Into the Deep End of the Pool

For all the New World trials, most of the imported lifeguards seem delighted with their baffling new home.

"Everyone in America is so friendly," said Japarov, who has already been on several impromptu field trips with helpful locals. When he went to a Bethesda post office to see about getting a driver's license, a kindly customer drove him to the nearest motor vehicle agency. After he helped a woman change her tire near Tuckerman Lane, she gave him a sightseeing lift into Washington.

"Before in my mind, America is New York," said Japarov, who was pushing a vacuum around the pool at the Knights Bridge Apartments off Briggs Cheney Road one afternoon last week. "I never heard of Silver Spring, but I like very much the people here."

Most of the lifeguards are university students who paid $3,000 to $4,000 in airline tickets and recruitment fees for a chance to practice their English, see the country that supplies much of their pop culture and get a tan that would be hard to achieve in landlocked Moldova. Gherbovet, who said he was bright red after his first day at the pool, still doesn't bother with sun block. "I do not think it is useful," he said. "Now I am dark."

In exchange, the workers, most of whom are here on J1 student visas, will spend about four months pool-sitting for eight or nine hours a day, seven days a week, with free housing and wages starting at $7.10 an hour.

Japarov, for one, will try to take most of his salary back to Kyrgyzstan to repay his mother, who took out a loan to bankroll his American summer. But others will end their stays with a shopping spree.

"We see a lot of laptops going home," Lavery said. "Lots of iPods, lots of Smartphones."

Dascha Pavlova, 18, a linguistics major from Moscow, plans to plow some her wages back into the mall economy. Not much distinguishes Pavlova from an American-born lifeguard, except that instead of flip-flops with her rescue red bathing suit, she wears stylish pink peep-toe flats.

Pavlova is also one of two High Sierra employees credited with a save this season, after she pulled out a youngster who had waded too far into the deep end.

She shares a Gaithersburg apartment with four other Russian lifeguards, two women and two guys named Sergei, which is furnished by their employer with air mattresses, a card table and plastic chairs.

"We have a whole room for our clothes," said Pavlova.

On a recent night, after a dinner of hot dogs and spaghetti with ketchup (on the spaghetti, not the hot dogs), Pavlova and her roommates walked half an hour to the nearest Giant for their first shopping trip. They marveled at the expanse of a full-service American grocery store, and also at the expense. Food costs more here, they said.

"How do we get it home?" Pavlova asked. "Can we take this cart?"

The lifeguards tend to spend their few free hours at home, Pavlova said, or at gatherings of other European workers. While they are old enough to go clubbing and drinking in their own cities, those under 21 are enduring prohibition on this side of the Atlantic.

At 30, Ivan Zikic, is one who can legally partake of American nightlife. A pool supervisor from Serbia here on an H-2B temporary workers visa, Zikic said he has found it easy to make local friends at bars where soccer is on the television.

"My favorite place is Friday's," Zikic said, "the one on Rockville Pike near the Barnes & Noble library."