More foreign students are enrolled at Duke than ever before, with 1,503 graduate and undergraduate students from 102 countries.

"The whole idea of a university," said Gil Merkx, vice provost for international affairs and development, "is providing access to universal knowledge."

Tori Hogan

During her sophomore year, Tori Hogan and six other students from professor Miriam Cooke's "Modern Arabic Literature and Culture" course spent spring break in Lebanon.

While there, Hogan visited a Palestinian family in its small, concrete apartment in the Shatila refugee camp. On the wall hung pictures of the family's sons and brothers who were killed in the camp's 1982 massacre.

During the visit, the family - a mother, grandmother and two children - invited Hogan to spend the night. Hogan balked at first ("thinking what would my mom say") but eventually accepted and remained in the camp while her classmates returned to the group's downtown hotel.

"As I'm lying on the thin little mattress in this tiny unit," she said, "I'm listening to the sounds of the camp and thinking, 'Oh my gosh, this family doesn't have a hotel to go back to. They're stuck in these conditions.'

"It's such an obvious thought," Hogan conceded. But it proved formative. She had already traveled in Europe, Africa, South America and Asia. In Durham, she was mentoring two teenage refugees from Burma. But until her night in the Shatila camp, Hogan still planned to graduate pre-med and pursue a career in genetics research.

Now Hogan plans to devote herself to helping refugees.

Back at Duke, the McLean, Va., native designed her own major in global health and human development with Sherryl Broverman, an assistant professor of the practice in biology. She worked for Save the Children's child protection officer in East Africa, studied child development in Uganda, taught a Duke house course on the refugee experience, started a refugee outreach program at a Durham high school and continued working through Lutheran Family Services to support the Burmese family in Durham.

Despite her enthusiasm for aid work, Hogan takes a critical eye to the aid industry. In her senior honor's thesis, Hogan argues that in some refugee situations Western approaches to helping children recover from the traumas of war are rarely effective -- and may even do more harm than good.

Hogan's efforts have been noticed. She won a Fulbright scholarship, which she will use to continue her refugee studies at The American University in Cairo this fall. She also is among the first group of students to complete Duke's new Scholarship with a Civic Mission program.

And before heading to Egypt, she will spend the summer backpacking around New Zealand and Australia - the 39th and 40th countries she will have visited.

Morgan Johansen

Morgan Johansen's Christian faith led him outside the U.S.

Through the Campus Crusade for Christ ministry, he spent the summer after his sophomore year teaching English and presenting Christianity to young people in a riverside town in Slovakia.

Johansen, of Tallahassee, Fla., remembers one young man in particular. Frantisek Hlusek had visited other English camps but this time was more receptive to the group's religious message, Johansen said.

"The first week that he was there I ended up sharing the Gospel with him, and he ended up accepting it," Johansen said. "He said, 'I want to be a Christian. I want to start living my life like this.' And so I was like, great. And he prayed to ask God into his heart."

Johansen's Slovak was rudimentary and Hlusek's English limited. To study the Bible together, Johansen presented passages in English while Hlusek followed in a Slovak Bible.

Pursuing a double major in computer science and electrical engineering, Johansen stayed on Duke's campus every semester to complete required courses.

But during his junior year, Johansen again turned his attention to religion and other cultures. With classmate Kesav Mohan, an Indian-American Hindu, he co-taught a house course on religious diversity in America.

After graduation, Johansen plans to combine religious and professional goals in another overseas trip. He will spend a year in Toulouse, France, helping to set up a Campus Crusade chapter at a university.

He chose France because he already knows some French. He also wants the challenge of presenting Christianity in a society more secular than America or Slovakia.

Johansen also sees a connection with the kind of engineering work he hopes to do.

He interned one summer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif. That lab is collaborating with the European Space Agency on a mission to send a probe to Saturn's largest moon. The European Space Agency's headquarters is in Paris.

"I could come to JPL and say, 'Look, I've lived over there, I speak the language. I know the culture. I'm the man to send over there for an overseas job.'"

Chia Lun Huang

When Chia Lun Huang (pronounced Jow-loon Wong) returned to her native Taiwan the summer after her sophomore year, she brought a group of Taiwanese-American college students with her and helped them find internships.

Vision YouthAction was born from that trip. The non-profit organization matches Taiwanese-American students with nonprofit groups in Taiwan.

"A lot of Taiwanese Americans just want to go back, but they don't want to go back just to vacation," Huang said. "They want to go back and do something more meaningful. They want to go back and know about the society not just as a consumer."

While at Duke, Huang not only connected Americans to her culture, but she also explored other cultures. During her freshman year, she enrolled in the "Changing Faces of Russia" FOCUS program and spent fall break in St. Petersburg, Russia. Huang, who attended high school in Shanghai, found herself comparing the two Communist-influenced cities.

"St. Petersburg is very gray on the outside," she said, comparing it to the bustle and construction of Shanghai. But the rich cultural heritage in St. Petersburg's museums and cathedrals make it "very beautiful on the inside."

Huang spent a semester during her junior year studying in Paris, where she learned to immerse herself in the surrounding culture, including contemporary art.

"When we were talking abstract art, I was able to go to the Picasso Museum, which was right next door," she said. "When we were studying impressionists, I could go to the [Marmottan] Monet Museum. It was just very accessible."

She also explored cultural dynamics in America. She spent a summer working with a neighborhood revitalization group in Chicago as part of the Hart Leadership Service Opportunities in Leadership program. She recently finished an ethnography of Asians in gay and lesbian groups at Duke.

And after graduation?

"I just figured it out yesterday," she said recently.

With a grant from Duke's Asian/Pacific Studies Institute, she will spend the summer researching how the governments of Singapore and Hong Kong use scholarships to American universities to further their priorities, such as building up the biotech industry in Singapore.

"And after that?" she said. "Ask me three months later."

Links:

• Miriam Cooke, http://fds.duke.edu/db/aas/AALL/faculty/mcw
• Sherryl Broverman, http://fds.duke.edu/db/aas/Biology/faculty/sbrover
• Scholarship with a Civic Mission, http://rslduke.mc.duke.edu/
• Campus Crusade for Christ, http://www.duke.edu/web/crusade/
• mission sending a probe to Saturn's largest moon, http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/index.cfm
• Vision YouthAction, http://www.vya.org.tw/en/vyadown.html
• Service Opportunities in Leadership, http://www.pubpol.duke.edu/centers/hlp/programs/sol/index.html