PaJoofInterview

This is a story about a man from Gambia who changed the lives of youth in Chicago through alternative education. He talks about his journey from Africa to the United States and his experiences with the colonial education system. He discusses the resistance against colonialism and the importance of critical thinking. He also shares his work in community organizing and his involvement in radical education. He explains the creation of an alternative school for dropouts and the challenges faced by students from group homes. He discusses the creation of a program to integrate DCFS kids into the school system with the help of mentors. Welcome back to 79.3 FM SC Radio ESI, Ending Systematic Injustice in Social Work. My name is Syra Juice and of course I'm your lovely host for today. On today's episode, he is a man from the Gambia, West Africa, who changed the lives of hundreds of youth in Chicago through alternative education. He's here today to tell us the story of the Ya Ami Juice Harambee House, a group home for girls. Although this home existed over a decade ago, the strategies used to serve our youth who are victims to the DCFS system are timeless. If we use the strategies shared in this interview to uplift, empower, and motivate young people in the child welfare system, we may be able to do away with the system rooted in racism to reimagine a new one based on their real needs. All right, so I am sitting here with Pa Juice, my father, and we're here today to discuss, honestly, your time in education, just period, being in America. First off, I've never seen anything like what it is that you've done in this city, in any of the research that I've done, just living with you, us growing up here under you all. I feel like we were just exposed to just the most revolutionary way to educate youth. I want us to kind of go down like your journey before we get to the Ya Ami Juice Harambee House and just kind of start with your beginnings and just where you started and how that influenced your path to, honestly, prologue, the Harambee House, everything. So just tell me who you are and where it is that this story begins. Okay, well, the story started in Africa. My name is Pa Juice. I was born in a colonial environment. Africa was colonized and from Gambia, we were brought into the British educational system. And the British educational system was to educate us so that we can sustain the colonial system in Africa. In general, that's the purpose of education. To sustain the status quo, you know, so that the system works and operates accordingly. Now, when we were younger, we were trained into the British system of education. For example, standing up every morning in our classroom from the primary level, singing God Save the Queen, as opposed to God Save Our Mothers. And thus started the mentality of sort of resistance in our lives. Now, the mentality of resistance is to try to look at the other way, you know, in terms of what the world was all about. To be oriented in systems that are completely different from the colonial system. There were limitations in education in Africa. They deliberately refused to allow the majority of Africans in a mass education concept. They wanted few to be educated, to represent the colonial system, to become their administrators and maintain the system of colonialism. It is still going on, you know, in terms of the mentality that we have on the neo-colonialism, which is a form of still colonizing people after the so-called flag independence. You are given the flag and they say you are free and you are independent. But nevertheless, the economic system is controlled by those people who formally colonize us. These were the roots that we began to critically question. Now, in our development, the time and space of our development in the 50s and the 60s, the world was changing. We are growing in a world where people are questioning the domination of colonialism in Africa. The resistance of all people in South America for independence and, of course, in North America, the emergence of the civil rights movement, the emergence of the Black Panther Party, right, and the struggle for against the Jim Crowism and the struggle for different things in North America. In Africa, we were exposed to the Black Panther Party. We happened to meet people like Stokely Carmichael, who later on we worked with in North America. You know, all these different Africans were coming to America, to Africa, different American Africans from here, we call African Americans, African superior. They were here and looking into Africa as well, and the whole educational system started to change. Because of the critical thinking of some of our youth in Africa, I actually applied to come to the United States to an alternative school. It was called Milwaukee Independent School. Now, they could not give you a visa with that because it was an independent and they called it non-accredited because alternative schools there, here, we are looking at the differences between regular schooling and those young people who are being educated out of the system, and they create alternative schools for them. So, from there, I came to America, went into high school, you know, from high school, I continued to become a critical thinker, to commit myself to absolute change. Before coming to the United States of America, we were exposed to great thinkers and great freedom fighters for African independence. We have read and studied different people on the continent of Africa, people like Kwame Nkrumah, people like Frank Ferdinand, Eric Grever, we had the opportunity to learn from a whole bunch of former Black Panther Party folks in Africa, and that changed the whole