Also, this past week, my women's group planned on showing a movie on Sunday - they would sell tickets as well as food to raise money for the bakery project. As the teacher is not coming until the 6th of July, we were planning on using this opportunity to raise money for the materials needed for classes (flour, sugar, eggs, etc.) . I was worried at first as all the participants were told to sell 10 tickets each (10 lemps, or about 50 cents) and anything not sold they would have to cover. A lot of them hemmed and hawed about being able to sell all those tickets - it made me worry because if they couldn't sell these tickets, how much harder would it be to sell bread on a regular basis? However, on the bus ride home today, I got a call from one of the women saying that they needed more tickets as they already sold out what they had! I was very excited - I thought I was going two for two this weekend. However, my bus arrived at 5 pm (the movie was scheduled to start at 7) so as soon as I got home I dropped off my bag (thanks to Michele for letting me crash at her place in S.B) and headed over to the salon (warehouse type building used to hold large meetings, parties, materials). The seats were all aranged but we needed the speakers and the projector. After retrieving those from the municipal building, when we started to put everything together we realized that we were missing one cable for one of the speakers as well as the cable to connect to the computer. By this time it was 6 so I had to run around to look for these parts - someone mentioned that the school borrowed them but upon arriving we only found the speaker cable. By then it was almost 7 so our makeshift solution was to put the microphone up against computer speakers. I ran to my house to pick up my speakers and then we started showing the movie at 7:30. No big deal, right? Heh... yeah right... and on that note why the ***k do these people not keep their equipment organized??? During my frantic calls to various people, trying to look for the missing parts, one person lamented how they used the church's cables because they couldn't find theirs. Are you friggin serious??? This is why wecan't have nice things. Because you aren't organized and keep losing stuff.
The movie I had picked out was Wall-E. Great movie and it would tie in with the trash management project I was trying to accomplish with one of the municipal workers. I worked hard to download the movie (dubbed in spanish) and was certain it would be enjoyed by both children and adults. Wrong!!!! People started to complain about the movie, saying it was boring and childish, so I ran back to my house to bring my external hard drive. They wanted something more adult oriented? Fine. I would show Pan's Labyrinth. Sure it may be a bit violent (some scenes) for the kids but it was a beautiful movie. My host mom in another site loved it. Strike 2. They got 10 minutes into it and wanted to watch something else. My frustration level was reaching its boiling point. My counterpart eventually brought a ranchero dvd saying that this was the type of movies they wanted to watch. Basically it was a cheesy action movie in Spanish - think of Steven Segal or Jean-Claude Van Damme, but with less martial arts and more cowboy action (but not Brokeback style). At that point just gave up and shrunk back to the food area where the women were hanging out. I just wanted the night to be over. But nope - someone forgot to tell me about the gratuitous nudity in the movie. I heard some catcalling and the women started to point at the screen - I turned and saw a man embracing a woman from behind and starting to undress her. In my mind I thought "No way. He's just gonna feel her up over her bra and then they'll cut to the next scene. This is Honduras, very conservative - they wouldn't show nudity. My female counterpart would not have given me a movie with nudity - she said there was singing and dancing." I was wrong. Horrified and stunned, I watched the man on screen took off her underwear piece by piece (there were lots of moms and children in the crowd). I ran to the computer and fast forwarded the scene (there ended up being several other). My reward for all this hard work? Laughter from my women's group. They thought it hilarious how my jaw started to drop more and more with each article the actress's clothing. So overall movie night was a disaster - during the movie switches some people wanted their money back. But from a financial standpoint it was pretty profitable. We're going to do it more often, but this time we will divide the movies into 2 categories - for children and for adults (and maybe one for these cheesy action movies for the teens). And we will screen the movies first. And we will improve the organization - especially the accounting. Running around everywhere trying to get things organized, I didn't have time to create a proper bookkeeping system for them. But all's well that ends well - the women got a valuable experience on organizing and running a project. And I'm just glad the weekend is over.
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