Earlier this morning, President Obama spoke with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in a meeting which a senior administration source called “businesslike.” Expressing his impatience, Obama told the Israeli and Palestinian leaders, “We’ve had enough of talks….it’s time to move forward.”

Residents of Sydney, Australia awake to an eerie orange sky as the worst dust storms in at least 70 years engulf the city and move north towards Queensland.

Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah University of Science and Technology officially opens. The university, which boasts the world’s 14th fastest supercomputer and one of the world’s largest endowments, could also become a cultural battleground in this conservative country — the school is co-ed, and female students will mix freely with males and will not be required to wear veils.

“As heart wrenching as it is informative…. You’ll have a pit in your stomach by the end of the show.”
–Families.com

WIDE ANGLE’s unprecedented, award-winning 12-year documentary project, Time for School, returns in 2009 with visits to seven classrooms in seven countries to offer a glimpse into the lives of seven extraordinary children who are struggling to get what nearly all American kids take for granted: a basic education. We started filming in 2002, watching as kids first entered school in Afghanistan, Benin, Brazil, India, Japan, Kenya and Romania, many despite great odds. Several years later, in 2006, we returned to film an update — and now, three years later, we travel to check in on our young teenagers who are making the precarious transition to middle school. Among the highlights: in Afghanistan we reunite with 16-year-old Shugufa, who resolutely remains in school despite the Taliban’s recent acid attacks on young women her age. “If they continue attacking schools, our country won’t progress. Without an education you can’t get anywhere,” says Shufuga, whose own education was delayed when her family lived in a refugee camp in Pakistan during years when the Taliban ruled her country. We also visit the biggest slum in Nairobi, Kenya, where 15-year-old Joab’s mother has died and his father has abandoned the family. We watch as, incredibly, Joab manages to stay at the top of his class while also raising and feeding his two younger siblings. And in the blazing desert of Rajasthan, India, we encounter Neeraj, 15, only to learn that she has been unable to realize her dream of making it to 10th grade: since our last visit her night school has closed, and she now helps support her family by grazing the livestock full-time while her brothers continue their education.

These children’s stories put a human face on the shocking fact that more than 75 million children are currently out of school; of these, two thirds are girls. One in four children in developing countries does not complete five years of basic education, and there are nearly one billion illiterate adults — one-sixth of the world’s people. WIDE ANGLE plans to continue revisiting all the children, and their peers and families, through 2015, the year they should graduate — and, not coincidentally, the U.N.’s target date for achieving universal education, a Millennium Development goal endorsed by all 191 members of the United Nations.

While each child in Time for School 3 has a unique story, taken together their lives tell an epic tale, shedding light on one of the most urgent and under-reported stories of our time.

AFGHANISTAN

Central Asia Institute
Promotes and supports community-based education, especially for girls, in remote regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA)
The oldest organization of Afghan women struggling for peace, freedom, democracy and women’s rights; has run clandestine literacy programs and home-based schools for women, and hopes to start building “free and modern” schools – especially for women – in the future.

Mercy Corps
Global relief and development organization that helps people build secure, productive and just communities, including agricultural schools in Afghanistan that teach modern farm practices.

BENIN

FADEC (Femmes Actrices de Développement Communautaire/Women Actors in Community Development)
FADEC works with Nanavi, the Beninese student in Time for School, and other girls in her village, to improve access to education. Email: Fadecd@gmail.com.

Batonga Foundation
Created by Beninese singer Angelique Kidjo to support both secondary school and higher education for girls in Africa.

BRAZIL

Two Brothers Foundation
Provides educational opportunities in Rocinha, one of the biggest favelas in Rio de Janeirio, through local and international community service and cultural exchange.

Viva Rio
One of the major NGOs in Rio de Janeiro that is fighting the growing armed violence, social exclusion and poor education in Rio’s lowest income neighborhoods, like Rocinha.

KENYA

Sumerian Foundation
Works to eliminate long term poverty to some of the world’s most vulnerable children through the building of social enterprise and development programs. In the past, the Sumerian Foundation has provided resources to Ayany Primary school, the school that Joab attends in Time for School.

Children of Kibera
Started by a Kibera-born U.S. high school teacher to provide educational opportunities for orphans and vulnerable children in Nairobi’s largest slum, Kibera.

Kenya Krew
After watching Time for School, a group of students from Lawrence Middle School in Long Island, NY, wanted to do something to help Joab, the Kenyan boy in the film, and his classmates at Ayany Primary School in Nairobi. After conferring with Joab’s teacher about the school’s needs, they decided to raise money to build a library for the school. They have raised $8000 towards their goal of $15,000. To contribute to this project, send your donation to the attention of Karen Weiner (the Lawrence Middle School teacher who sponsors the organization) at:
Lawrence Middle School
195 Broadway
Lawrence, NY 11559.
Include the words “Kenya Krew” in the memo line.

INDIA

Barefoot College
Operating on the principle that “solutions to rural problem lie within the community,” the organization seeks to improve, girls’ education, health & sanitation, rural unemployment, and environmental issues.

Pratham
Established in 1994 to provide education to the children in the slums of Mumbai city, Pratham now reaches millions of children living both in rural and urban areas, providing pre-school education, reading and literacy programs, vocational training, early childhood care, and urban learning centers.

SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA

Building Tomorrow
Building Tomorrow works with students in the U.S. to raise awareness and funds for the education of underserved children in sub-Saharan Africa.

Fifty percent of Dalit children drop out of primary school.

In the village of Dumbraveni, Romania, two schools stand side by side. One is for the general population, the other serves children with “special needs.” Ninety-seven percent of the students at the second school are Roma, a marginalized minority commonly known as Gypsies. “Roma children are placed in classes for children with mental disabilities although there is nothing wrong with them,” says Magda Matache, Executive Director of Romani CRISS, a leading Roma rights organization in Romania. “Segregated schools continue to exist and the quality of education that Roma students receive is very, very low.”

About 23 percent of Roma adults in Romania are illiterate.

Around the world, children from ethnic, racial and linguistic minorities are being left behind in the quest for universal education. The United Nations Millennium Development Goals, a set of targets for international development agreed to at the turn of the millennium, call for universal primary education by 2015. In the past decade, some progress has been made towards that goal — today, nearly 90 percent of children are enrolled in primary school, compared to 85 percent in 2000. But 75 million children are still out of school; of those, the majority are minorities. The U.N. doesn’t track progress based on racial or ethnic criteria, but a new report from Minority Rights Group International estimates that between 50 and 70 percent of out of school children are from minority and indigenous populations.

“You see the same thing happening whether it’s with Afro-Brazilians, indigenous people in Australia, among the Batwa in Central Africa, the Dalits in India…” says Maurice Bryan, who contributed the chapter on Latin America to the Minority Rights Group International report.

But without reaching minorities and indigenous people, the goal of universal primary education cannot be met. “It’s impossible,” says Bryan, pointing out the obvious. “Let’s say 30 percent of a population belongs to a minority, if you don’t reach that minority, you’ll never get past 70 percent.”

Take Brazil for example. About half of the population is of African descent. But Afro-Brazilians lag far behind Brazilians of European descent, averaging just 6.4 years of schooling. “So if you talk about the Millennium Goals,” Bryan says, “if you just reached the Afro Brazilians, you’d reach the goals.”

Or Romania. Most reports on the Millennium Development Goals don’t even bother to track progress in highly developed countries such as those in the European Union, which Romania joined in 2007. But Snjezana Bokulic, the Minority Rights Group International program officer for Europe, says that conditions for the Roma minority are “comparable to sub-Saharan Africa,” so, while European countries are likely to surpass most of the goals, “a segment of the population will be left out.” As for the goal of universal primary education, only 31 percent of Roma in Romania complete primary school, and Roma comprise between 2 and 10 percent of the population (depending on who’s counting), so the goal is unlikely to be met. “It’s an issue of mathematics,” says Bokulic.

The Millennium Development Goals include a specific provision calling for an end to gender disparity at all levels of education, but there is no similar targeting of disparity based on racial or ethnic difference. Bokulic calls this a “glaring omission.”

Bryan says that no one realized it at the time, but looking back, he agrees that this issue should have been included. “People didn’t used to think that you should pay special attention to women,” he says, “but once they realized that it was necessary, there has been progress on the gender gap. Now the racial gap is the new kid on the block.”

