Indoctrinated from childhood to pursue medicine as the only acceptable career, Azita Misaghi bucked the brainwashing and, at 46, remains highly pleased with her defiant defection to dentistry.
Everyone calls her "Dr. Azita," affectionate shorthand for Azita Misaghi, an Iranian dentist reared until age 15 in Pakistan.
Indoctrinated from childhood to pursue medicine as the only acceptable career, she bucked the brainwashing and, at 46, remains highly pleased with her defiant defection to dentistry.
Exuberant, personable and thoroughly Americanized, she graduated from George Washington High School, Marshall and the WVU dental school. She started practicing in the tiny but multinational coal community of Logan. Her best memories are rooted there.
Radiant with contentment, she reflects a deep commitment to the Baha'i Faith. She worships here with an intimate religious community of no more than 40 followers.
CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- "My dad is from Iran. My mother is of Iranian nationality, but her parents migrated to Pakistan and that's where she was born. My father went to Pakistan to study medicine, and that's where he met my mother. I was born in Karachi, Pakistan. I was there until I was 15. Then we migrated to Alberta, Canada. My dad's parents had moved to Canada by then. We stayed a year. Our aim was always to come to America.
"My life in Pakistan was quite ordinary. We were in a middle-class family. Life was good, simple and hard-working. Education was very important for my family.
"You are brainwashed from the very beginning that you either choose medicine or you are a nobody. Right after high school, you either pursue medicine or the arts. The arts are second-class. You are either a winner or a loser. I wasn't interested in the arts. I was brainwashed.
"We went to Canada in '77 and arrived here in January of '78. I had to go through a cultural shock coming over here. One thing is the honesty and simplicity of the people. In those other countries, you live with so much corruption, from the milkman who delivers milk to your house that he has diluted with water to the policeman who is supposed to keep your security and have your interests in mind but takes a bribe to put you in jail whether you are at fault or not. It's a corrupt nation. It's the poverty. You have to feed your family, so you do anything to make that extra buck.
"We chose Charleston because my uncle, Cyrus Mali, is a doctor from Pakistan and had gotten into the residency program at CAMC. He was the chief urology resident. He's still practicing there. We just came here to kind of get our bearings and, 30 years later, we're still here, so I am a West Virginian at heart. I went to George Washington High School, then to Marshall, and got my dentistry degree at WVU.
"I chose dentistry in rebellion toward my parents. They wanted me go into medicine, and I was going to teach them that they can't tell me what to do. My father was very disappointed. I was on the waiting list for medical school, so should I go with the one that gave me entrance, or should I wait? So I took dentistry, and I haven't regretted it a second.
"In 1987, when I was a third-year student, I went to Pakistan with my mom and grandmother. I'm a Baha'i by faith. In India, the Baha'i House of Worship had just been built and we wanted to go see it. It's in the form of a lotus. Lotus has many symbolic meanings in the Indian culture. We wanted to be there for the opening of the building in New Delhi.
"My grandmother remembered that we have a close family friend in India. We made connections and they invited us to come. We planned to stay four days. The third day, their son proposed to me. To get to know him a little better, we ended up staying three more days. I told him I wasn't sure, that I was in America and he was in India. I told him, 'When you make it to America, give me a call.'
"A month later, he was in America. He lived with my family for a month, and we got to know each other, and a month later, we were married. Met in August, married in November, and 22 years later, here we are.
Everyone calls her "Dr. Azita," affectionate shorthand for Azita Misaghi, an Iranian dentist reared until age 15 in Pakistan.
Indoctrinated from childhood to pursue medicine as the only acceptable career, she bucked the brainwashing and, at 46, remains highly pleased with her defiant defection to dentistry.
Exuberant, personable and thoroughly Americanized, she graduated from George Washington High School, Marshall and the WVU dental school. She started practicing in the tiny but multinational coal community of Logan. Her best memories are rooted there.
Radiant with contentment, she reflects a deep commitment to the Baha'i Faith. She worships here with an intimate religious community of no more than 40 followers.
CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- "My dad is from Iran. My mother is of Iranian nationality, but her parents migrated to Pakistan and that's where she was born. My father went to Pakistan to study medicine, and that's where he met my mother. I was born in Karachi, Pakistan. I was there until I was 15. Then we migrated to Alberta, Canada. My dad's parents had moved to Canada by then. We stayed a year. Our aim was always to come to America.
"My life in Pakistan was quite ordinary. We were in a middle-class family. Life was good, simple and hard-working. Education was very important for my family.
"You are brainwashed from the very beginning that you either choose medicine or you are a nobody. Right after high school, you either pursue medicine or the arts. The arts are second-class. You are either a winner or a loser. I wasn't interested in the arts. I was brainwashed.
"We went to Canada in '77 and arrived here in January of '78. I had to go through a cultural shock coming over here. One thing is the honesty and simplicity of the people. In those other countries, you live with so much corruption, from the milkman who delivers milk to your house that he has diluted with water to the policeman who is supposed to keep your security and have your interests in mind but takes a bribe to put you in jail whether you are at fault or not. It's a corrupt nation. It's the poverty. You have to feed your family, so you do anything to make that extra buck.
