats the next day and handed them to
Setare through the bars of her window. She was startled by the gift and kept repeating, “You shouldn’t have done this! You shouldn’t have done this!”

By the time I finally met Mercedeh, I had learned the basics of her story. She was charged with armed robbery, and her victim had demanded eight million tomans (about $4,000) compensation, which she could never pay. The victim had offered to withdraw his complaint if Mercedeh would become his sex partner. She had said no and would stay in prison as long as she refused.

The first time Mercedeh came out to the courtyard, Nazanin swooped in and took her away as soon as she started talking with me. When Maryam went to Nazanin and assured her that I had no sexual interest in her friend but only wanted to get to know her better, Nazanin agreed to meet with us in the courtyard, along with Mercedeh and Setare, and allow Mercedeh and me to talk privately for a few minutes.

Though Mercedeh was only twenty, all the freshness of youth was gone from her features. Her face was slashed with scars. Most of her teeth were missing or broken, and the few that were left were yellow or black. She said her teeth had been knocked out by her interrogators when she first came to prison. She had been tortured and her mouth smashed. She raised her pant legs to show the deep scars left from being whipped with steel cables. There were scars on her hands from guards putting out cigarettes on her skin.

Her arrival had made headlines: “Girl Behind Multi-Million Tomans Robbery Arrested.” To pay for their
shishe
habit, she and a friend had dressed in provocative clothes and stood at a busy intersection asking for rides in luxurious cars. When someone picked them up, they offered to go to the driver’s house for sex. There they drugged their victim with a drink. As soon as the man fell unconscious, the girls left with all the cash, jewelry, and other valuables they could find in the house. When occasionally the drugged drink wasn’t strong enough, the girls would slash their wrists to force the men into paying them to leave. After Mercedeh was captured, the prison guards had tortured her to reveal the names of her robbery victims.

Gradually, Mercedeh and Setare became friendly with us, though
Nazanin continued to resist. She planned to go into business making
shishe
pills after she got out and was expecting Mercedeh to help her. Our suggestions and prayers were a threat to those plans. Nazanin advised Mercedeh to go into business with her; we encouraged her not to accept, but with the Lord’s help to take her life in a new direction.

Maryam and I wanted to give Mercedeh a gift as a token of our affection and a reminder that the Lord was always with her. Because we weren’t allowed contact visits, we arranged for one of our sisters to buy a gold cross necklace and smuggle it in through another visitor. A couple of days after we’d made these arrangements, but before we had received the cross, Mercedeh met us in the courtyard and said she’d had a dream the night before that someone had given her a beautiful gold cross necklace. When the real necklace was given to her, she was speechless with joy and surprise. She said it was exactly the one she had seen in her dream.

The shimmering beauty of the cross around Mercedeh’s neck was a stark contrast to her sad, grim, disfigured face. It was a reminder of the beauty and purity of Jesus Christ and how He descended from heaven to earth, suffering terrible pain and humiliation, to save the sinners of the world. Yet despite our sins, He doesn’t leave us to perish, but leads us out of the darkness into His shining light of salvation.

While spiritually we were strong and fulfilled, physically we suffered along with the rest of our fellow inmates. The filth, bad food, poor medical care, and lack of exercise and fresh air in prison made it practically impossible to stay healthy. Prisoners saw their hair become thin and brittle from malnutrition, like Shirin Alam Hooli’s had done; their skin, eyesight, strength, and ability to sleep were all degraded by the conditions. And woe to anyone who had the misfortune to actually get sick—the inept medical treatment was likely to do more harm than good.

Maryam and I both felt ill during much of our time at Evin. I struggled with a chronic sore throat, splitting headaches, backaches, and kidney problems almost from the beginning. Several times, I visited the clinic, in another building across the prison yard from the women’s prison. It was
three or four stories tall, with the second floor reserved for female patients. There I saw addicts from Ward 1 for the first time. These women were in frightful condition, little more than toothless, ragged skeletons because of their drug habits. They could get their fix more easily inside the prison, because the prison officials readily sold drugs supplied by the same organized crime group that controlled sales at the prison shop.

