The back seat of a Lyft is not my go-to crying spot, but two weeks ago, I had a conversation with a rideshare driver that left us both in tears. If I could have hugged this man as he was operating a moving vehicle, I would have. But all I could do was sit forward and pat his shoulder as he apologized for getting emotional.
It was gas prices that sparked the tears.
I keep thinking back to this conversation as I read about the deal to end the war in Iran (opens in new tab), the economic impacts of which may take months, or longer, to reach our shores. In the span of a 12-minute ride from SoMa to my children’s elementary school on the west side, the driver, whom I will call Fadi because he feared identifying himself on the internet, reminded me how real the war is for many people — and how urgent.
It was June 2, and my car was in the shop, so I hopped in a Lyft from the office. “Are you done with work for the day?” Fadi asked by way of small talk. No, I explained, I’m going to get my kids, and then I’ll finish up from home. “You are blessed to be able to be with your kids and make money in your home,” he said. For a moment, I was annoyed, because the last thing I wanted to do when I got home was continue to work, but I understood the implication. He was not able to work from home surrounded by his children, and so I asked him about them.
That was when I learned that Fadi’s teenage daughters, wife, and mother live in east Jerusalem, in the occupied West Bank. “I have not taken a day off in 11 months,” he told me. He had acquired U.S. citizenship as a child and came to the Bay Area the previous summer. He immediately began driving Lyft in order to send money to his family in Palestine. He showed me the sheaf of yellow Western Union receipts he gets every day after he wires money to Palestine, which pile up in his center console.
Over the course of our ride, I learned that Fadi had been an organic chemistry teacher before the Hamas terror attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, and the devastating Israeli war on Gaza that followed. But that felt like a distant memory. Unable to support his family at home, and needing to fund his mother’s medical treatments, he came to the Bay Area, where his sister also lives. There is no room for him to live with her in Dublin, so he rents a small room near SFO in an apartment with four other rideshare drivers. He does not have access to a kitchen.
“What do you eat?” I asked him.
“Every day I buy one large sandwich from a Palestinian guy in San Bruno, and we talk about home,” he said. He explained that he used to stop for breakfast too, but since gas prices have gone up because of the U.S.-Iran war, he cannot afford the second meal. I mentioned how I had seen gas selling for $7 that morning in SoMa. “Your president’s war has come home,” Fadi said. It used to cost him $70 to fill his tank; now it’s more than $90.
“It was my birthday last week, and my daughters said, ‘Papa, go out for a nice dinner and send us photos,’ but I cannot. How can I waste money on a $60 dinner?” he told me.
At this point, we pulled off the 280 South exit at Geneva and hit a red light. Fadi scrolled through his phone and showed me photos of his daughters and wife, stopping when he came upon one of his youngest, holding a pink, three-tier cake with candles. He had sent extra money for her 13th birthday celebration. “My job is to protect them. Every moment I am breathing is for them,” he said.
I flashed back to the night before at my own kitchen table, when my 10-year-old son had said, suddenly, “It doesn’t feel like we are at war.” Moments earlier, he had caught a snippet of news from Iran on the radio as I was cooking. Cognizant that his 6-year-old brother was hanging on our every word, my husband and I attempted to explain how the U.S. can be at war abroad, even though it might not feel that way at home.
We also tried to touch on ways that international conflicts do make themselves known here — in the lives of people who have families or friends in war-torn countries, in the prices of goods affected by the disruption to trade — but these are concepts that are hard for adults to understand, let alone children. And perhaps, we thought, they are concepts they shouldn’t have to know yet. We spoke about how the situation in Iran is a separate war from what’s happening in Gaza, which is different from what’s happening in Ukraine. We went to the world map we have hanging on the wall and showed them where those countries are, then tried as best we could to move on to happier topics.
I remembered this with a pang of horror as Fadi described how his daughters’ lives have changed in the past three years, how they miss going to school with their friends and playing. How they miss their father. As he scrolled through photos of his family to show me, he began to weep. As the stoplight changed from red to green and we started driving, I wept with him. I wanted to do something to help this man. I invited him to come on my podcast and tell his story (“I do not have time to stop working and do that”). I gave him my phone number. He wiped his tears, saying, “Hold your children!”
The car wound through Ingleside, past teenagers enjoying their final week of school at Lick-Wilmerding High, past parents holding the hands of their kids as they crossed the street. It didn’t look like we were a country at war. But then we passed the gas station near my house, which has some of the cheapest fuel in the city but was still running over $6 a gallon.
As economists predict the inflation caused by the Iran war could take months to unwind, if it ever does, I keep thinking of Fadi. I envision the breakfast he isn’t eating so he can send that extra $20 to his daughters. I cannot bring myself to try to tell my own curious children this story, about how a war in Iran can affect the lives of children in a different war-torn area, whose father is halfway around the world trying to protect them the best way he knows how. All I can do is hold them.
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