Nourishing the heart with Helia Sadeghi
Helia Sadeghi has worked with the Human Rights Center for two years. Now, she shares the journey that brought her here.
Helia Sadeghi is many things — an investigator, a writer, an interpreter, an entrepreneur, a chef — identities woven together through a life spent seeking community. For the last two years, that journey has included the Human Rights Center, where Helia’s work has helped shape lives.
First, as a student in HRC’s Human Rights Investigations Lab, which trains UC Berkeley students to investigate violations of human rights in partnership with legal, journalistic, and advocacy organizations, Helia worked on an award-winning project investigating arbitrary judicial decisions in asylum cases to support advocacy work for Human Rights First, and documented human rights abuses in Iran in partnership with Amnesty International.
Helia then played a lead role in HRC’s emergency scholars-at-risk project, which brought three Afghan women to the Human Rights Center after they fled the Taliban following the U.S. withdrawal from Kabul. She worked with the women, who had previously held prominent positions in journalism and law, supporting them as they set up their new lives in the United States, helping them seek healthcare, find housing, and buy groceries. She also supported their research at HRC by translating their work and helping them apply to graduate programs at UC Berkeley, with the aim of relaunching their careers.
Most importantly, Helia did everything she could to make them feel at home in a new and foreign country.
“It was very life-changing and amazing,” Helia said of working with the Afghan scholars. “It wasn’t just supporting them to navigate bureaucracy and immigration, or stabilize their day-to-day living logistics, it was about acknowledging the weight of their new lives and helping to stitch their spiritual wounds.”
Though Helia graduated from UC Berkeley last year, she’s just getting started helping to heal the wounds of others. She’s continuing on with the Human Rights Center as a researcher for an ongoing investigation into violence against “Women, Life, Freedom” protesters and bystanders by Iranian security forces. In doing so, she’s drawing on her upbringing and lived experience in Iran, which continues to inspire her human rights work, her art, and her culinary expression.
Raised in Isfahan, the artistic capital of Iran, Helia was surrounded by high expectations of academic achievement, both from her family and her peers. Her school was known nationally for its exclusivity, boasting a rigorous curriculum that foisted college-level content on ambitious high schoolers. The high-stress academic environment fostered intense emotions between students — intimate friendships, heated rivalries, and in Helia’s case, her first love.
It is illegal to be gay in Iran; same-sex relations are punishable by death. Two female classmates falling for one another in Isfahan was unacceptable from a social, religious, and political perspective. “We had so much internalized homophobia, so much internalized stuff that was just really challenging to navigate on top of the academic pressure, and all the anxiety of the university entrance exam,” Helia remembered.
Even so, the newness of love was intoxicating. As a young poet, Helia found solace in writing her feelings down, as did her girlfriend. They documented their poems on public blogs, exploring love, identity, and loneliness through their work.
“Writing was our outlet to talk about these feelings and how hard it was,” Helia shared. “We were suffocating inside, we were bursting with love, but we couldn’t tell anybody.”
When a classmate began reading Helia and her girlfriend’s poems and surmised their connection, she outed Helia to the school, starting a chain of events that would lead her to seek asylum in the United States. Once her secret was revealed, Helia was threatened endlessly at school, her peace shattered even as she continued studying for national exams. Though she didn’t feel safe, Helia never considered leaving the country for good — until those threats were extended to other members of her family while Helia was traveling on vacation in the United States.
“After that, I told my friends that I don’t think I can come back,” Helia remembered. “That’s when I applied for asylum here.”
At just 17, Helia was on her own. She began working full-time night shifts at Subway to pay rent, and enrolled in high school. On top of supporting herself financially and juggling her studies, Helia was struggling with Complex PTSD.
“I was really wounded from everything I had just experienced,” she reflected. “There was no space for healing my trauma. I felt disconnected from those around me because I felt no one could fully understand what I had been through.”
For Helia, the kitchen was a haven. As a child, she would stand on a stool to reach the stove and fry falafel, a fixture in the kitchen as far back as she can remember. While Helia finished high school in California, she rented a room from an older Iranian woman who treated her like family. They would cook and garden together, slowly restoring Helia’s resilience while tending herbs or sipping tea. Helia started recreating dishes from her childhood, playing with flavors and textures from Iran that tasted like her memories.
“My mother worked two jobs as a doctor, so I would often be responsible for making family meals after school based on her instructions,” Helia shared, recalling how she would help her mother make tomato paste from scratch, grind spices by hand, and make jam from the farm-fresh plums and sour cherries her grandparents grew.
