Extra Credit Update: Summary + Prediction, Questions, and Text-to-World Connection

Extra Credit Update: Summary + Prediction, Questions, and Text-to-World Connection

Picking up from where I left off, I have read that Abby and Amira & Sadeed are getting closer to learning about each other's cultural and everyday life. However, this process of sending letters back and forth starts to create some country tensions between the three. Sadeed was going to send a letter to Abby one day, when he was caught by another Afghan man, who took the letter Sadeed had in his pocket, and ripped it into pieces and went away. Sadeed took the pieces of paper and he and Amira tried to piece the letter back together. Abby in the meantime, has set up a bulletin board display about her learning about Afghanistan and she had an Afghan flag taped there. A student got "uncomfortable" seeing that and so the principal asked Abby to remove it. The flag had some written words that were important to the Islamic religion so they weren't allowed to be shown in a public school display. This is all that I have read so far in the book.

A prediction I have made is that since Abby, and Amira & Sadeed are not being enemies to each other of any sort, and in their letters, they never mention religion or any items that sound racist, I predict that they will never be uncomfortable communicating to one another. 

Another prediction I have is that since the Afghan stranger man and the student who observed the Afghan flag saw evidence of Abby and Sadeed's communication visually, I predict that Abby and Sadeed will start to communicate to each other but instead, they will start communicating via email because no one can see their emails and then make comments of dislike against this communication.

But a question I have regarding this section of the book that I read is that why are Afghans and Americans disliking one another and are feeling uncomfortable hearing about each other?

A text-to-world connection is that I can see that in this story's case, the presence of a letter written by an Afghan boy to an American girl, and an American public school display of the Afghan flag, that mentions Islam prayer words can make people in either society feel "uncomfortable" depending on which nation they are in, in this case, America or Afghanistan. In our world, I can see a direct piece of evidence of why the two nations are like this to one another. I have seen videos of the September 11 attacks and articles regarding these feelings between the two countries. Ever since then, Afghanistan has been considered one of the world's countries hostile to America because America was the one who was targeted and so it experienced a deadly, and worldly-known attack it didn't deserve at all.