Iranian woman polishes cars and her dreams
It's a men's-simply club in the tangle of auto repair shops on the traffic-clogged streets of Iran's capital, Tehran. Included in this, personnel toil in dim garages, welding and wrenching, fabricating and painting.
That's until Maryam Roohani, 34, arises from under a car's hood at a maintenance shop in northeastern Tehran, her dirt- and grease-stained uniform stopped black jeans and long hair tucked into a baseball cap - which in her job, replaces Iran's compulsory Islamic headscarf for women, or hijab.
Buffing a blue BMW sedan in the shop until it shines, the girl couldn't be farther by the farms of her childhood. In the rural, tribal village of Agh Mazar near Iran's northeastern border with Turkmenistan, girls receive married after striking puberty and devote their lives to increasing children."I have type of broken taboos," Roohani said at the garage, where she carefully coats cars with attention-getting gleams and scrapes sludge from their engines. "I faced opposition when I chose this path."
The auto industry remains male-dominated all over the world, let alone in the tradition-bound Islamic Republic. Still Iranian women, especially in the cities, have made inroads through the years. They right now constitute over half of all college graduates and a sizable portion of the workforce.
A good farmer's daughter, Roohani was raised laboring on the land like the majority of different children in Agh Mazar. But unlike her five siblings, she possessed her eyes on her father's tractor, and developed an uncanny knack for driving a vehicle it young.Even as she worked as a hairdresser and studied to become makeup artist in Bojnurd, the provincial capital, a larger passion pulled her in: applying finishes to cars.
