Word: saudi
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After 9/11, and the discovery that 15 of the 19 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia, the flow of students from the desert kingdom to the United States largely dried up. Now the U.S. and Saudi governments are cooperating on a program to encourage more Saudi students to come to the U.S. for college. TIME's Jeff Chu went to Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia, where the Saudi contingent now numbers more than 30. Here are some of their thoughts about life on a U.S. campus, and Americans' view of their homeland...
...welcome has been warm--"Everyone is so friendly," al-Dehaim says--but Marshall's Saudis marvel at their American schoolmates' near total lack of knowledge about their country. "My neighbor, he asked, 'Are you riding camels at home?' Someone said, 'Did you bring your own oil with you?'" says Ahoud Alqahtani, 20, one of the few Saudi women at Marshall. "We don't know a lot about their country," admits Justin Carpenter, 21, a student senator. "But I bet we're not as different as we thought we were...
...Saudi students acknowledge some lingering wariness. They worry when news like the debate over the Dubai Ports deal or the attack earlier this month by a Muslim student from Iran who, claiming it was "the will of Allah," drove into a crowd at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill could turn campus opinion against them. "When they see the TV news, maybe they won't like Muslims, Saudis," says Hamad Almusai, 22. "But they don't know us." Still, any discomfort seems to dissipate as the students engage in that quintessential college activity: just hanging...
...Jessica Simpson, Almusai a portrait of King Abdullah--but "probably my accent." Kenny Ison, 20, a culinary-arts major from Point Pleasant, W.Va., happily recalls how his roommate, Hatim al-Garzaie, 21, invited him to sit on a rug spread on the floor and dine with a bunch of Saudi students by digging into communal pans of rice and meat. Other nights there have been jam sessions; al-Garzaie turns off his PlayStation, plugs his oud into the amp and leads his fellow Saudis in songs from home. "Already," says Ison, "I've learned so much that I never thought...
...first-person accounts from Saudi students at Marshall, go to time.com/students