Awake.
Good morning world! Good morning suitcase! Good morning rat hiding behind my suitcase in the corner! That’s how I started my day. I went out to have breakfast and I told Kara and Lama about my new friend and we discussed its fate. I refuse to kill it and opted to corner it in a box and take it far away from the house and let it go (how far away do you have to take a rat so it doesn’t come back?) By the time I went back into my room to investigate, it was nowhere to be seen. It’s still M.I.A. so hopefully it was smart enough to over hear Kara and Lama’s plot to kill it and leave for greener, more tolerant pastures.
Right after breakfast, Lama and I got to work translating, and after a few hours we had translated 5 minutes of footage. My goodness it is going to take forever and I think I’m going to need to hire some students to help or something. We’ll never make it otherwise. That or Lama and I collectively agree to quit sleeping for a month. I would prefer the former. We put it on hold to have lunch, and after that Lama and Kara went back to the expo so they could actually see it during the day and talk to people, where last night was more of a party. I stayed at the house to keep working.
In the afternoon, the students were scheduled to come by the house and I was going to run a camera workshop. Since we’re planning to begin our collective documentary project on Wednesday, I needed to show them more than just the camera. We had said 2 pm, and only 2 students out of 7 had showed up, so we waited until 3 pm before we started. Well 2 was all that made it out, and it wasn’t necessarily so bad because it allowed me to give them a much higher quality lesson. I explained the camera and all the features and functions and controls, which when you’ve never done ANY photography, is a daunting task. There are a lot of complicated concepts and it is a lot to dive into all at once. So I let them just take the camera and go shoot something. They came back in 15 minutes and they had shot some sweet footage and got used to controlling the image. After that, I tried my best to explain audio and microphones. Once that lesson was over, I had them set up a documentary interview in the backyard, and since Alice had joined in on the lesson making three, everyone got a turn to interview, be interviewed, and work the camera and headphones. I don’t know what they interviewed each other about but they were laughing a lot. I heard Mutzig a couple of times though.
I am not sure how to gauge the success of the workshop. They got their hands on the camera, they saw how it works, and they shot a bit. We’re going out into the field Wednesday so they’ll have another opportunity to try it all out and just get practice. I really hope by the end I can encourage them to just try and experiment and figure things out, and realize they don’t need me to teach them. I’m still optimistic we can make something together.
The workshop ended in the evening and we worked on other projects until it was dinner time. Lama had to take off for a meeting with Bernard and skipped dinner altogether. Regina showed up to discuss business with us, and since she is one of the students in my “class” I said we might as well do the workshop again since I can go much faster as she speaks English and it was her alone. She also might be the keenest to learn, plus she volunteers at a radio station as a journalist. She’s got the media bug. And she hauled the camera’s ass too. She was guessing what I would explain next and basically saying “get out of my way and let me do it”, and I couldn’t have liked her attitude more. She interviewed Kara and set it all up and seemed to have a really solid understanding of the concepts, not just saying she did. So I’m glad she got to try out the camera too, and she will be coming out on Wednesday and she’ll be a huge help on the shoot I’m sure.
Regina took off later and somehow again I was wiped out. What is in the air in Kibungo? I did a bit of reading and writing in my bed for awhile but that was the end of my day.
Asleep.
