A 'Good' Man Can Be Hard to Find

One year, the volunteers at the Good Samaritan Children’s Home in Nairobi, Kenya, were faced with a decision. With the money they had, they could either cut down on breakfast and lunch for the 115 former street children and AIDS orphans they cared for or discontinue their classes. When they decided to leave the decision to the children, the children chose education.

Since then, donations of rejected food have enabled the children to eat in addition to their studies, but resources remain scarce in the orphanage and school, as Visual and Environmental Studies Teaching Fellow Randy Bell ’00 and Pacho Velez ’02 discovered when they spent six weeks there shooting a documentary about the home. According to the directors, they hope to show that AIDS is “not only a medical crisis but also a socio-cultural one that threatens to create a generation of children without parents.”

In a benefit at the Carpenter Center last Sunday, the directors showed their work in progress, with half of the proceeds from the event going to finish the film and half to the Good Samaritan Home. The 20 minutes of loosely edited footage they have so far are full of images of uncomfortable everyday intimacy: a child’s head being shaven, a skinned rabbit hanging to be eaten, children standing around a murdered corpse. In the slums of a city where 100,000 children live on the streets, former street children talk with bruised toughness of their days sniffing glue. Now, sitting in a classroom, they are told that God will free them from sadness.

The rough cut was preceded by Look Back, Don’t Look Back, a quirky, popular short film Bell made with Justin Rice ’99 about trying to procure an interview with Bob Dylan. Their collision with the blockades around celebrity creates a clumsily funny and endearing film that is more about the journey than the destination.

Bell and Velez expect to complete Good Samaritan in June 2002 and hope to show it on television and at film festivals worldwide. While they have raised $9,000 to date, $100,000 will be needed in order to cover post-production costs. Information about donations to the film and the home is available at www.goodsamaritanfilm.com.