Going to the Source : In Africa, educator Dolores Sheen discovered a true home--and another chance to uplift children as they have uplifted her.

SASEKOFE, Ghana — The first child rushing into Dolores Sheen’s arms is a 15-year-old whose tenuous frame makes her look half that age. As she walks in small steps with both hands placed in one of Sheen’s, a broad smile brings fullness to her gaunt face.

A young man dashes to a brake drum hanging from a tree and with a piece of metal begins clanging a high-pitched, syncopated rhythm to give notice of Sheen’s arrival.

Children, most of them barefoot, engulf “Aunt Dolores” as she makes her way toward benches set up beneath a stilted canopy of coconut palm leaves, where some have been waiting as long as six hours.

Never has there been such hope in Sasekofe, a West African village of about 400 people who live in mud or concrete houses with no electricity or running water. It is a gift from God, they say, that this woman from California has come here--home--to Ghana to establish a school.

It was during a search for her ancestral roots in August that Sheen came upon Sasekofe, about 70 miles from the capital of Accra. She was stunned by the verdurous savannah, the buildings, the feathery crowns of neem trees brushing each other with thin leaves.

The landscape stirred visions of a dream that came to her in 1976, shortly before her father’s death. Could this be the place in her dream? Could this be what her father envisioned when he told her that someday she would understand its meaning?

After talking to village leaders, Sheen proposed that this be the site of Sheenway Ghana, patterned after her Sheenway School and Culture Center in Watts. She left the village flooded by emotions that seemed to pour into an empty place in her soul.

“I cried tears,” she says, “a thousand years old.”

It is not money that she brings to Sasekofe, for she has none. She accepts no salary for her work and is supported by friends and family, who days earlier had given her money when she was preparing to leave for Ghana with only $7.

What she brings is benevolence and hope that the generations-old cycle of poverty might be broken, that through education the entire village might prosper.

“Perhaps,” says Togbi Nukpe, the 75-year-old village chief, in his melodious Ewe language, “we will no longer live in darkness.”

In the meeting area, Sheen, 56, is welcomed by the community and neighboring chiefs, dressed in traditional robes and gilded crowns. She tells them of her mission, how they all must help build the school.

Already, volunteer architects are at work, she says, and others will come to teach them to construct the buildings. Power and water will be brought in, but the villagers must provide the labor. And she must find the money.

“I know some of you doubt me. You hear politicians talk, and they don’t do anything. (In America) they promised me so many things and they never did it. . . . I have to beg people to help. It’s very embarrassing.”

It would be easy to dismiss the Ghana project as a pipe dream, but Sheen has proven her mettle by keeping the Watts school going for nearly 24 years without an endowment or government funding. When the well goes dry, it always seems to rain.

She imagines a full well now as she describes to the gathering a 50-acre campus that will include, among other things, a dormitory, infirmary, science laboratory, library, polo field and soccer stadium.

One child raises a hand and stands to speak. He asks if the school will lead to jobs. If they work hard, Sheen says, they can become whatever they want.

“Will we have white teachers?” another child asks.

“You’ll have blue ones and green ones and gray ones too,” Sheen answers.

Then, under a hazy sky, against the breath of a December wind known as the harmattan , village leaders take Sheen down the paved road to the school site. The stream of people enters a field of corn, withered to maturity and soon ready for harvest.

About 100 feet into the field, beneath a towering silk cotton tree, they stop at the boundary of the site. Sheen, with a baby tethered to her back, sways gently from one foot to the other as she looks up at the tree.

For her, too, this project brings light to darkness. It is lonely, she says, being severed from one’s past. For years, she has thought about her great-great grandmother--stolen from her home, forced into slavery and bought by a man named Thomas Sheen.

“I’m realizing,” she says, “where my home really is.”

As they leave the field, children clap their hands and sing a song of praise for their good fortune. A chorus of drums and a tarnished bugle join in.

*

Her earliest memories are of growing up in Tyler, Tex., where her father, Dr. Herbert A. Sheen, built his first medical practice, and where on some Sundays the Sheens were the only ones in church--because of white parishioners’ reluctance to worship with African Americans.

