‘I think we should use this as an opportunity to build bridges’: professor Ottawa university lost two community members in Iranian plane crash

OTTAWA – The breadth of the suffering that emerged from the downing of Ukrainian International Airlines Flight 752 was on full display Wednesday at a vigil at Carleton University. But so too was determination to forge on and find lessons learned from what otherwise feels like a senseless loss of life.

Carleton lost two community members in the crash: PhD student Fareed Arasteh and alumnus Mansour Pourjam. Similar events have been held at schools across the country over the last week, including the University of Ottawa.

Of the 176 people who died in the crash, including 57 Canadians, “many of the victims were students, faculty, staff, alumni, friends of Canadian universities,” said Carleton president Benoit-Antoine Bacon at the Wednesday vigil.

“It’s a national tragedy, especially so in the Iranian–Canadian community,” he said. And it’s just the latest in a strong of losses at Carleton. Last January, alumni Judy Booth and Bruce Thomlinson were killed in the Westboro bus crash. Then in March, Carleton professor Pius Adesanmi and alumnus Peter DeMarsh died in a plane crash in Ethiopia.

“Life is short. Through bad luck or malevolence it can be made shorter still,” said Bacon. “All we can do — if I can quote elder Barbara Dumont-Hill — is to strive to live life in a good way, with resilience and purpose and gratitude, if we can.”

Arasteh’s friend and roommate Reza Samanfar told the assembled mourners he wanted to address them as Arasteh would have, given the chance.

“He would tell us to dream and he would ask us to never give up on our dreams,” said Samanfar. “His soul was an infinite source of energy.”

Arasteh spent two years working to secure admission as a PhD student in Carleton’s biology department, leaving behind a stable consulting job in Iran.

Questioned on this decision by Carleton professor and lab head Ashkan Golshani, Arasteh explained his feeling that he wasn’t really living, and wanted to make a contribution.

“He was telling me that every minute he’s going to spend in the lab, he’s living his dream,” said Golshani. “He was a player, he was not a background person. He made a lot of noise during the time that he was with us.”

Rather than a moment of silence, Golshani urged the crowd to make some noise — a fitting way to celebrate Arasteh’s life, he said. He also suggested looking for a lesson in the tragedy.

“This is a very sad situation. It couldn’t get any worse. But it has brought many of us together. It has brought many nations together.

“I think we should use this as an opportunity to build bridges. Because I think the way for the future is to build bridges, and not walls.”

In speaking about his brother Mansour, Masoud Pourjam also took a moment to thank the Canadian government “who pushed the government back in Iran to be more transparent” in the days following the crash.