Vera Oyé Yaa-Anna · 2024 Spark Award Winner

In 2003 when Vera Oyé Yaa-Anna set up a non-profit to offer her unique blend of storytelling, nutrition education, drumming and song to local children she decided to call it Oyé Palaver Hut. The name reflects her heritage. “Throughout West Africa,” she explains, “you have a place called the Palaver Hut. It’s a small gazebo-like structure that people use as a meeting place, like city hall. It’s where elders come to listen to disputes and where people can come and settle them. It’s also where people come to be entertained.” Over the past 20 years, hundreds of children have seen Auntie Oyé, as they call her, dressed in bright African garb, creating delicious food, dancing to the beat of wooden djembe drums, telling stories and inviting them to share theirs. Classrooms and church basements and many other spaces have become Palaver Huts.

Vera grew up in Liberia, descended on her father’s side from Americans who migrated there in the mid-nineteenth century to escape the horrors of slavery and on her mother’s side from the Grebo people of West Africa. It was a happy, privileged childhood with sisters and brothers, good education at a private boarding school, and no television. “We told stories a lot,” she remembers. At the age of 13 she went through a traditional ceremony of planning and preparing a meal and inviting people, in her case her parents and siblings, to come and share it.

Political unrest in Liberia brought Vera to the United States, first to Los Angeles where she earned a degree in marketing from Pepperdine University and then, after another period in Africa, to Washington where she had friends. Battling a sense of dislocation and depression, Vera began to discern a sense of mission, a conviction that her real identity was not as a businesswoman but, rather, as what she calls a “culinary griot” with powerful things to share, especially with children. Drawing on the faith she had learned as a child, she determined to follow this unexpected path. Walking by Friendship House one day and hearing children laughing inside, she went in and offered to do a cooking workshop. Now she is delighted to see children at venues all around the neighborhood enjoying avocadoes, eating spicy, vegetable and spice-laden jollof rice, and chattering happily about the experience. 

As did the late Steve Cymrot, Vera brings sparks of deep commitment, enthusiasm, and fun to our community.