Word: sana
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This comforting after-school scene could be happening anywhere in America, but outside the bedroom window, wild green parrots are feasting on berries in a jamun tree, and from a distance comes the scratchy voice of a muezzin revving up his loudspeaker for the afternoon prayer call. Sana and her family live in a wealthy suburb of Lahore, Pakistan, where her satellite television pulls in the standard Pakistani and American fare: MTV, Friends, syrupy Pakistani romances, a few minutes of Oprah until something better comes along. But a year ago, the images stopped being such a laugh...
...Sept. 11, Sana and her mother watched the little TV by the bed in numb horror. First the dissolving towers, then the furious retaliation: Muslim-owned shops in the U.S. being trashed and burned, Arab-looking cabbies dragged from their cars and beaten. "We were both in shock," recalls Sana, who telephoned her brother, a student in Ann Arbor, Mich., that first night to make sure...
...Sana believes she has earned the right to think of herself as a citizen of the world--she has been to the U.S. and has an expansive, tolerant outlook on global affairs. But it has been sorely tested this year. She comes from a line of Punjabi soldiers (her mother is the daughter of a famous army general, her father an economist), and she inherited the dark, piercing eyes of a hunter, and a stoic determination she would need in the months after Sept. 11, when she felt caught between Islam and America, the two worlds she loves. Rising Islamic...
...after Sept. 11, Sana wanted to wear something special--something defiant--to school. So she pulled on a T shirt that said SEEDS OF PEACE. An essay she had written in the spring of 2001 about the plight of Lahore's street kids had won her a trip in August to a Maine camp sponsored by a New York group called Seeds of Peace, which brings together young people from war-torn regions around the world...
...Before going to camp, I was scared. I didn't want to associate with Jews and Hindus," recalls Sana. "But we all became good friends." Swimming in the lake and talking around the campfire late at night, they found that the anger they had brought with them from the war zones seemed to melt away. When she returned home, not many of her classmates sympathized with her change of heart. In Pakistan, Jews and Hindus were supposed to be the enemy. On Sept. 12, it was even worse: Sana still believed in peace, but few others in her school...