November 28, 1993

With a degree from the prestigious Keio University, Hiroshi Matsuo was working his way up the Mazda Motor Corporation's personnel department when he got a new assignment. After three days of training, he donned an apron and oil-stained work gloves, and began unloading auto parts and delivering them to the assembly line here.

WHEN I walked in the other day, Andrea Frias-Mojica and Josephina Silveri, the hair stylists, were eating their lunch in the little room in the back. Two women of a certain age were under the dryers in the front, thumbing through The Daily News as the radio blared an insistently joyous merengue. I asked Andrea about her baby. She smiled and said in her husky Spanish-accented English that he had a cold but he was O.K. Two weeks ago she had left the shop near tears when word came that he was ill, leaving behind rows of unbeautified heads cooing words of support. This is Edda's Unisex in Morningside Heights. Outwardly, it is just an Amsterdam Avenue hair salon with a black and white linoleum floor, walls painted green and yellow, a mural of a white-sand beach and rows of felicitous beauty products. Add the women -- and the occasional man -- and it is a New York community, one of those small universes of camaraderie that help make this buzzing city of disharmonious parts begin to make sense.

IT'S autumn, which means Rosemarie Widmer has left her husband again. The 54-year-old housewife packs her bags and leaves her Bergen County home at the beginning of every fall, wending her way back to her not-so-secret passion of 20 years: counting the number of rare falcons and other raptors migrating over Cape May on their way to South America for the winter.

AT a time when many public schools are struggling to maintain programs, the Kent Center School located in the northwest corner has added a new one: foreign language classes beginning in third grade. In September, the small school, with just 279 students enrolled in pre-kindergarten through eighth grade, joined less than a dozen public school districts in the state that offer language instruction to students below the fifth grade. The Kent program will give the children exposure to French, Russian and Spanish this year, with each language taught three times a week for three months at a time by a part-time, multilingual teacher. The other five elementary schools in Region 1, located in Canaan, Cornwall, North Canaan, Salisbury and Sharon, are considering the adoption of similar proposals next fall, the superintendent, Marvin Maskovsky, said. If approved, the six schools would share three full-time language teachers, at a cost of $9,000 to $28,000 per school, depending on the number of children involved. One Phone Call a Week "There's no better way to teach students about diversity," Mr. Maskovsky said.

AS Congress debates health care, health-maintenance organizations on Long Island are reporting high growth, traditional insurers are expanding managed-care operations and hospitals are forming provider networks. "Everything is changing," said Joseph Welfeld, a consultant from the Hay Group for the Classic Care network of eight Nassau and Suffolk County hospitals. "It's being driven by the payers, by employers, the state, Medicaid and Medicare. All that health-care reform is going to do is fill in some of the gaps."