A girl from Pakistan will receive a Lincoln Academy diploma in June after participating in a U.S. State Department exchange program during her senior year.
Sammia Nasrin, 17, is from Lahore, a city of about six million people in northeast Pakistan near the border with India.
For the past several months, she has experienced massive changes in geography, culture, academics, student behavior and family dynamics, and she has thrived.
Nasrin came to Lincoln Academy through the Kennedy-Lugar Youth Exchange and Study Program, also known as YES.
The program provides scholarships for students, ages 15-17, from countries with significant Muslim populations to spend up to one academic year in the U.S.
The students act as ambassadors, both in the U.S., to dispel negative stereotypes about Muslims; and when they return, to do the same for America in their home countries.
Nasrin was one of 15,000 applicants to the YES program last year and one of just 108 to receive a scholarship.
The biggest academic difference between high school in Pakistan and the U.S. became apparent before Nasrin’s first class.
“We can’t choose classes there and here I can choose classes,” she said.
In Pakistan, all students study Islam and Urdu, the national language, and attend “Pakistan studies” classes. They also take compulsory math and science courses.
“She was doing chemistry and physics in eighth grade,” said Rebekah Karim, Nasrin’s host mother.
Students in Pakistan attend nine classes per day year-round. They wear uniforms and complete all their work by hand. “Here we do our work on laptops; there we do our homework in notebooks,” Nasrin said.
Pakistani students stay in the same classroom all day, while the teachers move between rooms; the opposite of what happens at Lincoln Academy and most U.S. high schools.
Students in Pakistan, after they finish 10th grade, have to choose a career track for their next two years of studies, what Karim describes as “pre-college.” For example, students can decide to study pre-business, pre-engineering or pre-medical.
Nasrin, at the time of her departure, had just completed 10th grade and was leaning toward a pre-medical track. At Lincoln Academy, she enrolled in challenging math and science courses, including Advanced Placement biology, algebra II and statistics.
The first trimester was a challenge, and Karim encouraged her host daughter to study what she wanted to study, instead of what she felt obliged to study. Pakistan would not give Nasrin credit for her year here anyway, Karim said. Why not enjoy it?
“Finally, after the third month, she spoke up and said ‘Okay, I want to do this,'” Karim said. “This is so foreign to her, to be able to choose what she wants to do.”
Nasrin’s present course load includes art fundamentals, ceramics, drafting, English and U.S. history. She also completed a driver’s education course and obtained her learner’s permit, becoming the first female driver in her extended family.
Karim does not allow her to drive on the winter roads, but Nasrin plans to get back behind the wheel in the spring. “I love [driving],” she said.
There are also social differences between high school in Pakistan and the U.S. In Pakistan, students do not date and never display physical affection at school. Later, after engagement, they can date with a chaperone.
“They get to pick who they want to marry, but it’s very, very monitored,” Karim said. “There’s no affection before marriage.”
Here, Nasrin sees physical displays of affection between students every day.
“It’s awkward being from where she’s from and being with someone who’s kissing their boyfriend, hugging their boyfriend,” Karim said. “It just makes you feel out of place.”
“We are innocent people there,” Nasrin said. “This is not in our religion.”
Perhaps the most important difference, however, might be something most Americans take for granted: everybody goes to school and nobody tries to stop them.
The struggle of girls to attend school in Pakistan is infamous, most recently making international headlines in the case of Malala Yousafzai, the 15-year-old student activist who survived gunshot wounds to the head and neck from a Taliban assassin.
Only 60 percent of the girls of Nasrin’s generation attend school, she said.
Access to education is less of a problem in cities like Lahore, where the military protects residents against the Taliban and other insurgents.
Rural villages do not have the same level of security, and village residents are more likely to believe women “should stay in the house,” Nasrin said.
“It is really difficult for those girls to go to [school],” she said.
Nasrin has experienced new things outside school, too. She swam for the first time with Karim and her host sisters at the Wiscasset Community Center, an activity she was initially uncertain about.
“Number one, girls don’t swim in Pakistan,” Karim said.
“And number two, I am scared of water,” Nasrin said.
She ultimately overcame her fears. “She likes it and she goes now with us,” Karim said.
The change in climate from Lahore, with its extreme heat and monsoons, could hardly be more extreme.
“I grew up in Miami, and Pakistan is the hottest place I have been my entire life,” Karim said.
“I have seen the snow for the first time,” Nasrin said.
She vividly remembers the first snowfall of the season, when Karim covered her eyes and excitedly ushered her bewildered host daughter out the door.
“She just opened the door and I was like, ‘Oh my god, what is this?’ And it was amazing, because I was really curious about snow,” Nasrin said.
Nasrin will graduate June 6 and return to Pakistan June 19 per the terms of her visa and YES contract.
She believes in the tenets of the YES program, and it appears to have been a success at Lincoln Academy.
“They know that I am a good person and I am a Muslim and I am proud of it, but I am not a terrorist,” Nasrin said.
“I am trying with my gestures, with my behavior, to show them, no, we are not bad people,” she said. She has strong words for the terrorists in her country.
“They are not Muslims. They are not Pakistanis, I believe that,” she said. Islam “is peace,” she said.
The terrorists “are not close to God,” she said. “I think they are not humans, too… [They are] cruel people.”
Nasrin will start “pre-college” in September, and will have to decide what field she will study.
She is conflicted about her future. Her father, a veteran of the Pakistan Air Force, has long wanted one of his children to join the military.
Nasrin had planned to complete two years of pre-medical studies and join the Pakistan Army, which would send her to medical school.
She is close to her father and wants to please him, but she likes living in the U.S. and has started to think about going to college here, perhaps for architecture, textile design or textile engineering.
“I want to come back here and I want to join the Pakistan Army too,” she said.
Whatever she decides about her future, she has stretched her academic and professional horizons, as she expressed to Karim in a recent conversation. “She said, ‘In Pakistan, my opportunities are limited, but in America, the possibilities are endless,'” Karim said.
