Movie Night 03-09-13

On Fridays, I often spend the night at the school so I can show the kids a movie.  The movie goes from about 8pm to 10pm.  10pm is too late to drive home.  The Children's Home has a curfew of 7pm, and the mazungus (white people) are encouraged to be back before dark.  The school has one projector and some speakers, so we can show movies in the Cafeteria.  The movies are in English and help the students with their English.  If subtitles are available, I'll put on subtitles.

So far, here are the movies I've showed them, or someone else has showed them:

• Finding Forrester
• Paycheck
• Holes
• The Incredibles
• Despicable Me
• Narnia
• Iron Man
• Captain America
• Avengers
• Secondhand Lions

I've noticed that the kids see movies differently, and I also see them differently because of my cultural experiences here.  When watching "The Incredibles" the boys whistled at Mrs. Incredible.  Mrs. Incredible has the ability to stretch her body, and the boys whistled as she went flipping from the top of one building to another in a city.  Just yesterday, a kid asked me, "Can we see that movie with the walking and water?"  The kids got a kick out of the son, Dash, running on water.  But, I realized that the whole movie, the family of the Incredibles are yelling and arguing the entire movie.  Is that how Burundians think American families are?  There can be yelling and resistance to authority here, and it actually made me wonder if showing the Incredibles, a family movie in the US, to the school was a good idea.  One day at the internet cafe, I watched a crowd walk by.  The crowd was yelling at a couple of policemen who was escorting a handcuffed man.

In the movie "Holes," a boy gets wrongfully accused of stealing something, and he goes to a juvinile detention camp.  It was funny how many things in the movie related to my current situation, and the kids at school.  The boys living at the camp have to dig holes in the desert.  Ironically, when our kids get in serious trouble, they have to dig a hole with a shovel, then fill it back up again.  In the movie, it shows the boy taking a cold shower, then having the water get shut off in the middle of it.  I'm getting used to cold showers.  Sometimes the water goes off in the Children's Home.  In the camp, it shows the boy getting beans and  spinach for dinner.  I laughed since it reminded me of dinner from the night before.  In Burundi, we eat lot of beans and rice, and cooked pumpkin leaves that are called lenga lenga. The boy also runs away from a scorpion, and almost gets attacked by a dangerous lizard.  We have a lot of harmless geckos at the Children's Home.  I was expecting to see scorpions here, but I haven't seen any yet.  The kids did like the movie, and made a "Yo!" exclamation sound when the boy stole a truck and crashed it in one of the holes that was dug.

Last night, I showed Secondhand Lions.  The language was bad, but I think the kids enjoyed it.  I'll probably show Iron Man 2 and Thor sometime in the future.