By Brian H. Appleton

Doctor Nasser is one of the most decorated men I know but not with war medals but rather medals for his humanitarian efforts for which he has been recognized by many nations and yet he goes unappreciated and relatively unknown in these United States of America although he has been living in San Francisco and been a citizen for over 20 years.

As I write this he is being investitured into the Order of the Knights of Rizal, which is one of the highest distinctions available in the Philippines and it is reserved for persons who make a major contribution to that nation. He will be made a 4^th degree Grand Commander, which is second only to the head of the order. 

Brief summation of some of his accolades:

• He was awarded the "Heart of the World" medal or "Sersa Danka" by Adelina Lanedovna, the mother Theresa of Russia, of which there have only been 50 given worldwide.

• Deputy and Diplomatic Counselor of the World Parliament for Security and Peace

• Vice Consul for UNESCO and United Nations

• Advisor to President Putin of the Russian Federation Administrative Offices Health of the Nation

• Advisor to the Dumas of the Russian Federation Council on Health of the Nation

• Maltese Cross: Grand Commander of the Knights of Malta

• Cross of St. John's Hospitaller: Grand Commander of the Sovereign Order of the Orthodox Knights of St. John Hospitaller of Jerusalem

• Medal of the Legion of Merit of Belgium for Science, Education and Culture

• Medal of Cavalier of Dubai from the Lotus Educational Institute

• Countess Tatiana Bobrinskoy, descendant of Empress Katherine the Great, Czarina of Russia, awarded Dr. Heydarian the medal of the House of Romanoff for humanitarian service and research for his service in Central Asia.

• He was also investitured into the Sovereign Order of the Orthodox Knights St John's Hospitaller of Jerusalem, for humanitarian service and research for his service in Central Asia.

Academic distinctions:

• MD Pavalov State Medical University, St. Petersburg

• MBA Columbia Southern U. Alabama, USA,

• PHD British Institute of Homeopathy

• Licensed Naturopath, Wash DC

• Sports Medicine specialist post grad from Military Medical Academy, St Petersburg, Russia

 Nasser Haydarian holds four passports:

• A diplomatic passport form the UN IPSP

• (International Parliament for Safety and Peace.)

• A diplomatic passport from the Sovereign Medical Order Knights Hospitaller St. John of Jerusalem

• A US passport and an IRI passport

Q: Good Morning Doctor Nasser Let's begin at the beginning. Tell us about your childhood:

A: I was born in 1958, July in Tehran, Iran to my parents Mohammad Haydarian and Farhangis Afshari. From early childhood I was very socially and political aware especially of the discrepancies between the rich and the poor in Iran. When I started Sina High School, I was always the first one to finish the examinations and always received the highest grade in class. I skipped from 7^th to 9^th grade and then from 9^th to 11^th. My IQ is 180.  I was extremely good in literature and horrible in Physics and Chemistry but excellent in mathematics.

I finished high school by age 15. I had written a poem called "Elm bekhtare ya Servat ?"       ( which is better, knowledge or wealth?) It went on to say that the wealthy think that wealth is better and then it went on to enumerate all the crimes that rich people commit to stay in power exploiting the poor. One of the reviewers on the examination committee was Savaki( state secret police) and then I got kicked out of Sina High School. One day the principal of Sina High School called me in and questioned me about who I had collaborated with on my poem and I said:" no one." A week later he said I could stay because I was such a good student but I had to keep my mouth shut. So I decided to leave.

My older brother introduced me to one the most famous poets of Iran of the day, Akhavan Saless. I apprenticed myself to him for 8 years. I studied with him every day.

One night I was coming home from Akhavan Saless's home. Savak knocked at my door. I went down and answered. They asked if I was Nasser Heydarian. I said yes, and they said they worked for the government and they had a warrant to ask me some questions down town. I told my mother they were some friends inviting me out for a coffee and I went with them. I was put in jail and tortured for a year with no contact with my family at all.

Every night I heard the torture going on in the neighboring cells around me and at dawn I heard people being executed by firing squads against a wall. I coped by doing Namas and meditating. I would have to guess that more than 10,000 people were executed during the Shah's regime.

I had been accused of subversive activity yet I was not a member of any organization. I had read a book by Samad Bekhrang and another by Sadegh Choubak and that was enough to get me arrested. When they tortured  me, they were trying to get me to name other "subversives." You can see the scars of cigarette burns here on the backs of my hands and the scars on my back from razor blade slits rubbed with potassium.  It was my anti establishment poetry that had gotten me in trouble. After my arrest I actually had to stand trial in a court of law but it only lasted two hours. I was only 18 and didn't know how to keep my mouth shut so I said to the court that we live in a country where oil and other resources were plentiful in abundance and a country with a long history of human rights and therefore there was no reason that there should be such a huge discrepancy between the rich and the poor with homeless people living in card board shanties while rich lived in marble palaces. There was no reason for such inequality. That was enough to get me jailed and also a court gag order in which they stated I was not allowed to write anything politically provocative especially in poetry or in their words not to be a "wise ass." I refused to sign anything to that effect so I was jailed. The sentence was for 14 months but the revolution came and all the jails were liberated so I got out unexpectedly two months early. I was grateful since a lot can go wrong in two months in jail. Six months of my sentence was in solitary confinement.