The women’s doctor, Dr. Avesta, was prejudiced against Christians the same way many of the guards were. She prescribed antibiotics for me every time I went to the clinic, though she never examined me and seemed to have very few medical instruments in the room. I picked up my medicine from the pharmacy downstairs, but the drugs did nothing to relieve my symptoms. I would suddenly get a severe headache and have to go to bed. I spent part of every day doing exercises to try to relieve my back pain. At times, my back hurt so badly that I would cry involuntarily until my face turned blue.

For years, I’d had powerful, vivid dreams that I believe the Lord used as a way to communicate with me. One night, in my misery, I dreamed that nails were being driven into my hands the way nails had been put into Christ’s. In the dream, my right hand had a hole in it from the nail, and I heard Jesus say to me, “I have let you taste a little of My suffering.” When I awoke, I thanked God for the strength to survive in prison, even though I saw myself as weak and disabled. My suffering there was nothing compared to what Jesus had endured for my sake.

By the time I felt better—a testament to the natural healing powers of the human body, not to the medical services supplied by the Iranian government—Maryam had fallen dangerously ill. It all started when a serious virus spread throughout Ward 2. When Mommy caught it, she developed a high temperature, chills, and an eye infection. Because she was so unpopular, none of the other inmates wanted to risk catching the disease by taking care of her. I was too sick to help, but Maryam nursed Mommy, even though we had decided to keep our distance from her because of all her gossip and backbiting.

Mommy had a strong constitution, and because she had clout with the guards, she got plenty of fresh fruit and nourishing hot soups. She recovered within a week. By then, Maryam had come down with the virus and
was beginning to suffer. It started as a cold and progressed to a sore throat and an ear infection that got steadily worse. Within a few days, the agony of her earache drove Maryam to bed, where she wrapped the covers around her head to try to reduce the pain. She couldn’t sleep, and along with the pain came dizziness. The next morning, when I awoke, Maryam was lying so still beneath her blanket, and her face was so pale, that I became alarmed. I shook her by her shoulder until she opened her eyes, but when I spoke to her, she couldn’t hear a word I was saying. She had become completely deaf.

I quickly reported this serious problem to the guards and tried to get Maryam a clinic appointment. But one of the guards looked at Maryam and said, “She looks all right to me. There’s nothing wrong with her.” I pleaded with the guards for hours until they finally relented—which they did mostly to silence me and the other prisoners who were arguing on Maryam’s behalf.

When another guard came to escort Maryam to the clinic, he said harshly, “You could have waited a few days. You wouldn’t have died.” He turned her over to a female prisoner who worked in the office, with orders to take her to the clinic. The woman was angry because it was lunchtime, and she forced Maryam to stand in the corridor for half an hour while she left to eat.

Once again, the clinic was full of drug addicts from Ward 1. They looked like African famine victims, ravaged by the effects of drugs and without money to buy any food to supplement their prison meals. After waiting a while on a bench, Maryam went into Dr. Avesta’s office. The doctor took her blood pressure, and before asking any medical questions, asked, “What are you charged with?” Maryam could sometimes hear a little and was able to figure out what the doctor was saying.

“I’m here because I believe in Jesus Christ.”

“Is that a crime? Were you involved in any activity?”

“I converted to Christianity. Converting is a crime.”

“Yes, and a very dangerous one.” Dr. Avesta shook her head. “If you are an apostate, your sentence will be heavy.”

After Maryam described her symptoms, Dr. Avesta gave her some erythromycin, an antibiotic useless for treating a virus and which no sensible doctor would prescribe. Maryam started taking it, and also took some pain
pills that other inmates gave her. Her condition only got worse as the infection spread to her eyes, causing a painful discharge that restricted her vision to nothing more than shadowy images. Two days later, she developed a sharp pain in her stomach and a terrible headache. Waves of nausea washed over her. I helped her to the toilet, where she knelt on the floor and vomited for hours. Others in the ward called for the guards, who looked at Maryam through the bars without opening the door.