The sequel movie night (Written Nov 25 2005)

Tonight we had our second movie night this week and we watched Kill Bill Vol 2 – the more storyline driven of the two movies. We had more people watching the movie this time because apparently word about the movie showing got around to the kids of the village plus some of the adults who wanted to see a movie. So for this night we had a good range of Samoans to not only have an impact on but also gauge interest. While I was watching the movie, I came to the realization that this was a good movie for the Samoans – particularly those in the rural areas because it has a dominant female lead that can do all the things that men can do and does not get help from me. The hardest thing for female volunteers to get use to in Samoa is the retraction  of some of the "rights" that women in the state have. In this culture, men do all the hard work and if a woman tries to do it she gets pushed out of the way (that happened a lot on our cooking day/Thanksgiving). So here was a movie that all these young kids were watching where the woman was not sub-servant to the men in anyway – so even though it was violent by American standards at least it probably had some kind of positive impact on the kids. Then I got to thinking that a lot of the movies that are playing at the only cinema in Apia have male leads, so maybe this is truly a rare occasion in the Samoan culture. So that's it from me – not as gruesome a night as before but still a great day of learning/viewing the entire Samoan culture.