November 4, 2005

From Baghdad to the Blue Ridge Mountains

By SARA LIPKA

In an American-fiction class at Sweet Briar College in central Virginia, a long way from her home in Iraq, Maha is reading On the Road by Jack Kerouac. "It's exhausting," says the Fulbright recipient, "but it's new. I like everything that is new."

Maha, a 29-year-old foreign-language teaching assistant from Baghdad, is among the first Iraqi Fulbright grantees to come to the United States since the State Department reopened its exchange with Iraq in 2003, as part of an effort to build