The Boys of Baraka/ PBS POV Documentary

Synopsis:

Devon, Montrey, Richard, and Romesh are just at that age — 12 and 13 years old — when boys start to become men. But in their hometown of Baltimore, one of the country’s most poverty-stricken cities for inner-city residents, African-American boys have a very high chance of being incarcerated or killed before they reach adulthood. The boys are offered an amazing opportunity in the form of the Baraka school, a project founded to break the cycle of violence through an innovative education program that literally removed young boys from low-performing public schools and unstable home environments. They travel with their classmates to rural Kenya in East Africa, where a teacher-student ratio of one to five, a strict disciplinary program and a comprehensive curriculum form the core of their new educational program.

I called Baltimore my home for 4 years back in the late 1990s. I was always aware of the overwhelming poverty and crime but as a lot of people say, the city has "charm." What I wasn't aware of was that a few blocks away from me lived boys that were slowly losing their chances to do something productive with their lives. Most of them were destined to end up in prison, homeless, on drugs, or killed. This is where the Baraka School stepped in to help some of these boys see that there is hope for the future. I seriously can't describe in words how powerful this documentary is. You get to see these boys get handpicked from some of the most violent and poor schools to attend the Baraka School in Africa where they learn how to deal with their anger and emotions. They get to receive an education without all the distractions of street violence, gangs, domestic violence, and drugs. You can tell that they are excited and scared to go and they have very difficult times adjusting. They go from living in a frightening concrete jungle to living on the plains of Africa; a chance that not a lot of people get especially boys like these. Watch them struggle and fail and pick themselves up and succeed...in the last half of the documentary watch with great pain when all that is given to them is suddenly taken away. Heartbreaking.