PORTLAND, Maine — Parivash Rohani was 19 when her family sent her from their home in Iran to India to escape religious persecution.
A member of the minority Baha’i faith, Rohani saw her family’s home burned along with 500 others because of their religious beliefs, so she and a cousin were sent away in 1979 for their safety.
When she tried several years later to renew her passport, Iranian embassy officials told Rohani they would only do so if she wrote to her hometown newspaper and recanted her faith and announced she had converted to Islam.
She declined.
“There was no way I was going to do that,” Rohani said Friday. “My house burned down for this fate.”
So Rohani came to the United States after the United Nations granted her refugee status.
Decades later, after stints in Brunswick and Auburn, she is a nurse, lives in Portland with her husband and children, and works as a volunteer for the human rights campaign Education is Not A Crime.
Rohani will tell her story at noon Sunday on New Mainers Speak, a weekly radio show on WMPG (90.9 FM). For the past two years, guests on the show, hosted and produced by Kate Manahan, have told of their homelands, why they came to Maine, their experiences building new lives for themselves and their families, and their hopes for the future.
This Sunday, in recognition of the show’s 100th episode, a two-hour special will be broadcast live at noon. Rohani will speak about living and practicing as Baha’i in the United States.
The show will include a panel speaking about the effect new Mainers have had on their work and personal lives, and former CBS Baghdad news correspondent Ali Al Mshakheel, now of Portland, will interview Manahan, who is a social worker.
Manahan started the program two years ago after taking community radio training and pitching an idea: offering a voice to members of the immigrant community, which she said now includes one-third of Portland’s school population.
Manahan had three goals for the show, she said: “To make sure we know our neighbors and to know that they’re feeling welcome,” to connect to people’s hopes and dreams and share them with the community, and perhaps, most importantly, simply to witness their stories.
“Telling your story is healing,” Manahan said. “You feel like people are listening, you feel like you belong, and you feel like someone is interested in you. The transformation is amazing. They come in nervous, with maybe a couple of notes written down. And for many people this isn’t their first, or second or third — it’s maybe their fifth or eighth language, and here they are on the air sharing their stories.”
One woman, Tania Blas from Peru, told of being a systems engineer in Peru and working as mayor of her town before coming to Portland.
“ She was on air and something happened in the middle of the interview,” Manahan said. “She realized while she was doing it, ‘I have a voice again!’ She became joyful and open. It was just amazing, and I feel like it happens a lot. She was so proud to have her children come in the studio and see her.”
Mike Mwenedata came to Portland in 2010 from Rwanda, where he survived that country’s genocide. He now operates Rwanda Bean in Portland, a coffee company that returns 50 percent of its net profits to farmers.
“His mother was a neurosurgeon, and he went from being a privileged young man to being a street child with nothing,” Manahan said of Mwenedata’s story, which he shared on New Mainers Speak. “He saw people with their arms macheted off who were still smiling. He forgave the people who killed his family, then he [went through the reconciliation process] and then he moved on with his life. He is joyful and powerful. He wants something to happen to make the world a better place.”
Manahan said the program is a reminder of the importance of free speech, “an incredible gift” that many take for granted.
Ridelphine Katabesha, from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, told her story in the WMPG studio and then told Manahan, “It was my pleasure to share with you today because there’s no one waiting for me outside your studio.”
“She was an advocate for women who were raped in DR Congo — the eastern part, the most dangerous place in the world to be a woman,” Manahan said. “She used to put all her furniture up against the door [at night for safety].”
Most importantly, perhaps, New Mainers Speak redefines the word “immigrant” for many people.
“People come [to Maine] for work, for love, they come as refugees and asylum seekers,” she said. “Immigrant means a lot of different things, and it’s really important for everyone to be listened to and heard.”
Rohani said she feels more accepted in the United States than she ever did in Iran because of her religion.
“I was never dealt with as a regular human being,” she said. “I was always untouchable, subhuman. For the first time I felt human when I came to America. I said, ‘Oh my god, people look at me as a human being.’ These stories are really helpful because they give a human face to immigrants.”
Sunday’s show can be heard on WMPG at 90.9 FM or streamed on www.wmpg.org. It also will be recorded and available after the show at www.newmainersspeak.com.