886: Blackout
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From W.B.E. Z. Chicago, it's "This American Life." I'm Hannah Joffiwalt sitting in for "Ira Glass." When Sharon Jafari moved to the U.S. as a young adult, there are a lot of promises made to her family back home. We'll be in touch all the time, call you every week, almost like we're in the same town, which is the kind of thing you say. But Sharon actually pulled this off for the last 20 years. We are a close family. We message several times a day. We send each other real, like normal stuff. I mean, I don't want to lose those details, those small details of their lives because I am so far away from them. And they really get into the details, this family. Who ate what? How far was the walk? What's the latest with the dental work? On the phone, by text, random thoughts tossed out at any hour. Have you seen this pumpkin dessert and solicited suggestions? I would send them videos of exercises they can do at home. Like you worrying about them getting enough movement? I would love them to, yeah, I would love, yes, I have been trying to get my mom to do more yoga and my dad to not sit all day. How's that going? Not great. So just like a constant ongoing conversation with them. Totally. The kind of thing that you would be asking them if you were actually in the same space and close. Then in February, the United States and Israel attacked Iran, where her parents live. And on that very same day, the first day of the war, the Iranian authorities shut the internet down, just put the whole country into an internet blackout, a shockingly effective blackout. The call wouldn't go through. It would just disconnect. I didn't hear anything. It would just disconnect. Did you do it over and over again? Yes, of course. I tried so many times. I wouldn't be able to get through. Calling through cell phone was impossible. It just became useless. The cell phone became useless for us. The only way I was able to communicate with them was them calling on a landline to my cell phone. That was the only way they could reach me. Text message, email, nothing else was working. After that point, no, they called me on the landline. And it's funny when I think of it, you know, there were so many times when I visit them, and I would tell them, "Who needs a landline?" Maybe I should get rid of this, you know, in this day and day, "Who needs a landline?" Inside Iran, what was happening was, as soon as the war started, cell phones were only working to call people inside the country, no internet. Communication with the outside world became so difficult, it was like going from breathing regularly out in the open to being underwater and breathing through a straw. Workarounds like VPNs are expensive or janky, some are flat-out scams, and they're banned. A private satellite service like Starlink, illegal, and people have been arrested for using it. So, the landline.
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