But Bokulic isn’t optimistic about the chances of achieving educational parity for minorities, even if there were a Millennium Development Goal targeting the issue. “Discrimination is entrenched and racism is very difficult to tackle,” she says. “Words are not enough.”

Manjula Pradeep of the Navsarjan Trust Foundation in India agrees. “It’s more on paper,” she says, “but in terms of implementation, the goals aren’t so effective.”

Pradeep says that in order to keep up the appearance of providing primary education, some children are kept in school until the seventh grade, whether or not they can read and write.

While India’s enrollment rate for primary school has reached nearly 90 percent, only about 50 percent go on to secondary school. Of those out of school, 41 percent are Dalits, or members of the lowest caste.

Just last month, India passed a new Right to Education Bill, which guarantees free and compulsory education to children ages 6-14. But Pradeep doubts that this will help keep Dalit children in school. “Teachers ask the children in the lower castes to sit at the back of the room so the other children aren’t defiled by them. They are even told that they can’t drink from the same water fountain,” she says. “They are abused with filthy words, so they drop out.”

Still, many advocates for global education say that attention is finally being paid to the issue of racial and ethnic disparity.

“Governments have begun to see that it’s to their advantage to educate all their people,’ says Steve Moseley, President of the Academy for Education Development, a U.S.-based nonprofit.

“It didn’t come up when they were laying out the Millennium Goals,” says Bryan,” “but once you had the goals, you had the question of why they were not reaching everybody, and then you had the question ‘well, who is everybody.’ So the Millennium Goals may have been responsible for this whole discussion coming to the fore.”

In 2003, the Romanian government got together with the U.N. to set goals for the country that go beyond the standard Millennium Goals – one target is to increase the literacy rate of the Roma population. “The Ministry of Education is finally dealing with this issue,” says Matache, “I think for sure that the participation of Roma will increase by 2015.”

“Brazil is doing far more than anyone else,” says Bryan. “One of the big things is affirmative action; that’s what’s happening in Brazil, and now Colombia is beginning to try it as well.”

According to Bryan, the new Minority Rights Group International report is the first ever to look globally at the issue of education for minority populations. He says this can serve as a baseline from which to measure future progress.

And Moseley believes that that progress is possible. “Even for those facing the greatest disadvantages – poverty, gender discrimination, racial discrimination — it is possible,” he says. “Because I’ve seen tremendous progress, I know it’s going to be possible. Maybe not by 2015, but it’s possible.”

Just as important as the growing library are the friendships that have sprung up between students in two very different parts of the world. Teachers from the two schools matched up sets of pen pals, and the kids have been writing back and forth since 2007.

When producer Frederick Rendina returned to Kenya in 2008 to film Time for School 3, he brought video messages from the Lawrence Middle School students to their pen pals at Ayany Primary. Click below to watch their messages and to see the responses from the Kenyan kids.

AARON BROWN:
If people only knew your family history, you would almost be the poster child of the girl from Africa who never gets educated. You’re the seventh of nine children in a poor country. So, how exactly did you become you?

ANGELIQUE KIDJO:
I become me because of my parents. It started with my mom and dad. Both of them were educated. And when they married, they vowed that they’re gonna send all their kids to school, because it’s the best investment ever – for our future. They always say to us, “The choice you made is your choice, because it’s your life. We as the parents, we all are gonna be as a steady wall on which you can lean on any time. We can’t make the choices for you. Make the right choice — we can help you there.”

So, my father has been the only one really with a salary every month, because he was the only one working. My mom was the housewife. And how he managed to send ten kids to school is something that I’m still trying to figure out today, in that poor country. Not only paying the school tuition, but the uniform to boot. And managed to have a teacher for all – to do our homework when we come back home.

So, that’s why I become who I am today. Because since I was a child I was brought up with the idea that if you are educated, you can do whatever you want. They give me the strength of believing me and myself. My father and my mother always used to tell us, “You are one among the world or you are the world. It depends how you position yourself. A human being is not a matter of color. Do not blame your failure or your success on your skin color. That is not a good excuse in this house.” So, they taught at my early age to be open to the world – not to see the world just in my house.

AARON BROWN:
One of the things you said just now, and one of the impediments to educating children in developing countries, is even if the school itself is free, the uniform costs money –

ANGELIQUE KIDJO:
The book.

AARON BROWN:
The books cost money. So, governments can promise – and do – free public education, but it turns out, it’s not free at all.

ANGELIQUE KIDJO:
Uh-huh.

AARON BROWN:
And then there is the other problem, which, of course, is if the child is in school all day, the child isn’t at home.

ANGELIQUE KIDJO:
Helping.

AARON BROWN:
Yeah.

ANGELIQUE KIDJO:
(UNINTEL PHRASE). Especially when it comes to girls. I was in Ethiopia doing– some work with UNICEF on gender inequality, workplace and schools, and we had a panel of discussion. And as we were ready to discuss with many different people, moderators male and female, a young girl came in from Sudan. It was still the war in Sudan, and she was from the minority that was really [being] attacked there.

She was — her skin was dark. Then we start talking – being very intellectual – and then she just quietly raised her hand and said, “I just have to make a point clear here. Before we start talking about gender inequality, we have to talk about the status of a girl in a family. Because when you are a girl and you are born in Africa, you have no identity. You are the child of your father, more than the child of your mother. And your father have the right to decide if you are able to dream, to decide your own life, or if you’re gonna be married very early. Before we start talking about gender inequality, that’s what is the foundation of what we have to talk about.”

And it’s true. Because the early marriage is decided most of the time by the father. And the father brought that to the mother. And the mother have no say, because the mother is not educated most of the time. So, here I am in a family where my father has stood up and said, “My three girls will go to school. And no one will come to this house and tell me what I have to do.”

AARON BROWN:
Do you know where your father came to that notion that not only will his boys be educated, but that his girls will be educated?

ANGELIQUE KIDJO:
I think he get that from his mother. Because my grandmother become a widow when she was 35 years old. She became a widow. The mother of my mother, too – both of them, pretty much the identical destiny. At that time, when you become a widow, you marry the brother of your husband or somebody from the family, which my grandmother refused to do. She refused to do that. And on top of that, you have the church really involved in the family life. When you’re a widow and you’re wife of the man, you are not allowed to marry outside of the house. So, she decided she was gonna go to see the Pope, in Rome. She was one of the [few] women in Benin at that time to have a French Passport, because Benin had been colonized by the French. So, she went to Rome and asked to see the Pope at the Vatican, which she succeeded in doing. How she did it, she didn’t tell me the details.

And the Pope say, “Okay, it’s whatever you want to do – go do it.” So, she came back. What did she do? She took the fabric – African fabric that we have – from home trading to the market, and called the women. And she called them together, saying, “Let’s do this.” Because, she said, “I want to make a living to send my kids to school. I don’t want to prostitute and I don’t want to be passed on as the merchandise to another man. I’m a human being with feelings. And I can think for myself. Thank you.”

So, my father have that from his mother. And his mother was fiscally fighting for him to go to school. She sacrificed so much for her only son to go to school. He went first to Daka, in a city where the Fon, the people that work for the government are, and then he came to Paris. And he studied there. And when he came, he was among the first intellectuals, before colonization finished. And he start workin’ under the French Government at a post office.

AARON BROWN:
In no sense, honestly, are you an average Beninian.

ANGELIQUE KIDJO:
Yes, I am.

AARON BROWN:
No, you’re not. You’re not. And you’re not for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that your father saw, literally, the world.

ANGELIQUE KIDJO:
Absolutely.

AARON BROWN:
And that alone made you different. Whether it made you destined for something, I have no idea. But it certainly made you different.

ANGELIQUE KIDJO:
It does. I always say that without my family, I won’t be here. And my mom and dad, they said, “You are our family. You are all we have. You have to go to school.” Because my mom is a single kid. And my father become a single kid, when he lost his sister. So, therefore, all the world was only around us. “How are we gonna arrange for you guys to become whoever you want to be?”

And my father said, “Simple. You want to sing you go to school, you get an education. You do not sing without going to school. God forbid something happen, you can find a job. And it is the same rule for boys and girls equally. You say to me you don’t want to go to school, because you can’t get it. You want to do something else. Tell me what it is. Well, you’re not gonna sit in my house not going to school and expecting me to feed you. You’ve gotta have a job. If you want to go to school, you want to learn tailoring, I will send you to that. You need to have a job.”

