“The Boys of Baraka” is a unique coming-of–age story that follows a group of extraordinary 12-year-old boys from the most violent ghettos of Baltimore to an experimental boarding school in the most rural corner of Kenya, East Africa. An emotionally explosive journey shot over three years, the film zeroes in on a group of brave kids who are willing to cross the ocean to chase an opportunity — boys with a fierce determination to fight the label of “throw-away.” - Th Boys of Baraka

The true doumentary based film, The Boys of Baraka, was a true journey into how most of our educational sytems are ran in our urban communities. You travel amongst four young boys: Richard, Devon, Romesh, and Trey into the educational system of Baltimore Maryland. This movie will leave you either feeling very optimistic for the education of our children or it will make you so mad at our current status of urban education and family structure, that you feel totally at lost.

You are first introduced into the homes of the four boys and you catch a glimpse into their atmosphere. Your emotions intertwine with the reality of what they have gone through in their past along with their current status as young boys growing up fatherless and motherless, all while battling the pressures and demands of growing up in drug and gang infested neighborhoods with a lack of educational funds and community and mental development. You then meet Ms. Jackson, whom I had a terribly hard time connecting with as she seemed to always point out the negative things about what the boys could grow up to be instead of that of the positive, instead of raising them up to be the unthikable. The childen who grow up in these neighborhoods do not need to be preached to about all of the negative things that they may end up doing, hell, they see “all that they can be” just by walking to school.

Throughout the film I quikly realized, that even though the boys were encouraged to go to school, once they get there, there were little to no male teachers, lack of tructure,and even once they get to the Baraka School, there semed to be not only a lack of male role models and mentors, but most of the teachers and the instructors were not of African descent. We must realize that our boys need a sense of themselves in oder for them to beome the men we expect them to be. It would be great to have seen the School of Baraka be ran by those who could really show the boys what they could become, because in the end, they will think that in order to get something good, you will need to get assistance from people of the “caucasian persausion” so to speak. Not to mention that they called a white guy, the “Head Master” at the school...What!

While I fully understood the experience and the triumphs of what the boys learned, the bigget problem however, was what they had to do once it was all taken away from them. It really nurtured my mind to see the reactions from the parents when they were told that it would all be taken away...”Now What Are We Supposed To Do” they ask.

The boys of Baraka is not about a group of boys travelling to Kenya to learn, no, underneath all of the layers that were given to us, lies a cry out for help in the areas of community, of family, of structue, of hope. The Boys of Baraka will make you cry, it will definitely make you smile at moments, and it should make you furious with how our children are being taught. A feature of the dvd also includes commentary from Bill Cosby, who adamintly speaks on the facts of how we need not to complain about white people owning these sort of schools if we are not going to work to own them ourslves, and I totally agree with him. We must take our communities into our own hands, and not worry about asking anymore, all it takes is a collective mind state.

Visit Devons website, one of the very charismatic "Boys of Baraka", "A Young Man All Baout Change": devonbrown4life.com

Find out more information and get updates about The Boys of Baraka at: www.theboysofbaraka.com