Word: baraka
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Working with the Baltimore schools, Abell came up with an innovative solution: send some of the class cutups and brawlers 6,000 miles away to a school the foundation dubbed Baraka--Swahili for "blessing." So far, the program has accommodated only about 40 students a year, less than 1% of the middle school enrollment--not nearly enough to achieve the classroom tranquillity in Baltimore that was the initial goal. But in its four years, Baraka has delivered an unexpected bonus. It has turned around the lives of most of the students who have gone there. Many of them, like Brandon...
...cheap and his teachers, half of whom are Kenyan, are willing to work for salaries as low as $5,000 a year. The focus is on boys (who more often than girls pose disciplinary problems) in the seventh and eighth grades. "That's when we lose them," says Embry. Baraka tries to save the boys with strong discipline, "tons and tons" of adult attention and an accelerated academic program that will be a source of pride to them when they return to Baltimore...
...hell," says Brandon of his first year at Baraka. He kept talking back to his teachers, again and again, and landed in the "boma," a crude, isolated group of tents surrounded by thornbushes that Baraka used for punishment. For smaller matters like swearing or sleeping in class, discipline worked on a point system. Staying out of trouble earned students safaris, video nights and trips to the Kenyan capital of Nairobi, three hours south of the school...
Brandon had never really studied before; he hadn't brought a single book home from school. At Baraka he had to adjust to the rigorous classes designed to raise the students up to grade level. That typically meant cramming five years of learning into two years...
Seeing themselves in this new context seems to help many of the Baraka kids redirect their lives. Kevin Prem, now 15, joined a gang when he was only 10. By the time he was 12, his two older brothers and nine of his friends had dropped out of school. At Baraka, though, Kevin got his temper under control and won five awards for academic excellence. Now he plans to be a prosecuting attorney, so he can put in jail "people who sell drugs to kids." Daryl Stewart, now 16, had been kicked out of six schools before going to Baraka...