And now, as I’m sitting here talking about this, I realize the sacrifice it took my parents, to put us in that position. Pressure was not there at all. At a very early age, I learned to deal with my time. My father said, “This is the rule in the house. Lunch is going to have to be at lunchtime. Dinner time, you have to be there. What you do in between, I don’t want to know. (LAUGH) But if you’re not there for those two things for us to catch up and talk about what’s going on, then we have a problem.”

And he made another rule. He said, “Our house is an open place of for speech, free speech. There will never be a taboo subject in this house. If there’s any problem, we need to hear it from you. Drugs we can talk about. Sex we can talk about. Anything out there, we need to hear from you, because we don’t want people to put wrong ideas in your head. We don’t have the answer, believe us, but we’re gonna find the answer for you. But please talk to us.”

So, today, I don’t take any lightly anymore. That’s what I’m trying to pass on to my daughter. Because it’s such a richness that my parents – I mean, I feel blessed. I feel small and I feel empowered at the same time. Wherever I go, I go confident. Because I know something happens to me in the world. If money is down under the feet of a table, they’ll go find it and come and get me.

My family, we are all one. Because that’s how we have been raised. And one of the concerns of my father, before he passed away, was to tell me, “Do not be afraid. Do not be scared. My body might not be here, but I’ll always be with you. Stay one family. Do not let anger get in between you. Because if you start getting angry, people will find the gap they need to explode you. Do not give into anger. Always talk.”

AARON BROWN:
I rest my case, by the way, that you are not an average Beninian. But we’ll move on. I want to disagree with something you said – or I’ve read that you’ve said, and I assume it’s true. You were talking about education, the importance of education, and you said – “Educated parents appreciate more the value of education.” And I thought about that. And I remembered a farmer that I met at the beginning of this summer who had gone to maybe two years of school. I asked him about what he wanted for his children. He had no education to speak of, and he said, “No matter what I have to do, I want them to have a life better than mine, easier than mine. And the only way they can have that is to have what I do not have.”

ANGELIQUE KIDJO:
Education.

AARON BROWN:
Education. So, I’m not so sure that there is this difference between the parent who is educated and the parent who isn’t in how they value the education.

ANGELIQUE KIDJO:
There are differences. I’ll tell you what the differences are. First, if they’re educated, they understand the long education cycle. Because they know that more educated you are, more chances you are to change you – to really make a big change in your life and other people’s life. The parents that are not educated, they are realizing, late in their life, that if they have been educated, their life would be better. Therefore, they want a better life for their kids.

Are they willing to sacrifice all the way up to university? Not many of them will do that, because it’s a long process. I will come back to Benin, for example. Or take the example of Nanavi in the Wide Angle report. When I first saw Nanavi in 2003 and the father was still there, I was so happy. I’m like, “That is one thing that can help you go to university.” Why? Because Nanavi is not growing up in city. She’s growing up in a little village. When you go to villages, the society is based differently. Everyone is much more closer to one another, and there are people that might not be from your family, but they have a say in your family, because they are important for the community. Like the voodoo priest, in our village.

Nanavi, by having her father on her side, have more chance to finish high school. But the father was not educated. But because he saw what education could have done to him, he will go to that extent. But that doesn’t mean that the community around Nanavi will be willing to sacrifice everything for Nanavi to go to university. That’s what I’m afraid of. And I’m at the same time also hopeful.

AARON BROWN:
Yeah, I don’t think I disagree with that. But I guess I’ve come to a certain certainty in my life that the difference between parents is actually very small from one society to another society — from the poor to the rich. We all, as parents, want for our kids—

ANGELIQUE KIDJO:
The best.

AARON BROWN:
Or better. Better than what we had. And if you had nothing, and many people in African villages have something very close to nothing – even if they can’t express it as eloquently as you can, they get that the ticket out is to go to a schoolhouse.

ANGELIQUE KIDJO:
Yeah, but it’s not long ago that that has to have been like that.

AARON BROWN:
Yeah.

ANGELIQUE KIDJO:
Because I grow up in Benin. When I was going to school, I’ve had friends that come from villages before parents. And some of them drop out of school, because first of all, they have to leave the family – to come miles away to go to school. And when you are sent with family, friend or whoever to stay in a city to go to school, or just to go to high school, there’s a lot of pressure on the family, to pay for this or to pay for that.

And at the same time, there’s one thing that we don’t take into account, that we don’t think about most of the time – that when people are poor, as they are poor in villages, their pride is what they cherish the most. And if that sacrifice has to touch their pride, they will cut it off. That’s just simple the way it is, because they can’t lose their pride.

And sometime, some of them – if they have one person in the family that is educated, that person in the family that is educated will go and be the advocate and say, “Your pride versus the education of the child, how do you weigh it? How do you do it?” Because that person is part of the community. It’s not perceived as interfering in the family. And they listen better. That’s why I always say that somebody that’s educated is an asset more than anything else in any kind of setting in Africa for a child to go and stay in school.

Let’s come back to girl’s education. If my mother was not educated, you think that my mother was educating? You think he cares about vaccination? It’s not his business. He won’t take care of it. He will think about it, but he won’t do it. But because my mom was educated, I have been one of the rare kids in school that have more vaccination than anybody else. (LAUGH) It gives me the nickname of white kid, because I have all vaccination. I mean, every time summer was over, my mom would make sure that I’ve done all the vaccinations, all the tests have been done, and I’m starting school fine.

Because if you sick, you miss one week or two week, you have to catch up later on. My father supported it, would pay for the vaccination if he had to pay it. But most of the time, it was UNICEF truck that would come around. And my mom had that little paper. I had that paper like – as soon as I saw that truck, I was like [screaming] “The truck is coming.” She would write everything down. And then you knew that you were in for another shot.

AARON BROWN:
And you believe that had she not had the education she had, she wouldn’t have known to do the things like that?

ANGELIQUE KIDJO:
Absolutely. She can’t even write down the date of the first shot.

AARON BROWN:
Okay. Which leads to this question. Is the value of education – girls or boys, doesn’t really matter – that they learn science and learn history and learn geography and whatever? Or is the value something else? That they learn something about – that they become more confident? That they have a greater sense of pride in themselves? Which is the value or the greater value?

ANGELIQUE KIDJO:
They learn. Both of them are complementary. You have to learn to know science, geography, history – your whole own history and the world history. Because what education does, it expose you, for you to see the world differently, outside of your little box. The value that your family give you compliments that. I am proud of who I am, why? Because my mom and dad has always told me, “You are not inferior or superior to no one.”

AARON BROWN:
Right.

ANGELIQUE KIDJO:
That education is not in school that you have it. Your parents have to give you that. Or your surrounding community. So, when you go to school and you start learning. Because when I was in school and we start learning the history of the First World War, the Second World War, I had no idea those war happened. Because I was not born.

And then I start reading the fact, and I’m like saying to myself, “Was it necessary? All those deaths?” That was my first question to my history teacher. Such as the First World War. And he said to me, “I don’t know. History will – time will tell if it was necessary or not. But that is the fact that I have to give you. That that war had happened.” Why do you learn that? For that not to happen anymore. I’m afraid of another third world war. Because there are so many crazy people out there that doesn’t value life as much as I do.

So, if you can talk to those people, from what you have learned in your history class, you teach people every time. Before you talk to a leader, you have to be able to talk to somebody in your village that is violent, that always like to fight. You have that fact. It’s not the war, but violence leads to actions. If you have to hit somebody – if your only way of responding to a conflict is to fight – there’s something wrong in that.

AARON BROWN:
I want to bring you back to where we were for a second. The child in the village in rural Mozambique, girl or boy, for whatever reason, gets to go to school. Let’s just say they finish school, and they do well in school. In the course of their lives, is what matters there that they understand the elements? They know the elements in science or something? Or that every time they look in the mirror they see someone who accomplished something?

ANGELIQUE KIDJO:
Uh-huh.

AARON BROWN:
Is that the greater value?

ANGELIQUE KIDJO:
Yeah, it is. If you combine both of them, absolutely.

AARON BROWN:
Yeah.

ANGELIQUE KIDJO:
Because you have learned something that gives you greater pride in who you are. And that is important. You go to school. You learn. And you’re not proud of yourself. You cannot use that knowledge from school in your own life. When you look at yourself in the mirror, you see a double face. It’s difficult. There’s a book that has been written by a Senegalese writer, called L’Aventure Ambigue, and the writer’s name is Cheik Hamidou Kane.

