Published: February 18, 2008 11:19 pm      

NORTH TONAWANDA: Student gives back

The latest donation to the North Tonawanda Food Pantry comes courtesy of a 16-year-old boy whose home is 8,000 miles away.

Dushaynt Karnik is a foreign exchange student from Pune, India, located near India’s western coast and the Arabian Sea. He’s enrolled in the 11th grade at North Tonawanda High School and is staying with the Stitt family. Karnik received a Youth Exchange and Study scholarship to come to the United States. Among its requirements is that he take on a leadership project, for which he chose a food drive benefiting the North Tonawanda Food Pantry.

“I chose that because I’m staying in this community, so it’d be like a helping hand,” Karnik said. “There are many people who don’t have food.”

Hunger is a problem in certain areas of India, so food drives are popular back home, he said.

Initially, Karnik thought that only the seven other foreign exchange students in the high school would help him out, but more than a dozen students offered their support shortly after a morning announcement during school last week. Each student canvassed an area near home. Over two days last week, they collected enough food to fill 12 cardboard boxes, which Karnik was going to drop off this morning.

Karnik had to see the project through from start to finish. First, he pitched the idea to North Tonawanda High School Principal Jim Fisher. Then he met with several school advisors and held a meeting for students interested in assisting with the food drive.

“He had to think it through from soup to nuts,” said David Stitt, Karnik’s host father. “It was a pretty daunting task. He did everything on his own.”

Since arriving here in August, Karnik has done plenty of volunteer work, including giving 18 different presentations during October for International Cultural Awareness Month. He also helps out with a local Boy Scout troop.

“It’s a lot of fun. I never expected I would get a scholarship to come to the United States,” said Karnik, who will be here through June before departing for Washington, D.C., to experience the Fourth of July and then head back home to India.

Karnik said that life in the United States is about what he expected it to be, although some people back home were under the impression that every American student carried a gun, he said. Among the biggest differences is in the two countries’ educational systems. Karnik learned three years ago the math that he is being taught here. In India, students have to take a grueling exam to graduate from 10th grade.

“It’s so intense that people don’t even sleep the night before the exam,” he said.

After high school, Karnik plans on studying architecture. He said he’ll probably obtain his bachelor’s degree in India, then return to the United States for a master’s degree.

Aside from being ahead of the math curve, Karnik is also a fast runner. As a member of North Tonawanda’s indoor track team, he was on the 4x200 meter relay that broke a Buffalo State College track record back in November. Their time was one minute, 50 seconds.

Christmas was another highlight of Karnik’s American experience. “I was getting gifts all over the place,” he said.

Karnik was especially delighted by his visit to Niagara Falls.

“I always wanted to see Niagara Falls. I never thought I would be placed near it,” he said. He’s also been to a Buffalo Bisons baseball game and was at HSBC Arena when World Wrestling Entertainment’s “Raw” came to Buffalo in December.

When asked what the biggest challenge has been since coming to the United States, Karnik replied, “the food.” He enjoys chicken wings, but he’s not a big fan of hot dogs.

Karnik is the third foreign exchange student the Stitts have hosted through AFS. Their two previous students were from Russia and Turkey, and they’re hosting a Swiss teen beginning later this month. Stitts said that being an AFS host family makes the world seem a much smaller place.

It’s also a humbling experience.

“Kids are kids,” Stitts said, adding that the foreign exchange students act the same as American teens. “They do the strangest, goofiest things, just like any other 16 or 17-year-old,” he said.

Karnik, especially, is just like any other Western New York teenager. When asked if he likes snow — a site unseen in a country where the temperature doesn’t drop below 60 degrees — he said, “Yeah, but not when it comes to shoveling.”

Contact reporter David J. Hill at 693-1000, ext. 115.