Watch out for strangers in their strange lands

Mingling with teenagers is not exactly my idea of spending a fun Sunday morning. Yet, I agreed when a friend recently asked me to interview the candidates for a international student exchange program.

In hindsight, I wish I had stayed home to take care of my own inner child.

Perhaps it was my subconscious attempt to get even with those annoying adolescents, who nonchalantly break the sacred silence inside the movie theater, and who make any public place less comfortable by flocking together in big, noisy, hormone-charged groups.

Part of me was curious to find out what was actually inside their heads, but I also secretly wanted to burst their adolescent bubbles (OK, call me Cruella DeVille).

On a panel of four interviewers, I was assigned to test the students' proficiency in verbal English.

It turned out to be pretty interesting. On average, their English was sufficient, and some were quite fluent. It was impressive, because they had not studied abroad and they went to regular public schools, not the favorite or posh ones.

Another thing about the students was that they were not so America-centric as my generation back in the '80s and '90s. Most of them cited Japan as their country of preference, saying that they were very impressed with the technology, the intelligence of the people and especially the (pop) culture -- manga, anime and the like.

Among all the candidates, one stood out from the rest.

A petite girl, with glasses and hair tied in a pony tail, she was confident, eloquent and intelligent. She said she had never lived abroad, "I just love English very much".

Like the other students, she chose Japan as her preferred country, but she said something disturbed her about the land.

"The people are not religious and they don't regulate religious teachings in their law," said the girl, a student at a noted private Islamic school.

There was a pause among the interviewers, before one of us asked why that would be a problem for her.

She gave an articulate explanation, saying that religion is an important part of people's lives, and so on and so on, basically the parroted sentiments I hoped I would never hear again after the tedious days of indoctrination back in religious studies classes.

As a follow-up question, I could not help myself by asking her opinion about religious fundamentalism, and she, predictably, defended the hard-liners.

One of the interviewers cut short our growing debate, reminding me this was a 15-year-old girl I was talking to, and I was supposed to test only her language proficiency.

The colleague tried to change the subject by asking her what countries she would like to go to apart from Japan.

"Well, I definitely don't want to go to Germany because the people there are racist, and America, obviously, since they think Indonesians are terrorists," she said, without missing a beat.

She must have realized from our gob-smacked looks that she had said a bit too much, for she quickly doubled back, saying she would not mind being placed in any country and would work hard to adapt to the customs.

But is this us-against-them attitude what they teach kids these days? Or has this morally superior, sanctimonious attitude been around all the time?

Suddenly, I wished that the girl was the typical teenager who gets on my nerves: One of the noisy, screaming boyband fans for whom the mall is the center of the world. For they seem charmingly benign, and at least they were not given to spouting narrow-minded opinions.

Now, however, I sincerely hope that girl passes the exam and goes abroad. An experience in a country far, far away, coming into contact with all those strange, morally defective people of her imagination, would hopefully open her mind.

Maybe she would also get the chance to take a look at herself, and realize that bigotry and blind faith are dangerous in anyone's hands, regardless of where they come from.

-- Indira Husin