Iranian students in Canada seeking support amid unrest back home

Internet blackout, currency collapse causing financial, emotional strain.

For three weeks in January, Carleton University student Maryam Mansouri had no idea whether her mother was dead or alive.

The last Mansouri had heard, her mother was about to join thousands of Iranians in the streets of Tehran in protests that quickly turned deadly. That same day, Iranian authorities severed phone and internet access, effectively cutting the country off from the outside world.

"I was zooming in on [news] footage to find the body of my mom and my best friends," Mansouri recalled. To her relief, her mother was safe, but the internet shut down created other problems. She couldn't access the funds she needed from back home to pay the overdue tuition of more than $20,000 for her final semester at Carleton.

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Mansouri is one of thousands of international students from Iran struggling with both the emotional and financial toll of the turmoil back home.

"I know that people … think that international students are rich … but many of them, like me, they are coming from countries in danger of regime changes and uprisings," she said.

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While the country has seen waves of mass protests in recent years, Dena Abtahi, a research associate with the Institute for Research on Public Policy (IRPP), says the latest government crackdown, coupled with the economic collapse, is having a profound effect on Iranians around the world.

"There is no purchasing power to actually make ends meet within Iran,” said Abtahi, a former international student.

For students like Mansouri who rely on financial support from their family back home, those contributions have become "essentially worthless," Abtahi said.

On top of Mansouri's full-time course load, the fourth-year journalism student works two part-time jobs to try to cover her living expenses. She said she uses a food bank and has been able to cover her rent thanks to help from members of the Iranian community in Ottawa.

Stories like Mansouri’s are common, according to Abtahi, who’s heard from others who have had to change their visa status from a study permit to a work permit to afford basic necessities.

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