Thursday, March 6, 2008
Teen empowers peers through verse
Web site provides forum for discussing peer pressure, teen pregnancy and family issues
by Elahe Izadi | Staff Writer
Christopher Anderson⁄The Gazette Asantewa Disroe, 14, of Laurel started a new Web site, homegirls4eva.org in February to provide young girls with a forum to discuss issues important to them such as gossiping, sexual predators and peer pressure.
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As a 2-year-old, Asantewa Disroe would walk over to her mother, Abena, and hold onto her leg, and wouldn’t let go while she recited poetry on stage.
At 6, the Laurel resident wrote her first poem while sitting in a recording studio watching her mother record an album in 2000. After the recording, Asantewa showed her mother the poem, ‘‘God is in my Head.”
The beginning of the poem read, ‘‘God is in my head when I walk down the street. He helps me pick up my feet. He gives me what I need, when I’m always on my speed.”
Abena Disroe was surprised at her daughter’s first poetic endeavor.
‘‘I think that the poetry vibrations just kind of shot up her veins,” said Abena Disroe.
Since then, Asantewa, now an eighth-grader at Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School in Beltsville, has performed her poetry throughout the country. And she launched a Web site in February that she said will help girls between 9 and 15 years old network and discuss problems like peer pressure, malicious gossiping, teen pregnancy, sexual predators and family issues.
‘‘I chose that age range because young people, people don’t think they know about stuff like that, that stuff like that happens to them, but I know a lot of younger people that go through stuff like that too,” said Asantewa, 14.
The site, called Homegirls 4 Eva and accessed at www.homegirls4eva.org, encourages girls to write to Asantewa about their problems, and she responds to them with a poem that articulates what they’re going through and how they can overcome it.
Lauren Moore is Asantewa’s mentor and president of a Minnesota-based small business development company, Spycat, which helped develop Homegirls 4 Eva.
‘‘What I did was work with her, to try and figure out what was the best solution that would empower the most,” Moore said.
Moore, who mentors other girls, said many young people are asking increasingly serious and difficult questions.
‘‘For troubled kids in the ‘tween’ ages, there’s virtually no resources for them to draw upon,” she said. ‘‘They’re kind of left hanging.”
Moore helped Asantewa develop her idea into a tangible resource for girls. Asantewa is also organizing a Board of Advisors to whom she can turn for advice. The board will include educators, community leaders, teachers and other professionals, Disroe said.
‘‘She can relate to [youth] and they can trust her,” Moore said. ‘‘And she also has a community that she can go to as well if she doesn’t know the answer to the question.”
Asantewa’s poems focus on themes of love, hope and spirituality. She has performed on poetry CDs, was a member of the Girls and Boys with Hearts Poetry group, and at the age of 9, opened the Children’s Showcase at the second annual Spoken Word Expo in St. Louis. In 2003, at the age of 9, she was the youngest poet to perform at the First Thursdays Poetry Open Mic Fest in Chinatown Starbucks in Washington, D.C.
Disroe is a professional poet who is composing her first book. Asantewa is also compiling poems for a book, and the pair hope to publish their books at the same time and go on a mother-daughter book tour.
Although Asantewa is focusing her Web site on helping others, Disroe said her daughter’s efforts would help foster her own growth as well.
‘‘It’s going to help her, and it will give her a real sense of purpose,” Disroe said. ‘‘With all these young girls starting to write in and do this, somebody is going to be helped.”
