Miracles Happen

I have an entire school full of children in front of me while I’m frantically plugging and unplugging wires, pressing buttons, and connecting and disconnecting speakers. Why is it that they can watch the movie we’ve been promising them all day but can’t hear it? If only I knew. The older boys come over to play around with the sound system that they use every Saturday evening for dancing, which is their usual activity during “entertainment,” and it’s still looking hopeless. While trying to concentrate on which plugs should go where and whether or not I’ve already tried that, I throw up a few Hail Marys and pray that I don’t have to tell these kids that they can’t watch their movie.

All of a sudden, I hear the opening music of Madagascar 2. VICTORY! Everyone claps and laughs, and we start watching… and we keep watching… and it’s just a low murmur of noise, nothing distinguishable. Panicked, I shoot a look at Patricia, and then we hear the best noise I’ve ever heard- 220 kids cracking up at the animation projected onto a white sheet hanging on the back wall of their multipurpose dining hall/chapel/auditorium/classroom. They were completely captivated, and couldn’t have cared less about the fact that they couldn’t understand what the characters were saying. I sat back and took some photos and relaxed, smiling, really understanding the meaning of the phrase “it’s the little things in life.”

Then in walks Sister Mary, whose equipment it is that is fascinating these kids. She walks over to the machine that I fiddled with for 20 minutes, presses two buttons, and we can clearly hear the characters. She’s amazing. As we listen and debate whether or not to start over, I realize that I can’t understand a word the lions, penguins, or monkeys are saying. Why? Oh, because the film is in Chinese. That’s what you get when you buy a bootleg DVD on the streets of Nairobi, Sister Mary. Thankfully this DVD had about ten other films on it, so we watched Shrek- in English- and the kids loved it.
That night, we held a special screening- for secondarians (high school students) only. By the time we arrived back at Our Lady of Grace after our lunch/dinner break, the makeshift movie theatre was packed. And there were kids around age five in the front row… certainly not secondarians. It broke my heart to have to tell them to leave- they had to go to bed! As they walked out, heads hanging low, the secondary students cheered- they usually don’t get much time to themselves without having to share with and take care of their surrogate younger siblings. The movie was quite intense, but it applied to their CRE (religion) classes, which was certainly helpful. Who would have thought the first time I would ever see and discuss Avatar would be in a tiny little school in Africa?