Susie Fisher, an art teacher at Eagle High School, decided to use some money she had to help a family buy an airline ticket.

The round-trip leap-frog - Tajikistan to Moscow, Munich, San Francisco then Boise - cost more than $2,000. But the ticket's value meant more than Fisher could have anticipated.

Fisher's generosity helped make it possible for a retired teacher in Tajikistan to spend the winter in Boise with his family. As a bonus, he also serves as a temporary tutor for young refugees settling into their new lives here.

Fisher is not unlike other Treasure Valley residents who share the resources they have, financial and emotional, opening their homes to international students, refugees and new Americans, softening culture shock with the normalcy of a real home.

Jarie Castelin, a friend of Fisher and coordinator of the intensive English programs' curriculum and instruction at Boise State's office of international programs, said that people like Fisher build international connections one person at a time.

"What's really important in this day and age is one-to-one diplomacy, when, as Americans, we sit and eat and talk. People take that home with them, and they always remember that," Castelin said.

A TRANSITION, NOT AN ENDING

Fisher's story starts back in 2004 - a dark time by all accounts. She lost her husband, Rob, an art teacher for 30 years at North Junior High, to multiple myeloma, an aggressive cancer.

The Fishers had shared a love of art and a belief that death wasn't so much an ending as a transition - albeit a radical one - into a new form of being.

"It was a horrible loss," Fisher said of her husband's death. "But I knew there was still something good for me. I had reinvented myself before. I knew I could do it again."

Fisher is a tall woman, whose subtly matched outfits and stylish glasses hint at her artistic persuasions. Art and teaching genes run in the family. Her son, an artist, lives in Los Angeles. Her daughter teaches social studies in Moscow, Idaho.

Fisher is the kind of teacher who lets longtime art students combat the cinder-block austerity of Eagle High by painting the ceiling panels over their desks with permanent, original designs.

When she decided her house was too quiet, she rescued Lady, a retired racing greyhound. "Lady rescued me," Fisher insists.

She also is a believer in "therapeutic hugs."

So maybe it shouldn't be a surprise that when she found herself lonely after her husband's death, she didn't go into seclusion. Instead, she opened her home to a series of foreign students studying at Boise State.

Then, with one particular student, she threw in all the expanded meanings of home - friendship, affection, celebration.

AN INSTANT RAPPORT

"I was the matchmaker," said Jarie Castelin.

Castelin was the first to suggest that Fisher, whom she had always considered open-minded and curious, might make a good host for international students. After a good first hosting experience with a student from Taiwan, Fisher quickly agreed to host a second student, Zulfira Pulatova, for a couple weeks until she could find an apartment.

Pulatova, who is from Tajikistan, is getting her master's degree in public administration at BSU through a prestigious program - The Edmund S. Muskie Graduate Fellowship Program for students and professionals from Eurasian countries.

Fisher and Pulatova met as strangers at the airport but felt an instant rapport, Fisher said.

When Pulatova's husband, Parvis Pulatov (the surnames of Tajik women add a final "a"), a businessman and engineer, and sons Komil, 6, and Umed, 4, followed, what had been intended as a two-week relationship grew into a permanent family.

The trappings of that relationship now include dinners of traditional Tajik pilaf and walks in the park. Fisher babysits the boys and is expanding her knowledge of Tajik culture. For example, she's watched every minute of the wedding videos the Pulatovs brought to Boise. Komil and Umed now call Fisher "Grandma Susie."

THE FAMILY EXPANDS

Pulatova had one worry, about how her father, Jafar Abduvaliev, a widower, would fare through the rough winter in Tajikistan. It's a bleak time of year, with only a few hours of heat and electricity each day. Even those in the middle class, like Abduvaliev, live austere lives in Tajikistan.

"All of last winter, I was wondering what he was doing there alone. It's not usual for a parent to be alone in our culture, and last winter got very cold," Pulatova said.

Fisher offered to send Abduvaliev an e-mail, just to be another friendly voice from the U.S., and the two became pen pals.

They had a lot in common. Abduvaliev taught school for 36 years before retiring, and he spoke English.

