Kudos to Devon Brown - Baltimore’s Own
A Baraka success story
Teenager talks about his life-changing experience at the school in Kenya
By Makeda Crane | Sun reporter
August 3, 2008
UniSun recently caught up with 18-year-old Devon Brown, one of 20 boys from the most crime-ridden neighborhoods in Baltimore who was chosen to attend the Baraka School in Kenya, a two-year experimental boarding school that was supposed to separate the students from their city lives in hopes that they would focus on their education while in Africa.
Brown is one of the success stories from the program. Last spring, he graduated from the Academy for College and Career Exploration. Later this month, he will attend the Maryland Institute College of Art on a full scholarship from the Abell Foundation, which also sponsored the Boys of Baraka project. He plans to major in film production.
Brown was the kid preacher featured in the 2005 documentary The Boys of Baraka. Although the school closed after one year due to political unrest in Kenya, it altered his life, he said.
Unlike many of his peers, Brown had the support of his grandmother, who encouraged him in his passion for preaching in the pulpit of Zion Baptist Church, which he began doing at an early age.
August 4th, 2008 at 11:56 am
Kudos to all who were and are still involved. This speaks to my point about the historical successes as well as the failures of black male leadership. We can do it, and here is proof that when we get involved things change for the better. Of late, I have wondered if we should simply step aside and let the women take over. Consider Ida Wells, Sojourner, Harriet, Rosa…, these women were responsible in a greater sense for our successes, far more than we realize. We ought to build a leadership coalition with our females instead of trying to dominate them, they have done a better job historically than we have in my opinion!
There was another airing of a great retospective on TV over the weekend entitled, Shaking Hands With The Devil. It had to do with the attrocities in Rwanda in 1994. Even during the retrospective, all the President and the people still had to say a decade later was: Why didn’t the white men come and rescue us from the Hutu! Never once did they take responsibility! All black people must seize the initiative and learn to take responsibility for ourselves and our black family at large. We must stop waiting for others to solve our problems, too many good souls are being lost in the meantime. A good place to start is with ourselves, then in our homes!
I was asked years ago to sign a petition to have prayer put back into school. I asked the petitioner, do you pray with your children at home? The answer was no, and it was just another example of someone hoping to rely on someone else to do what they were supposed to do. Get it? How long has prayer been banned from school, and this individual admitted that during that time she (in this case) had not been praying with her own! Hmm!