And it was all the question about the chronicles – the chronic school, and the school where you learn math and science. How do you combine both? When you come out of those two, and you want to become minister or teacher, whatever you decide to be in your country, how do you combine those two things? That’s why it’s called the Ambiguous Adventure. And the whole quest of a human being is that. How do you combine your value, the education you receive from your family, the education you receive in school, and this speedy world in which we are living?

If you don’t go to school and learn about science, relativity, history, geography, genetics, most of the time people will be talking you gonna be like, “Hello? What is he talking about?” You don’t have to know them deeply, like a scientist will do it. But at least you have an idea what we talking about. And then you can take that, what you learn, and put it in your life, or somebody else life. And you can say, “Oh, I remember this and that. So, this is what it was.” How can we, in the future, not make this happen?

There are a lot of deaths in Africa. For example, when it comes to child mortality, it brings back again, education. A mother that is educated, at least even a primary education, have a sense of hygiene, of sanitation. So many kids can be saved. Tetanus kills more and more than Malaria. Why? Because most of the women that give birth in rural area, to cut the umbilical cord, what do they have? The kitchen knife. That’s it. You don’t vaccinate it. That child will live a week. So, a woman that goes to school knows, even if she’s in pain, she’s gonna go, “Don’t put that – just take the knife like that. Just put it in the fire, do something. Remove the bacteria. Boil it. Whatever it is.”

AARON BROWN:
Right.

ANGELIQUE KIDJO:
So, education today in Africa is a matter of life or death, especially when it comes to women.

AARON BROWN:
Education, particularly to women, is life and death. That’s what you said. Now I’m not the smartest guy in the world and I know that. I get that. The prime ministers of all these countries know that. The parliaments or whatever, they all know that. And yet 75 million children do not go to school in the world. Tens of millions more struggle to stay in school. Why is that?

ANGELIQUE KIDJO:
Why is that? Because it is more interesting for the prime minister and leaders of all those countries to just that time will take care of it or somebody else will come and take care of it. It’s– that was something that I always say. Did the politicians in Africa ever think about what remains their people? Do they have a sense of their population? They drive by in the fancy cars, but do they see their people? They can change only if they start viewing them as assets. So far they haven’t done that.

AARON BROWN:
So we chip away all of the talk about, you know, the kids are needed on the farm or the grocer needed to work in the house – you chip all away that and what you’re left with is that smart, educated people, people who are in charge, don’t really care that much.

ANGELIQUE KIDJO:
Because they wanna keep the power. Power kills. And power have been killing more human beings in the history of humanity than anything else go back to Roman Empire. What was all those war about? Power. So why are we still in these?

AARON BROWN:
So we keep these children not stupid, but uneducated.

ANGELIQUE KIDJO:
Uneducated.

AARON BROWN:
So that we can be in power?

ANGELIQUE KIDJO:
Absolutely. Because more people educated you are, more you are hold accountable to what you do.

AARON BROWN:
Okay. Which brings me to this. If you ask anyone, almost anyone on the planet, you know, do you love kids? They go, “Yeah. I love kids.” “Do you value kids?” “Oh yeah.” “Are kids the future?” “Oh yeah.”

ANGELIQUE KIDJO:
Yeah.

AARON BROWN:
“We really love kids.” I don’t believe that. ‘Cause if you look, what you see are – children, girls trafficked.

ANGELIQUE KIDJO:
Right.

AARON BROWN:
Children, boys are kidnapped and used in wars. That doesn’t sound very loving to me.

ANGELIQUE KIDJO:
No.

AARON BROWN:
So I wonder if at the end of the day, you really think we love our children?

ANGELIQUE KIDJO:
Me, I do. But I don’t know for politicians. Politicians are a little bit schizophrenic, I have to say. They say what they what you want to hear when they want you to work for them. But the problem in Africa is even greater than that. We take it back, a big step back. We take it back to the history of the continent. We started with slavery. Slavery started with people that were well educated, well organized, that knew what they were doing. No one can tell me that the slaver didn’t know that they were enslaving other human beings.

And men and women that could have changed the face of my continent have been taken away to build other people’s wealth. Nothing has been done to restore the image and the confidence and the pride of the black people in the world ever. One. That’s the first one.

Second problem. Colonization. We thought colonization were over when we enter the era. The colonizers just moved themselves, but colonization never end ’til today. Apart from South Africa, none of the African countries have been given a chance to be self governing, self sufficient, making mistakes and standing up back on their feet and do it. They have always been under the supervision of the country that colonized them.

None of the countries in Africa actually where I come from have monetary system. How can you talk about economy if your money is linked to a money miles away out of your reality. And then when you started to devalue that money, you can’t bring the kids to school anymore. Second problem.

Now we come to the leaders of Africa. Right after the era of indifference all the African leaders that stood up and say, “We are indifferent, which means we can put our kids to school. We become partner of yours 50/50. We are not only a supervision anymore,” have been killed. Okay?

So you set a sequence of events, send the message clearly lf you wanna be in the way of the interest of the rich country, you gonna be removed. By any means necessary. So the one that having educated, they keep the same pattern. The same people that were educated to be put in place after colonization were over pass on that education to continue keeping the power.

Well, that only when we went down to the people that needed to be educated to become part of the economy of the country. So today what are we facing? We’re talking about education. Is it a lot of money to educate everybody? When I was going to school in Benin the system was a little bit different – before the communist regime arrived and they wiped out all the good education system we had in place.

Since then no politicians that came to power in Benin have worked to restore that. Why? I mean we can talk about education here. I can leave my country in a colorful moment. Let’s compare them to America. For me, coming from a poor country from Africa I cannot understand when somebody tell me there are illiterate people in America. I said, “Excuse me? That is impossible.”

This is the richest country in the world. The biggest in the world. How can you tell me coming from a poor country that in America some children can’t go to school? Naw. When I arrive in America that was my reaction – American, you just joking.

Yet I come to realize that sometimes people would come to me and asking me where is the 42nd Street? And you are right only the person can’t read it. So is it okay in America for people to be illiterate? And not okay in Africa? Because the same politician, they are the same breed everywhere.

When you have the power you don’t want your people that vote for you to question too much what you do. So therefore in Africa the one that I left behind are the women. Because of the society, the way it’s been built before. Women stay at home.

AARON BROWN:
Right.

ANGELIQUE KIDJO:
And now we are talking about education. It’s a completely different thing. When I start the campaign of UNICEF for the millennium development goals and I started doing PSAs for TV, for radio, to send kids to school – at least primary schools – I didn’t know at that time the impact that I was having on my continent because of my family.

Because now suddenly the mothers and the fathers that love my music and love what I do put education with my face. It’s okay to send my girl to school if one of them become Angelique Kidjo. All becomes next president of this country. Fine. We haven’t had in Africa for so many, many, many, many years strong female role models in politics.

AARON BROWN:
I don’t disagree with that at all. But this isn’t just Africa. Children are abused –

ANGELIQUE KIDJO:
Everywhere.

AARON BROWN:
And denied across Asia – in Thailand, families in villages sell their girls, their little girls, 12-year-old girls, into prostitution. In Indonesia there are terrible – of course, Africa’s always the best example – too frequently the worst situation. But is that the only example? And so I’ve found myself pondering this question. Do we really love our children the way we say we love our children, or is that just something we say because who would say they don’t love children? No one.

ANGELIQUE KIDJO:
Some do really love the kids and they would give everything for the children. We cannot generalize that we do not love our children. But one thing that is really – I would say the danger, the greater danger, for the future of our children, is poverty in the world.

AARON BROWN:
Sure.

ANGELIQUE KIDJO:
If we are able to reduce – I’m not saying eradicate poverty; that’s gonna be very difficult – if we are able to reduce poverty to 50 percent of the population of this planet we will then see increasing number of people going to school. Which gonna change the economy.

You have to see what’s going on. Let’s take the economical crisis here. The people that lost a little bit of money, but they are not that much in need. Absolutely not. Who is? The poor people that needs every cent they can save to send the kids to school?

Those who know that education is the best investment of the children. They are the ones struggling. Why? Because the one that have the biggest part in the hand, they’re the minority in the world, and are not willing to share. So how do we make them share? That I don’t know.

AARON BROWN:
I wanna go back to something you just said. You talked about how your fame, your celebrity, gets people to think in Africa. You’re a daughter of Africa. You are famous in Africa. They hold you in great pride – with great pride in Africa. And you get all that. Is that ever a burden?

ANGELIQUE KIDJO:
It is a responsibility. It is not a burden.