Parvis Pulatov found a job at Micron, and the family was saving money to bring Abduvaliev to the U.S. for the winter. But with Pulatova a full-time student, and two sons to raise, saving was hard.

Fisher offered to subsidize Abduvaliev's trip to Boise. She offered a spare room in her house for a six-month stay.

At first, Abduvaliev resisted. "He insisted that men always pay for themselves, for everything," Fisher said. And at times, Fisher admitted, she second-guessed her own generosity.

"I thought, oh, my god, what have I done? The money. And a six-month houseguest?"

Pulatova pressed Fisher, giving her opportunities to back out, but Fisher took comfort in a message she read in her horoscope one day - to have faith in the direction her life was taking, and to not worry about change.

Abduvaliev and the Pulatovs eventually accepted Fisher's help, and after a 30-hour journey, Abduvaliev arrived in Boise.

Fisher noticed a change in Pulatova right away.

"It gives Zulfira such peace to have her father here. The tension in her face, it just left," Fisher said.

Pulatova had been trying to combine caring for her family and studying. "I'm here on a demanding fellowship. I'm accountable to the fellowship and department. I'm trying to be a good student, working through the language barrier. Now I know my dad is staying with my sons, and my dad is not lonely," Pulatova said.

UZBEK IN THE HALLS OF EAGLE HIGH

Then, as Castelin, Fisher's friend at Boise State, described it, everything expanded like "a pebble thrown into water."

This year, two sisters, former refugees from Uzbekistan, arrived at Eagle High as students. The girls spoke only Uzbek.

"We have several interpreters who speak Russian," the girls' counselor, Carolyn Yoder, said, "but the girls do not."

Fisher overheard the counselors talking and thought to ask Abduvaliev if he spoke Uzbek.

Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, both part of the former Soviet Union, share a border. As it happens, Abduvaliev taught many Uzbek students throughout his teaching career, and Uzbek is among the languages he speaks.

Fisher asked Abduvaliev if he would consider tutoring the girls. He said yes.

"Do you really want to, or are you just being nice?" she asked him. They agreed that helping the girls would be Abduvaliev's way to pass on his own generosity to the U.S.

"To us, it was a miracle," Yoder said.

Every Monday and Friday, Abduvaliev, an elegant man with a profile that could be interpreted as stern, dons his volunteer name badge and goes to Eagle High. The scene, a quasi-rural, but modern and sprawling American high school, is different from the schools he's accustomed to seeing.

Sweat-shirted students sit in the hallways, buying bags of chips from vending machines. At home, Abduvaliev made snacks for his grandsons, nuts and raisins - growing and shelling the nuts and growing and drying the grapes.

He got his own education under the Soviet regime, when his academic challenges included learning to draw the contour, from memory, of every country in the world.

He smiles easily, though, especially when he jokes with Fisher, about dinner parties they've gone to, about his grandsons and Umed's resistance to coming in from the cold, about bad movies they've seen that weren't worth the price of admission.

The Uzbek students are eager and learning quickly, he said. Their teacher, Sandra King, agreed.

"The sisters are very quiet most of the time, but when he (Jafar) comes they get very animated."

The teachers strategize together about ways to help the girls learn English.

"We just decided Jafar could bring in books from his grandsons and have the girls read those," King said.

When she first heard she was getting Uzbek students, King lay awake at night, worried about how she would teach them.

"Then Susie comes to me with Jafar and asks me if I would be open to him coming. I said, 'Yes, yes bring him.' He has made my life easier and I am sure the girls' lives, too."

ANOTHER TRANSITION

Abduvaliev will return to Tajikistan in the spring but will continue his work at the high school until then. Pulatova, her husband and their sons will follow later in the year when Pulatova's fellowship ends.

That ending is something that neither Fisher nor Pulatova can bear to think about. They've decided not to talk about it until they have to.

Everyone's being philosophical and planning ahead to a time when the economy turns and Fisher can afford to travel to Tajikistan. Pulatova and her husband are eager to be in the position of hosts in their own country.

"It's amazing to see how one loving, positive choice leads to another positive event. Then the cycle just keeps repeating itself," Fisher said.

"I think we will have this forever, this connection," said Pulatova.

Anna Webb: 377-6431