My Big Fat American Summer

Neither woman had ever been to the United States; they'd been warned that the food was loaded with grease and could make them fat. "Can you buy fresh salad and fruit here?" Nadia asks. Still, the women heard rave reviews about working here for the summer. Two of their friends at school sold french fries on the Ocean City boardwalk last year. The hours were long and hard, the friends reported, but the money was good, and so were the parties.

Until recently, Nadia worked in a Sofia coffee shop, and Radi worked for an accountant. Nadia says the pay was underwhelming, about $200 a month. She would like to own a car, but affording one seems impossible. Her larger dream is to open a cosmetics boutique in Sofia, and she has been trying to save $3,000 for start-up capital. But saving that kind of money while working in Bulgaria, she says, would take years.

Nadia realized that even in America saving $3,000 would not be easy. Just getting to Ocean City would soak up a good part of her earnings. Her parents were able to lend Nadia $2,000 for travel and visa costs, though they don't have a lot of extra money. Her father was an officer in the Bulgarian military, and, after the Communists lost their grip on power in the early 1990s, he was forced to retire on a small pension that he supplements by working as a security guard. Nadia says that her mother wants to work but is unemployed, as are 12 percent of Bulgarians.

Radi, too, was enticed by the luminous green of American dollars. She planned to use her summer savings to send her mother to Paris for a vacation. Radi's father passed away when she was only a few years old, and her mother, a civil engineer, was left to raise Radi and her older brother. Radi tried to borrow the money she needed to come to Ocean City from a bank, but she says that no one would extend her credit. Her mom was not thrilled with the thought of her daughter being so far from home; Radi had never left the country and considered a six-hour bus ride from Sofia to the Black Sea a major journey. But Radi's mother reluctantly went to the bank and took out a $2,000 loan in her own name and handed the money to her daughter.

Anne Marie Conestabile answers her cell phone at the social hall of her church. "Wait. Who is this? . . . Hello, Robert from Poland . . . What are your needs? . . . Linens? I don't have any linens now, but I know people to call who have linens."

Conestabile, 55, has emerged as the patron saint of foreign students in Ocean City. A few years ago, as she was leaving Sunday Mass at Saint Mary Star of the Sea Catholic Church, she noticed a couple of despondent-looking young men.

"Hey, guys. Do you need some help?" she remembers asking them. In fact, they did. The men were students from Poland. They said that their job contracts had not been honored, and they had no money. Along with five similarly destitute friends, they'd been sleeping outside.

Conestabile, who emigrated from Italy when she was 13, sprang into action. She called a fellow parishioner, the owner of a hotel, who put up the seven Poles for free. Soon she chased down jobs for all of them. "It was an awakening," she says, to what was happening to foreign students in Ocean City.

Four years later, Conestabile has organized dozens of volunteers from five of Ocean City's churches. Throughout the summer they give away thousands of meals and bags of groceries at weekly gatherings for international students. "I feel it is our responsibility, as Americans and as Christian people, to show these students how we can be. I want them to go home and say, 'Not all people we met were nasty, were greedy.'"

She and others heap scorn on landlords who don't return security deposits, restaurateurs who withhold wages and employers who hedge their bets by extending more job offers to foreign students than they have positions.

But Conestabile says that most Ocean City employers play fairly, and many donate groceries and supplies to her to give to international students. When she finishes talking to Robert from Poland, she turns to three Russians standing in the church social hall: Katja Lopatina, 20, Sasha Pitchenko, 19, and Ksusha Afonia, 19. Conestabile hands them bags of groceries and explains some of the finer points of life in this beach town.

"Girls, there is an absolute law in Ocean City," she says. "You have to wear a top at the beach. If you don't you will be arrested." (She's right, kind of. Ocean City Police Chief Bernadette DiPino says topless bathing is definitely illegal, but she doesn't think anyone's ever actually been cuffed for it.)