| "I'm trying to curb this stigma
that we just kick it over here," said
Olufemi to a group of visiting students.
"What I'm trying to do is give you an
alternative to what you do. You can cuss somebody
out or you can handle it another way." The job of the student mediators
is fairly straightforward. They must diffuse
arguments before they get out of hand. At the
heart of their efforts is the "I
Message."
"The 'I message' is
basically like, we tell the person what they did,
describe it and tell them what it made us think,
how it made us feel and what we need them to
understand," said Cassandra Tribble, 17, one
of Olufemi's students. "And when we say it
in that way, basically they understand you, they
listen to you. They don't interrupt you because
you're coming at them in a calm way."
Olufemi uses a mixture
of crisis intervention techniques and personal
stories to reach her students.
"My mom had died
when I was ten years old," Olufemi told a
recent class. "So I had a lot of aggression,
I had a lot of anger. The biggest feeling that
haunted me was I felt abandoned, I felt alone all
the time. So, when I felt alone, I started up
mischief."
That mischief led her to
a crossroads -- she narrowly escaped an arson
charge and decided it was time to change. She
embraced her role as a student crisis mediator.
In her students, you can
catch glimpses of Olufemi's own life as a
confused, young girl.
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