As she settled into life in California, Helia also began creating community with her new classmates. The presence of a peer group of publicly queer students was a welcome surprise. She surrounded herself with them. “I learned what queer joy could be like through seeing them and seeing their joy,” Helia said, “which I think brings me to the community I’ve slowly built through feeding others, and through being intentional with how I present my full self, food, and culture.”
The day before graduating high school, Helia was offered a job as a translator from the same lawyer who processed her asylum claim. Soon, she was managing asylum cases, cancellation-of-removal cases, and helping secure work permits for refugees and immigrants whose stories mirrored her own. As much as possible, Helia wanted to help people avoid the missteps she encountered while filing for asylum and navigating the extraordinary challenges of the U.S. immigration system.
“Being able to connect with so many immigrants who were going through such similar and challenging and confusing experiences made me really passionate about this work,” Helia shared. “I needed to do everything that I could to help them, because I had to figure out so much on my own.”
After being accepted to UC Berkeley as a transfer student during the COVID-19 pandemic, Helia moved to the Bay Area. She was thrilled to pursue coursework in psychology and human rights, but finding community was initially a challenge — pandemic safety precautions limited social activities, and she was struggling with homesickness and unresolved trauma.
What’s more, youth protests against the Iranian regime in response to the killing of 22-year-old Masha Amini for violating state-mandated hijab rules had thrown Iran into the media limelight. The burgeoning “Women, Life, Freedom” movement was both a beacon of possibility for reshaping Iran’s future, and a case study in the magnitude of state violence against protesters. For Helia, the moment was both surreal and overwhelming.
“This revolution was the thing my generation had been dreaming of and preparing for, and I couldn’t be there,” Helia lamented. “Friends and friends of friends were going missing, and there was nothing I could do.”
Looking for a way to heal and reconnect with herself, her family, and a culture she felt simultaneously rejected and embraced by, Helia returned to the one thing that made her feel at home — cooking.
It reflected a moment of individual revolution that echoed the communal. In the moments between braising lamb or pounding eggplant, Helia began unbraiding years of pain and hurt to make space for the joy and pride she felt cooking and sharing food from her homeland. For the first time, Helia felt like there wasn’t a need to choose one identity over the other — it was possible to be both proudly queer and proudly Iranian.
“I think being Iranian to me is being caring, kind, and hospitable,” Helia shared, thinking also of her counterparts in Iran fighting against oppression. “It felt like a way to honor the nurturing and kind parts of my culture, even though I was also so hurt by all the negative aspects of the homophobic and traumatic experiences that I’d had.”
Helia created a blog and an Instagram page to document her recipes, under the name ‘Big Dill Kitchen,’ a play on the dual meanings of the word “dil” in Farsi that can mean both “heart” and “tummy.” Her photos show brightly-colored dishes and beautifully set tables, often accompanied by reflections written to her many followers.
Supported by a robust and growing audience, Helia began organizing limited menu pop-ups and community events around the Bay Area. She noticed her customers were largely part of diaspora movements themselves, often both proudly queer and deeply connected to their cultural roots who were excited to share space with others they could relate to.
“Community building wasn’t something that I ever thought I could do,” Helia reflected. “Much like all other magical things in life, it happened naturally and organically.”
As an investigator and advocate, Helia plans to attend law school to advance her work in human rights. As an artist and writer, she recently started a Substack to share recipes, poems, and stories. She is also working on a cookbook and launched a private dinner series this spring, which brings strangers into her home who leave as friends.
“There have been so many tears and hugs at events,” Helia said. “I feel like I am doing exactly what I am supposed to be doing when people feel connected back to themselves just because of a silly dip I made. It is the magic of food, love, and community.”
On a sunny Sunday morning at downtown Oakland’s Tamarack café, Helia Sadeghi is a tornado of energy. She beams while tending to the long line of customers who have heard about the special food pop-up ‘Big Dill Cafe,’ taking new orders between frying chicken and lentil shami kabob patties, assembling breakfast platters loaded with fruits and herbs, and bringing armfuls of fresh fare to hungry diners dazed by the aroma of warm Iranian comfort food.
There are laughing faces at every table, talking over steaming cups and plates that start full and end in crumbs. It’s clear Helia is in her element, bringing people together and nourishing them, making them feel welcome. In reflecting on the many mountains she has climbed to arrive at where she is, Helia shared the Farsi phrase “khanehbedoush,” meaning that one’s home lives on their shoulders, a sentiment she has identified with for a long time.
Now, for the first time in her adult life, Helia is planting roots instead of carrying her life on her shoulders.
To connect with Helia for professional collaborations, you can reach out to her at heliasadeghi@berkeley.edu. To learn more about her story, her events, and her food, check out her newsletter, Instagram, or website.
