the boys of baraka

We have it so easy. We really do. As white, North American 30-something's we know that pretty much anything we could ever want to do is possible with just a little bit of work. We don't know what it's like to be discriminated against, or hated, or to just plain have the odds stacked against you since birth. So this documentary I watched last night was about 20 grade 7 boys from Baltimore who get hand selected to spend 2 years in a remote boarding school in Kenya. Apparently Baltimore is a huge ghetto town, who knew? Stats from the movie report that 78% of black males from Baltimore do not graduate from high-school, let alone university. One of the teachers in the flick tells them their three options as a black man ~ jail, death, or last and definitely the least popular, university. So anyways they take these 20 kids for 2 years to Kenya, work a lot on grades and interpersonal conflict resolution, and hope to hell that this has done enough, and changed the kids somewhere deep inside enough to make them realize that if they want to get out of the cycle, they need to finish high-school and hopefully go to college as well. Trouble is in the movie that when the kids come back for summer holidays after the 1st year, war breaks out in Kenya and they're not allowed back for their 2nd year. And they're all speechless. And incredibly let down. And it reminds me of a conversation I had a long time ago where I realized that people only know what they're taught. So you can't come in and make judgements against any kind of people without changing the scope of their knowledge, right? That group of girls over there who keep having kids at 15 years old? That's what they know. That's what their moms did, their grandmas did, their aunts did, their friends do. And the men that fuck them and leave? Ditto. Reminds of a joke I heard a couple of weeks ago ~ guy says "I'm tired of the 'leave-behind' game that we all play when we're ending a relationship. You know what I mean, when you 'leave-behind' something so that you're guaranteed to see that person again? Yeah, women will leave behind a pair of panties, some earrings, something like that. With men it's a son or a daughter."