Hannah Jaffe-Walt

I had the thought listening over and over that every part of what they're saying is not supposed to be heard.

Even basic things like what are people doing every day?

A blackout is not a censorship that goes line by line.

It is wholesale redaction of people's lives and sometimes deaths.

Here's what it took for people to get these messages out of Iran.

They had to borrow or pay for a VPN or satellite connection, wait for it to actually work.

Starlink connections in Iran keep getting shut down.

They had to not get caught.

Iranians have been imprisoned for speaking with foreign media.

It sometimes took days to get these voice memos out of the country to us, often short messages, a minute at a time, so the files were small enough to get through.

The messages came from a whole range of people from different parts of Iran, different ages, professions, political views, and also different experiences.

Every time I got one of these messages, I stopped what I was doing to listen all the way through.

So I want to play them for you the way I heard them, one person after another.

We have edited them, but tried to leave them at a length where you can really hear what people have to say as they go about their day.

I'm going to play the messages in four sections.

We could call them acts.

So here we go.

Act one, both and.

In these first few messages, people talk about the dual experience of living both in a war and at the same time in an internet blackout.

Both dragging on and on, 63 days and counting as I record this now.