Both sides gain from time together

But the two 20-year-old women did more than learn all year. They also did plenty of teaching - sharing with fellow students the traditions and contradictions of a proud, war-ravaged land that many Americans know only through stereotypes and misconceptions.

"In so many ways, they've given to this community, through their character and their hospitality," said Ricon Wren, a senior from Texas and an orientation program adviser who met them at the train station the day they arrived and became friends with them. "We didn't know anything about their culture before they got here."

Through everyday conversations with fellow students in the cafeteria and the dorm hallway, they offered details and anecdotes about their Muslim religion and their family life back home - and about what they and their families had endured under successive regimes: the Soviets, the Mujahideen, the Taliban, and now the American-backed elected government.

"We had a hall meeting, and they were telling the girls about Ramadan, and fasting for a month, and the American girls were fascinated by all this," said Ashley Loyke, a sophomore resident adviser who lives in the room next to the Afghan women. The students have learned that it's a big world. . . . It opened up new waves of conversation, just coming in and out of the building, and even while we were brushing our teeth at night."

The women came to campus by way of a death-defying journey, traveling to neighboring Pakistan to get their American visas and then hiding their passports in their clothes from Taliban fighters who were stopping suspect travelers. These are young women of quiet but defiant courage. They share independent streaks that have landed them abroad and alone more than once, seizing on chances to learn. That alone makes them unique in a society where women are usually submissive, often illiterate, and almost always sheltered by their parents and then by their husbands.

They are heading home this week to an unsettled Afghan capital, Kabul, for the summer. As excited as they are at the prospect of seeing their families again, they admit to anxious worry at the worsening car-bombings and suicide attacks in their homeland - and the recent erosion of hard-won gains for Afghan women.

Azizi and Faqeerzada are among 47 Afghan women pursuing four-year college degrees in the United States this year through a program called the Initiative to Educate Afghan Women. Paula Nirschel, who lives in New York City, launched the program in 2002, starting with just four scholarships, including one at Roger Williams University in Bristol, R.I. The program grew to 11 students in the second year and has expanded steadily.

The program has grown to 20 colleges. Six are in New England: Tufts, Simmons, Mount Holyoke, and Holy Cross in Massachusetts, and Middlebury College in Vermont as well as Roger Williams in R.I.

Nirschel, who interviews the finalists each year in Kabul, said that the two-way learning at Holy Cross is precisely what she had envisioned when she founded the program in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. While the primary goal was to offer college educations to Afghan women; "I also wanted other Americans to get to know the people of Afghanistan in a natural setting," she said in an interview.

The Afghan women, in turn, also have eye-opening moments in the United States. "They came here knowing Americans as soldiers and targeting parts of their country," Nirschel said. "There's an ambivalence about Americans. There are misconceptions both ways."

The program requires the participating colleges to help the women maintain their culture and their religion, stocking their refrigerators with Halaal food and making sure they have places to pray.

Holy Cross is participating for the first time this year. And Faqeerzada and Azizi admit to gulping when they learned that Holy Cross is a Jesuit college. Both say they have been teased by Afghans and Americans alike about whether they have been converted yet. (They are practicing Muslims who have visited the very active mosque in Worcester, and they are taking a class in Koran study).

"When I heard the name Holy Cross, I was not happy - I am a Muslim," Azizi said. "But as soon as we got here, it totally changed. It hasn't been so strict. We haven't been forced to do anything."

Both women said that many people at home opposed their traveling abroad, unescorted, for their college educations. But the key for both was that their parents stood by them, letting them live out their dreams.

"I am the first girl in any generation in my family to be out of the country," Azizi said. "Even my brothers haven't been away from home." Azizi, a Pashtun whose roots are in Jalalabad, was born in Pakistan in one of the camps. Her family returned to Kabul seven years ago. Her father worked for the United Nations for 18 years, in Pakistan and later in Afghanistan. Her father was shot in the leg in a kidnapping attempt after the fall of the Taliban and was hospitalized for seven months, undergoing three operations.

Azizi first demonstrated her independence by traveling to Maine in 2003 for the summer for the Seeds of Peace Program. She spent a high school year abroad in California. After high school, she worked in a bank in Kabul for two years and has hopes of a career in international relations and global economics.

Faqeerzada is a Tajik, from the north. During the Taliban era, she was in a secret school for girls in Kabul, but it was discovered and threatened, so her parents sent her to Peshawar in Pakistan for four years. She returned in 2002, after the Taliban fell.

Patricia Bizzell, an English professor who worked with the Afghan women in orientation and taught them in an autumn course, said, "They are a little older, they are much more mature - and they have to be."

"This is an unusual case of the value of diversity, not just in sense of social justice but because the academy gets great benefit from this."