Students aren’t going to school anymore in Iran. A fact seniors Donia and Daria Dastmardi learned from their aunt, a professor at Shahid Beheshti University, when they finally got a hold of her amidst the country’s media blackout. 

Since late December, after the collapse of Iran’s rial raised inflation to 52.6%, businesses in Tehran’s Grand Bazaar have gone on strike and closed their shops. 

Soon, more people joined, taking matters to the streets with mass nationwide protests and demonstrations calling for the end of the Islamic Republic, demanding for fundamental change and human rights. 

The Dastmardi sisters immigrated to America in 2015 from Iran, a predominantly Muslim country, after converting to Christianity.

“If [the government found] out, it’s dangerous,” Daria Dastmardi said. “You can’t have churches, you can’t go to church, you can have a private church at your house but they can take you to prison for that.” 

For Iranians outside of the country, fear doesn’t stop at the borders. As protests intensified, starting on Jan. 8, Iranian authorities began tightening their control over information by cutting off nearly all access to internet and telephone lines nationwide.

“It [makes] me mad, sitting here watching all these people be like ‘oh, they’re turning their Wi-Fi off,’” Daria Dastmardi said. “[People] don’t really sit and think about it because we’re only shown a small amount of what really is happening. You don’t hear on the news that students aren’t going to school anymore or that they’re turning the lights off in the streets so people can’t go outside past a certain time. It’s changing their lives, but we can’t see that.” 

Senior Arshida* adds to that frustration saying the term ‘blackout’ holds more weight than most might realize.  

“It’s so easy to say ‘blackout,’ but the truth is much harsher,” Arshida said. “We’ve lived with the internet since we were born, and then to live without any communication is insane, especially when there’s people getting murdered.”

One of Arshida’s schoolmates in Gorgan lost her life as a result of the protests—news that she had to find out through Instagram. 

“I wasn’t friends with this girl that passed away,” Arshida said. “But then, what happens if that was my friend? But I just don’t know yet because there’s no contact. So [when] the media goes, ‘There’s been a blackout, help Iran,’ blackout literally means if your friend died, you don’t know.”

Arshida first moved to the United States with her family at age five, returning to Iran for yearly visits. At 13, she moved back to Iran with her mother and lived there until she was 16. 

“I started to grow up [as] a very Iranian teenager,” Arshida said. “If we had a new law or if the government forced us to wear hijab, I was there experiencing it with them. I have firsthand experience of how it feels when you’re a young girl, you’re going to [school to] take your test and they don’t let you in without your hijab.” 

Arshida lived in Iran during the Women, Life, Freedom movement, which gained momentum in 2022 following the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini while in the custody of Iran’s morality police. The movement emerged in protest of the country’s mandatory hijab law, which many viewed as discriminatory, and the morality police, specialized units that enforced strict Islamic dress codes and behavioral norms through patrolling public spaces. 

“I remember this one year, I was wearing this skirt that had a small slit.” Arshida said, “[Then] this Jeep full of four police officers saw me and they stopped. I saw they stopped and I was like, ‘oh my god, they’re going to come for me,’ so I started running back to the supermarket I had gone to before in this summer heat, and I couldn’t even take a breath to calm down because I thought I was done for.”

The fear rooted in something as simple as clothing is one senior Dorina Khakpour said she understands deeply. 

“It’s crazy having kids all the way from kindergarten starting to wear hijab and having to go through that so young,” Khakpour said. “Being a girl, it makes me a lot more sensible to the situation because the opportunities here are quite literally endless. I came here to get a better education and girls’ education there is limited because it’s like having a boundary of [being] cut off from understanding what they truly could be deserving of.” 

Born in America, Khakpour moved back to Iran when just a few months old. She went to school there until fourth grade, before she and her mother moved back to America, while her father stayed back for work.

Khakpour says her understanding of the situation in Iran began during the Women, Life, Freedom movement, when she and her mother started attending protests in America. That early exposure shaped how Khakpour viewed the movement as it continued to evolve.

“Once the Women, Life, Freedom protests started dying down, I thought that was going to be the end of it,” Khakpour said. “Seeing them start back up [through] a much bigger movement against the government is a beautiful thing because you’re seeing these people not giving up on something they truly believe in and wanting to get their voices back.” 

That hope, Arshida says, is colliding with a reality Iranians can no longer endure. 

A month before the protests began, families in Iran tried to sustain themselves on monthly incomes that stood only near $200, leaving millions unable to keep up with the inflation of food, resorting to bread-only meals in their kitchens. 

In Iran, a timeline of disappeared foods became a new normal, with dairy disappearing a year ago, chicken six months ago and fruit four months ago. 

Delaying famine as much as they could, families even ended up cutting visits and medicine, focusing the money they had on food alone, which still wasn’t enough to put adequate food on the table. 

“We couldn’t imagine living in Iran,” Arshida said. “In America, if we have [an] inflation over eggs, people go crazy. In Iran, it happens literally every single day. [They] can’t afford what they afforded a month ago. Iranians have become so immune to it until right now, where they can’t take any more because they’re unable to feed our children and themselves.”

Ever since the protests have begun, over 35,000 deaths have been reported, where many who have been massacred were under the age 30, leading some to call it the ‘Iranian genocide’.

