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Washington DC – Last year, family members of Helen Jeffreys Bakhtiar, an American nurse who served in Iran in the 1930s and 50s, learned that a mountain had been named in her honor in the Bakhtiari region of Iran.
In the 1930s, Helen and husband Abol Ghassem Bakhtiar opened one of the first private hospitals in Iran where she served as a hospital nurse in Tehran during the 1930s. Then, when President Truman layed out his Point Four Initiative during his 1951 inauguration speech, emphasizing “the distribution of knowledge rather than money” to underdeveloped countries such as Iran, Helen Bakhtiar responded by joining the program. Bakhtiari traveled to the Bakhtiari region of Iran as a member of the U.S. Public Health Service where she immunized children against disease and trained local health workers in maternal and child care.
In honor of her life’s dedication to serving the people of Iran, the Bakhtiari tribe named a mountain in the region surrounding the city of Esfahan after Helen Bakhtiari. In an interview with the Abu Dhabi-based newspaper The National, Helen and Abol Ghassem’s granddaughter, Ardalan, said, “When you hear that the Bakhtiari tribe have named a mountain after an American nurse, you realize that, against all odds, there’s an opportunity for the two countries to learn more about each other as people.”
This story was featured on the US State Department website yesterday.
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Washington DC – Last year, family members of Helen Jeffreys Bakhtiar, an American nurse who served in Iran in the 1930s and 50s, learned that a mountain had been named in her honor in the Bakhtiari region of Iran.