The 322nd Night of Memory -1

Birthday Party after Doing Ablution for Corona Dead

Iranian Oral History Website
Translated by: Fazel Shirzad

2021-4-20

Note: The 322nd Night of Memory program was held in person and online on Instagram on March 25, 2021. In this program, Hujjat al-Islam Seyed Hossein Naqibpour, Hujjat al-Islam Hassani, Hujjat al-Islam Taherloui, and Ms. Rahmani Nejad shared their memories. In this program, which was especially for jihadist clergymen, Davood Salehi was present as a presenter.

The first guest of this Night of Memory program was Seyed Hossein Naqibpour, one of the jihadist mullah. He began his speech as follows: "In the second week of March 2019, I was contacted that the kitchen of Masih Daneshvari Hospital needs staff. The four persons and I went there and after filling the application and getting our body temperature and training to wash our hands, we went to the kitchen. On the way, a patient saw us, clergymen, welcomed us warmly with nasty words, and we officially started our work.

He pointed to the problems of work and said: "Because of the coronavirus, food had to be packed in the kitchen and then sent to the rooms, they had little power. We had to prepare 1800 packs a day. Interestingly, the hospital kitchen was located next to the morgue, and the cooks compared the officially announced statistics of those who was died by coronavirus with the dead patient they brought to the morgue.

After a few days of helping friends in the kitchen, an issue was raised about helper for patients. In the middle of March of last year, the first meeting was held in the camp of Hazrat Narjeskhatun (PBUH) health jihadists in this regard, and it was decided to enter the hospital and continue working with the patients. Patients' families were not allowed to come in the hospital so that the spread of the virus to be reduced; therefore, the jihadist forces were supposed to help the patients in the hospitals. After the necessary training on how to wear hospital clothes and how to disinfect, etc., the staff was divided in different shifts by this task.

He continued: "Unfortunately, although I was assigned a shift, I was considered to be sent to another hospital." After a few days, because the preparation time for the new hospital took time, I went to Imam Khomeini Hospital. There I was offered a cultural job. Since the jihadist forces did not deal with the medical staff so far, our presence in the hospitals had a negative reaction from some of the medical staff. In the initial encounter with jihadi children, some nurses initially did not accompany them; But after a few days, they found that jihadists were helping the patients and medical staff without any expectation; therefore, their perspective was changed.

"One of the other things we did to alleviate the situation was to give birth to nurses," said Naqibpour, "For many, it was strange that regular mullahs to come into the hospital with a birthday cake and give birth to nurses.

The narrator continued: "Another case that was done in hospitals was the issue of giving ablution to the deceased." It was supposed to be done in hospitals, and I was helping friends to do it. According to the precaution announced by the authorities, we first bathed the corpse three times with our own hands and we were wearing gloves three times; after that, we disinfected our hands, stones which was used for ablution, etc. Once when we were going to hold birthday to a nurse at 10 o'clock, I was called at 9 o'clock to go and do ablution for a dead person. After I finished my work and disinfected my hands, I picked up the cake and went to the birthday party. I thought to myself that if the nurse knew where I was before this birthday party and what I had done, she would hit me by the cake!

He said: "In one of the hospital's units, there was a nurse who was very incompatible with jihadi forces." A few days later, his father took a corona and was admitted to the same unit. When the nurse asked her close relatives to come to the unit to help her father, but they refused, she thanked the jihadi forces with tears in her eyes and said, "How good it is that you help strangers you do not know."

Naqibpour continued: We were working and helping in Imam Hossein (PBUH) Hospital for a while. We had a sick eleven-year-old girl there. This patient was an Afghan citizen. He had leukemia and was hospitalized for several months for chemotherapy and later for corona disease. When we got out of the illness and decided to leave the hospital, we decided to have a party for this little girl; we made a cake and bought some toys, balloons, and so on and went to the unit where the little girl was hospitalized. There, we coordinated with some actors such as Mr. Amoo Pourang and Mr. Parastui, etc., and made a video call to change the mood of this girl. At the end of his speech, the narrator referred to a memory from Imam Khomeini Hospital and said: "Because sometimes we were in the hospital without clerical clothes, sometimes we heard things that we did not have time to answer." In most hospitals, our job was to help patients to eat and talk to them and their companions to increase their morale. On the day of Eid al-Adha (an Islamic holiday), I went to Imam Khomeini Hospital to see a patient and after a while, I congratulated a woman who was with the patient. He said, "Remember, in the past, we used to prepare a sheep a few days before Eid al-Adha, and after sacrificing it, we ate meat, but now we neither had Eid Ghadiri nor Eid al-Adha!"

Naqibpour said that the disease, with all its problems, had its advantages, which I hope will have a lasting effect.

To be continued…