AARON BROWN:
Never feel overwhelmed by all those little girls who look at you and say, “If I could only go to school I could be like her.”

ANGELIQUE KIDJO:
I can’t allow myself to be overwhelmed because if I am I won’t be able to help that girl. Believe me, sometime it’s tough. Sometime I cry my eyes off. And then in that moment I’m like, “God help me. How much pain can I take?”

Yet, the kids turn around and give me the strength, the love that I need to go out there and fight for them. I cannot leave those kids unheard. I cannot let them – the dream never become true. Especially when a girl comes to me and say, “This is what might be. Forgive me.”

Her sister – there were two sisters. They lost their father and the mother and there were only two left. And both of them were HIV positive. The older sister died and she was still in that school. The only thing that she had from her sister is a painting that she painted. With a tear coming out of her face, she said, “Enough of this from HIV/AIDS. Enough is enough.” And she said to me – she never knew me – “I want you to have this.” And I break in tears. Because those kids, no matter what, they still have faith in us all. It’s not because we’re black or because we’re white. Because they see that if they speak to our heart our life – their life will be different.

And so people take advantage of that. We’re not all the same. I’m not saying that we are all angels here because human nature is not only goodness. I know that. I’ve experienced that. But at least everything I can do in my power with this help of others that can change anyone’s life in this world, starting in my continent all the way down to America, I will do. I can’t sit.

If somebody’s life in is danger, a child or an adult, and I have the possibility to stop it, I can’t sit back and watch. I don’t care if by doing that, by trying to save somebody’s else life, I lost mine, because a life of a human being is above it all for me. Is above money. Is above power. And we cannot – it’s not discussable. It’s not changeable. It’s what we are. It’s the essence of humanity. We lose that and we lose everything.

AARON BROWN:
I just wanna ask a couple more things if I may. It’s interesting to me that you actually on the one hand, you’re pretty cynical.

ANGELIQUE KIDJO:
Uh-huh.

AARON BROWN:
And on the other hand, you’re quite an idealist. I mean you’re an –

ANGELIQUE KIDJO:
Yeah, I am.

AARON BROWN:
– interesting combination of both. (LAUGHTER) Let me suggest to you that if we really wanted to – if we really cared, all of us – I submit we would educate those children, every single one of them. Okay? We would somehow figure out how to do it. We’d get ‘em in a uniform, get ‘em a history book, get ‘em a schoolhouse, find ‘em a teacher. I don’t care if they live in Benin or in Biloxi, Mississippi, we would educate them if we really cared. I’m not sure we really care that much.

ANGELIQUE KIDJO:
We care but we are trapped in our lifestyle. That’s just the plain choice. You say I was idealistic, but I’m realistic too. That might make me cynical, but you have to know what you are against or to go around it and find other solutions. We are living in a world where more and more our brain is not in demand that much anymore. Everything is brought to you in an easie way in the developed world. You have computer. You wanna know something, you go on Google and then you do it and then you find it. The food we eat, we got no power over it. Somebody decide to put something out there that taste good and kill people, who can fight against that? You can’t. Why? Because, again, our lifestyle, we want everything that is up. Like cell phones. We know now that without customs that mineral– and that material– we can have video games or cell phones.

And we know that there’s a place in the world where customs is at the heart of the war. Where women are raped with guns, without guns and in every horrible way we can think about. But does that mean that we don’t want a cell phone? Are we ready to give away our cell phone? Are we willing to give away our video games? We are not willing to. Even if we want to. Even if we care for our children. This lifestyle that we have created, and we call it the lifestyle of the civilized people, it is our jail.

AARON BROWN:
But then I wonder this: If we don’t really, in our hearts as a world – whatever exactly that means – If we don’t really care about these kids and whether they get educated, aren’t you sellin’ ‘em a bill of goods? ‘Cause you go out there and you go village to village, town to town, place to place. And you say to these children, “You can be anything. You can get an education. Don’t give up. Stay in school. You’ll be –”

ANGELIQUE KIDJO:
Oh no.

AARON BROWN:
– “powerful,” blah, blah, blah, blah. But we don’t care enough to do it. And so you are raising –

ANGELIQUE KIDJO:
I care.

AARON BROWN:
You care. But you are raising a false hope.

ANGELIQUE KIDJO:
No way. I will follow that hope down because I know – I was telling you, when you were talking about the fact that we don’t care for our children, that we can’t generalize because people do care. And people that care, I reach out to them and they help me.

I believe more. I believe we can make, we can do. I believe in you, me and regular people to devote their time, their talent and their money to that cause. Because if you start going to the politicians, we’re not gonna be able to do it. At one point I have to go to them, but we have to start from this crutch, something in bringing to half labor and say, “This is what we have achieved.”

And this has a lot of attention in the world. So if they don’t wanna help us, put it up there. Then we’re gonna expose you. The politicians’ egos are greater than anything else in the world. They will not have the name next to it, so why don’t you use them? That’s how you go around this.

And people care. I refuse to believe that people do not care. People do care. And I can’t tell you why I say that. Many people constantly during my concerts say, “Angelique we wanna help. What do we do?” How can we do this? Do we have enough information out there for people to know what to do?

A lady come to me and said, “I can take a year off as a nurse and go to Malawi,” because I was talking about the Malawian homes, because they have villages that take care of women that are HIV positive, and that are delivering baby – how the delivery is done for the child not to be infected affected by HIV/AIDS. And that lady come to me and say, “I will do it.” Hey, I put in call to UNICEF leadership. Because I can. If all of us use our resources I believe in the link between human beings above it all. Because when you link people together, before money comes to play, you see magic happening.

AARON BROWN:
But you know, you go to a little village in Ethiopia or Mozambique or wherever, and you see 100 or 1,000 children and you do your pitch. And maybe one of ‘em, two of ‘em, five of ‘em it works on. And maybe five fathers say, “Yeah, I haven’t thought of that. I’m gonna send my daughter to school too. That’s a good thing.” And the rest of ‘em don’t. And you know that’s true. How do you do it then?

ANGELIQUE KIDJO:
How do you do it?

AARON BROWN:
No, how do you do it?

ANGELIQUE KIDJO:
How do I do it? I take what I have. I take what I can get. It’s better than –

AARON BROWN:
And if it’s five, it’s five.

ANGELIQUE KIDJO:
It’s better five than none. Why should I sacrifice the five because I want all the 1,000 to go? Those five might be my best asset to prove to that village. Because you have to prove – “Look at those five kids.” We can duplicate it. We can do more of that.

Most of the time we talk and there’s no action. People wanna see proof of it. And what is stronger than proof? What is stronger than any, “Oh, you take that child from that family, oh, she is going to France. Oh, he is going to America. He got a scholarship. He’s gonna become a doctor. I want the same for my kid.”

I count on that. I’ve got to believe that. Although if you lose hope in people and you just said, “It’s too overwhelming,” for me, it’s cowardice. Nothing is easy in this world. Nothing comes easy to nobody. So therefore if it’s one child that I can save at the time, I’m doin’ it.

AARON BROWN:
You know what the best part of my life is? I get to meet people like you. (LAUGHTER)

ANGELIQUE KIDJO:
Thank you so much.

AARON BROWN:
Thank you.

ANGELIQUE KIDJO:
You’re welcome.

AARON BROWN:
Really nice to meet you.

ANGELIQUE KIDJO:
Thanks. Thank you.

* * *

AARON BROWN:
You’re from Benin. You don’t live there, but it is a part of your soul. You go back there, you see children there who are not in school who should be. But who can’t –

ANGELIQUE KIDJO:
Go to school.

AARON BROWN:
– go to school. And you know because you lived it, that no matter what you do, how many speeches you give, how many concerts you perform in Benin, here, there or anywhere, most of those kids in your lifetime will not go to school. Why do you keep goin’ back?

ANGELIQUE KIDJO:
Hope. I’m a hopeful person. I’m an optimistic person. Just because the history of my life. I come from a poor family, and look what I have achieved. My father was the only one with a salary. When it comes to money, there have been days where we didn’t have food on the table. But education was always there.

I cannot give up. You know, we are not all equal in front of life. You can give the same opportunity to twins. That’s the closest you can have from the same father and mother. They you are never going to choose the same thing. They’re never gonna come exactly the same because that’s just human nature. We are all different but at the same time our difference is our richness.

I crave for difference. Every time I go to a different country and I stand on the stage and before me I see black, yellow, red, Indian, whatever people is out there, I thank God to give me the power of being able to touch people’s souls beyond our differences – beyond the different languages that we speak.