“My mother birthed my sister in Texas,” Sheen says. “Black people could not be on the same floor as white people, so they told my mother she would have to have her baby in the basement. This incensed my father so he built a hospital, a small hospital, so she could have her baby like everybody else.”

Dr. Sheen, son of a minister, had grown up poor in Decatur, Ill., near Chicago. There was a time when the eight children shared one pair of shoes.

Her father was always there for her, Dolores Sheen says, even after her parents divorced when she was 16. She recalls dancing one Easter Sunday on the back porch of their home, tapping shiny new patent leather shoes against the linoleum. As she danced, shaking the floor, hot water from a nearby pot splashed on her. Her father rushed to the porch and carried her to the bathtub, running cold water over her burns.

She can still feel the comfort of his deep, honeyed voice that made her believe things would be all right. He was sagacious and contemplative, she says. After dinner, he would sit quietly in his leather chair for an hour or so to reflect, philosophize.

In 1945, the Sheens moved to Los Angeles. Dolores, third of six children, attended Catholic school, then two years of college before getting married. Being a mother was her only goal at the time, she says, although she had thought of becoming a doctor. She also considered a career in the performance arts.

One of her five children, Erin Blunt, was a player in “The Bad News Bears” movies. Her former husband, Augie Blunt, also is an actor.

Dolores worked as a nurse and managed offices at four health clinics. After the 1965 Watts riots, her father, who charged only $6 for office visits and didn’t bill those who couldn’t pay, went to work helping rebuild the community.

He gave interest-free loans to entrepreneurs, but as those businesses began to fail, he decided a school would be a better means of improving life. He bought houses in the path of a new freeway and had them moved next to his office at 101st and Broadway.

In 1971, Dr. Sheen opened a preschool with Dolores as director. His only mandate was that the school teach children to think. “They didn’t have a name for it at the time,” she says. “Now they call it critical thinking skills.”

Dr. Sheen funded the school with his own money, and when he died of colon cancer in 1976, Dolores was left to keep Sheenway afloat. One of her first decisions was to put her furniture up as collateral on a loan to pay for the school’s utilities. It has been a struggle ever since.

The school expanded and now includes 40 students, preschool through 12th grade. It operates on about $250,000 a year, about 70% of it garnered from donations. Tuition of up to $260 a month is based on a sliding scale.

Montessori concepts emphasizing self-learning are incorporated with Sheen’s personal beliefs about education. The students must wear uniforms, and discipline is enforced by Sheen’s paddle. A lesson in Latin may evolve into a discussion of science, history or current events, depending on student interests.

“We take our cues from the students,” Sheen says. “We can’t teach them unless we know them and understand them and care for them. If they get excited about a topic, we’ll stay with it for as long as they stay interested.”

Almost all Sheenway students have a troubled past. William Myers, 15, was kicked out of public school last year for fighting. When his mother drove him to Sheenway to visit, he refused to get out of the car.

Myers’ mother, Freda Toney, and grandmother, Irene Toney, say they feared that he was headed down the same road as his father, a gang member. Now, they say, it’s difficult to get him to leave school. William has changed, they say, maybe he has been saved.

Field trips are routine and students visit museums or mountains, banks or hospitals. Last year, they interviewed transvestites in Hollywood. “They were curious, and I couldn’t answer their questions, so we went to the source,” Sheen says.

Three years ago, Sheen sponsored a mountain retreat with Bloods and Crips in an attempt to bring peace to the community.

She says she will hire gang members and unemployed residents to build a $15-million urban village in Los Angeles. The plans are buried beneath papers in her office, awaiting funding.

“We have everything but money.”

The project includes a new Sheenway campus, housing for the elderly, as well as retail space and a foster care home. She has applied for funding through the Community Redevelopment Agency, but competition is fierce.

Meanwhile, classes continue in the old buildings. Donations from son Erin and entertainer Richard Pryor have given the school title to a full city block, where someday she hopes Project Phoenix will further her father’s legacy, his belief that “a child is a promise of immortality.”