orientation, and immediately, I finished and completed high school, and I went to the university, my studies was in philosophy first, so my first degree was in philosophy and a minor in mathematics. I became a community organizer, and a pan-African organizer in North America, that took me to the Left Tendencies period. Now, once we started the educational system here, I joined a, first I was interested in organizing and teaching people, and then I joined a community organization, and I joined people about pan-Africanism, I was a completely organizer, along with people like Stokely Carmichael and all these other people in America, throughout my life, until today as we speak. That, of course, you know, took me to radical education, and we started to look at everything radically. The first job that I had, you know, was to, there was a place called Frederick Douglass Center, and the Frederick Douglass Center was a center for young people who used to come out of jail, sometimes mentally disturbed, and it was something like a mental execution. There were situations where temporary living, yeah, it was, it was created by a company, the organization called the Human Resource Institute. Now, at that time in North, in Chicago, there were a lot of community activities and communities, especially for young people who were mentally disturbed, there were mental institutions that they were funded by the government, by the city, and that was Human Resource Development Institute. Young people who come out of jail, we either put them in the temporary living, TRF, Temporary Living Facility, or Permanent Living Facility, we will pick them up from those facilities, take them to Frederick Douglass Center, and there is the arson crowd, there are different activities that we occupy them for the whole day. Okay, now, from there, I started teaching some of them their GED and attached myself to the Junior College, which was called, Olive Harvey College. Mm-hmm. Yeah. From Olive Harvey College, we started teaching GED and different things, and therefore decided to do a master's degree, and from there, we looked for an alternative, and I, in 19, in 1973, schools were created in the city, we would call alternative schools. It has a radical tinge to it, in terms of, like, for dropouts. Yeah. That's when I joined Prolog. Prolog was an alternative school for young people who were deprived of proper education in the regular Chicago public schools, and we created those institutions in search of those young people, 100% dropout, and determined to create a structure, a radical structure to educate them. So the whole philosophy, the whole orientation was the case, and it became a student-centered learning, with a philosophy that says that the young people, central to the education, the young people. Our school was able to even eliminate grading systems. We eliminated grading systems to say that the performance, it was a learning-based performance where young people do not have a specific timetable defined by the system as whether successful or not. We have an evaluation system where it's central to it was the young people who are learning, for young people to understand the concept of learning before they engage themselves into it. So the philosophy spread, and from one school we created four schools, and from there we created a technical school, and still we started serving close to about four, five hundred people a year in the city of Chicago. There was, however, a problem. When we look at the problem of dropouts, we started to experience young people who were with the group homes or the DCFS. Now we just realized that not only the young people were failing, you know, in terms of the level of public school, but even when they came into our school, they were having difficulty transitioning themselves from the group home to us in the alternative schools. What type of, I guess, what did you see from those students from those group homes? Like, did they show different behaviors than the other students? What did you see? Yeah, the behavior was that, number one, most of them really did not understand why they're there. Number two, most of them were not happy about the whole idea of coming to school. They leave the group homes, and most of them will not come to school at all. So what was done with the alternative school network, the network in the city of Chicago, we decided to put together a proposal to the state of Illinois, to the DCFS program. You know, I said, look, we can create something, but you got to have different incentives. So we created the youth YES program. The YES program was a program to get the DCFS kids from their group home, bring them into the school, and socialize them rather differently, where 10 students, every DCFS student, 10 of them will have one mentor that's over with them, working with them 24 hours in order to integrate them into the socialization process in the high schools. That started the program. Still, there were difficulties when we started to think about creating our own group homes, and having the state give us funding. We create our own independent living facility, and they are connected to our schools. So how does that process work? Like, going to the state for money for kids in group homes, was that like a hard process? Well, the state started to bring out the data, the data indicating that 80 to 90 percent of the group home kids were not graduating from high school, and that there got to be a way to create a condition for them to be successful. All right, so we created the YES program, that is Youth Education Skills Building. That was in all the alternatives, there were the other alternative schools. We put a proposal and sent