"When those men got on the plane, I was really worried," confesses one of the female Muslim students I took on a service learning trip to India . The rest of the students, three, erupt into giggles and nod. I shake my head. These girls are so full of life almost everything is greeted with what can only be described as a giggle. They are girls and not women quite simply because their culture dictates that women are married females who have known the company of men. In the Biblical sense. So, I'm traveling with three girls.

"You all are silly," I say as they continue into full blown laughter.

"No, no, honestly, honestly when I saw those men get on the plane and then start reaching into one of their bags, I thought it was over," says another student shaking her head.

We are speaking of four men in the traditional Muslim robes for men in the Gulf, also known as thobes, who boarded the plane right after us on our midnight flight to India . The girls and I are traveling by bus to visit the Taj Mahal, one of India 's largest tourists sights and a sight of significance for my Muslim students when this secret spills out.

A few days later, on another journey, this time to tsunami ravaged South India more stories come forward as the girls reveal how they really feel about the image of Islam in the West.

"We are not all terrorists, you know," says another student, citizen of a country long at war with the United States . "To hold my passport is a problem in almost every country I visit." She is eighteen and yet she speaks with the passion of someone living outside of her native land, a life long foreigner longing to go back and leave the unwelcome status of being an exile in the Gulf. She has dreams of going to medical school, to become a doctor, and has her heart set on studying in her home state. She will not be swayed by news reports of daily bombings. "I would rather die in my country than be alive abroad," she explains to me when I gently try to explain to her the perils of studying in a country coming apart during a developing civil war.

"We are dying for our countries," says her best friend and fellow exile, another student on the trip. "It may not be anything but we are willing to die to at least try to return." She is happy to join me on the trip to do relief work near my own family's village in South India . She asks me soon after we touch down how it feels to be home. I'm suddenly embarrassed and happy to be a person who has the luxury of calling several places here home; of being a person who thinks of where ever she is at the moment as her current home. Perhaps this marks me as a foolish American, traveling abroad with the security of knowing my 'home' is always awaiting me, whether in India or America .

We get into an entrenched discussion about Islam and the West; we talk for hours about why it is the world continues to Israel as victims when there are Palestinian children dying everyday.

"I'm ashamed I was afraid of those men," one tells me, returning back to the image of the four thobed white men on the plane. "But I don't know what else to do. That's what has become of us. We are afraid of each other."

A small silence descends among this band of four Muslim women who have tested the limits of their families in order to break many taboos. They are traveling alone, that is without the chaperon of a (preferably male) family member. They are traveling in India , a non-predominately Muslim country. They are traveling with a single woman, non-Muslim, me. And they have done this because of their belief in taking personal action to affect poverty on a individual level.

"There are so many girls at school that argue with me," one of the two exiles tells me, "They just accept what any religious man tells them. When I ask them why, they say he has more experience, more wisdom. I don't argue with that. But they can think. We have to think for ourselves, to test these ideas; we can't just accept what he says because he is older. But they don't listen to me and they loose interest." Her passion simmers just below the surface and she is just as earnest and idealistic as any teenager in America wanting to test authority to find out for herself what is true. She reminds me of myself in high school resisting ideas of womanhood presented on all sides, American and South Indian alike of women as good looking complements to men.

"When we were at the Taj Mahal, I thought, here is a great Muslim man who did something great to be remembered well. Everyone knows the Taj Mahal as something good. He gave us a good name. What have we done since then? I want to do something good for Islam." Her eyes are bright with unshed tears and she looks away.

All week long the same student is tireless in her efforts with the children at all the shelters we visit. She leads the other team members, her peers, in games to entertain the students, she helps pull computer boxes and materials to start the first computer center at a new school, she doesn't flinch when we enter the 40 square meter hut of a tsunami survivor where 9 people sleep in the evening or pull away when she hears the story of how a seventeen year old saved five children the moment the tsunami struck. She is making an impact for her faith, even if she doesn't have the time to notice it during our hectic week of working with street children and in tsunami villages. They all are.