And it is the same thing for me when it comes to education because I know those girls and those boys come to me. Sometimes I’m not even doing a concert. I am in Benin and I am sitting down and a young girl came to me because that year there was no school because the teachers were on strike. And the girl comes to me and says, “Angelique, please, I wanna become a neurophysician. I wanna go to school.”

AARON BROWN:
Okay.

ANGELIQUE KIDJO:
“Can you help? Can you talk to the government.” Now I went on TV and made an interview and say, “How can you pay teachers that are on strike? The kids are on the street. They wanna go to school. How can you do that? The next year there were no strike. I say, “Lets find a solution but don’t hijack the kids. They wanna go to school. Why don’t you send them to school?” Those kind of things I can do. Because hey, life is beautiful. Life is –

AARON BROWN:
Well, hey life is beautiful if you’re lucky. But for a lot of people in the world, life is not so beautiful.

ANGELIQUE KIDJO:
And you know what –

AARON BROWN:
And you know that. You –

ANGELIQUE KIDJO:
I know that.

AARON BROWN:
– see that all the time.

ANGELIQUE KIDJO:
But you know –

AARON BROWN:
And that’s the point – in many ways the point of these two films has been –

ANGELIQUE KIDJO:
These films. Yes.

AARON BROWN:
– that for far too many children on this planet, life is not beautiful at all.

ANGELIQUE KIDJO:
Because you don’t choose where you were born. Sometime you’re born in a really tough place. But it takes your determination to make it happen. Because –

AARON BROWN:
That’s –

ANGELIQUE KIDJO:
It is –

AARON BROWN:
That’s –

ANGELIQUE KIDJO:
You have to believe that.

AARON BROWN:
No, that’s not fair to –

ANGELIQUE KIDJO:
It is fair.

AARON BROWN:
No. Listen, that’s not fair to a seven-year-old girl in Benin, or anywhere else, to say, “If you just had more determination it would all work out great.”

ANGELIQUE KIDJO:
No. It’s not only determination. It takes –

AARON BROWN:
Thank you.

ANGELIQUE KIDJO:
– it takes school. If you are given the chance – like Lena, we have given a chance to go to school. And she’s determined because her father, before he died, asked her to complete school. That was her determination. It’s enough for her, to such an extent, to complete an education.

But she needs help from other people. In that movie she’s lucky because at least we’re talking about her. How many girls in Benin like none of these that you can’t show? So for me, what I would like to see happen with this film is to show it in Benin on the TV. Because here it touches only American people. But if Beninese people can see this movie it can change a lot of things, politically in the politics of education of the country. It can give us other girls saying, “Oh, I can go to school too.” We have to bring this tool to help not only organizations that work in education fields, but you have everybody in every level. So determination is important because that’s one thing that my parents have taught me. They say, “We can send you to school. It’s up to you if you wanna complete school. Or not.”

AARON BROWN:
Tell you what. I’ll bring the movie to Benin –

ANGELIQUE KIDJO:
All right.

AARON BROWN:
– if you come with me.

ANGELIQUE KIDJO:
I’ll go with you. I’ll go with you and what we can do – we can go there and have a panel of discussion on TV. Not only in French but English, because one of the things that I miss a lot of in Benin is that you have real people that have a say in education. How we can improve education in villages. In their community – that we don’t hear about.

We bring them with an interpreter and they will speak out what they see and how victims have none of the same food and other kids like Nanavi in Benin. Let’s do that and I’m 100 hundred percent with you. And you’ll see the result.

AARON BROWN:
Let me ask you one more thing. How long have you been married?

ANGELIQUE KIDJO:
Twenty-two years.

AARON BROWN:
Has your husband ever won an argument?

ANGELIQUE KIDJO:
Nope. (LAUGHTER)

AARON BROWN:
I don’t think so.

ANGELIQUE KIDJO:
Sometime he gets his point across because I give him – you have to give him –

AARON BROWN:
You just – you fake it, though. You don’t really believe him, do you?

ANGELIQUE KIDJO:
No, I believe him.

AARON BROWN:
Oh, okay.

ANGELIQUE KIDJO:
I mean, I’m lucky. I mean I have been the luckiest woman on Earth to find a perfect partner. Perfect, so called. Nobody’s perfect. But we have our down side and have our up side. The most important thing that we have in common is we are friends. And we talk about everything.

AARON BROWN:
But he apparently doesn’t need to win an argument. I do occasionally. Nice to see you. Thank you.

Three years ago, I was responsible for finding seven children in seven different countries whose stories highlighted something particular about education in their parts of the world — children whose families would let us film them, and who were charming and articulate. All of this was to be done long-distance — without ever leaving WNET’s New York offices. My associate producer and I would start with UNICEF or another NGO to establish contact with a school. From there, we’d speak to principals and teachers who would fill us in on some of the first-year students. Then we’d narrow it down to two or three candidates. Even though we might have a strong hunch about one particular child, it would rest with the field producer/camera person to make the final decision.

The field producers, most of whom I’d never met, were phenomenal. I sent them a myriad of interview questions, shot lists, and suggestions for scenes, and we spoke on the phone during filming. But ultimately I had to have absolute faith in their judgment, which I did. And in every case, it paid off beautifully.

This time around, the groundwork had been laid. We were following up with the same seven children. For six of the seven segments, I worked with the same field producers as last time. What was astonishing to me while producing “Back to School” was how much had transpired in the lives of our students in such a short time. Our two students in Africa had each lost a parent since we’d filmed them last, and Neeraj in India was hanging onto her already tenuous schooling by a thread. The gap between the children in the industrialized countries and those in the developing world seemed to be widening at an alarming pace. And yet in terms of potential — their curiosity, questions, dreams — they were all at the same starting gate.

Over the next five months we spun the material from three years ago into the new film. One of the highlights this time was having our students meet each other on camera. We were able to show them the segments we had filmed three years earlier and have them ask each other questions. In Benin and India, whole villages came out to see the film — and for some it was the first time they had seen a portrait of their community or what life is like in other parts of the world.

Frederick Rendina, Field Producer in Kenya, 2006

When I first met Joab, he was a quite shy boy of 10 — and looked much younger. His living conditions were very harsh, he had little food, and his father was struggling with alcohol abuse. Joab spoke very little English then, so our communication was through a translator or our Kenyan sound recordist. Then, the bright light in his life was his mother, Leah, who was full of energy and dreams for her son.

We were all devastated to learn of Leah’s death just a few months after filming the first segment of “Time for School,” and we were gravely concerned about what had become of Joab. Visiting Joab for the second installment, “Back to School,” was therefore a mixture of happiness and sorrow. I was thrilled that Joab had grown to a confident, and sometimes tough and combative, young man. I was glad that I could converse freely with him now in English and conduct interviews in English. And I was pleased we could joke around more easily because of that, and that we had established a degree of trust that allowed us to talk about the very painful things in his life. Throughout the filming, Joab bravely spoke to me about his mother and the stigma attached to her death. At times, some memories were so difficult that the camera had to be turned off.

Nonetheless, Joab is back in school and doing well, despite the continuing hardship of life in Kibera

Hervé Cohen, Field Producer in Benin and India, 2006

Benin - The first time I laid eyes on Nanavi three years ago, I liked her right away. She was bright eyed with a big warm smile, and I was also fascinated by her story

Nanavi lives in Koutagba, a Voodoo village a few hours away from Benin’s capital. She was the first of her generation to attend school, hence defying her destiny and village tradition of being relegated to a Voodoo convent, like most girls of her village.

There, education is a privilege traditionally bestowed only on boys. I was excited to film the first steps she took on her way to school, and I also remember the difficulties she had writing the number three. In spite of her timidity, we hit it off quite well and built a trusting relationship.

Upon my return three years later, I was pretty touched to see that she had not forgotten me. But while she still had that wonderful smile, I could see in her gaze that something was broken. The lives of Nanavi and her family had changed drastically within the last three years. Nanavi’s father had passed away a year prior, and the family was left in sheer poverty. The corn mill, which was their source of income, had broken down and with the father gone, they had no means to repair it. Nanavi, her mother and siblings were forced to leave the family farm and settle in a small hut in the village center. And so this shoot, compared to the one three years ago, was a bit more of a challenge. Nanavi was very emotional especially when it came to invoking the memories of her father. I later realized that she was the one closest to him. Before Nanavi’s father passed away, he made the mother promise that she would keep Nanavi in school no matter the circumstances — a promise the mother kept in spite of all her hardship, and one that Nanavi was more than happy to fulfill. Difficulties writing the number three were now a thing of the past. She loves school and is one the most motivated students in her class.

