Students Learn to Seal the Deal, African Style - washingtonpost.com: 'Say 50,' prompted Vera Oye Yaa-Anna, a woman swathed in the bright yellow and red patterns of her native continent. 'Auntie Oye,' a professional storyteller from Liberia, goes from school to school, lining classrooms with bold African cloths, animal-hide drums, straw fans, large stuffed jungle animals and an orangey, 12-foot-long python skin.
She teaches students a little about Liberia and its founding in the 1800s by freed slaves from the United States but mostly about Mali, a country of 12 million people that is the size of Texas and California combined. There, she tells them, mud is an ingredient in cloth-making, people shop for food every day because they don't have refrigerators and life centers on communal activities.
'I teach them how to deal with people who may not be like us,' she said. 'Your individuality in Africa doesn't work because we work together as a community.'
Yaa-Anna said she is motivated to teach kids about Africa in part because of prejudice she has encountered in the United States. For example, she said, people here sometimes assume that because she is from Africa, she must be hungry.
'If these [students] can cultivate a love for Africa, then that's my job,' she said. 'So that when they become adults, they won't stereotype like I've been stereotyped.'
