February 2004

Asana Mohamad • Adjusting to Iowa

It is so cold in Iowa! Why don’t the pretty pamphlets that the university sends out ever show a picture of a group of students huddled like penguins in the cold? It was great—sunny with a hint of breeze—when I woke up this morning. By 11 a.m., it was blustering; by 2 p.m., it was windy and cloudy; and by 3:30, it was just freezing. I felt sorry for all the people who chose to wear shorts.

Asana with her twin sister, Fuseina, and a friend

The weather is just one of the things that my identical twin sister Fuseina and I have had to adjust to since moving to Iowa from Saudi Arabia. That’s where our parents, who are originally from Ghana, now live. Fuseina and I were born in Seattle, although we only spent the first year of our lives there. We tend to stand out on the UI campus because we wear the traditional headscarves of Muslim women. People here are curious about us and our religion (many stopped by the UI’s Association of Muslims in America table we put up at the IMU during Ramadan Awareness Week last fall), but they’re also very friendly. Ever since we came to Iowa City, we’ve felt surrounded by positive vibes.

I have to admit that I was a little worried when we visited our older sister, Zeinab (Zee for short), at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. We flew out of Chicago O’Hare airport, and some people say that wearing a headscarf when going through airport security is like wearing a target on your back at a gun club. We didn’t have any trouble, though.

Zee took us shopping and to the movies (Fuseina and I love watching movies and our favorite TV shows—although we’d prefer less nudity on screen!) and then on a tour of the campus. She made sure to let us know that there wasn’t a bar in sight at the student union. “Not like in Iowa, where you can come out of your biology class, cross the street, and go into a bar,” she teased.

The night before we left, Zee made us some cookies. Her cookies always taste like the Lord FedExed them specially from Heaven. By the time we got back to our apartment in Iowa City, it was time for lunch, so Fuseina and I made rice and peanut butter soup while we talked about our final computer projects.

I wonder what kind of project the smart aleck guy in our class will come up with. A class hasn’t gone by when he hasn’t done at least one of the following:

A) Tried to correct the professor and/or tried to find a mistake in the notes;

B) Said the test wasn’t hard, right after the professor said it was “challenging”;

C) Answered a question before it was even out of the professor’s mouth.

Now, C) is particularly annoying. But, hey, it takes all types, right?

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