Rukhsar Asad, 16, had a simple reason for coming to America.
“I wanted to see what it was like on the other side of the world,” says Rukhsar (pronounced ROOK-sar).
The Pakistani exchange student arrived here in August. She quickly settled into a routine and began to make friends at East Hamilton High School.
Her new classmates peppered her with questions. “Did you get here by plane or boat, Rukhsar?” “Do you have McDonald’s and iPhones in Pakistan, Rukhsar?”
“It was really cute and funny,” says Rukhsar, a Muslim girl from the Pakistani city of Peshawar (pronounced peh-SHOW-er), population 3 million.
Cute and funny are two words that come to mind when you talk to Rukhsar, who says she has learned to love Tater Tots and NASCAR racing. She went to her first NASCAR race in Talladega, Ala., in October and picked out driver Kyle Larson to root for. She carried a sign that read, “Your No. 1 fan from Pakistan,” and she got to meet the driver before the race. (Larson eventually finished 17th.)
Rukhsar enjoyed Thanksgiving here and quickly got into the Christmas spirit, entertaining her host family in East Brainerd by dancing around the house to Christmas carols.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, things turned grim.
On Dec. 16, Rukhsar’s smartphone blew up with disturbing texts and Facebook images from her hometown. Terrorists had commandeered a school there and begun killing scores of students. By the time the shooting was over, 145 people were dead, including 132 children.
Seven members of a Taliban terrorist group had carried out the attack — the deadliest in Pakistani history — in retaliation, they said, for actions by the country’s military in northwest Pakistan. The attack, at a military school, targeted the children of Pakistani army officers.
Rusksar was getting ready for school when the social media barrage began.
“At first, I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, that’s my school,'” Rukhsar said, but later news reports clarified in her mind that it was instead a military school near her home.
She soon learned that a cousin of a close friend was among the dead.
“The news feed she was getting was really graphic,” said Judy Robinson, Rukhsar’s host parent. “When I saw it, I just sobbed. It was beyond my comprehension.”
For her part, Rukhsar absorbed the tragedy with sadness, but also resolve.
“It doesn’t make me fearful, but it makes me sad,” she said. “But we are strong people. We are not going to be scared from this.
“… All of my friends (here) are saying, ‘We don’t want you to go back. Stay here with us.’ But no, I have to go back to struggle against this.”
The whole point of student exchange programs is to promote understanding between nations and cultures, and Rukhsar’s courage at age 16 has been good for her host family and friends here to witness.
Robinson, a devoted Christian, says some of her friends originally questioned her decision to host a Muslim child.
“People were taken aback,” she said. “It was concerning to them. But it’s worked beautifully. We share with each other. This is a no-judgment zone. We share ideas with each other. We’ve actually found a lot of similarities in Christian and Muslim beliefs.
“It’s not the Muslims who are the enemy, it’s the terrorists.”
Meanwhile, Rukhsar has a message for the Taliban extremists to who orchestrated the deaths of children in her hometown.
“For every kid they killed, we’ll educate 100 of theirs,” she says defiantly. “I don’t want them to represent Muslims. In our holy book it says, if you kill one human you kill all of humanity. If you don’t know this, you’re not a Muslim.”
Contact Mark Kennedy at mkennedy@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6645. Follow him on Twitter @TFPCOLUMNIST. Subscribe to his Facebook updates at www.facebook.com/mkennedycolumnist.