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FILM TRACKS TRANSFORMATION OF BALTIMORE BOYS: EUR’s Lee Bailey talks to teen featured in acclaimed documentary ‘Boys of Baraka.’
*EUR’s Lee Bailey caught up with one of the young brothers featured in the award-winning documentary “The Boys of Baraka,” the gripping story of a group of 12-year-old boys from the roughest ghettos of Baltimore who attend an experimental boarding school in Kenya.
“The whole point of this thing was to change these boys to men,” says 17-year-old Richard Keyser, who along with his brother, Romesh Vance, were among the 20 at-risk black boys chosen to participate in the program.
Keyser describes the hopeless conditions surrounding his peers in Baltimore’s inner city, where 76 percent of African-American boys do not graduate from high school, and 50 percent end up in jail.
“They was over in school acting fools,” Keyser says, referring to the group of kids who traveled to Africa. “They done went through trouble at home, in school and everything, and the whole point is bringing the boys over to Africa so they won’t have to worry about girls, getting in trouble and all that crazy stuff.”
At the beginning of the documentary, the crazy stuff was put into sharp perspective by Mavis Jackson, a recruiter who visits the school and tells the students they have three options when they turn 18: “An orange jumpsuit and bracelets, a black suit in a brown box or a black cap and gown.”
Both Keyser and his brother applied for the program, but the school was leaning towards taking only one. When their mother was asked her opinion of only one son being allowed to participate, she said, “Don’t make one a king and the other a killer.”
Both of the boys were given scholarships, and followed by filmmakers Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady to the Baraka School in the bush country of Nairobi, Kenya, along with the other selected classmates. Cameras trail Romesh as he visits his father in jail. Explaining his upcoming trip, he tells him, “I'm going there so when I grow up I gonna be somebody."
Once in the Motherland, all of the boys quickly notice the dramatic difference between the region’s wide open fields, wild animals and lack of gunfire. Suddenly, the group is plucked down in a world empty of TVs, Playstations and other common indulgences.
While their transition is far from smooth – many are homesick, some get into fights – the boys began to thrive like nobody’s business. Grades improve, and more importantly, the boys began to see themselves differently.
“Pretty much we was happy because we done climbed mountains, we done seen animals, we done ate different foods, not American food, but African foods,” said Keyser, visibly excited at the memory. “We done killed animals, just so much experience. For boys that don’t go to church, we went to church. Boys that played basketball, they came back to Baltimore playing soccer with a basketball!”
The Baraka school is an American-run program with white volunteer teachers. Kenya was chosen for the program because, among other reasons, the cost of living is low, and the “boys can live the lives of boys,” in the freedom to run around and play without anticipating gunfire or worrying about their next meal.
The documentary takes a heartbreaking turn when terrorist attacks and the closure of the American embassy in Nairobi forced the school to shut down at the end of the first of the boys’ two years. During their summer in Baltimore that year, they’re given the bad news.
“All our lives gonna be bad now,” one boy says in tears when learning he won’t return. Disheartened parents said the terrorist threats don’t make Kenya any more dangerous than the streets outside her door.
“They’re more likely to be killed right here in Baltimore,” said one parent of the kids. Another added: “If you send them to Baltimore, you’re sending them to jail.”
While some of the students picked up their bad behavior from before the trip, others were noticeably transformed by the experience. One child, Devon, is elected president of his ninth grade class and shows early signs of his journey toward becoming a preacher.
Another boy, Montrey, could be the poster child for the message behind the documentary. Once the worst-behaved kid, Montrey, after just one year at Baraka, earns the highest math test score for the entire state of Maryland, and is admitted to the most competitive high school in Baltimore. His eye-popping turnaround underscores how a simple change of environment – where worries of unruly classrooms, cash-strapped households and unsettling violence melt away – can make all the difference in a population mostly written off by politicians as lost causes.
Toward the end of the film, Montrey says: “People think we ain’t got a future. I’m gonna make a difference. I’m gonna be on the map.”
Keyser, the oldest of several siblings, is currently working on his GED through the federally-funded program Job Corps. Before his nine months at Baraka, the youngster said he recognized that his path was headed in the wrong direction.
“Instead of me hanging around the positive crowd, I was hanging around the negative crowd,” he tells Bailey at the recent NAACP Image Awards, where the movie won for Outstanding Independent Film.
“I had to notice through myself, ‘Why is you around these people? It’s time for you to hop back on the map, do what you’re supposed to do, and help my mother, because my father never was there,” he says. “There’s things that I done bad, you know, and there’s things I done good. But everybody not perfect,” he says. “People make mistakes, and they get over it and turn the bad mistakes into good [things].”
"The Boys of Baraka" had a limited release in New York and Los Angeles last month, and is scheduled to be shown on PBS later this year. To get more info and to see the captivating trailer, click here: http://lokifilms.com/site/index.html.
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