Cultural Exchange : Education: Third-graders from a Jewish school in Northridge visit their Navajo pen pals on an Indian reservation in Arizona.

They flew in by jet, 43 third-graders toting matching black carry-on bags and wearing the uniforms of their generation: Reebok, Camp Beverly Hills and Bugle Boy.

Students from a private Jewish day school in Northridge traveled east last week to meet their pen pals, Navajo third-graders at the Chinle School in northeastern Arizona.

It was billed as a cultural exchange: the San Fernando Valley comes to the high plains of the Navajo nation. City children meet their country cousins. Future professionals--”I want to be a radiologist,” said one Northridge 8-year-old--mingle with future sheepherders. Wealth meets poverty.

But after a quiet and eerie few minutes together, none of the differences seemed to matter much. Children, being children, melted quickly into groups, laughing, talking, poking each other, seeing who else has Nintendo. Parents and teachers sighed with relief.

“There really is quite a difference in cultures,” said Naomi Calof, a third-grade teacher at the Abraham Joshua Heschel Day School.

Tired of students learning about the American Indian only out of a textbook, Calof and colleague Sandy Kligman decided years ago that the best way for their students to learn was by being there. Their idea of bringing children to Indian country to study has caught on with the state Department of Education, which has given preliminary approval for use of a teacher’s manual written by the two women--”How to Teach Southwest Studies”--as a state text.

The five-day trip this year was the school’s 11th tour to Arizona and New Mexico, but only the third time students met pen pals at Chinle.

“It’s like meeting somebody that you never knew and learning all about the stuff you didn’t know,” said Michael Gitig, 8, of Northridge. “It’s pretty neat.”

Michael and his friends said a lot happened on the trip. Ashley Cohen lost a tooth. Students bought clay pottery and turquoise jewelry. Everybody got splashed during a Jeep tour along the floor of Canyon de Chelly, a winding, sandstone canyon with walls 1,000 feet high. There were hieroglyphics--ancient drawings known as pictographs--and adobe dwellings built into the canyon walls, remnants of the Anasazi tribe, who lived there until about 600 years ago.

The students also saw Chaco Canyon and the Acoma reservation in New Mexico, traveling in two luxury buses and singing themselves hoarse. Parent chaperon Don Karpel, a Beverly Hills attorney and former camp counselor, knows each verse of just about every camp song.

The children had exchanged pictures and letters since fall, trading tales about their families and what subjects they enjoyed most in school. Heschel student Jonathan Parach told pen pal Jeremiah Nez that macaroni and cheese is his favorite food, and soccer and kickball his favorite sports.

“I didn’t even recognize him at first,” said Jeremiah, laughing with his new friend.

Navajo Ernest C. Bainbridge Jr., 10, said he got a haircut just for the occasion, one of those fancy jobs with a pattern of horizontal stripes cut on the sides.

During the day they spent together, the Navajo students showed their Northridge counterparts how to weave, prepare cornmeal and dance an Indian two-step. The Northridge children gave speeches, sang and danced in a presentation explaining Rosh Hashana, the Hebrew New Year. They brought specially baked Mandel bread and cut up apples to dip in honey, a New Year’s custom.

There were presents to exchange. The Navajo boys made colored sand paintings that spelled out the name of their pen pals; the Navajo girls made yarn purses for theirs. The Northridge students painted designs on T-shirts and hip black baseball caps for their gifts.

“They’ve studied the history, the religion, the culture of the Indians,” said Northridge parent chaperon Mark Gitig. “Now I hope they lose the fear of people who are different, which is a lesson they can take wherever they go in the world.”

Calof and the principal of Chinle School, Mary Ann Hunter, met by chance during a student trip four years ago and hit upon the pen pal idea.

“A lot of our kids are very isolated here,” Hunter said. “We have some who have never been off the reservation.”

That will soon change. For the first time since the pen pal exchanges began, the Navajo children will be visiting their California counterparts this week.

The isolation of the Navajo people, who number slightly less than 200,000 on a reservation that covers 25,000 square miles, accounts for at least part of the problems experienced by the tribe during recent years, which have been marked by high rates of unemployment and alcoholism, Hunter said. Of the handful of Navajos who enroll in college, nearly 90% return to the reservation without earning a degree, she said.

“They’re just not used to being outside of the reservation and mixing with other kids,” Hunter said.

By contrast, parents of the Northridge students are already paying more than $5,000 a year for their children’s education, even though the children will not enter college until the year 2000.

The gulf between the two cultures is sometimes illustrated unintentionally. One parent compared her second trip with the Heschel children to Indian country with the second time she saw the pricey musical production “Phantom of the Opera.”

“You notice so many more things the second time,” she said.

Most of the 930 students in Hunter’s primary school, which includes kindergarten through third grade, have no electricity or running water in their homes. About one-fifth of her kindergartners speak only Navajo, and the rest are bilingual, she said. So many students came down with hepatitis last year that everybody at school ended up getting inoculations, Hunter said.

The new elementary school next door, which will house classes for fourth- fifth- and sixth-graders beginning this week, was blessed by the school custodian, who is also a medicine man. “He had to perform a fairly lengthy ritual to cleanse one of our kindergarten classrooms after we found a couple of snakes there,” Hunter said.

Even with television, most students at Chinle School believe the rest of the world lives as they do, Hunter said.

Chinle third-grade teacher Betty Smith hopes her students’ perspectives will begin to widen Monday when they arrive in Los Angeles. Parents and students raised $6,000 over the past seven months to pay for the Navajo students to visit their California pen pals.

Navajo third-grader Carmelita Thompson, 9, said she told her pen pal, Lindsay Josephson, all about studying volcanoes and earthquakes. And Monday, Carmelita will have her first, long-awaited glimpse of the world outside her reservation after an all-night bus ride.

“I want to see how people dress and the things they do,” Carmelita said. “I’m a little nervous. I’m glad the kids are nice and kind.”

Near the end of their day together last week, the two groups of children were out on the Chinle School playground, climbing over big truck tires and swarming over the jungle gym.

“These aren’t Jewish kids and Navajo kids,” chaperon Karpel said as he watched them playing. “These are just kids.”