Baltimore Sun May 1, 2005 The Lifelong Lessons of 'Boys of Baraka' Documentary creates a poignant picture of replanted students from Baltimore City Author: Sun Staff Jonathan Pitts Edition: FINAL Section: ARTS & SOCIETY Just over 10 years ago, Robert C. Embry Jr., president of Baltimore's Abell Foundation, approached the city's middle-school principals with a simple question: What can I do to help you? The organization he led gave about $5 million a year to the public school system, and Embry wanted to know how he could generate the most bang for his bucks. Embry, a lifelong Baltimorean and former official of state and city schools, expected the usual requests for computers and other equipment. He was in for a surprise. The schools' most urgent problem, he was told, was that the worst-behaved 5 percent of the students were keeping the rest from learning. Could he just find a way to get them off the premises? The solution he came up with, The Baraka School, became one of the more colorful experiments in the history of Baltimore education, and is now the subject of a poignant new documentary, The Boys of Baraka, which has its local premiere at the Maryland Film Festival this coming weekend. In Kiswahili, the native spoken language of eastern Africa, "baraka" means blessing, and to Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, two filmmakers from New York, The Boys of Baraka was their own windfall. Their task was to frame a singular question: What happens when you take some of the most disruptive middle-school boys from an inner city, transplant them to a 150-acre ranch in the wilds of Kenya, and try to teach them how to think and act? "The elements were just so compelling," says Ewing. "Who wouldn't want to film a story like that?" The Boys of Baraka shows us four Baltimore preteens who take that exotic journey during the 2002-03 school year. They eat goat meat, go to class, learn Kiswhahili; they clown and fight, get punished, pine for their homes half a world away. And their lives in the film, like the story behind it, show that they aren't the only ones who learn, as Embry did, that the truest gifts come in unexpected packages. A trained camera Ewing, 34, and Grady, 33, learned of The Baraka School four years ago in a Newsweek magazine story. A Baltimore businessman named George Small, they learned, happened to own acreage in the Kenyan bush, which he had donated for the Baraka project. Organizers built a small boarding school there, ringing the place with an electrified fence to keep out the giraffes and hyenas. And since 1996, 40 or so boys a year, mostly from backgrounds where no father was present, had left Baltimore to live there, take classes with just seven or eight other students rather than the 30 or 40 they were used to, and generally get so much individual attention that it amounted to a culture shock nearly as great as the African wilderness itself. Ewing's first thought was that other filmmakers must have already claimed this story. Many, it turned out, had contacted Baraka, but the administrators, protective of the boys, were not interested. Only a year's worth of lobbying won Ewing and Grady their access. "Passion and interest go a long way," says Ewing, who like her partner is a veteran of PBS productions. In 2002, the women found themselves in Baltimore, where Baraka was culling its newest class of 20 from a group of applicants within that unruly 5 percent. To Ewing, "the level of bravery and intelligence in the group was extraordinary," and the filmmakers' openness drew the boys out. "Rachel and Heidi were so easy to talk to," says Richard Keyser, now back in Baltimore at 16. "We loved them both from the first day. That's what made us 'the Baraka boys.' " Richard became one of the four at the heart of the film, and his story is as colorful and affecting as the movie as a whole. When we first see him, he lays out his plan to escape the drugs and violence of his neighborhood. "I'm a strong man, like Frederick Douglass," he says with a smile, sirens wailing in the background. His self-assurance is remarkable for a 13-year-old "at risk," but the camera of Ewing and Grady never misses the qualities with which he might skirt those dangers. When he visits his father, in prison, to share the news that he's going to Africa, the pain in Richard's smile is palpable, but his good humor never falters. "I think those parole people ought to hurry up," he says with a laugh. "We ain't got all day." The other "stars" are just as surprising. Devon Brown's mother is a drug user who's in and out of jail, but at 12, he's a star at church, a pint-sized preaching prodigy. Montrey Moore, also 12, has been suspended eight times for fighting, but he hopes to get "my master's degree, my bachelor's degree, a Ph.D., a TLC" and become "a chemical scientist, a chemologist" someday. Richard's kid brother, Romesh Vance, emanates thoughtfulness. They're just the boys for Baraka, eager, full of promise, living at the edge of trouble they don't fully understand just yet. Their potential is like a flame, flickering in a rising wind. All they need, it seems, is the right sort of grownups to pay attention and tend the blaze. Learning environment When they get to Kenya, the boys are wide-eyed at their new surroundings. One stares at a herd of zebras. "All