Words of Understanding and Hope
Ashburn 5th-Graders Channel Compassion for Darfur Into Poetry Collection

By Delphine Schrank
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, June 3, 2007

If a war could be stopped with flights of compassion, 10-year-olds in Darfur might sleep a little easier tonight.

At Mill Run Elementary School in Ashburn, 149 fifth-graders penned poems so startling and full of compassion for the suffering people of western Sudan that their words will appear in a book that will have an introduction by author Maya Angelou. Proceeds from the book's sale will help fund a school in Darfur's Muzbat village.

The brainchild of teacher Logan Williams, the book project began as a lesson, which begat a question, which begat poems and drawings, which begat an idea, a publishing company and a groundswell of support from admiring readers far afield and younger Mill Run students keen to take action themselves.

"Can the power of words change history?" With that loose question, the Mill Run fifth-graders unleashed their imaginations, sending messages of hope or projecting themselves into the minds of Darfurians and the abyss of their conflict.

Out poured the answers.

Wrote Colm Gallagher:

The night is empty, not a sound.

There is no one but my mom and me.

My dad is lost, he must be found.

At the break of dawn his body is on the ground.

His body is empty but his soul is full.

Leah Choi wrote:

The angels gather around this world

They watch the darkness take over

Its shadows cover the sky

The angels bring light that carries hope

The darkness disappears

As the light surrounds the world

Williams credits Lois Lowry's novel "Number the Stars" as the starting point. Together with colleagues Rebecca Williams (no relation) and Ann Wolff, she used the tale of young Annemarie in Nazi-occupied Denmark, who rescues her Jewish friend Ellen from the death camps, to prompt reflection on courage and justice in the face of inhumanity.

Surprised at the depth of her class discussion, she consulted Principal Paul L. Vickers about pinning the themes to current events. He vigorously approved.

"There's nothing more important than to teach a child to discover empathy," he said.

Williams then asked her students, "Do you think this could happen today?" To their resounding "no" she responded with news clips about the situation in Darfur, where at least 450,000 people have died from violence or disease in a campaign of government-sponsored aggression since 2003 that the U.S. government has called genocide.

Williams decided that writing poetry on the themes would test her students' newfound skills in free verse and allow them to articulate complex ethical ideas.

"I was shocked, very shocked," Williams said. "I didn't expect the quality of the work, and I wanted to share it."

She sent a draft collection of the poems to the authors and filmmakers behind "Darfur Diaries: Stories of Survival," which documents the atrocities in the region and which the Mill Run teachers had shown in segments to their students. One of the filmmakers, Adam Shapiro, visited Mill Run and spoke to the class in early April.

Williams launched her own company, Open Doors Publishing, to print the collection in time for the fifth-graders' graduation in mid-June. Tenth-graders at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Fairfax County helped with the editing. And Rebecca Williams contacted Angelou, who read the poems and without hesitation offered to write the introduction.

"The courageous person knows that all children are our children as we belong to the world and the world belongs to us," Angelou wrote in her preface to "We Hear You; American Kids' Reflections on Darfur."

The 149 poems -- one for each student -- veer in rhythm and tone from the discipline of a haiku to the loose freedom of a ballad. Lyricism abounds, and delicate black-and-white drawings of huts and lions, bleeding hearts and acrobats perched upon the world leaven subject matter that doesn't often shy from evoking horror and great pain.

" Standing at the edge of freedom . . . / Thinking of my loss," one poem begins.

Another ends in a poignant metaphor:

"The movie just keeps playing

over and over

Won't it ever stop?"

"I was having images of what they were doing in Darfur, and it was kind of scary to me," said Anika Steenstra, 10, whose poem, "A Perfect World," graces the back of a pamphlet explaining the project.

Anika said that at first, she had no notion of what was going on in Darfur. But writing a first poem -- a wish for peace, accompanied by a sketch of a shining world held up by a pair of clasped hands -- immediately provoked her to further study. She browsed the Internet and stumbled on pictures of a little girl with protruding ribs.

"I hope that some children and adults in Darfur will read my poem, because it's for them," she said. "And they should know that someone cares about them and they're not alone."

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."