During our visit, the corn mill was repaired, and I was able to see it function before leaving the village. The last day, before heading back to the capital, the entire team received blessings from the Voodoo priest. I left Koutagba happy, knowing that Nanavi and I had renewed and strengthened our ties. I told her that I would like to return in three years to film her again. She said she would be waiting.

India – The India segment of our show this year was the most challenging — and quite an adventure! Neeraj, who had been filmed three years prior by Oren Rudavsky, had to leave night school to go on the road herding the family’s cattle. Our mission was to track her down. Neeraj’s parents, though very cooperative, were not of much help in our search; they had no way of keeping track of their daughter on a grazing trip that could take her and other herding families hundreds of miles away from home.

But before embarking on my search for Neeraj, I attended a ceremony hosted by Neeraj’s mother and the other mothers of the village — a ceremony held at the crack of dawn on the morning after my arrival in Rajasthan. Through the ceremony, the mothers were asking the Goddess Sheetla to protect their children against smallpox. Although the disease has been eradicated, this tradition is still perpetuated.

The next day, while I was interviewing the parents, they received a phone call from an uncle, who informed them of Neeraj’s whereabouts a few hours’ drive from her home village. So off we went. We knew it was not going to be easy to find Neeraj in the vast region of Rajasthan, and alas, by the time we got to the place Neeraj was expected to be, she was already gone. No one could tell us in which direction she had headed.

After several other attempts, we settled for filming “around” Neeraj’s life: her parents, sister, friends, and even her school. Luckily for us, three months after our first visit, we learned that Neeraj was once again back home and back in her night school. Needless to say, it was impossible to let this opportunity pass us by. I was more than eager to pursue the second part of the adventure and finally meet Neeraj. No matter how compelling those images of her absence may have been, there was no one better to evoke Neeraj’s experience than Neeraj herself.

When I did finally meet Neeraj, I was quite impressed by her; she had grown and matured quite a bit since the young woman I saw portrayed in WIDE ANGLE’s last show. She was much more at ease, confident, and quite vociferous about her determination for a different life than her parents — one that only a good education could help provide. Her desire was to go to day school like most of the boys in order to get, in her own words, “a real job” such as a civil servant in the military or the police force. Though in the meantime she has to settle for night school, like most girls and the less fortunate of her village, and though she must carry on with her daily load of house chores, Neeraj is driven by her dreams of a better life. We all hope she will one day bring her dreams to fruition.

Alexandre Lima, Field Producer in Brazil, 2006

When I started scouting for “Back To School,” I called up Leslie, the mother of our main character, Jefferson and arranged to go over to her place to have some coffee and talk about the shoot. Between this first afternoon in her house and the day we started shooting, I spent about two months visiting the community where Leslie and her four kids live.

Try to imagine a favela stuck up on a hill, with a population of almost 300,000 people. Here, families of five to eight members usually live in tiny two-bedroom concrete shacks, and yet they’re still able to smile everyday

It’s a place where you can hear all kinds of music, lots of noise, dogs barking, and always hundreds of people walking up and down the narrow streets.

This is Rocinha, one of the biggest favelas in South America. It is ruled and controlled by drug lords and their gang members — a place where the state powers don’t do much for the people unless they are using their police violence against them. It does not matter if a person is a worker or a criminal; the police will shoot first and only after they kill will they find out if the person hit was a worker or a criminal. Located in the most expensive neighborhood of Rio de Janeiro, Rocinha is the most lucrative drug dealing market in town, coveted by drug gang rivals, the police, and the rich neighbors who consume its drugs. A war can start at anytime, without warning. Rocinha has its own rhythm — it plays by its own rules. Once you understand it, you must respect it, and then you will be safe.

Nowadays, a camera has became a threatening weapon in places like this, so in order to film or photograph in a favela in Rio you need to make it clear why you are there and what it is you are shooting. So before I started filming, I made sure I talked to the main characters in order to let them know what I was doing there. First I spoke to the school’s principal, then I went to the community association president, and finally I spoke to the drug dealers. I went to talk to a man surrounded by a few young boys carrying AK-47s, and after the man heard what I had to say, he smiled at me and said these words: “Fé em Deus e nas crianças,” which translates to “Faith in God and in the children.” Then he called me by my name, saying, “Alex, if your work concerns children and education, the favela is yours — you have it. The children are the future and the most precious thing we have; if you are dealing with the children ain’t nobody gonna mess with you around here! Go ahead, do your work, and if you need anything let me know.”

I put my people together, my camera, and my gear, and I started shooting.

By this time, I knew almost every little corner of the favela where we were going to work. The principal and the teachers of the school were willing to help as much as they could, and the community association president had one of his men walk along with us as our guardian angel. The great part was also that Jefferson was having the time of his life participating in “Back to School.”

In a favela there is not only violence and misery, but also much hope and joy among its people. Even knowing that most Brazilian kids won’t encounter the right conditions to go on and finish their education, I still believe that one day the right to be educated will be preserved for all human beings.

Yes, there will be a day when a poor Brazilian kid from a favela won’t have to choose between becoming a criminal or being a soccer star in order to get out of the ghetto.

Bruno Sorrentino, Field Producer in Japan and Romania, 2006

Japan - When I first filmed with Ken two years ago, he was five and just starting school. He was a little nervous about his first day. By then he was already conversant with Hiragana and Katakana, the two phoneticised scripts used in the Japanese language. He could already count and do basic sums, could pen the odd Kanji Chinese character and, to top it all, was already familiar with the Latin alphabet. He crammed in after school classes, and on it went. But this wasn’t to be the story familiar in the West: overworked automatons in Japan’s school system.

Two years on, Ken is one of his school’s best baseball players. He has a terrific sense of humor, is one of the most popular kids in his class, and he enjoys fooling around in the same way kids anywhere else do

Much of the teaching is designed to encourage free and creative thinking to allow the individual inside to develop as much as at any school in the West.

I’m looking forward to revisiting Ken in another couple of years when things may again be different: he’ll soon have to cram extra hard for higher grade exams. But his parents say they want him to just do what he loves doing best. If that means sport, and not bookish subjects, that’s fine by them. We’ll see!

On my last day, I was treated to the entertaining sight of an end-of-term tradition in Japan’s schools: The entire school (some three hundred kids in all) were cleaning their classrooms and scrubbing down the rest of their school — right down to the stairway steps. For an outsider, this was amusing enough, but these kids were cleaning their school by skateboarding and tobogganing across classrooms and corridors on an array of cleaning cloths, dust pans and brooms, sometimes getting up to breakneck speed. They were cleaning in the way only kids know how.

Romania – On our return to Bucharest, we were glad to see Raluca retains her hilarious sense of humor. She speaks a few words of English and French, but because of her ongoing passion for Middle Eastern TV soaps, Raluca sings numerous songs in word-perfect Arabic.

On the face of it, not much has changed in her life. She still spends much of her time outside of school hours in the care of her grandmother because her parents have to work long hours. But what happens in her country will have a profound effect on her future.

Raluca’s hard-working parents have to hold down a number of jobs between them in order to maintain their (by European standards) modest standard of living. When we returned to Romania for our latest update, I looked out for signs, however small, of economic improvement. Just outside of Raluca’s parents’ apartment block, a swanky new shopping mall has just been completed on the site of what used to be an old slum. Other malls and office blocks have sprung up in other parts of town.

But one thing in particular caught my eye at one of the three office jobs that Raluca’s mother holds down. Two years ago, I saw a local advertising publication there; it was just a little bigger than a magazine. Today, it’s the size of a regular telephone directory, with literally hundreds more businesses inside advertising goods and services — a sure sign of an economy that’s picking up.

When we next return, Romania will be a fully fledged member of the European Union. How will the inevitable changes around the corner affect Raluca and her family

Polly Hyman, Field Producer in Afghanistan, 2006

I first met Shugufa in early 2004 while filming for “Time For School.” Shugufa is one of 11 children and lives with her huge family in the village of Ashtagram, a few hours’ drive from the capital city of Kabul.

It was a pleasure to return this year to visit this charismatic young girl, now 13-years-old, and see how her life has progressed over the last two years.