it to the state and said okay. So every alternative school, about maybe 10-15 of the alternative schools in the city, had close to about 10-15 kids from the group homes, and that's when we thought about the need to create a special group home for the girls who were mostly not really coming to school, you know, and thus started the Amidjouf Harambee House. And we did the Harambee House to change the whole philosophy of the young people living together. We did live there, we were running it, we went to the city, to the state rather, and the state was saying okay, we're going to give you a plan. We wrote a proposal about the concept of the Harambee House that is going to be different. We are going to socialize them different from the group homes. Like what were some of you all's differences? Some of the differences were, like the girls who were there, once they are seniors for example, we will socialize them, get them together to go to prom, for example. We will have them, you know, go to dinner at different times with their mentors, right. We will have very good cooks who will cook for them decent food, you know, at the center there, you know. We socialize them with different things in the city. The regular people, not only that we even allow their parents to come and visit them at the group home, okay, which we spread out the concept that look, you cannot be here and you know your mother is on the south side and there are no avenues of visitations and all that because adoption would have the whole adoption concept here. So we changed all that and the kids started to look at it. There were some kids who said to us that that was the first time some people were celebrating their birthdays and bringing out cakes, you know. We would take them to different places. We even take them to different cities if some things are happening, you know, where we treated them like they are in a family community and that they deserve all the socialization and the money and the funding that comes in goes to them 100 percent. And that was the creation of the Amidjubaram House. And what we were able to do is to get them to get them to have group homes directly to the schools, right. So there were no excuses in terms of, you know, I can't go to school here, I can't do that. We were even able to purchase buses and these buses would pick them up in the morning and drop them off. And we have almost 80-70 percent success. We did the Amidjubaram House from 2014-2015 all the way to, you know, about three solid years that the state automatically gave us funding every year to continue the work. Before us, the school, we started to have a difficulty with CPS because of course our independence and what have you, you know. So we will see some of the kids will come from there and get to our Miracle Marina House where we train them for drywall, for carpentry, for different things that we are now thinking about reviving if funding is possible. So who, as you said, that would be, we need it back. So the concept there was, the philosophy for our educational philosophy was that education is a right, right. It's not a privilege but it's a right. And as humanists, we felt like all the kids have the right to be educated. Yeah. And that's one of the reasons that we did that. That house was, or still you can see the young girls who went to school there and can even remember what was done and the socialization process that was going on, you know, with some very good women who actually lived with them. Right. That was going to be my next question. So how did you go about hiring the staff? Like who was there with the girls? They were social workers. They were social workers. Some of them were social workers and some of them were like teachers but they were all part of an experience in the city of Chicago who have worked with young people in the high schools. There were some who were there but who were also teachers. Right. So some of them living with their teachers. Yeah. Or some of them living with a teacher from another school. From another school. Right. But those teachers would come in, in and out different from those who live with them actually. Right. And there were those who could come in, do the cooking, do everything and socialize them as young adult females growing up. Yes. And we would allow them weekends to go back home to their moms, mothers and fathers and they come back. Because before that, you know, you send them home, they will not come back. Sometimes they would be out there. So the whole orientation was that the kids are central to education. Yeah. And when we eliminated the concept of later grades, okay, and the school was performance-based. Okay. Right. So if the term is over and then you did not pass, we say, we're going to give you another week, two or three weeks conditional. The conditional would mean before you fail, you will have to do the work that you missed in one or two weeks and then continue with the grade. So the environment was less competitive. Yeah. You know, in terms of the class concept that you create in the classroom, oh, she's a straight A or don't talk to her because she's a D student. Yeah. It's a nonsense like this. So the whole concept was we adopted the Paulo Ferrarian approach, who was an Argentinian who talked about how adults who did not have education were trained in the fields in Argentina. And the concept was students center of learning. Student-based learning is different from us approach of a system of education that eliminates and they treated everybody else. So we were able to create each kid in those schools and the group home that we created, the Amijo Harambe House, belonged to a particular group with a counselor. Every 