A world of friendship under one roof

WALTHAM -- Before he came to the United States, Tung Dao wouldn't have known where to start in the kitchen.

Dao's wife, who is back home in Vietnam, probably would be stunned to see the wiry 33-year-old deftly splitting a whole chicken down the middle and manipulating mountains of chopped celery with chopsticks, as he prepares a typical Vietnamese meal for his roommates.

A graduate student at Brandeis, Dao is getting an altogether different sort of education at the house that he shares with a Pakistani, an Afghani, and a Rwandan. The four students, far from their homelands, have banded together in a way that defies dour notions about cultural and national divides.

Despite their heavy courseloads, they make time for study breaks, to talk politics and culture, go to the beach, dine out in Boston, and share their native dishes.

Hammad Masood, a 27-year-old from Islamabad, looked on in the group's sunny kitchen as Dao sautéed vegetables and beef for a communal lunch on a recent Saturday.

Because Masood observes Islamic law -- eating only specially prepared halal meats -- he could not eat all the food. But he helped out, setting the table and joking with his roommate.

Masood and Dao met their other roommates -- Regina Ingabire from Rwanda and Nadia Behboodi from Afghanistan, both 29 -- shortly after arriving in August. They then moved into this modest apartment -- four bedrooms opening onto an eating area, a kitchen, and a single bathroom -- in a multifamily home a 25-minute walk from Brandeis's Waltham campus.

''We have been figuring [it] out day by day," Dao said of their efforts to meld their very different backgrounds.

Dao is from an atheist family; 80 percent of Vietnamese profess no religion. But he says he doesn't mind waiting a few minutes in the morning while Masood, from Muslim Pakistan, says his morning prayers before they walk to school.

''I need to respect [other people's] religion in the same way they respect our customs or privacy," Dao said.

They have had to adapt in other ways -- not just to fit the American way of doing things, but to reflect the diversity of their classmates. Masood said he tries to find out how his peers greet their own countrymen -- learning, for example, that he should kiss a female Middle Eastern classmate on the cheek three times when he says hello.

That's not a problem in the United States. But he wouldn't do that at home, where physical contact between the sexes is largely forbidden in public. Nor would he do it greeting a woman from his own country here.

Ingabire, though, is used to the more affectionate Rwandan way of greeting that includes hugging and kissing.

All the students in this global group are pursuing master's degrees at Brandeis's Heller School for Social Policy and Management, a small, internationally tailored program that offers such specialties as economic development, health, and business.

Heller's enrollment statistics read like a United Nations roster, with students representing more than 60 countries.

Seventy percent of the program's 85 first-year international development students come from outside the United States, and all 14 students in Dao's international health policy and management program come from abroad.

''We've tried to create a . . . strong sense of community," said Laurence Simon, a professor and the school's director of sustainable international development programs. Simon recalled that a pair of students from rivals India and Pakistan had struck up a friendship as they exchanged stories about common experiences working with women in those conservative countries.

Likewise, Chinese and Tibetan students in past years have reached out to one another; Israeli and Palestinian students have broached debate on their region's conflict.

Generally, he said, students ''find a great deal more in common with each other than they feared might divide them."

It certainly helps that most of the students are pursuing careers in humanitarian realms.

Ingabire, who wants to work with women back home in Rwanda, said the global village environment enhances their learning experiences in the United States. ''Development is development," she said -- from Kigali to Karachi.

''It's important to have students from different continents -- what you learn from people is almost equivalent to what you learn from books," Behboodi said.

Before coming to Brandeis, Behboodi had worked for the United Nation's Children's Fund in Kabul.

Like any set of roommates, the group has had its conflicts over mundane things, such as early-morning noise, as well as over more substantial issues, such as gender roles and matters of sex discrimination.

Behboodi and Masood talk about relations between their neighboring nations. Because she, like many Afghan emigrants, lived in Pakistan for a period of time, she also speaks his native Urdu.

''Sometimes it becomes a heated argument, but we do control it," Masood said, noting that politics is one thing, friendship is another.

As a bachelor, Masood would never have had female roommates in Pakistan.

But living with Ingabire and Behboodi -- with whom he shares the household chores (women ''are better in cleaning," he said) -- has given him a chance to get to know women in a new light.

''The house is a platform [for] learning," Masood said of the arrangement. ''When you're adapting to a culture, you have to adapt to the norms . . . of the society." Still, he stays true to his own values, fasting during the holy month of Ramadan, for example.

Last month, South Asian students brought in typical dishes in one of a series of cultural events at the school. US students provided American fare to fellow students at school this week to coincide with Thanksgiving.

''We learn their culture, their dance, their food," said Ingabire, whose roommates have gotten her to like spicy food, something uncommon in Rwandan fare.

For Dao, one of the most memorable lessons literally fell from the sky. When fat flakes began to fall one Saturday last month, Dao rushed outside. He had never before seen snow.

''It was amazing. The snow was very big, and it fell very heavily," he said. He took a picture of a snowball and sent it in an e-mail message to his 6-year-old son.

The cost of attending the Heller program is steep, especially for students from the developing world.

Tuition is more than $31,000 a year, and living expenses are another $10,000 or so. Health insurance runs at $1,300.

Some students get full scholarships from the university, such as 27-year-old Trung La, who is from Vietnam. Trung lives a 10-minute walk away from Dao and his friends, but he's a fixture at the apartment.

Behboodi relies on a US Fulbright grant. Masood scraped together his fees with help from his father and Brandeis, and by cleaning out his bank account.

Thoughts of budgets and studies melt away as the students sat down to a meal of bo xao hanh toi, sautéed beef and vegetables, and ga quay, roast chicken loaded with garlic.

Dao, the chef, served himself another helping of chicken and revealed why he likes cooking for his roommates. ''I don't like cleaning up," he says.