Everybody was shouting "Khomeini, Khomeini, Khomeini" and I went home. I had just the clothes on my back and a pair of sandals and no money so I had to walk from Evin Prison to home which was about ten miles. Everybody was home. My mother fainted when I walked in.

After that I watched the new regime to see what they were up to and to decide if I wanted to stay in Iran or not. At that time I kept busy writing song lyrics for young singers in recording studios. I worked with the famous singer Maziar.

One day my brother came and asked me if I wanted to work for the government. I asked him which section. He said Setat Enghelab Farhangi and I would have to do back ground checks on applicants for universities. I told him no thanks. That was exactly one year after the revolution. I decided to leave because I didn't like the direction the new regime was headed. My family especially my brother said that it was time for me to leave. The regime knew that if I refused to work for them that I was against them.  My brother drove me to Tabriz.  I stayed in Tabriz one week with friends and I made a plan of escape as they were looking for me by now. My friends took me to the mountains to the Barzargan Border with Turkey. There a young man in his thirties acted as my guide and rented me a donkey for 400 tomans. We rode together to the border. My donkey's name was Ascar and he was pure black. When we got to the border there was a mouth of a narrow gully. Here the guide took back his donkey and gave me a back pack with some noon-e-sangyiak, panir (flat bread and goat cheese) and a bottle of water. The passageway was about 25 meters long and after ten minutes I emerged on the other side in Turkey. From there I walked about 14 kilometers to a man waiting with a car which my brother had prearranged. We drove for almost two days to Izmir. I stayed with my escort in his house for ten days.

Q: What happened after that?

A: After that I contacted a friend of mine in Palermo, a Persian student, who was going to help me get a visitor's visa to come to Italy but my passport was from the Shah's regime so it was invalid. I contacted my brother to tell him I needed a new IRI passport.

 Meanwhile I went to Istanbul, where I stayed for two months, with a connection from the guy in Izmir and I paid him 1000 Tomans to stay with him for that period of time. My brother got me a new passport and arranged for someone to bring it to me in Istanbul in person. Then I got an invitation to come to Italy with a 30 day visitor's visa. I went to Palermo and started on a new journey of a life of exile. I moved to Perugia because a friend told me there were many Iranian students there. I stayed 1 ½ years in Perugia and learned Italian and took most of my meals in the University Mensa. I worked as a dish washer in a restaurant in winter and in summer I did farm labor like harvesting water melons. I was about 21 by now and I had no money. It was very cold in the winter and I was only wearing summer weight clothes because that was all that I owned. I went into Standa, the department store and on the second floor I put on a winter coat. As I was leaving the store, I was apprehended and taken to the Questura (police station.) I stayed overnight in jail. The next day I had to go before the judge and they got me an Iranian lady translator. I told the judge that I was a hero and that in one year's time I would help a thousand more heroes to escape Iran. When the translator heard my story and understood who I was, she started crying and pleaded my case with the judge. He was lenient and gave me a court order to vacate Perugia within 48 hours. My story made the local paper, the Corriere del Mondo.

A friend, Merdad took me on his motor scooter to the freeway. I wanted to go to Rome. It was very dark on the freeway and we had no head light or tail light. A car suddenly came up behind us and swerved to avoid hitting us. Unfortunately it went into a skid and went off the road where there was about a five foot drop. The car tumbled over several times and landed upside down. We kept going about two hundred feet and I told Merdad to stop. He said:" no let's just keep going" and I said:" no we have to go back and see if we can help them." I went back and heard a man shouting for help. I saw that he was a large man and he was pinned behind the steering wheel and couldn't move. I told him I would get help. We drove a few kilometers and found a small manufacturing plant and used their phone to call for help and then we left. I prayed that this man would be alright and we read in the paper the next day that he had been hospitalized but was OK. He said that he had only seen two shadows in the middle of the road at the time.