I instantly recognized Shugufa’s welcoming smile in spite of the modest veil that now covers her head. She is still full of energy and enthusiasm for her studies, although there was a hint of restlessness that I didn’t see in her before. Perhaps this is typical of all girls of this age, but I suspect that she is becoming anxious about her life and the future of her beloved Afghanistan.

When Hamid Karzai was elected President in 2004, people dreamed that their lives would improve. But a recent increase in insurgent activity and countrywide poverty has created a frustration amongst the Afghan people that did not exist a few years ago. Shugufa and millions like her have seen little change for the better. She continues to go to school and studies hard, but all of this seems fruitless when there are few qualified teachers at her school. She dreams of a happy, educated future where she can earn enough to support her family. I hope that her dreams are possible.

Call (718) 506-1351 to join the conversation!

WIDE ANGLE’s unprecedented, award-winning 12-year documentary project, Time for School, follows seven kids in seven countries struggling to get what nearly all American kids take for granted: a basic education.

On Thursday, September 10th at 12:00 noon, EST, we’ll be hosting a live discussion with Oren Rudavsky and Frederick Rendina, two of the film’s producers, and two experts on global education: David Gartner of the Brookings Institute and Faryal Khan of UNESCO.

The discussion will be hosted by Pamela Hogan, Executive Producer of Time for School. You can read a Q & A with Hogan about the series on the Inside Thirteen blog.

Visit our site to listen live through Blog Talk Radio, and call (718) 506-1351 with any questions for our guests. You can also send us your questions in advance by leaving a comment below.

We’d especially like to hear from students and educators, and want to extend a special welcome to members of Classroom 2.0, a social network for people interested in using collaborative technologies in education.

We look forward to hearing from you!

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The University of Brasilia’s affirmative action process is about to enter a crucial week. Students who have identified themselves as Afro-Brazilian must pose for a photograph that will be evaluated by a secret committee. This panel will try to determine whether students look “black enough” to qualify for the quota system.

Iolanda dos Santos and her family moved to Brasilia from a poor region of northeast Brazil. She is currently undecided whether or not she should apply to the university under the racial quota system.

Download the PDF here.

photo credit: Ademir Rodrigues

In 2001, on the heels of the United Nations Conference on Racism in Durban, South Africa, several Brazilian institutions established race-based affirmative action for the first time ever in that country. Affirmative action represented a major step in Brazil’s process of democratization and nation-building, which ran against Brazil’s long-held ideology of racial democracy. Racial democracy was a belief since the 1930s that racism and racial discrimination were minimal or nonexistent in Brazilian society in contrast to the other multiracial societies in the world. By the 1990s, ideas of racial democracy were being slowly eroded as Brazil democratized and a small but active black movement denounced the popular idea of racial democracy, as it alleged that racism was widespread and pointed to official statistics showing Brazil’s tremendous racial inequality.

From the 16^th through the 19^th century, Brazil’s economy was based on agriculture and mining, which depended on a large African-origin slave population. During more than 300 years of slavery, Brazil was the world’s largest importer of African slaves, bringing in seven times as many African slaves to the country compared to the United States. In 1888, Brazil, with a mostly black and mixed-race or mulatto population, became the last country in the Americas to abolish slavery. Abolition in Brazil, though, did not create a rupture in the country’s racial inequality or its beliefs about black people.

Miscegenation and the fluidity of racial classification in Brazil throughout much of its history has largely been used as proof of its racial democracy. During slavery and colonialism, Brazil experienced greater miscegenation or race mixture than the United States, which resulted largely from a high sex ratio among its European settlers. In contrast to a family-based colonization in North America, Brazil’s Portuguese settlers were primarily male. As a result they often sought out African, indigenous and mulatto females as mates, and thus miscegenation or race mixture was common. Throughout its history, there were no anti-miscegenation laws like those found in the United States or South Africa. Today, Brazilians often pride themselves on their history of miscegenation and they continue to have rates of intermarriage that are far greater than those of the United States. Relatedly, there were no classification laws nor was there racially-based violence. The absence of classificatory laws and a high rate of miscegenation resulted in a racial continuum with racial categories from black to white and going through intermediate colors that shaded into each other. Thus, the racial classification of some Brazilians is ambiguous, at times varying according to the classifier and the social context.

photo credit: Ademir Rodrigues

Today, most Brazilians of all colors now acknowledge that there is racial prejudice and discrimination in their country, despite miscegenation and fluid racial classification.  Based on statistical analysis of censuses and surveys along with other kinds of evidence, we know that racial inequality is high and racial discrimination in the labor market and other spheres of Brazilian society are common. Nonwhites are the major victims of human rights abuses, including that from widespread police violence. On average, black and brown (mulatto or mixed race) Brazilians earn half of the income of white Brazilians. Moreover, television and advertising portray Brazilan society as one that is almost entirely white, even though nearly half of the population identifies itself as nonwhite. Despite the historical and contemporary absence of race-based laws and Brazilians’ historical denial of racism, Brazilians are not surprised when others make racist jokes or a racist comment.

Most notably, the middle class and the elite is almost entirely white so that Brazil’s well-known melting pot only exists at the working class and poor levels. The near absence of Afro-Brazilians in the middle class is closely related to their poor representation in Brazilian universities. Nonwhite Brazilians were rarely found in Brazil’s top universities, until affirmative action began in 2001. Because of this, university admissions may be the most appropriate place for race-conscious affirmative action. By 2008, roughly 50 Brazilian universities have established some type of race-based affirmative action policy.

Affirmative action has also led to a commonplace discussion of race and racism in Brazil, for the first time, whereas the racial democracy ideology treated any talk of race as racist itself. There was little formal discussion of race in Brazilian society, while other societies were thought to be obsessed with race and racial difference. Only explicit manifestations of racism or race-based laws were viewed as discriminatory and thus only countries like South Africa and the United States were seen as truly racist.

Traditionally, Brazilian universities depended on a standardized test, known as the vestibular, as the only criteria for admission.  Many leading universities are now mandated to admit a fixed percentage of nonwhite students while others use a point system that awards additional points to Afro-Brazilian students.  Many of these universities also have quotas for indigenous people, for the disabled and those that attended the poorly funded public schools that the middle class tend to avoid, or award points based on these social disadvantages. Nevertheless, the focus of efforts to repeal affirmative action have been on the quotas for Afro-Brazilian students.

photo credit: Ademir Rodrigues

Affirmative action policies represent a new stage in Brazil’s effort to combat racial inequality and they are not without controversy as a backlash against them has been mounting. Detractors of these policies include much of the media, private school students, their parents and the schools themselves, scholars and artists who value the racial democracy ideal and even black students who believe in meritocracy. They claim, among other things, that class-based policies and universal reforms such as improved public education would have the same effect without having to define Brazilians on the basis of race or color, that affirmative action violates Brazilian principles of meritocracy and universalism, that affirmative action admits unqualified students to the university, that high levels of miscegenation often make it impossible to distinguish blacks from whites, that affirmative action divides Brazilians into black and white for the first time and thus will create racial hostility, and that poor whites continue to be excluded from university education. Furthermore, they claim that affirmative action is a U.S. import that is out of place in Brazil, even though affirmative action began in India in 1948 and has been used in several other countries.  Legal challenges to university-based affirmative action are now before the Brazilian Supreme Court. A statute of racial equality, which would institutionalize affirmative action in all Brazilian universities as well as in public contracts and in public employment, passed the Brazilian senate and is now pending before the Chamber of Deputies, and has come under particular scrutiny by opponents of affirmative action.

Defenders of racial quotas continue to argue that race conscious remedies, together with universalist policies, are needed to significantly reduce Brazil’s high levels of racial and class inequality and that prior to affirmative action there was little concern for redressing racial inequality or even for reforming the poor state of public schools. The end of racial democracy thinking, a national debate about race and racism and the beginning of serious policy attempts to reduce racial inequality represent a new stage in Brazil. Brazil’s affirmative action experiment is still in its early stages and so far the concerns of its detractors have not been borne out as Afro-Brazilians often do as well or even better than the regularly admitted students, and race relations have not become hostile. At the same time, an unprecedented number of Afro-Brazilians have begun to graduate from top universities, which is certain to diversify Brazil’s middle class and create positive role models for Brazil’s large Afro-Brazilian population.

Edward E. Telles is a sociology professor at Princeton University and is the author of Race in Another America: The Significance of Skin Color in Brazil, published by Princeton University Press in 2006.