Classmates Land at GU as an International Family

The Tulane University law school classmates ran up the stairs in the empty parsonage in Silver Spring, their foreign accents echoing through the big rooms as they stared in disbelief at all the donated desks.

Three weeks ago, they weren't sure what a hurricane was. Where they are from in China, in Albania, in Chile, there isn't anything quite like it, they said.

Now they are hurricane evacuees, six students from six very different places, uprooted by Katrina and relocated to the capital of a country still foreign to them. In Washington, some don't have access to their ATM cards or their passports. Agnes Foldi even lost her Hungarian-English dictionary.

And yet, through chance, determination and the unexpected grace of strangers, they've found a home together.

"We are a small family here now," said Rudina Jasini, who left Tirana, Albania, this summer with a Fulbright scholarship.

Like her new housemates -- students from Australia, Costa Rica, Hungary, China and Chile who were studying for specialized law degrees at Tulane -- Jasini had just begun to get over the aggravations of an unfamiliar place and to embrace New Orleans.

She loved the city's architecture and its etouffee, its seamy edges and its history. She loved the way strangers smiled and called her honey, sweetie, baby. Some nights, her classmates said, a band would start playing and people would dance in the streets, and drivers would find another way home.

There were more than 50 foreign students in the master of law program at Tulane. They were just becoming friends when they heard the hurricane warnings. While many U.S. students fled to their parents' homes, those from abroad weren't sure what to do.

At first, Shengyang Jiang, a quiet, bespectacled 28-year-old from Wuhan, in central China, refused to leave. Finally, he grabbed his wallet, some clothes and, mostly, stacks of his law school books.

Australian Yanya O'Hara and Chilean Paula Carvajal took off to Alabama, then got someone to rescue Foldi from a shelter in Mississippi. After that, the three friends set off to Florida, calling home to Perth, Viña del Mar and Budapest on their one working cell phone, while classmates Jasini and Marco Solano scattered westward.

They watched TV, saw water filling New Orleans and began searching for other programs. They knew virtually nothing, they said, about U.S. law schools' reputations and locations.

Carvajal had brought her cross, her rosary beads and an icon of Saint Expeditus, to whom she had prayed for a scholarship to study maritime law; the items provided solace as she tried to figure out what to do.