By the time we got to Rome, Merdad read over the court order and discovered that I had not just been banished from Perugia but I had been given 48 hours to leave Italy. In Rome we talked to some Iranian connections who told us to go to Yugoslavia. We took the train to Trieste and then started walking into Yugoslavia through the mountains without visa as illegal aliens. The mountains were heavily forested and known to be full of brigands. It was middle of winter by now. We walked for 9 hours in heavy snow and suddenly we came up against a tall fence. We crawled over the fence and thought we were back in Italy but upon consulting the map, it turned out it was the first of nine fences in the no man's land between Italy and Yugoslavia. It took us two and half days to cross them all with only a few cans of tuna to eat and snow to drink. Finally we reached the border. The plan had been to leave Italy to comply with the deportation and then sneak back into Italy and seek political asylum from the United Nations in Rome. Merdad went back to university in Perugia and I went and stayed with a friend of his in Ladispoli, a village outside or Rome. Meanwhile I went to the UN and petitioned them for political asylum and they opened a case for me. After 2 ½ months they sent me papers which gave me official political asylum under the protection of the UN. They asked me which country I wanted to go to and I told them the USA. Two weeks after that I got a parcel in the mail from the US Embassy in Rome with my tickets and $750 traveling money and with the sponsorship of a Baptist Church in Pennsylvania. There were 75 of us who received this UN protection from different countries all around the world. The next thing I knew, I was in JFK airport. I had never been to America before and I didn't speak any English. I had studied German in a Sina Vocational High School. I was met by a security officer with my name on a sign. From there they sent me to Berkeley, California because they said there was a big Iranian ex-pat community there. There I went to Adult Education classes to learn English and I worked as a house painter. I asked my family in Iran to send me my high school diploma and transcripts so I could apply for college. I got into the College of Alameda. I got my AA degree in Psychology. After that I moved from Berkeley to San Francisco. Since wrestling is in my Iranian blood, I had wanted to start a wrestling school but I didn't have enough resources or time as I was working on my BA.  About this time, a friend took me to an Italian restaurant on Divisadero and I noticed that one of the waitresses was an Iranian girl. It was love at first sight. I asked her out to coffee and after a year we were married. We have been married 23 years.

I took a lot of courses at San Francisco State University and graduated with a BA in Physical Education with a minor in Physical Therapy. About this time, some Iranian singers in Los Angeles started contacting me asking me to write songs for them. I also ran an ad in the Pejvak, the San Jose Persian Yellow Pages, that I was available as a lyricist.

I wrote songs for Maryam Jallali , Houman, Rashid and Farhad. I gave two songs to Dariush.

Q: Wow, that's amazing! Then what?

 A: I then decided to study medicine at the age of 42. All the years prior, I had only done business as an owner of coffee houses. But I soon discovered that it was very difficult to get into medical school in the US. A friend of mine called me from St. Petersberg, Russia and said that he thought I could qualify for medical school there and also one in Rostoff. I applied for both and was accepted. I didn't speak Russian yet but luckily the universities had just started offering the course of study in English. I chose Rostoff University. Medical school there was a six year program. They accepted my four years of US courses and I did my fifth year in Rostoff. Then I got permission to finish my sixth year by distance learning and returned to San Francisco. At the end of the year I went back and took my examinations. I then did my residency (ordinatura) at the Russian Military Medical Academy in St. Petersburg in sports medicine for one year post medicine.  

I wanted to take the US Medical Licensing Exam parts 1, 2, 3 & 4. Also since my degree in medicine was from a foreign university, I had to do my residency over again for three years rather than one. I decided due to my age and not being able to take three years off from working and having to take out major loans that I would not continue my practice of medicine in the USA. I thought about going into business instead as I needed to make a living. My wife's family was involved in the coffee business so I decided to open a coffee shop. Meanwhile at the same time I kept studying and started on a PhD in Homeopathy from the British Institute of Homeopathy because I thought it would be easier to get licensed to practice that medical discipline in the USA. By 1997, I opened a coffee shop on 16^th and Mission called City Blend Café Roasting Company with 2,500 square feet of space. This was in the middle of the dot com bust. The business started growing and it started to become a famous place in San Francisco. Some non profit organizations began having meetings there and City Supervisors started having their campaign advisory meetings there as well.  One time an episode of "Nash Bridges" TV series was shot in my café with Don Johnson and Cheech Moran. The film company manager rented out my place to do the shooting. Business remained good until 9/11.        (You can go to Google to see what happened.) On Sept 11^th my café was vandalized and then again on Sept 24^th. Between damage and lost business, these hate crimes cost me over $90,000. I sent a claim of all my losses to Sacramento and they basically told me to fuck off. What they did was give me a lot of press coverage. Ted Copell called me for a TV interview and I refused. Senator Feinstein and her husband came and posed for pictures with me, the City Supervisors and Willie Brown, the mayor at that time came. It was in all the local papers. Some of my patrons voluntarily camped out in the ruins of the café in sleeping bags to protect it until the doors and windows could be replaced.

