“My name is not Ebola. It’s Amadou.”
That’s what young Amadou Drame told his adolescent tormentors before they attacked him and his brother at a Bronx middle school infected with fear and apprehension, the boys’ dad said Monday.
Taunted with chants of “Ebola” from the moment they enrolled — just weeks after they emigrated from west Africa — Amadou, 11, and his brother Pape, 13, were attacked Friday at IS 318 in Tremont, punched in the face and relentlessly bullied by a group of mean classmates, all because they are from Senegal, one of several west African nations where Ebola cases have been reported.
“They call me from the school, tell me come, they’re beating your children,” said distraught dad Ousmane Drame, a cab driver who is raising the two kids on his own. “I rush, go there, and my children were very hurt, Amadou was crying, laying on the floor, more than 10 children on top of him, beating him.”
Ousmane, 62, who has lived in New York for 25 years, said he brought his sons to America for the opportunity of a better education, but this was not the lesson he had in mind.
Pape Drame, an eighth grade student at IS 318 in the Bronx, has asked his father to send him back to Senegal rather than endure the frequent beatings at school from the other students.Photo: Robert Kalfus
“If they go to the gym, they say, ‘Oh, you don’t play. Don’t touch the ball,” Ousman said.. “`You have Ebola. Sit down there.’ For two days, they don’t touch nobody, they just sit down.
“It’s not just them. All the African children suffer this.
“I spent seven years in college. I went to school all my life. They’re born in a teacher’s family. They have to go to school.”
Ousmane said he met with the school’s principal Monday after Amadou and Pape were kicked and punched on a concrete floor at the school last week.
He also reached out to the Bronx’s African Advisory Council, which is pressing the district for a solution.
“On Friday, while the younger one was in the gym, he was assaulted,” said Charles Cooper, president of the council. “They came to him calling, ‘Ebola, Ebola, get out of here,’ punched him several times all over. They then went to lunch. During lunch, they were outside in the yard, which is supposed to be a safe place. There’s supposed to be someone looking over them and making sure they’re safe. That was not the case.
“The kids were yelling, ‘Ebola Ebola get out of here,’ and they rushed him, threw him on the ground, kicked him, punched him. He was screaming. His brother heard him screaming from across the yard, so his brother ran to him.
“The other kids jumped on him also and started beating on him as well. The school tried to say it was a fight,” Cooper said, “We made it very clear to them. This was not a fight. This is assault. This is bullying.”
The Department of Education did not immediately comment.
Senegal is one of several west African countries where Ebola cases have been reported, but there have been no new cases in that country since late August, according to the CDC.
Amadou has since told his father he wants to go home to Senegal, where their mother stayed behind. That, Ousman said, is not an option.
Ousman said the boys are American citizens, born in New York and raised in Senegal so they could learn French and math.
“This,” he told the boys, “is your home.”
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