12-02-2025
Austin Marathon runner on trek to share his story, help Doctors Without Borders
Even before he understood the depth of his parents' work, Daryush Nourbaha was proud of what they did. It had to be something special.
Spending stretches of his childhood in Iran, Nourbaha remembers seeing women lined up around the block, covered head-to-toe in traditional black chadors, waiting for their turn to visit with his mother. She was the first female physician the town had seen in ages.
He also saw his father treat a shepherd who had stepped on a landmine left behind after the Iran-Iraq War. The shepherd's flock followed the man as he hobbled in unimaginable pain, on flesh that no longer resembled a foot, to reach the hospital where Nourbaha's father did his best to stitch him up.
'That image stayed with me,' Nourbaha recently told me, 'because he had walked for who knows how long to get some medical attention.'
Those memories may be three decades old and a half a world away from Nourbaha's life here, living in Austin and overseeing workplace safety for an aerospace manufacturing facility in San Marcos.
But as Nourbaha spent the past few months training for this weekend's Austin Marathon, on long runs and treadmill workouts, he thought about the conflicts in faraway places. He knows what suffering looks like. What could he do, as just one person, to help?
He decided to use his race to raise money for Doctors Without Borders, to help others do the type of lifesaving work his parents had done through a different program.
'The purpose of a doctor in the middle of something so heinous going on — where humans are killing humans, dropping bombs, firing tanks and ammunition — the doctors there just want to do the best they can to keep people living and keep them healthy,' Nourbaha said.
This isn't political for Nourbaha. It feels personal to him. Whatever you think about the issues in the headlines now — the question of U.S. dollars going to humanitarian aid around the world, our long-running debates over immigration and border enforcement — these aren't just policy fights in America. They affect people's lives around the globe.
Nourbaha has dual citizenship — American and Italian — through his mother, and he has spent parts of his life on three continents. His father's family is in Iran, but he can't return there since he fled Iran after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
Nourbaha was 17 then, living in Iran with his father but planning to rejoin his mother in New York. After 9/11 happened, it was unclear where America might strike in retaliation, and Nourbaha knew he would face two years of mandatory military service in Iran once he reached 18.
'It was like, 'What's going to happen now?'' Nourbaha said. 'I can't just sit around here and then start war with America,' the second home he loved dearly, having spent a chunk of his childhood in California.
'So that's when we found people who helped me across the border,' he said.
Slipping into Turkey seemed like his best path back to America. A Kurdish-speaking Iranian man named Rasool, accustomed to smuggling wood and alcohol through Iraq, agreed to help.
'Every night we would walk for hours, and then we would be told, 'This is where we're going to stay tonight,'' Nourbaha recalled. They slept on the rocks under a starlit sky.
One night, a panicked Nourbaha awoke to the sight of a man in a military uniform walking towards him. He nudged Rasool awake. Then they realized it was another guide, dressed to help them pass the next checkpoint.
The night they crossed the border into Turkey, that guide told Rasool, 'Three days ago, four Afghans were killed right here.'
After a two-week journey, Nourbaha reached the U.S. Embassy in Ankara. He presented his American passport. He was safe.
He made it back to New York, but the way he left Iran came at a cost. He lost his Iranian citizenship, and, as he discovered when he flew last summer to Istanbul to try to visit his relatives for the first time in 22 years, he wasn't allowed back in Turkey, either.
'These political boundaries, they have serious personal ramifications,' he said. 'As a global society, we don't put enough thought into these sorts of things, especially in an interconnected world where people can just travel from Point A to Point B with such little difficulty.'
Nourbaha knows he's fortunate. As an American, he's had security and opportunities. Now he hopes, by sharing his story and raising money for Doctors Without Borders, he can pay some of it forward.
When he sees images in the news of buildings reduced to rubble in war-torn areas, 'I think about where are the people?' Nourbaha said. 'They're probably in a tent with Doctors Without Borders trying to tend to them. Wouldn't it be great to contribute to that?'
Daryush Nourbaha has set up a GoFundMe fundraiser to benefit Doctors Without Borders, a humanitarian organization that provides medical care to people affected by conflict, disease or disaster. Visit or learn more about the organization at
Grumet is the Statesman's Metro columnist. Her column contains her opinions. Share yours via email at bgrumet@ or via X or Bluesky at @bgrumet. Find her previous work at
This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Austin Marathon runner aims to help Doctors Without Borders | Opinion
