Posted on 09/07/2003 9:19:46 PM PDT by fire_eye
Najima and Nayaba Bawa were despondent when their parents first raised the subject of sending them home to Ghana. It was three years ago, one evening as their mother was braiding Nayaba's hair. Najima, then in junior high, had lost focus in school. Hanging out with friends had become more important than studying. She had even brought home a few C's on her report card.
They had reached a decision, the girls' parents calmly informed them. They were sending them to the Akosombo International School, a boarding school in the eastern Ghananian town of Akosombo, about 80 kilometers, or 50 miles, northeast of the capital of Accra.
"We tried everything to get out of it," said Najima, 16, now preparing, along with her sister, for her third year there.
Nayaba, 14, who like her sister grew up in Washington, said, "We wondered what we had done to be sent away." When they arrived at the Ghananian school and met the children of other Africans from the United States, they realized that their parents' decision was not uncommon. The Bawas, and other African families have opted for a temporary, reverse emigration for their children. In part it is an effort to help them maintain links to their heritage. But it is also, many say, a conscious, protective response to adolescence in America.
American teens have more opportunity to get into trouble than those in Africa, where the levels of independence and materialism are less common, these families say. And the negative consequences of slipping through the cracks, they say they have observed, often disproportionately affect black children.
For the children to fulfill the parents' American dream, many immigrant parents have decided, it may be best for them to leave the United States for a few years.
"During those tender years when so many African-American children are lost, it is seen as a beneficial absence," said Sulayman Nyang, a professor of African Studies at Howard University.
According to the census, the African-born population in the United States totals nearly 1 million. There are no figures on the numbers of African families who choose to school their children in their home countries, but academics and families interviewed said the cultural time-outs have been practiced since the African population in the United States began to swell in the late 1970s and 1980s.
Though boarding school is impossible for refugees from the most unstable parts of the continent, it is a popular option for immigrants from African countries with relatively stable political and economic systems like Ghana, Nigeria, Senegal, Kenya and South Africa. Some schools in Africa, like Akosombo International School, are coeducational, and require students to take rigorous academic programs with more language and science courses than are required in many schools in the United States. Some cater to families who want their children to attend college in the United States or England and offer international baccalaureate programs. Roughly 20 percent of Akosombo International's students are from Ghanaian families living in the United States and other Western countries.
Some children return to the United States in 12th grade, so they can take their SAT examinations and make sure they have all the necessary credits to apply to American colleges.
"We want to teach them that they can pick and choose from different parts of the American experience, like a buffet," said Mahama Bawa, the girls' father, an African clothing store owner who came here from Ghana in 1983. "But to do that they need to be able step back from it, to develop a broader perspective."
The Bawa sisters, who are returning to Akosombo in mid-September, said boarding school in Ghana was not completely devoid of normal teenage pressures.
But the girls said that the strict discipline imposed at their school - dorm and classroom inspections, mandatory 4 a.m. jogs on Saturdays mornings, rigidly enforced study and play times - relieves them of some of the pressure of having too many choices.
"Here a lot of people are just focused on what party to go to," said Nayaba. "In boarding school the goal is just learning, not to be average but to be at the top of the class."
For many families, the relative affordability of boarding schools abroad is also a plus. One of the better private schools in Ghana, Akosombo International School is far too expensive for the average Ghanaian. But at roughly $750 per child for room and board for a three-term school year, it is well within reach of families in the United States.
The Bawas, who are Muslim, said they probably would have enrolled their daughters in a Roman Catholic school here, but even the least expensive private schools in the Washington area would have cost around $5,000 for each child.
In boarding schools abroad, children experience cultural immersion that is difficult to duplicate in the United States. They become acquainted with large extended families. Najima and Nayaba are becoming fluent in Hausa, Twi and Ga, three of the many languages spoken in Ghana.
The sisters say the experience is giving them a new view of their identity. Their mother, Tanya, a training and development manager for a federal credit union, is African-American. The girls, asked how they see themselves, are decisive. "We are African-American - literally," Najima said.
Albouri Ndiaye, a senior at Michigan State University, said the benefits of his time abroad have become clearer to him in the four years that he has been back in the United States. Ndiaye left an elementary school in Brooklyn for a Catholic school in Senegal at age 8.
"The things you pick up don't seem so important to you at the time," said Ndiaye, 24, who is majoring in environmental economics and policy. "It's little things, like respect for elders, hospitality and a sense of community. I feel so happy now to have received those values. It has given me a bigger sense of myself."
(Excerpt) Read more at iht.com ...
These Africans come over here and the "Culture" in our American schools - particularly that of the so-called "African-American" kids - is so degenerate that they have to send their kids back to Africa to go to school. Not only that, but the education there is better!!!!
Way to go, Jesse... Way to go, NAACP... Way to go, NEA... Way to go... oh, never mind. the list would have to include every leftist that ever waved a red flag or smoked a reefer, and I haven't got time... But yeah, you left is really making great strides in improving the educational system, and the lot of black people in America, yes... You're doing a *great* job... Keep up the good work...
Oh, excuse me... I meant to say, "You leftists is really making great strides..." A thousand pardons...
After teaching at American high schools, my Ireland born wife often insists that our 6 year old daughter should go to the same boarding school in Ireland she went to.
Throw in $1800 or so for a round trip plane ticket and methinks there is an alternative for pumping more and more federal money into failing inner city schools-- send the kids to Ghana to learn some discipline and real skills and fire the unionized flunkies slopping at the public trough for a chance to distribute the spoils. Hey, if we can outsource IT jobs to India, why not teaching jobs to Ghana?
Technically, we are ALL African-American, literally.
Oh, you got *that* right. Horowitz and Collier, among others, argue that black America was well on its way to assimilation and an end to racism, until the Left got ahold of it with its agenda of class warfare, multiculturalism, and group identity.
What? Why???
They're just "misguided" and "mistaken"... You should be "saddened", and "troubled", and "disturbed", and "disheartened", and "discouraged", not "Full of **HATE**"...
i.e.... yeah... Get a rope... Get A LOT of rope...
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