HORN-WATCH

WORCESTER — Spend an hour with Jonathan M. Starr, and you might forget the city where you’re sitting. His descriptions of life in Somaliland and the school he founded there are so engrossing and different from life here that he can barely get it all in.

Jonathan M. Starr former  Flagg Street Capital, in Cambridge and now founder of Abaarso Tech, a nonprofit organization that helps prepare the country’s brightest boys and girls for top-tier institutions in the U.S. and U.K.

Mr. Starr, a 34-year-old Worcester native, Worcester Academy alumnus and former investment banker, was in the city last week to visit his mother, to speak at the academy and to help announce a sister school relationship between the academy and his school, Abaarso Tech.

The students at Abaarso Tech are the same age as Worcester Academy’s high school students and they know how to use Facebook and Skype, but there’s also a world of difference between them. All of Abaarso’s students are Arabic, and the girls must cover almost all of their bodies except their faces when they’re in class. During girls’ basketball games, there are always a couple players adjusting their veils, Mr. Starr said.

Abaarso is co-ed, but contact between the genders — even speaking — is strictly limited. On the other hand, the boys and girls treat each other better within their own gender groups than you would typically see in the U.S., Mr. Starr said.

On Friday, he visited John Murnane’s advanced placement world history class and, with Abaarso student Sulekha Hashi Elmi on speakerphone, told the class a little about Somaliland, a section of Somalia that has its own government but which the United States has not recognized as a separate nation. Somaliland has a president but is largely overseen by clans, who are a check on the president, run their own welfare systems and oversee even minor things, such as how Abaarso will replace two of its cooks. They will probably have to hire two others from the same subclan, Mr. Starr said.

“It’s Wild West,” he said.

Mr. Starr, whose uncle is from Somaliland, has a healthy respect for practices that have helped keep the peace in Somaliland, such as dividing top political posts among the clans rather than the president bringing in a full slate of his own people.

The students in Mr. Murnane’s class have been e-mailing students at Abaarso since the beginning of the school year. Libby Y.F. Dimenstein of Worcester said she had never heard of Somaliland before learning of the school. She and friends sent Abaarso students a video tour of Worcester Academy’s campus, and she was surprised they do many of the same activities, like basketball.

“It was interesting how relatable we were to each other,” she said.

The correspondence helps bring Abaarso students up to speed on their English and another culture without creating more work for the school’s teachers, Mr. Starr said. Some students had never met a non-Muslim before the school opened. “They need to learn some degree of tolerance,” Mr. Starr said.

Abaarso’s teachers, who come mostly from the United States and Canada, are busy raising students’ academic prowess from below grade level to competitive enough to get into Western universities. Mr. Starr generally pays his teachers their living expenses plus $3,000 a year, which he said should be enough to attract the right people to the job.

The students are among the best in the country, and their work ethic is amazing, Mr. Starr said. Ideally, they’ll graduate, go to a university outside Somaliland and return to improve their country, he said. “The impact could be massive, but it’s decades away,” he said of the school.

The partnership with Worcester Academy gives academy students a broader view of the world, said Ronald M. Cino, acting head of school. (Head of School Dexter P. Morse is still at the academy but has announced plans to retire next year.)

“They’re not allowed to think myopically,” Mr. Cino said. “This is a total perspective changer.”

The two sets of students could end up at college together, he noted.

Mr. Starr’s talk at the academy is part of the school’s Open Gates Lecture Series and was titled, “The Failure of Aid Work and NGOs in Africa.” He drew from his experience in Somaliland and other research, he said. He was unimpressed by the nongovernmental organization representatives he has met and believes they are paid too much and don’t know enough about what they’re doing.

Attempts to help, Mr. Starr said, should be designed from the ground up and specific to the community they serve. Abaarso, for instance, operates in a Muslim society, so the school is building a mosque on campus, and students have prayer breaks.

His goal is to make the school self-sufficient, something he hopes to accomplish in the next year. He’ll do it both by bringing in higher-paying Somali students from abroad (such as those from expatriate families in Britain) and by beefing up enrollment in the other Abaarso programs: a master of business administration program, an undergraduate school of finance, and tutoring for students in kindergarten through eighth grade.

The students at Abaarso’s secondary school, which is a boarding school, pay $100 a month in theory, but some families contribute in other ways. One brings Mr. Starr a giant amount of fruit each semester.

When asked how people should contribute to international efforts, he suggested creating college scholarships for his students. That way, he said, the school and its students don’t get any money unless they do their jobs.

Source:telegram.com