“My father was a visionary,” she says. “I’m just a dreamer.”

*

The students gather around as the flesh-eating lizard is taken out of an orange shoe box and placed on the carpet. They watch skittishly as it slowly approaches the pink-skinned baby rat, which is too young to sense danger or defend itself.

Sheen explains that life and death are part of the same circle. They listen quietly, apprehensively.

“Our planet was created to take care of itself,” Sheen says. “For all living things, there’s an order, a way in which they have to survive. . . . If you don’t eat, you will die. And you’re supposed to always try to live.”

The students flinch as the lizard lunges for the rat’s head.

At Sheenway, survival is a constant theme. Sheen has been shot at outside the school, spat upon by police, survived two heart attacks. A teacher was mugged by a gang member a block away from school last fall for wearing the wrong color.

Then there is financial survival. Utility cut-off notices are stacked on her desk. The insurance payment is due. Last year, she nearly lost her Carson home, which she had refinanced to raise money for the school. She suffered the indignity of being approached by a bill collector in a hospital waiting room.

“I don’t get paid a salary. When I get sick, I have to go to the county hospital, and I refuse to get on welfare, so I know what it is to be treated like you’re nothing because you don’t have money.”

Everyone at the school performs multiple duties. The four paid staff members--a principal and three teachers--make $7 to $12 an hour. Sheen splits her time among administrative and teaching duties during the day. At night, she teaches adult classes and cooks the students’ meal for the following day.

Much of the work is done by volunteers such as Dorothy Miller, whose granddaughter attends the school. Parents must volunteer at least nine hours a month as a condition of students’ financial aid. Miller puts in a full week running the office.

“The thing I admire most about Dolores is that she makes everything a learning experience,” Miller says. “She’s forever teaching, and our children don’t always get that.”

By 11 a.m., Sheenway students have recited the pledge of allegiance, sung their school song, discussed current events, analyzed the significance of frankincense, gold and myrrh--the symbolic gifts of three wise men.

They have studied two parakeets, a turtle, a lizard and a rat that was raised at the school specifically for this lesson, this fate. The older students have taken the younger ones by the hand and helped them make snowflakes out of coffee filters. They have seen a drum made in Ghana from goatskin.

They have laughed at photographs taken during a field trip last year to San Francisco showing a surprised Aunt Dolores in hair curlers.

They have seen one life lost, so another life is sustained.

*

Sheen awakened early on Feb. 2, 1976, and immediately telephoned her father, who was undergoing tests at Good Samaritan Hospital.

Even though she planned to visit him later, the dream fueled a sense of urgency. She spoke quickly as her father listened silently. At one point, she wondered if he had fallen asleep.

“No,” he said, “I’m still here.”

In the dream, she was searching for her father, traveling through the countryside, when she came upon a building. Outside were benches and trees growing so close that their leaves touched.

She walked inside to find a clamor, the sound of children, some of them seated, some standing to form a wall of faces. She entered an elevator that took her to a room where her father laid in bed with his hands folded over his chest, the way he always slept.

“Papa,” she said in the dream, “I’ve been looking for you. How did you get here?”

With his eyes still closed, he smiled, and she leaned over to kiss him, feeling the stubble of his beard. She sat in a chair as her father waxed philosophically about life. The sun set and rose again before he said, “It’s time for you to go.” She stood and left, and upon leaving, saw water all around the building.

Tests showed cancer, and Dr. Sheen spent his final days bedridden in his office. Dolores slept on the floor next to him, and as he died, she held him in her arms.

After his death, while sorting through his papers, she came upon a bundle of letters written to her father by the author Zora Neale Hurston. Six years earlier, Sheen had learned by chance that her father had been briefly married to Hurston in the 1920s.

“I asked him why he never told me,” she says, “He said, ‘You never asked.’ ”

In one letter, Hurston described a dream--the same dream Sheen had in 1976. The letter, the dream and her father’s words haunted her until last year, when she made her first trip to Africa.