"We chose Charleston because my uncle, Cyrus Mali, is a doctor from Pakistan and had gotten into the residency program at CAMC. He was the chief urology resident. He's still practicing there. We just came here to kind of get our bearings and, 30 years later, we're still here, so I am a West Virginian at heart. I went to George Washington High School, then to Marshall, and got my dentistry degree at WVU.
"I chose dentistry in rebellion toward my parents. They wanted me go into medicine, and I was going to teach them that they can't tell me what to do. My father was very disappointed. I was on the waiting list for medical school, so should I go with the one that gave me entrance, or should I wait? So I took dentistry, and I haven't regretted it a second.
"In 1987, when I was a third-year student, I went to Pakistan with my mom and grandmother. I'm a Baha'i by faith. In India, the Baha'i House of Worship had just been built and we wanted to go see it. It's in the form of a lotus. Lotus has many symbolic meanings in the Indian culture. We wanted to be there for the opening of the building in New Delhi.
"My grandmother remembered that we have a close family friend in India. We made connections and they invited us to come. We planned to stay four days. The third day, their son proposed to me. To get to know him a little better, we ended up staying three more days. I told him I wasn't sure, that I was in America and he was in India. I told him, 'When you make it to America, give me a call.'
"A month later, he was in America. He lived with my family for a month, and we got to know each other, and a month later, we were married. Met in August, married in November, and 22 years later, here we are.
"In Pakistan, when we went to visit my grandmother's family, I walked into the streets and looked at the dentistry as opposed to what they were teaching me at WVU, and it was like night and day. I have a picture of a whole array of teeth where I think people would go in and try a tooth in their mouth to see if it fit. If that denture fit, that's what they would go home with. But I think that is the lower class of dentistry.
"I went to the government hospitals where you pay a very minimal amount of money. There was one dentist and two technicians. The technician had taken out a slew of teeth on this patient and had let the patient go while the dentist was still analyzing the X-rays.
"I saw the technician numb the patient with a needle that is not disposable. Who knows how many others it was used on or how dull or sharp it was. Normally, you give a patient a few minutes to let the numbness take effect. But before it had time, he grabbed an instrument and used it on the patient and dropped the instrument in a dish of disinfectant. The next patient was a child. The mother and father held this poor baby down. The dentist numbed him in a hurry and reached back into that disinfectant and pulled out several instruments and went to town. It was really Third World, although this was 20 years ago.
"My first job was in Man. One of my instructors said, 'You are going to wear your rubber boots, aren't you? You will be stepping into a lot of you-know-what when you go there.' I don't know what he meant. It was three years of wonderful times, getting to know people in the tiny town. I think they have a population of less than 1,000. Once my husband graduated from engineering school in Morgantown, he joined me in Man.
"A lot foreigners go to Man: Filipinos, Colombians, Thai, Indians. All are physicians here on a visa trying to get their green card. If you work in a rural area for two or three years, you get your green card. So we had an international community in this coal town. I worked at the community health clinic. My best memories were there. My first child was born in Logan.
"Right after that, my husband decided engineering was not his thing, so we went to Lewisburg so he could go to the osteopathic school. We lived there for about four years, and I practiced with another dentist. Then we moved to Charleston because he wanted to do his residency here.
"I work with Dr. Sami Ghareeb in Poca. I've been with him 13 years. I work part time, just Monday and Friday. Once a month, I work with his son, Dr. Steve Ghareeb, here on Jefferson Road. When I'm needed, I cover the dental offices of his other son, Mitri, in Cross Lanes, and his son-in-law, Matthew Scarberry, in St. Albans. So it's one big, happy family in dentistry.
"We have a small Baha'i community here, less than 40. It is a global faith that started in 1844 in Iran. It has seen persecution and has had a lot of enemies from the cradle of its faith, which is Iran. The founder is Bahaullah. His name in Arabic means 'glory of god.'
"Bahaullah has brought us principles that all point to the unification of mankind. We believe in one god, that divine power that guides us, the same God all religions believe in but call by a different name. We believe that no matter what your philosophy or faith or color or nationality, we all came from one source.
"I believe in the truth of all the other religions. I recognize that Christ came from God, that Muhammad and Buddha came from God. They are all divinely inspired. They all just came at different ages and times.
"In the Muslim faith, they believe that Muhammad was the last prophet, and no one is to come after him. Bahaullah has claimed that he has come from God, so a lot problems have risen from the clergy who feel threatened by another faith.
"My dream is to see conflict amongst mankind end. Baha'is believe we will have peace. Whether it is an act of consciousness of bringing that about in a peaceful, mindful way, or whether it will be a result of unimaginable horrors is a choice mankind will have to make. Bahaullah has promised there will be peace. We just don't know when or how."
Reach Sandy Wells at san...@wvgazette.com or 304-348-5173.
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