Common ground Muslim teen at home with Jewish family in Brewer

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Back home in Egypt, 17-year-old Mahmoud Mohammed Ali speaks Arabic, goes to mosque and has trouble getting up before noon.

“Teenagers are teenagers no matter where they come from,” said Bonnie Green, the Brewer woman whose family is serving as host for Ali.

He is spending the school year in Maine through American Field Service, a cultural exchange program, under the U.S. Department of State’s Youth Exchange and Study scholarship program. Each year, scores of students use the program to give up their familiar surroundings for something different. Ali is one of 40 AFS students in Maine, and one of three YES students in Penobscot County. This year, Ali’s experience is a first for AFS in Maine: he is Muslim and his host family is Jewish.

“I don’t know any Jews in Egypt,” he said, wearing bluejeans and a sweater while sitting in the Greens’ living room during a recent interview. “I didn’t know a lot about the Jews, so I was very happy to come to a Jewish family. I didn’t know anything.”

He arrived in Brewer in August, and he will remain until June.

Ali isn’t the only person who is learning a few things, according to the Greens, who attend Congregation Beth El, the Reform synagogue in Bangor.

“Right off the bat, we were dealing with cultural differences,” said Bonnie Green.

She noticed that he disappeared after dinner, and her first thought was that he was trying to get out of washing the dishes.

“He actually was praying,” something he does five times a day, she discovered.

And when Ali was observing Ramadan, the Muslim holy month, which this year occurred while he was playing soccer for Brewer High School, he gave up food and water from sunrise to sunset, but unknowingly she asked him what he wanted for dinner.

“That part was a little challenging,” Bonnie Green said.

The Greens have four children, with Rebekah, 17, Nathaniel, 12, and Eliana, 8, living at home.

The family voted to select Ali from 11 applicants because they all wanted to learn more about Muslims, Jim Green said.

“It was more out of curiosity,” he said. “We were looking at different things – not only what they can learn from us, but what we could learn from them. We didn’t even know there was a mosque” in Orono, he said.

And the family has learned through experience as well as long and heated – but friendly – discussions.

TV programs have often led to discussions, “sometimes well into the night,” Bonnie Green said. “I think [the differences have] made a lot of our discussion very enriching.”

For Rebekah Green, a junior at John Bapst Memorial High School in Bangor, who along with her father gave Ali a crash course in sometimes revealing teenage clothing styles, the numerous conversations have opened her eyes to how people from other countries and religions view the United States.

“To talk with someone or hear someone who has a totally different viewpoint that is not necessarily wrong – it’s really neat to watch,” she said.

With negative stereotypes of Muslims in the U.S. and vice versa, the State Department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs created the YES program in 2002 to “promote mutual understanding and respect.”

The program is run in partnership with AFS, which stresses intercultural learning and offers international exchange programs in more than 50 countries around the world through independent, not-for-profit AFS organizations, each with a network of volunteers, a professionally staffed office, and a volunteer board.

YES students come to the U.S. from countries with mostly Muslim populations, such as Indonesia, Malaysia and Saudi Arabia.

“What makes this special is that he is Muslim and he’s living with a Jewish family,” said Nancy Grant, American Field Service hosting coordinator for the Bangor region.

“AFS exists to get people with different backgrounds together. Basically, when you get to know somebody, you don’t go to war with them,” Grant said.

When Ali first applied for the program, he was in a group of 2,500, and his mother didn’t believe that he would make the cut. “She wanted me to get out of my room,” he said. “[But] when she found out I passed the test, she didn’t want me to go.”

Ice fishing, snow, spicy foods and coed schools are new to Ali, who attends military school in Egypt.

He also has been exposed to a variety of winter holidays.

“We did the Christmas tree with my mom, who is Catholic, and when we got back we did Hanukkah,” Bonnie Green said. Ali was given a troll doll as a Christmas gift.

While there are huge cultural differences that stand out, Ali said, the biggest is the lack of communication bonds between families and communities.

“I think my town is like my big house,” he said of his home village in Egypt, population 500. “We have the same religion and we all go to mosque together. Very rich, very poor – you stand together. In America, it’s separate.”

Beth El Rabbi Darah Lerner said Ali has visited the synagogue on French Street several times and even participated in the Purim celebration, which commemorates Esther’s deliverance of the Jews in Persia from a massacre.

Ali has spoken with Lerner about making presentations at Beth El, one for youth and one for adults.

The idea is to help educate people about the differences – and similarities – between the two religions and cultures.

Lerner said the joining of Ali and the Greens is especially interesting because of the “Abraham link” with both faiths.

Muslims trace their spiritual ancestry to Abraham’s son Ishmael. Beth El includes families with some Jewish and non-Jewish members.

“We’re always getting our information through some lens,” Lerner said. “Here he is, live and in person. It makes it real.”

Lerner said people often base their feelings about a specific religion on what has happened in the past or from what they see through TV or other media.

She said Ali’s talks would be a good way to give her congregation a different, firsthand viewpoint.

“It helps us respect other religions, like we would like to be treated,” Jim Green said.

Even with all the differences, Ali is a “perfect fit” for her family, Bonnie Green added.

A date for the talks at Beth El has not been set.