I was talking to a man as I flipped through pictures on my laptop. He noticed a landscape picture all in white and asked me what it was. “Snow,” I said, and he just stared in astonishment. As we flipped through pictures of Switzerland in winter we talked of skiing and sledding and hiking in snow up to your knees. He was amazed. We talked about what cars do in the snow, and how trains were better in snow than cars. I guess Kilifi town doesn’t have winter blizzards…

Today was the first day where I gave full control over to the girls. I have picked two leaders among them, Salma and Grace, and they know what to do. They are responsible and serious about the opportunity to manage open air cinema events for the next couple years. They carry notepads with them and stop frequently to take determined notes. Today I found them kneeling next to the generator sketching out the schema of electrical cords. I had talked to them earlier about the way which we lay the extension cords. We make sure to keep the power for the audio on one circuit, and the projection power on another. Audio can surge and boom, depending on the signal. It can trip circuits because its can be unpredictable. If an audio powerline surges too much and trips the circuit, the projector will not lose electricity, which is bad. Like end of the world bad. Or at least I make it sound that way (projector bulbs are expensive and far away from Kenya). I’ve explained this all to Grace and Salma and they’re doing their best to remember because this weekend there will be a written test about everything under the outdoor cinema sun.

Tonight we moved fields to Bukungu Stadium, in central Killifi. Its a big open soccer field with public bathrooms, which apparently is enough to dub it a Stadium. The girls a doing a great job talking to the audiences. Its fun to hand them the microphone and encourage them to be confidently loud, playful, polite, and professional all at the same time. They speak in their local vernacular. With lots of Karibu’s and Asanti-sanna’s (welcome’s and thank you’s).

I get a good laugh from being corrected by my students; a feel-good-surprised type of laugh. Its a good sign that they are listening, interested, and know something extra about what you are teaching.

It happened today, just after I started the audio/visual training about eight Kenyan girls from the surrounding Kilifi villages. As I was teaching them about audio signals and XLR cables etc. I held up an end of XLR cable and was about to plug it into the loudspeaker. One of the girls informed me that in fact “this end of the audio cable, is the male end, and sends the sound, so actually Mr. Stuart, you plug this one into your speaker,” and handed me the other end of the cable.  I laughed with delight.

It reminds me of another training we conducted in Africa about two years back. I was in Nduta UN Refugee Camp on the border of Burundi and Rwanda and we were training locals how to inflate a giant inflatable screen and how to securely tie and anchor it. A tall Congolese fisherman smiled at me, grabbed the rope from my hand, and tied a sliding clove hitch around the stake with ease.  Everyone here on the coast already know their knots, which makes my job a little bit easier.

The girls were happy with the training. They liked using the audio mixer to blend the music, movie, and microphone sounds.  The touch screen on the iPad was mesmerizing for them and they gathered around it in amazement. They intuitively got the hang of the iPad applications, particularly Google Earth which was obviously their favorite. With a few finger gestures they zoomed around the map of coastal Kenya.

Tomorrow is the inflatable screen training and our first event. The students assured me they would all be there. My expectations aren’t too high though on the first event day. First trainings usually just involve an introduction to the inflatable movie screen, because typically, nobody’s ever even seen one before.

(Follow Stuart’s journey to Kenya on the Open Air Cinema blog)