African-American elementary students from a Newark charter school imagined children in Ghana killing zebras and tigers for food and wearing the animal pelts as clothing, said Kwame Batts, manager at Newark’s Akoma Ntoso Cultural Center. Ghanaian students’ images of African-Americans were similarly skewed. They pictured American children from images on television, as bejeweled hip-hop stars in do-rags and furs. Those misconceptions began to vanish Thursday after a hi-tech gathering in which students from the Marion P. Thomas Charter School in Newark met students from the Mase Matie school in Ghana and began to learn about each other. Telepresence technology — a form of video conferencing that brought life-size images of the children half a world away into their classroom — made the meeting possible. "It was shocking to me," seventh-grader Diamond Flagg said after asking and answering questions of the Ghanaian children. "Before I came I had a very clouded picture of Africa. After this experience I can say that I really want to go to Ghana." Next month, children in 20 additional New Jersey elementary and middle schools will have similar experiences as part of the cultural center’s "Live Dimension to African History Month." The center will bring high-definition technology to classrooms across the state to introduce students to dozens of classrooms in Ghana, to slave dungeons in Ghana’s Cape Coast and to the W.E.B. Du Bois Memorial Centre for Pan-African Culture in Accra. By the end of the year, the center hopes to expand the program to 50 New Jersey schools, including those in Franklin, Camden, Trenton, Irvington and others, Batts said. Students and educators from the school in Ghana gathered Thursday under sunny skies to address the roomful of Newark students at the cultural center in the city’s Central Ward. Though the weather was different, but the two groups of children quickly learned that they were very much the same. Questions between the students centered around favorite school subjects, food, music and movies. Ismael Guerrero’s primary concern was the level of sophistication of video games. "I asked do they have gaming systems," said Guerrero, 9, "I didn’t know that they had that," he said, but as the group learned, many children in Ghana were familiar with the latest Xbox technology. The students also shared more traditional pastimes such as basketball and soccer. One major difference was in cuisine, with American students citing pizza and hamburgers as dietary staples, and the Ghana students leaning more toward cassava, corn and okra. For program leaders, the cultural differences go deeper than food and games. Since the creation of the Amistad Commission in 2002, New Jersey schools have tried to place a greater emphasis on the roots of African American history and the consequences of slavery both in America and in Africa, Batts said. According to Batts, Ghanaians had as many misconceptions about the destination of slaves as Americans had of their origins. "They were under the impression that slavery was not a bad thing," he said, attributing the fallacy to centuries of British rule, ending in 1957. "They had always been told that the people were taken were taken to a better place." Batts said he hopes that other schools will invest in the Telepresence system, which costs between $3,000 and $5,000. The system was donated by Polycom, an international communications company. Nana Bena, a Ghanaian chief joined the students after the event and applauded the communication between the two nations. "You don’t have to be from a land to bear good witness for that land," Bena said through a translator. "Wherever you are, live a good life and people will vouch well for you." Source: www.nj.com