For transplanted students, a home for the holiday

A student at the University of Massachusetts at Boston who is from an Asian country whose name begins with T - Weatherbee couldn’t initially remember which one - had answered an e-mail and asked to be matched with a local host for Thanksgiving dinner.

Weatherbee, an art director and senior graphic designer at UMass-Boston, had answered an e-mail herself, volunteering to host a student. Her guest, it turned out, was from Taiwan. Hsiang Ting Huang, 26, a graduate student, said it was the first time she had shared a traditional Thanksgiving with an American family.

“Wow, it’s so pretty,’’ Huang exclaimed when she saw the appetizers Weatherbee had set out in her South Boston kitchen. It took a few more moments before Huang ventured to taste them, but she was soon returning for a second celery stick with cream cheese and paprika.

UMass-Boston created the hosting program about five years ago as enrollment grew and the director of student housing saw a need to help out-of-state and international students feel more at home.

“As a college student who lived and went to school away from home, I know that during Thanksgiving and holidays is really when you miss home the most,’’ said Idil Abubakar, director of the college’s Office of Student Housing.

Abubakar, a Somali native who was raised in Virginia and went to school at UMass-Boston and UMass-Amherst, has an unusual mission. The university has no dormitories or other student housing, so her office helps students find off-campus apartments.

“Most universities have some kind of Thanksgiving program, but [at] UMass-Boston, because there are no residences, people just come and go,’’ she said.

The program has provided Thanksgiving hosts for 10 to 25 students each year since its inception. This year, only nine students participated. At a campus with nearly 15,000 students, about 5 percent of whom come from other states or countries, that’s not exactly a broad subscription. But Abubakar said it is the depth of the connections that matters more than the number.

For many, the relationship doesn’t end when the turkey is finished and the football games are over, she said.

“We have students, they return to the same house next year, they return again and again, and then you have staff that naturally build this connection,’’ Abubakar said.

Matching students with hosts isn’t as easy as it would seem. Both the hosts and the students must submit applications, which are scrutinized by university staff for potential clashes, such as religious restrictions or allergies, not only to certain types of food but to pets that hosts may have in their homes.

For Huang, the fact that Weatherbee and her husband, Tim Dwinal, have a cat was a plus, and they corresponded about the cat, Abby, in their first e-mails to each other this week.

“The first thing she asked me was ‘Can I play with your cat?’ ’’ Weatherbee recalled shortly after Huang arrived yesterday and asked about Abby.

Huang, who wants a career in finance, had brought Shuai Wang, 26, a UMass classmate from China who wants to be a teacher. The pair, along with Weatherbee, her husband, and a family friend dug into a veritable feast as they discussed winter festivals and ice sculpting in China and whether there are turkeys in Taiwan - Wang thought no, Huang thought yes.

Among their favorite parts of the day, Huang and Wang said, was helping Weatherbee prepare the meal. It’s unclear whether they were being polite, but both also claimed they had enjoyed their first-ever Brussels sprouts so much that they planned to cook them again in their off-campus apartments. “Yes, we’ll cook them at home,’’ Wang said with an audible note of sarcasm in her voice and laughed.

For her part, Weatherbee said she normally spends Thanksgiving with family in Maine but decided this year to observe the holiday at home.

“I’ve always wanted to have a Thanksgiving for people who don’t have anywhere to go,’’ she said.

DeWayne Lehman, UMass-Boston spokesman, said the school wants to build dormitories in the future. Until then, he said, the university is focused on building a home-like environment.

“It’s programs like this that help make UMass-Boston a student-centered university,’’ he said. “Just because we don’t have dorms, doesn’t mean we don’t want people to call UMass-Boston home.’’

Donovan Slack can be reached at dslack@globe.com.