"Terror Experienced Abroad: An American Student Studies in Muslim Kenya,"
by Maureen Farrell

SIT-Kenya Coastal Studies

There's news…go talk to Athman, Anri said as she and Jason hurried off in a direction away from the hotel.

Okay, I thought to myself. What on Earth does that mean? The "news" I was to receive was more than I ever could have imagined.

Athman, one of our academic directors, was telling other group members the little news that we had at that point:

There have been some bombings in the States… from what they're saying, it sounds like the Pentagon in Washington has been attacked and a plane has hit the World Trade Center in New York. They think it was terrorists.

What were we supposed to make of all of this? Just nine days earlier, nineteen of us arrived from our respective universities from all over the US for our semester abroad on the Islamic coast of Kenya. Mombasa, our host city is predominantly Muslim, as is much of the East African coast. While only seven percent of Kenya's population is Muslim, the majority of this group resides on the coast. Arab lifestyles as well as Islam were introduced into the region as early as the seventh century AD, so the coastal society has a long history with Arab culture. The juxtaposition of the African and Arab cultures on the East African coast is one of the more fascinating components to the education we were getting on our semester abroad. But the news of September 11th changed things for us as Americans living among Arabs. This warm and welcoming community in which we were studying Arab-African culture was connected to the Islamic terrorists who were to blame for the attacks -- because of a common religion.

Just after the news broke, our group all gathered at Athman's house in Old Town Mombasa, where our other academic director, Tracy, waited. We watched the reports on CNN for three hours. Here we were, a cluster of nineteen students who had not known each other two weeks ago, trying to process these events as Americans in this Muslim living room, thousands of miles from home.

As we viewed the same footage of the collapsing towers and the smoke rising from the Pentagon over and over again, we found that there was not much we could say. Tears were creeping down my cheeks. And for what reason? I'm from Chicago halfway across the country from New York. My family was safe; I knew that. Others, though, were waiting to contact their families in the New York Area. Anri, whose family lives in Manhattan, was on her way to find a phone to call her parents when we met on the street. John, who is also from New York, could not contact his family because phone lines were not working. And I was the one who was crying. No one really knew what to do with this information. We all just stared blankly at the screen to see the few clips CNN had of the planes meeting the WTC towers, looking for some assurance some explanation for what we could not even believe.

So, now our academic directors were left with this problem: What to do with nineteen conspicuous American college students until December? Is it safe for us here? President Bush thinks it was Islamic extremist Osama bin Laden. We're supposed to be studying Muslim culture in a country whose US Embassy was bombed by this very man (so we speculate) just three years earlier in August of 1998. We were scheduled to be in Muslim home stays in one week for fourteen days. Is that really a good idea now?

Of course all Muslims cannot be blamed for the actions of one small sect of terrorists. And there really is no reason why any of us should have feared the very community that had given us such a warm welcome in our first few days in Kenya. In fact, following the release of all this news, most of us received nothing but sympathetic comments such as, Pole sana, New York (Very sorry, New York) and heartfelt, Sorry Americans about bomb! The Kenyan community is no stranger to terrorism. Nearly three hundred Kenyans' lives were lost when the US Embassy was bombed in Nairobi.
But, there are always those who take such opportunities to make matters worse. The walls of the Mombasa Post Office were tagged with graffiti reading:

Super Power bin Laden
America is finished
Israel is next

Another wall in the city said: Yankees go home. It had been tough enough trying to process the events of home without having fears for our own safety compounding the issue. But, graffiti like this is just the expression of an angry few. One woman who saw us staring at the Post Office wall was kind enough to say to us, These are just hooligans, pointing to the graffiti, Don't worry, she said. Gestures such as this are evidence of the sentiment that most Kenyans imparted towards our group of Americans, that of compassion.

Our home stays provided a forum for learning and compassion. We all had different families with which to interact for two weeks, and all of our experiences cannot be summarized in a short essay. But, staying in my Muslim family of twelve, I received a range of reactions regarding the terrorist attacks. While no one said to me, "America deserved this," as another student experienced, I did encounter comments such as: It wasn't Osama. He is a Muslim; we are Muslims. You don't know for sure that it was him.

My heart goes out to all the Muslim Americans who must be receiving such mixed messages from the country in which they have made their homes. The reports we heard of Muslim Americans being harassed and even attacked because of ignorant stereotyping are sickening. But, how would it have been appropriate for me to respond to my host family members telling me that Osama is a good man…he didn't do it? I watched my President on CNN state that he felt confident that Mr. bin Laden is behind these attacks. And here are the very people who have opened their home to me telling me something different.

I did not choose to let myself get absorbed into a political argument with my host family, so as not to upset my host family or myself. I think overall, though, my family and I were able to learn from each other with respect to this conflict. From me, they could see that Americans do not want to just kill all Muslims as some kind of payback. And from them, I saw the fear that they feel for the members of their faith community worldwide. They're scared that America is going to attack all Muslims because we think we know of one Muslim at whom we can point a finger.

* * *

Four months have passed since 9/11 and I have now returned home to The States; I am working to re-acclimate to a newly patriotic country that has seen great change. I see talk shows on TV with topics such as "I am a victim of racial profiling" where guests tell stories of being spit on and worse because they are Muslim. Such bigotry just seems foolish. Living in Islamic East Africa was an opportunity to learn about a culture different from my own. From this experience, I was able to engage in a genuine exchange of information between cultures.

Part of what we were able to understand through first-hand experience, as students living in a Muslim society, is that Muslims are a God loving and faithful people. Sometimes young children would snicker and shout Osama to us as we passed in some areas, but the attitudes conveyed about America with comments like that are surely held by many around the world. On the whole, Kenyans can empathize with our nation because they too have experienced the terrorism of the Al-Quaeda in Nairobi in 1998. Having lost so many of their own countrymen and women when the US Embassy was bombed, Kenyans can identify with the healing and rebuilding American society is undertaking.
We as students came away from our semester in Kenya, not only with feelings of sympathy and support for our nation and its future in the fight against terrorism, but also having forged relationships between Americans and Muslims abroad with which we hope to foster further connections and communication. Only by building such bridges will Americans and Muslims at home and abroad be able to join together in the fight against terrorism.

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