Simin Marefat

[Rasputin]

Take a pin, stick it in a map of the world and chances are Simin Marefat has been there. A San Francisco nurse and health care volunteer, she's been to 62 countries - mostly in the Third World. She's fed children and changed diapers in Rwandan orphanages. Delivered babies in Zambia and Zimbabwe. Educated sex workers on HIV prevention in Thailand. Vaccinated children in Pakistani refugee camps. Taught EKG and the care of open-heart patients in her native Iran.

[Rasputin]

"She's Valium-deficient!" says her brother Bobby. "I'm kidding. But she doesn't tire. She's a little scary, she really is."

She's also courageous. It's the result, Marefat says, of fleeing Iran at 11; of relocating to the United States, learning a new culture and knowing that, because she was Iranian, she was unwelcome.

In Iran, Marefat lived in Shiraz, a city in the southwest, and spent summers on the Caspian Sea, at her great-uncle's beachside villa. "Everyone, all my cousins, would be there - 30 people. Our parents would cook and the kids would be on the beach playing, building sand castles. The water was the color of turquoise. At night we'd build a fire and one of my other uncle's wives would sing."

Everything ended when Marefat's father, an oil engineer known for his strong opinions, said something that offended the government. Marefat is careful not to reveal too much, but says it took two years to find a reliable guide to transport the family into Turkey from Iran: "There were stories that you would pay people and they would take you across the border and kill you."

In 1986, Marefat, her brother and parents said goodbye to their relatives and flew from Tehran to Tabriz in the northwestern corner of Iran. "It ended up that my uncle had a friend who knew someone whose son was taken out of the country by this gentleman, a Kurd." In Tabriz, "we waited until they called and said, 'Today's the day to go.' And they pick you up on a street corner."

It took three days to cross the Zagross mountains into Turkey. They went by foot, by donkey and motor scooter through Kurdish territory - traveling by night. The family had no luggage, "just the clothes on our back. My mother had ripped apart our belts and put money in and sewed them back up. The heels of our shoes were opened and money was put in there and resealed."

In Istanbul, the American Embassy was seeing hundreds of Iranian refugees. The Marefats were granted political asylum and visas to live in the United States - in part because Simin's father went to college in the United States and her brother was born here. "We ended up in Kansas because the house where my parents had lived while my dad was in college was available. They'd stayed in touch with the landlord and he said to them, 'Why don't you come here? It's safe, it's cheaper.' So we ended up in Hays, Kansas."

Unable to find work as an engineer or academic, Marefat's father opened a restaurant, Maxim's. "We didn't serve Middle Eastern dishes. Just American food. Really basic: meatballs, Salisbury steak, meat loaf, chicken tetrazzini. I washed dishes and helped my Mom prepare food. I worked there from when I was 11 until I was 21."

The whole family worked at Maxim's, in her parents' case from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m., seven days a week. The restaurant succeeded, Marefat says, "(But) it was hard for me, because my parents are so educated, to see them work like that. I always wonder what went through my dad's mind when he waited on tables."

Even today, Marefat speaks English in an accent hybridized from Farsi and the hard, flat consonants of Kansas. When her family arrived in the United States, it was 1986. The Iran hostage crisis of 1979-81, when 52 U.S. citizens and diplomats were held hostage in Tehran for 444 days, was fresh in people's minds. In Hays, a small town of 26,000 residents, originally settled by German immigrants, Iranians were treated at best as oddities, and more often as intruders.

"My brother and I got teased in school all the time. Kids were really mean. And my parents had things told to them like, 'You shouldn't be here.' But the beauty of it was that, having gone through all that, to see how the town fell in love with my parents and how they are now so respected in the community."

It was that odyssey, beginning with escape, displacement, discrimination and eventual acceptance, Marefat says, that taught her anything was possible. She earned her nursing degree at Fort Hays State University in Hays, left Kansas at 21 and worked in Texas, San Diego, Seattle and Hawaii before moving to San Francisco in 2000.

When asked how she makes time for romance, she looks embarrassed. "There's not a lot of people who have gone to some of the places that I've gone and seen some of the things that I've seen. Hopefully, there will be somebody who will understand it and think it's great and will be proud to stand next to me. But, you know, they obviously haven't been the right people (so far), because they didn't support what I'm so passionate about.

"I definitely think I can find a balance. I've lived in this country and I've still affected change in Africa. I can do it from here. I am doing it from here."

Marefat will finish her master's in June, at which point she hopes to find a one- or two-year AIDS-policy position in Africa. Combining nursing and health-policy administration, she says, is unique: Whereas many policymakers haven't been in the field, seen a refugee camp or worked in an HIV clinic, Marefat has done all of that. She's seen the direct impact of policy, for better and for worse, on the lives of the people.

She has no plans to stop working as a nurse. "I can always volunteer on the weekends at the clinics or hospitals (in Africa). I love the patient interaction. I love the people and meeting them and hearing their stories and things of that sort.

"Why can't I do both?"