10 kids is counseled by someone that we pay as a mentor by DCFS that those kids can call you 24-7 in case they need anything. We were able to produce like a bank books, bank check books for them. We were able to give the mentors anything that they want. If, for example, the weekend the mentor will call them and say, you want to eat? Let's go and have lunch or let's go have dinner and they will be paid for. Yes. Just humanizing these young people. That's all it is. The humanization process is the most critical. They are human beings. What is this thing? We were able to see a lot of people designated as special ed that we would take time you know and we'll say to them look don't worry about your age you are allowed to be here from 16 all the way to 21 years old and we think that by the time you're 21 you should be able to complete your high school diploma you know and then move on. We had a lot of them who completed colleges. One of the things that we were able to do with them was that if you have kids you can bring your kids to the school if you do not have a babysitter. We talked so much in this class about child care and how hard it is for parents to juggle do I take care of my kid do I go to work just not know what to do so to be at a school where they're like bring your kids it's like you can you bring the kids it's a small school you get to even the teacher would even get to hold the kid or one of the other girls would just pick up the kid you know and then we accepted that. It just sounds like such a fairy tale especially knowing how things are these days it's like nobody's thinking about putting kids first like that. No because the system is messed up yeah you know that was our philosophy that was prologue period the whole idea of creating those schools you know and get the freedom and then you can see them gradually mentally liberating themselves from certain restrictions that are unnecessary yes okay you know have them do the right to do this the right to do that you know and uh you know that's how it was. So in 2023 you all are talking about you know trying to do this again do you see it working with how the world is these days? Well it's not how the world is it's uh is the funding situation for example once we decided once we started getting funding from CPS one of the first things that they rejected from prologue was what are these kids doing here with their mothers okay last month a kid who used to bring her child to the school called me from Dubai with a PhD degree teaching in Dubai and I asked him what happened to your child he said oh my child is in the university here I left him to finish his schooling but I am here Dubai teaching yeah teaching uh in a high school because he wanted to get out of America to places like Africa to teach and this is a student who was in the DCFS system who went through the Harambee house and that's that's what they were able to do with their life well well this is a this is a kid who yeah he used to bring a child to school and I remember him and they sit there every now and then the child would would cry and maybe one of the kids would pick you up and just walk out with you so that create a socialization process there is a counseling session in those schools for 15 minutes every day after lunch we we we call it small groups right after lunch uh you go to your small group for 15 minutes your small group counselor will know who was there in the morning and who was there in the afternoon and then that 15 minutes you will talk about any issue okay that was going on then every Friday we'll prolong that small group session for one hour so all the kids in their small groups and the issues that affect them is discussed there yeah as it should be so that was a prologue model that was very unique and people did not understand there were no fighting there was nothing you had there were no fighting there was nothing you had two people who were fighting well what we do is get them out of the school and then they will come and meet with the staff the whole entire school staff before they can return back these kids were expelled already these kids were dropped out already so after you do that then you bring them back and you talk to them about life and they are together again and be in the school yeah not like gangs from outside doing this or that and 90% of the kids were gangsters so-called yeah they were so-called imitating the people but now we were able to socialize them in the environment where they live yeah when a child is born into this world it has no concept of the tone of skin it's living in it's not a second my interview with Pajuv continued and he further explained all of his hopes and dreams to continue this work and not just the city of Chicago but back home in Africa he still yearns for liberation for all African youth no matter where they are as he is a true true pan-Africanist who believes in the power of education I am floored by his passion his dedication his commitment to growing and developing our communities through the tool of education and I am even prouder and honored to call him my father his strategies while they may not be the conventional American strategy remind us of the power of community that was instilled in us before we were brought to America those are the things we must return to and it's simple a lot simpler than people think a wise woman by the name of Lauren Hill once said it could all be so simple but we rather make it hard however I am committed just as my father is in this work and I hope that one day I can talk to my daughter or son about the revolutionary work that I have been honored to do the journey is just beginning forwards ever backwards never ever