Words of Understanding and Hope

One of her classmates, Michael Martinez, 10, said he hoped to send a similar message in "Your Star," the most uplifting of the four poems he wrote over a year.

"I wrote about hope and following your dreams and not letting others put you down," he said. "Hope is a very powerful weapon under you."

Another weapon was the power of their words. The fifth-graders sent out fliers and made commercials for Mill Run's morning news show, and the momentum they created galvanized the entire school.

A five-gallon jar near the school's entrance is nearly half-full of bills and checks; students deposit hard-earned pocket money or the profits from bake sales. The proceeds, along with those from the book sales, will go toward one of seven schools funded by the Darfur Schools Project, an initiative of the Darfur Peace and Development Organization.

A few weeks ago, Michelle Nyhuis's fourth-grade class set a $200 fundraising target and promptly overshot it. Her students had turned into passionate advocates: One boy persuaded his father, the owner of CiCi's Pizza in Maryland, to donate the proceeds from his arcade to the cause. Another set up a neighborhood carwash. A third persuaded her mother to set up a cash box in her nail salon.

"I'm proud of them. They should be proud," Nyhuis said, standing beside the blackboard in her classroom. On the top-left corner of the blackboard, the number $529.17 is boldly scrawled in a child's uneven hand below a fat, blue line and the number $200.

On June 14, several fifth-graders will read their poems at Ashburn Library before a talk by Angelo Manger Maker, an orphaned Sudanese who fled Darfur for a Kenyan refugee camp and waited 10 years before he was permitted to immigrate to Hampton Roads, Va.

Anika will be there. Michael, though, said he might have basketball practice. But even if he becomes the professional athlete of his dreams, his work with words is far from done.

"I want to serve mankind," he said. "Like in the words of Anne Frank."