Movie Night

In my last post I mentioned how Georgina enjoyed the Lion King soundtrack, and indeed so did the rest of our staff. Because of this, Claudia and I had the idea that it would be fun to get the movie and show it to our staff. We planned it out for Wednesday and told our 3 staff that we were going to have a "video show" night and that we would provide food for them and their families. Despite visiting multiple video stores, checking the stacks of DVDs for sale on the street, and calling up a friend with kids we were unable to locate the Lion King. We were recommended to try out Ice Age instead, which our friend lent us. We bought 2 chickens, a bag of maize and two large pizzas (what is a movie night without pizza?). Georgina used the maize to make a huge amount of nsima and she also deep fried the chicken and made a vegetable "relish" because one of our gardeners is a vegetarian.
Below is a picture I took of a typical plate of nsima, meat and vegetable relish. Nsima is the white blob in the bottom left - for better or for worse it is the food that powers this country.
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I rearranged the living room to make sure that everyone would have a place to sit and soon everyone was grabbing a plate full of food and a seat.
And I mean everyone. There were so many people Claudia and I could hardly believe it. Georgina brought everyone who was staying at her house and I felt like they just kept on coming. Brothers, cousins, a baby, children - I had no idea we had so many people living in our backyard! We also had our gardeners, one of their brothers and our night security guard. I set the TV up on two chairs that were on top of the dining room table and we started watching it.

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Most of our audience had very limited English skills, but luckily the movie has a lot of physical comedy so there was plenty of laughter - although rarely at times I would have expected it. Most of them had never had pizza before, but everybody, even George our picky vegetarian gardener claimed to enjoy it (how could anyone not enjoy the food of the gods?). The next morning I asked George what he really thought about the evening. He said that it was great, and that even Lazaro, our other gardener whose English is limited knew everything that had happened in the movie. Apparently they had a long discussion about the movie after they got home!

We are hoping to do it again - next time with The Lion King. Does anybody know where I can find a copy?

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