One of the first transactions with our travel agent in Tehran was to receive a cell phone to maintain access to his offices as we traveled and to be able to speak with the home offices of FOR at the end of each day’s activities. Global communications are magical, but they are not magic. It is nice when a plan comes together, but it doesn’t always come together. The telephone was a mixed blessing.

First, the agent used the same cell phone and number for successive groups and so for the first few days most of the messages coming in were for the previous group.

Second, the phone’s preferred language, and many of the messages, was in Farsi. So I accumulated text messages until I could check their content with our Farsi speaking guide. Apparently they were often jokes because the guide would laugh, but usually the punch line was lost in translation.

Third, the Iranian Cell company has figured out how to generate revenue with cell phone advertisements (watch out America) and soon the phone began ringing at 4 a.m. with offers of extended minutes at reduced prices: the company was advertising itself! (Here the solution was simple enough, turn off the phone when you go to bed; but now we have sacrificed the emergency contact value of the phone.)

Fourth, the phone was programmed to automatically disconnect the call after about fifteen minutes, usually just about when the day’s report was just hitting its stride and thus requiring entering the 20+ digit access sequence again. The joke was that this allowed the monitoring transcriber to take a break. (We did get this joke and laughed nervously.) Occasionally this became frustrating enough that we switched to the house phone in the hotel. But when the bill at our first check out was $75 for four days of calls, we went back to the cell phone and calling cards. Oh, yes, and with half of the group wanting to call home periodically we went through calling cards at a pretty good clip.

Fifth, the problem of coverage is, I can affirm, global if not universal. The signal failed in the bowels of hotel rooms and in the deserts and caves of many archeological day trips. Often just as the office was opening in the United States we were slipping out of signal range. However, the eight and a half hour difference in time zones meant we could call late into the evening and still find friends at their desks in the States.

And sixth, enough people advised us that our calls would be monitored that we were occasionally cryptic in our conversations. (But no, the talk about the weather was not code, it’s just the way we initiate social connection in American culture.)

I can still remember my first surreal experience of cell phone technology bridging time and distance miraculously. It was in a small van traveling from the Sea of Galilee back to Jerusalem through the Jordan Valley. I was poetically conscious that this was a road that Jesus and his disciples would have traveled two millennia earlier as well as many before and since. We were a team of five, one from South Africa, one from Switzerland, one from the United States, one from Israel and one from the West Bank, Palestine, and each of us was on a cell phone at the same time to our home country describing the events of a very rich day or travel and conversation. If it had not been a day full of surprises and learnings which were relevant and time sensitive, it would have been sadder that the beauty of the setting sun behind Jerusalem, as we climbed out of the Jordan Valley, was filtered through distraction of a conversations with people half-way around the world on three different points of the compass. The miracle may not have been fishes and loaves, but it was close to walking on water.

The second such experience has been repeated more frequently and it is the multi-tasking province of the cell phone. Whether it is one of three or four passengers on a motor-bike in heavy traffic using a cell phone (fortunately seldom the driver in this case), or the still stereotypic disconnect of a mother and daughter, each veiled in hijab and chador and each talking on cell phones as they walk down the street shopping, the scene often creates a double-take.

The third experience has to do with the embedded technology of cameras in cell phones. As an avid amateur photographer, one of my series of pictures has long been of other people taking pictures of people; the phenomenon of dueling cameras. Iran offered many such scenes as our delegation was camera rich. But I particularly like the irony of those occasions when the use of cameras was restricted, as in some museums, but that didn’t stop students from taking photos of 6th Century B.C. artifacts with their cell phone cameras while I took pictures of them taking the picture. It felt like time travel.

Finally, the phone served as a honing device. On a number of occasions it seemed telepathic rather than telegraphic; the phone would ring to report we were converging on a meeting place just as I was calling our guide to say another part of the group was coming from another direction. The phone relieved our anxiety about connecting by ten seconds when our physical presence was just about to accomplish the same task. That’s always good for a laugh.

ENOUGH FEAR

The telephone also has an emerging role in civilian diplomacy. Nick and his friends at The Action Mill have a project called Enough Fear in which they are using phones to creative spontaneous connections between Americans and Iranians.

Enough Fear collects numbers in Iran willing to receive calls and then sets of phone tables in public places and invites passing pedestrians to call and talk to an Iranian. This has already happened in Boston. It is next scheduled for Saturday, January 19th, 11:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. at City Hall Park in New York City. It’s a great way to make a brief reassuring connection with someone somewhere else in the world who is ready to move beyond fear of the other to the surprise of shared values and visions. If you are in the area you should stop by and make that call.

Hello Tehran, can you hear me now?