In Yabbies And Cappuccino, A Culinary Lifeline For Aboriginal Youth

hide captionAustralian celebrity chef and author Kylie Kwong (left) teaches a cooking workshop at Yaama Dhiyaan, a cooking and hospitality school for at-risk aborginal youth.

Australian celebrity chef and author Kylie Kwong (left) teaches a cooking workshop at Yaama Dhiyaan, a cooking and hospitality school for at-risk aborginal youth.

If you teach an aboriginal man (or woman) to make a cappuccino, can you feed his career for a lifetime?

That's the hope at Yaama Dhiyaan, a cooking and hospitality school for at-risk indigenous young people in Australia.

Students there are learning the skills to be cooks, restaurant and hotel workers, and caterers. The school is also helping to reconnect them to their culture, disrupted when many of their grandparents were kidnapped off the land, forced into missionary schools and denied the right to vote until the 1960s.

Aunty Beryl Van-Oploo is an aboriginal elder who heads the school. She is from the Gamillera tribe and grew up on a reservation about 500 miles from Sydney in New South Wales.

hide captionAunty Beryl Van-Oploo heads Yaama Dhiyaan, the first cooking and hospitality training college for at-risk indigenous young people in Australia.

Aunty Beryl Van-Oploo heads Yaama Dhiyaan, the first cooking and hospitality training college for at-risk indigenous young people in Australia.

"They asked me to name the school," says Aunty Beryl, "so I thought I might as well say 'hello' in my own Yuwaalaraay language. Yaama means 'hello' and Dhiyaan means 'family.' So it's 'Hello family and friends' when you come here."

Among the skills the students learn at Yaama Dhiyaan is how to make cappuccinos and other specialty coffee drinks.

Here is the original post:
In Yabbies And Cappuccino, A Culinary Lifeline For Aboriginal Youth