For a month, she traveled throughout Ghana searching for an ancestral link. Unable to find clues, she passed through the Volta region on her way back to Accra. It was Sept. 6, her father’s birthday.

“I had never connected the dream to Africa, but everything was the same. Then we came to the village and I saw all the children, their faces. I still don’t totally understand the dream, but building a school here feels right.”

*

Sheen lifts her hand to touch the metal shackles hanging in the museum at Cape Coast Castle, about 90 miles from Accra, and tears form in her eyes. As she moves toward a photograph of a slave, his back scarred from whippings, 13-year-old Elvis Aggrey is at her side. “Don’t cry, Mum,” he tells her, and she wraps her arms around him.

Children are drawn to Sheen. Even as she is sightseeing, the teacher in her flows freely and spontaneously.

“Even though I look like you, I don’t talk like you,” she explains to the boy. “My ancestors were taken away from here. It’s important that you know that.” And she wipes her eyes.

The castle, perched on cliffs overlooking the Atlantic, was used as a holding area for slaves. It is where they were loaded on ships, taking their final steps on African soil in shackles.

“I can hear their moans,” Sheen says upon leaving a dungeon. “I can smell their sweat.” She wonders if her great-great grandmother knew these walls.

The castle in nearby Elmina is nearly empty when Sheen arrives late in the afternoon. She moves slowly through the rooms and tunnels of the prison-like fort, finally resting on a bench in the courtyard.

Tracy Quayson, a 16-year-old from Cape Coast, sits next to her in the shadow of towering walls shedding chunks of concrete and sheets of white paint. The girl begins singing softly in Twi, and Sheen smiles for the first time since entering the somber structure.

“Can you teach me that song?” Sheen asks.

Quayson tells her the words, one line at a time, and they begin singing in whispers and laughing. The girl then stands and begins shuffling forward in small steps, clapping her hands and singing. Sheen stands and tries to fall into step.

The tortuous sounds that echoed here and in Sheen’s mind seem to fade, replaced by song and laughter. Once again, she has been uplifted by the spirit of a child, confirming what she knows well and sometimes says: that her life is so nourished by children and that without them, she would die.

As the castle closes for the day, Sheen and the girl depart, passing by a plaque hanging near the entrance: “In everlasting memory of the anguish of our ancestors,” it states. “May those who died rest in peace. May those who return find their roots. May humanity never again perpetrate such injustice against humanity. We the living vow to uphold this.”

*

Sheenway Ghana’s preschool already has begun. About 100 children are divided into three age groups that meet twice a week in temporary quarters. One class is held in a building with a red gravel floor, another in a room used for Catholic services on Sundays. The third group meets outdoors. An application for a $21,000 grant from the U.S. Embassy in Ghana to build a school is pending.

Sheen listens as one group sings “Baa Baa Black Sheep,” sensing that they don’t understand the words. She asks them to gather in a circle around her, then explains the song, walking on hands and knees, bleating.

She sits in front of another group, seated shoulder to shoulder on benches. The building is dark except for dim rays filtering through the open windows. Sheen gives them a drill: “Stand up, shake hands, sit down, turn around.”

“What’s up mean?” she asks. “Name something that goes up.”

“A bird,” says one student. “Butterfly,” says another.

“When do you shake hands?” Sheen asks.

A young boy raises his right hand. “When you greet a white man,” he says.

This is her way of getting to know the children, Sheen explains later, learning how they think.

“I sense that a lot of things here probably carry over from British colonialism,” she says. “The one child the other day asked if they would have white teachers, thinking a good education requires white teachers. This one boy said you shake hands when you meet a white man, not a man--a white man. These are things that need to be discussed, things they need to think about.”

In many ways, the children here are no different from those in Los Angeles. But their days do not begin to the sound of alarm clocks or traffic or televisions. There is only the roosters’ crow and the scraping of bundled twigs against the hard ground. Each day, the areas around the homes are meticulously swept.

Children and women with buckets and pans on their heads walk down a path through the brush and elephant grass to scoop water from a pond a mile away. Eventually, the pond will dry up and they will walk to Sogakope, three miles away.

