The four Iraqi students were anxious about their attire. How formally should they dress to meet a Stanford professor?
“I said, ‘Oh, no, don’t worry—just wear jeans,’ ” senior Diana Hernandez recalls. “At their universities, they’re used to dressing very fashionably, and the women are criticized if they don’t wear makeup. But they liked seeing that people here aren’t judged on looks, and they liked being more relaxed.”
One of three student hosts for the four Iraqi exchange students who visited Stanford in May, Hernandez shared her room in Storey House with Ala Mohammed, who is studying for a master’s degree in diplomacy at Keele University in Great Britain after graduating with a bachelor’s in English literature from Sulaimany University. The two women spent alternate nights in the bed and on a mat on the floor so that one of them would get some occasional sleep—between excursions to the kitchen for late-night microwave pizza. “Ala definitely got the experience of staying up late and talking with people,” Hernandez adds. “She enjoyed being able to discuss things openly and be heard—and saw that’s what college is all about here.”
The other three exchange students, Sasan Hanna, Shava Ibrahim and Shayan Shahir, made grueling trips from their homes in the semiautonomous northern region of Kurdistan to Baghdad, and then on to the U.S. embassy in Amman, Jordan, where they waited for days to pick up their visas. “The biggest victory of all was to get you here,” senior J.P. Schnapper-Casteras told the students as he introduced them to a campus audience.
Schnapper-Casteras came up with the notion of an exchange program when he took American Efforts at Promoting Democracy Abroad: Theory and Reality last spring with Professor Michael McFaul, ’86, MA ’86. After discovering there was no mechanism for Iraqi students to visit U.S. schools, Schnapper-Casteras found three like-minded friends—senior Jessika Lora and sophomores Nikhil Sachdev and Isabel Shelton-Mottsmith—and created one.
With funding from the Office of the President, Stanford Institute for International Studies and Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education, the Stanford undergraduates sent letters to 12 Iraqi universities, inviting students to apply. They got more than 100 applications and began planning a visit that would introduce Iraqis to courses in their fields of study, involve them in discussions with faculty and student groups, and take them on cultural forays to San Francisco and Sacramento.
Then there were the side trips. To Cold Stone Creamery for dishes of chocolate and coffee ice cream. To Macy’s and Wal-Mart for Gucci perfume and 49ers t-shirts. To the Shoreline movie complex to see Monster-in-Law, starring Jennifer Lopez, a favorite among 20-something Iraqis. Dinner on the house at a Menlo Park restaurant whose owner is Turkish, and a home-cooked meal at the home of sophomore Omar Shakir, whose parents were born and raised in Baghdad. Friends back in Erbil “will be asking me about every moment,” said Hanna.
Hanna, a sophomore majoring in civil engineering, and Shahir, a senior studying business and construction management, are both students at Salahaddin University; Ibrahim majors in architecture and design at Koya University, also in northern Iraq. That region has seen some bombings but is relatively untouched by insurgent violence that has targeted academics on campuses in central and southern Iraq. At Stanford, the Salahaddin students met for several hours with civil engineering professor Ray Levitt, MS ’73, PhD ’75, who said he welcomed the opportunity “to learn firsthand from people of their generation.”
Hanna and Shahir, in turn, said talking with Levitt and other professors one-on-one was a new experience for them. “To have a professor sitting with us is something hard to find in Iraq,” Hanna noted. Shahir agreed: “This is my first time to be in such a conference.”
Andrea Lunsford, director of the program in writing and rhetoric, spent an hour with the four students. “They’ve all been studying English ferociously,” Lunsford said. “They asked lots of questions about how our writing program worked because they have not had experience in writing that draws on their own opinions.”
At a get-together with the Alliance for Interfaith Dialogue, the three women talked about their Muslim faith, and Hanna spoke about his experience as a Chaldean-Assyrian Christian. Mohammed, whose father was executed by Saddam Hussein’s forces, argued that Islam has much to offer women of her generation. “Because God created our minds, we should use our minds,” she said.
Toward the end of their stay, Hanna told students and faculty who gathered in Bechtel International Center that he wanted to take the idea of “such a university as we are finding here” back to his homeland. “There are many people [in Iraq] who want to reconstruct the country,” he said. “When you have the idea, the rebuilding process is just simple.”
