It's a small world after all: Katharine Byrne got a virtual tour of the world from the comfort of her very own hospital bed.

Awakened at midnight by the glare of a ceiling light, I squint at Marisol. That's the name on her tag. She's here to perform one of the minor chores that go with my stay in this place.

Four years ago her little family came to this city from a village near Manila. Her children are 12, 8, and--the one she most hates to leave--6 months old now. Their father works days in a nursing home.

I know this because I have found during the past week that "Where are you from?" almost always elicits an eager flow of talk, especially at night as the low-level, hands-on workers come to read monitors and thermometers, inject fluids, draw blood, rumble machines in and out of my room. Most people like to talk about themselves.

At 5:50 a.m. the traffic increases as the night people hurry to put the finishing touches on their charges. Nisar, a handsome woman from Lahore, Pakistan, offers to help me with a bath and is relieved when I assure her I can do it myself. Her son, she confided yesterday, contemplates marriage to a woman from an "unsuitable family." I contemplate that possibility briefly and look for something to read.

Here are the directions that came with the "miniaturized, surgically implanted electronic device" now setting the pace of my heart. On the first page I am warned not to engage in "horseback riding, weight-lifting, rugby, or other rough sports, including bumper car contacts." I believe I can handle these restrictions.

Pushing a button called "music" on a paddle hanging from the back of the bed brings my favorite FM station into the room, and a cheerful, familiar voice tells me that today is James Galway's 65th birthday. And here he is with a Mozart flute sonata!

For a moment I am back in my own kitchen, the pleasure soon drowned in a swallow of cold, gray cup-filler from my breakfast tray. No time for self-pity. Perky Carla angles an ominous machine through the doorway and directs me to "lie down," as she pounds on my chest with a small mallet and reads what it tells her on the monitor. When I commend her for her use of "lie" instead of the customary "lay," she informs me that she learned English in Bucharest. "You can't learn English from Americans," she observes, "because they don't speak it."

Here comes Roska of the swirling mop and gold front tooth. She was born in Skopje, Macedonia. "Not," she explains, "the Macedonia in the north of Greece, but the real Macedonia," made up of parts of Yugoslavia and not to be confused with the Macedonia of Alexander the Great--a contested name in a part of the world where small parts have often been fought over.

By evening I walk to the end of the hall, where a Vietnamese patriarch lies in a coma, his family gathered at the foot of his bed: babies, children, young adults in respectful silence. Lavinia, a young nurse's aide, walks with me, recalling her own grandfather and his importance to the people of her village in Liberia. Later I ask the Nigerian towel and soap distributor if she knows where Liberia is. "Why should I know?" she asks. "Not my country."

Her name is Jacinta, and she tells me it means "gift of God." Early tomorrow morning, before she goes to the apartment she shares with four other women, she will attend one class at a nursing school. Her goal is to accumulate credits toward a higher place in the local hierarchy. It's hard to live on what she makes.

Vani is a Hindu from Kerala, managing to look pretty in two shades of purple at 3 a.m. At the sight of a little icon one of my children has set up on a table across the room, she tells me, "There were many Catholic girls in my village. At school they were friends to me."

It was not until the third night that I met a nurse who had lived in this town for many years, coming as a small child from a political construct pulled together after the First World War called Czechoslovakia. Baptized Halinka, she calls herself Helen. Her children, now in college, call themselves Daren and Jennifer.

She measures her family's success by the fact that they no longer live in the city, where "everything is too close together and people from the street can look into your house," but in a far-out suburb with trees and grass. In the last national election she voted for the incumbent.

The little blue notebook that came with the hospital's welcome package, together with the sliver of Cashmere Bouquet soap, the stubby pencil for marking the menu, and the little tube of toothpaste, is almost filled now with facts about hard-working people willing to talk about themselves.

There is only one more entry. On my last night I learn something about Ashur. "I came to this country from Iran, but I am not Iranian," he says. "I am an Assyrian. Assyrians are everywhere in the Middle East, but we have no country."

Assyrian? Out of the very long ago I remember the opening lines of a poem committed to memory when I was about 14: "The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold, / and his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold."

Byron's verses are about Sennacherib, an ambitious leader full of confidence in his gorgeous army moving against the Israelites. Although the next lines are lost to me, I feel certain that this was the beginning of a bad day for the King of Assyria in the seventh century B.C., and so I do not say any more about it to Ashur, whose ambition is to open a restaurant someday. Right now he studies accounting when he's not carrying dinner trays.

Local Assyrians, he tells me, have their own community, their own culture, and their own church. This was true of my own father, who came from a village near Sparta, Greece more than 100 years ago.

The late Johnny Carson once said of his fellow Americans, "We give immigrants some thing to hang onto. Usually it's a leaf-rake or a mop."

Ashur says of himself and all the other cheerful, efficient workers I have met this week, "We're doing jobs no one else wants and that can't be outsourced to some other country."

And so, thanks to you, Ashur. And to Vani, Carla, Roska, Lavinia, Jacinta, Nisar, Helen, and anyone else whose name I may have forgotten.

By KATHARINE BYRNE, a freelance writer in Chicago.