The men--even the elderly--leave early for the fields, carrying only a hoe and cutlass with handles worn smooth by use. It has been a good year for corn, cassava and millet--unlike 1983, when drought smothered the ground, the crops, causing hunger and death throughout Africa.

Many men have more than one wife--one nearby man has 41 children--and some of the women complain that their husbands neglect some of their children.

Half a mile away in the village of Dendo is a public school. The classrooms, like most of the structures, are built of bricks made from the sandy soil, bonded by mud and covered by thatched or metal roofs. It costs up to 1,500 cedis (about $1.50 to $2) per year to attend the school, and many families cannot afford it.

Janet Sappor, 27, has three children ranging in age from 5 months to 6 years. Her husband, Holy Tettedzie, farms and fishes. They live in a single room with one bed. The children sleep on a mat, enclosed by mosquito netting, on the floor.

Sappor says she hopes her children will become educated at the new school, find good jobs and care for her when she is old.

It would please her, she says through an interpreter, if one of her children would learn to be a doctor, one a professor and one a scientist.

She fears more years without rain, recalling the hunger of 1983. Someday she would like to leave. She smiles when asked where she would like to live.

“United States.”

But Sheen knows the problems in Africa are not solved by moving to the United States. She says she has felt like an American only once--the day she stood in Washington and listened to poet Maya Angelou recite her work and Bill Clinton take the oath of office.

“We were all there for the same reason, to see hope take shape. There was a feeling of unity. You didn’t feel ugly, you didn’t feel black or white or old. You just felt like a person.”

She considers herself an American African, not an African American. And she feels at peace now that the circle of her life finally has brought her home to Africa.

*

It has become known as “The Dream.”

People throughout the area have come to Sasekofe to celebrate the groundbreaking ceremony and to offer their blessing to the Sheenway project.

“We are here today in the name of the dream,” says Moses Atsem, Sheenway head teacher, before the ceremony begins.

“Yes,” says Kofi Gbedema, school administrator, who splits his time between Ghana and Los Angeles, running an import/export business. “Everything is falling in place, so we know it is meant to be.”

With Sheen are three members of Friends of Sheenway, a fund-raising group: Meredith Scott Lynn, an actress; Edet Belzberg, legislative specialist for Planned Parenthood in L.A., and Kristin Hahn, who quit her job as producer of “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous” to begin a search for something more meaningful.

Sheen is beaming as she addresses the crowd.

“I have much to be thankful for,” she says. “I would like to thank Almighty God, who makes all things possible. And I’d like to thank you for being a part of my dream. I would like to thank my father for teaching me how to dream. . . . Thank you for letting me come home.”

There are more speeches, dances. The children sing their school song: “We are Sheenway School students, yes, yes, yes . . . we can do our best.”

Once again, they walk to the silk cotton tree and form a circle. A chief from a nearby village says a prayer. Sheen kneels and places a tiny mahogany tree with three small leaves into the cool, sandy soil and gently, cupping her hands, pours water on it.

It is a momentous day. Perhaps this is the moment her father spoke of, the time when she would understand her dream and mend a painful wound. Sheen says she will bring others here from Los Angeles to learn what she has learned--students, teachers, Bloods and Crips.

They will meet the gentle people of Sasekofe and, as she has, hear within the rhythm of drums the pounding of their own hearts. On the campus of Sheenway School and Culture Center, Ghana, they will see the result of one woman’s dream and her father’s vision.

They will see a mahogany emerging from the soil of Africa.

Sheen stands. “We will call this tree Papa.”

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Dolores Sheen

Age: 56.

Background: Born in St. Louis, lives in Carson.

Family: Divorced. Five children, 11 grandchildren, one great-grandchild.

On establishing a school in Ghana: “I needed to trace my origin tribe, and when I found out I had an Ewe origin, I wanted to make the circle complete. I wanted to give back what was taken when the strong and the creative were taken from Africa and displaced.”

On her role as an educator: “I think the gift that I will leave behind is that I was a children’s advocate and I fulfilled my father’s legacy that a child is a promise of immortality.”