“Almost 30,000 getting killed in [a few] weeks doesn’t happen often,” Arshida said. “Youth are participating in these protests, putting their lives at risk because they just want a normal life. They don’t think that even if they work, [they’ll] be able to afford things. They don’t feel hopeful.”

Despite the violence and economic collapse, Arshida says she is hopeful for change within the regime, especially after the Women, Life, Freedom movement. 

“This summer [when] I went back to Iran, I saw women in Tehran in just a t-shirt and pants [with] no hijab,” Arshida said. “That was never a thing four years ago. This summer I was seeing more people expressing themselves with their own clothing. No one was telling them what to do, [which] was very refreshing.” 

Even with the visible progress on the ground, Arshida says that international coverage, shaped by the political framing of the protests, often misses what Iranians themselves are risking

“Right now, there’s millions of people putting their lives at risk,” Arshida said. “It’s a ‘now or never’ situation to speak about it. I see the media involving Israel, Palestine, America, when talking about the protests, but this involves the Iranian people and the Iranian people are asking for help and the Iranian people want a change.”

The disconnect extends beyond just headlines and politics, showing up in everyday conversations for the Dastmardi sisters. 

“I don’t think a lot of people know about what’s going on in Iran,” Daria Dastmardi said. “If I know something’s happening in another country and I have friends that [have] families there, I always make sure to check up [on them]. But I don’t think anyone’s brought this up. Even for the bombing [over] the summer, nobody really checked up on that. It’s not important to them as much as it would be to someone living in that country.”

That lack of awareness, Donia Dastmardi says, seems to be reflected in her own classroom too. 

“I don’t think a lot of people take the time to research and understand what’s going on either,” Donia Dastmardi said. “For Palestine, a lot of our teachers spoke up about it, and they educated us. But now, teachers aren’t educating us about what’s happening right now.”

Sophomore Sorena Botts said she found herself in a similar situation.   

“There are some [people] who think that what’s going on there isn’t real,” Botts said. “One of my friend’s mom was like ‘Is this actually happening?’ Yeah, it’s happening—there’s so many people that are out on the streets, fighting every single day, and videos that come out about it. I don’t know how they would see that it’s not real.”

Frustrated with how some were uneducated of Iran’s situation, Botts decided to write a song about the people being oppressed in Iran. 

“It was emotional writing it,” Botts said. “I sat down and wrote down [in] my notebook details about what I had seen from my family, how my mom was feeling, what was going on in Iran and how they’ve been fighting for 47 years. I took all those little details [to] make it.” 

Growing up, Botts and her family were frequent attendees at protests, where chants like “Natarsid, natarsid, ma hame ba ham hastim” (Don’t be scared, we’re all together) later served as inspiration for lyrics such as “Hand in hand, we stand.” 

Botts finished her song during the final hours of the night, before texting her producer at 1 a.m. about her last minute endeavor. 

“It’s very rare you get to finish a song in one day,” Botts said. “The next day I skipped school to record the whole thing—we started at 9 a.m. that day and we finished at around 6 p.m. Then the day after we released it.”

“Final Battle” was born, reaching audiences Botts hadn’t anticipated, including social media accounts with more than 100,000 followers. 

“I didn’t think that it would be a big thing,” Botts said. “But it felt good because it felt like I was helping the cause [as] more people were aware of it now.” 

Like Botts, during her sophomore year, Khakpour founded, Unveiling Voices, an organization dedicated to shedding light on the challenges faced by women in the Middle East, where she was able to raise profits up to $5,000 that she would send back to Iran through women’s products to women’s shelters. Along with trying to raise money, Khakpour created an online website to share and uplift stories from Iranian women she would speak to during her trips to Iran. 

“Staying in touch was the biggest thing,” Khakpour said. “Holding myself accountable to be up to date on what’s happening and sharing stories [of] the women there, I learned more about myself, my heritage, my culture and was able to learn more about where I came from.”

Khakpour believes that living in America brings about freedom that people may assume is universal, but realizing that’s not the case, like for countries such as Iran, drives her commitment to speak out.

“I take a lot of responsibility [of] being able to share whatever’s happening in Iran,” Khakpour said. “[When speaking up] you’re not just representing yourself, you’re representing millions of people that are going through this. It’s people’s jobs to speak up because imagine if that was me there, what would I want other people to do?”

That responsibility Khakpour speaks of is one that the Dastmardi sisters resonate with and echo strongly. 

“It’s every Persian’s responsibility who doesn’t live in that country right now to speak up because they’re living a better life than most people there,” Daria Dastmardi said. “People my age are probably dead right now because of that protest. It’s my responsibility to make sure I can spread the information that we’re getting that the news isn’t because innocent people are dying trying to gain their rights back.” 

At its core, the Dastmardi sisters emphasize there are limits to what Iranians inside Iran can do, something that should encourage others to continue to raise their voices. 

“There is a limited amount people can do in Iran,” Donia Dastmardi said. “They don’t have Internet, they don’t have Wi-Fi, and even if you’re non-Iranian I don’t think that should limit you to speaking up about something that’s happening to other people. The people getting killed were also human, race has nothing to do with it. It’s not about politics anymore, it’s about people dying. It’s about your morals.”

*Last name withheld to ensure protection and privacy of the individual.