the meat is in the butt!" he laughs. Another gazes from a thatched-roof house into a downpour. "I didn't know it rained in Africa!" he cries. They marvel at lizards crawling on cacti. But old habits are hard to break. As a counselor is speaking, Devon snatches his keys and runs away. Montrey disrupts a Kiswahili lesson, socking a classmate on the arm, and gets tossed out. More than one yearns for soda, chicken strips, video games. Romesh packs his bags to leave. But Baraka is a responsive environment. Teachers take offenders for long walks in the bush, hashing out how they might have acted differently. A counselor pins Montrey's arms until he calms down. Later, after yet another fight, he is left at a remote "base camp," where he and a boy he "cracked on" must put up their own tent. Devon, now 15 and a ninth grader at the Academy for College and Career Exploration in Baltimore, recalls a moment that changed him. After he deliberately bumped a teacher, two counselors took him for a "night walk," far from campus, and left him to find his way back. The chattering of baboons filled the dark skies. "Tears were running down my cheeks," he says. "That was a lot more scary than Baltimore. I was walking all by myself, thinking about everything [my grandmother and teachers] always told me about doing good. I wasn't so tough. That was when I started to listen." Richard struggles with his reading -- "something wrong with my brain," he says with a laugh -- but one night, to grand applause, he shares a poem he has written. The title: "I Will Survive." Devon and Romesh make the honor roll, and Montrey, by now reading books on his own for the first time, earns 95s. "Before Baraka, I always failed math," says Montrey, now 15 and a Baltimore City College freshman. "I never went [to class]. With all those teachers coming after me, I learned to value my education." Though setbacks abound, the film, which spans two years, shows little boys becoming young men. Baby fat melts away and voices deepen, but more important, a more peaceful quality, a less frenetic pace, sets in. "I remember how the boys started making more eye contact when they talked, speaking to each other more softly," says Grady, who, like Ewing, visited Africa three times for the film. "They were still boys, but there was much less fronting and fighting. They became more human." The co-directors ended up with 600 hours of footage,"[the boys] never ceased to surprise us with all they had to offer," Grady says, which they spent a year cutting into an 84-minute saga of hope and growth, of disappointment and reckoning. The Boys of Baraka, in the end, is about human development, what fosters it, what impedes it and offers a new look at Baltimore, the city that gave these young men life, nurtures them, and still sets the limits to their dre!  ams. Gaining confidence As they've done at other festiva ls this year, Ewing and Grady, partners in their own company, Loki Films, will be on hand to screen The Boys of Baraka this weekend. If all goes according to plan, their film's stars will be there as well, answering questions about their time on the Dark Continent. (Because of security concerns, the Baraka School has closed down after seven years in operation.) If prior audiences are an indication, Baltimoreans will find it funny and moving and need to bring their handkerchiefs. Looking back, the filmmakers still have a hard time describing their relationship with the subjects they got to know so intimately. Good documentarians that they are, Ewing and Grady sought to keep enough distance to remain objective, but for the past three years, they, too, were among the adults whose attention blessed the boys. "These are the kind of kids who may not have had many grownups seek their opinion before," Grady says. "Doesn't everyone warm to attention? I think it helpe!  d them gain confidence." Back in Baltimore, they show it. Devon, president of his school's student body, dreams of "some kind of life performing." Montrey has genuine talent for math and hopes to return to Africa one day. Richard, still struggling academically, hopes to return to the classroom to study for his GED. Thanks to the filmmakers, he has had roles in several episodes of the HBO drama The Wire. Romesh is still in school. Ewing and Grady are still in constant touch with the boys, playing significant roles as friends and counselors. "I can call them whenever I need anything," Richard says. "They care as much about me as anyone in my life. I don't know where I'd be without them." If their subject was growth, Ewing and Grady promoted what they aimed to capture, and the paradox doesn't trouble them. Recently, they gave private screenings to each "Baraka boy," and the response was gratifying. "They laughed at all the funny parts," Grady says, "sometimes till the tears ran down their faces. But you know what real ly surprised me? These are kids who never share much emotion. We expected them to be self-centered, like all teenage boys, obsessed with how they looked. But we were watching to see when they smiled, or looked sad, or really thought, and what moved them was the stories of their friends." That, she says, would never have happened when they were 12. The growth continues. The school they loved is no more, but "baraka" still means blessing.