My business kept losing money but I got through with my studies and got my PhD in Homeopathy. Eventually I sold the Café. The owner of Poncho Villa Burrito Restaurant bought the Café and kept it exactly as I had it and is still doing business over there today. For the next two and half years I spent my time doing humanitarian services as a doctor in Central Asia, Russia and Iran mostly at my own expense with some subsidy from the universities and some Russian medical doctors.

I went to Russia and met with some good people like Dr. Shanti and some government officials and I asked them how I could assist them with humanitarian services and fund raising for humanitarian relief and also which regions needed my assistance the most.

I went to Tajikestan, Uzbekistan, Armenistan, Bellarous, Baku, Azebaijan, Iran, Mexico and the Netherlands. I visited hospitals and orphanages to determine what equipment  they needed and then I would do fund raising to purchase them. I particularly focused on the needs of the disabled for adaptive technology and wheel chairs. A lot of these places did not have wheel chair access like ramps and so forth which made it difficult to use wheel chairs even if they had them. I developed occupational therapy procedures for people with hand and leg deformities. I came up with designs for adaptive eating utensils for people with deformed hands. My high school training in wood working vocational school at Sina, paid off. I also did house modification for the disabled. I would go to the homes of the handicapped and lower shelves that were out of their reach and make other adjustments to make their daily routines of life easier. I started purchasing medicine and alternative medicine from the US, clothing, computers, beds and so forth for the needy in these countries from my own savings.

The Russian government saw what I was doing and started opening doors for me. Their public health department is called "Health of the Nation."  They appointed me a member and vice consul, for the Russian Federation under the supervision of the Putin administration.

One day in 2007, I received a letter inviting me to New York to be knighted as a Lieutenant of the Order of St. John Hospitaller, Knights of Jerusalem which is a thousand year old charitable organization. My latest fund raising efforts with Countess Tatiana Bobrinskoy resulted in $500,000 of medical equipment for the Pushkin State Hospital # 33. The town was named after Pushkin the writer whom they call Chochoud Cherni which means "a little black" because he was.

A year after that I was promoted to Commander of the Order of St. John Hospitaller, Knights of Jerusalem, with the mandate of forming a commandery for San Francisco and St. Peterberg. On my last visit to the orphanages in Russia, I met the Mother Theresa of Russia, Adeline and she awarded me with a medal called the Sersa Danka or Heart of the World of which there are only 50 recipients world wide. It was exactly two weeks after that, when I received the message that I was nominated as vice consul advisory to the Putin Administration. Last January I was appointed a deputy minister to the Italian International Parliament for Peace and Safety which is recognized as an intergovernmental organization by the UN. It has the same functions as the United Nations. It was originally started by the former President of Cyprus who was succeeded by his appointee Archbishop Viktor Busa. 

Q: What are you doing now with the Knights of Jerusalem?

A: I am trying to establish commanderies in S.F, with 11 members and in St. Peterberg with 16 members, to see what humanitarian efforts we can undertake. Since I am in the medical field, my goal is to establish a clinic for the disabled in each country from Russia all the way down to Armenia and Iran and we will assist the biggest orphanage and drug rehab center in Tehran…Kahrizak Foundation.  We will approach the large pharmaceutical companies for donations.

Q: That certainly sounds ambitious but a very worthy undertaking. How much do you estimate you have raised in charitable donations since you began this work?

A: I would estimate between five and six million US dollars.

Q: That is very impressive considering that you have done all this more or less by yourself. I find it quite ironic that you have been given so much recognition by the Russian Federation, the Italian Parliament, which even gave you an EU passport, the UNESCO and so many other governments and churches and NGOs but nothing by the US government where you are the humble owner of a coffee bar. I think one of the things which impresses me the most about you is your humility. You are possibly one of the most decorated and honored human beings I have ever met and yet you are totally modest and approachable. I am also amazed to learn that in addition to how many songs you have written for famous Iranian recording artists over the years that you, yourself are also a singer and have recorded four CDs. You are still an active lyricist and poet and in fact that is how I met you one day when you were delivering a lyric to a singer friend of mine. I want to say that it is my privilege to know you and I wish that there were more people like you on this troubled planet who are not only unafraid to speak the truth and bear the consequences but also follow their words with generous actions to the benefit of the neediest of our fellow humanity.

A: Thank you for those kind words. The fact that you love Iran opened my heart to you.

Q: Is there a website, address or phone number that readers may use to get information on how to make charitable contributions to your new mandate for the clinics you plan to set up in Central Asia under the auspices of the Order of St John Hospitaller?

A: Yes, donations may be sent to the attention of:

Countess Tatiana Bobrinskoy, GDSJ

And made payable to:

The Sovereign Order of the Orthodox Knights
Hospitaller of Saint John of Jerusalem
39 Parkway East, Mt Vernon, NY 10552, USA

You may also contact me for further information at: Pavalov@yahoo.com

... Payvand News - 08/24/09 ... --

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