So I watched "The Boys from Baraca" tonight with Fuego. It was a pretty awesome film until about mid-way through... it did an awesome job of demonstrating the crap that the kids in the film had to live with and deal with, and the atrocious condition of their lives, schools, neighborhoods, and families. It did an amazing job of following these truly amazing kids to Kenya where they learned a new way of being with one another and were, for the first time, given the personal attention that most of us take for granted from our grade-school educations.

Where the film let me down was by demonstrating, mid-way through, that the Baraka school ended up completely letting all twenty of these boys down... just like every other institution in their lives.

They come home for two months in the summer and then, toward the end of their "vacation," an emergency meeting is called to let the parents and the kids know that the school has been closed due to civil war near Baraka. This was termed by the meeting coordinator as "a little bit of bad news." Bravo.

That's it. They don't get to go back for their promised second year, they don't get the redemption of having been taught a new way of being, going home and experiencing hell through new eyes, and getting to return to the healthy world they've been shown exists. The next scene is nine months later, when all the boys except four have been abandoned by the documentary (that's 16 boys whom we have gotten to know and who have just disappeared from the documentary's radar). Of the four boys they show, it seems by the end of the documentary that 1 (ONE) had ended up benefiting from the program.

For those who have seen this documentary and were hoping that two of the boys had hope... Montrey ended up dropping out of the good high school he got into after less than one year (you can find some updated information online)... sorry.

So we're left with no better odds than we're given at the beginning of the film -- with less than one quarter of the kids graduating from high school (we get about 20% if we include Richard, the boy with the learning disability, who is reported as taking the GED).

Yay.

Not an uplifting film, but important nonetheless.