{"id":104,"date":"2010-06-18T18:53:54","date_gmt":"2010-06-18T18:53:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mediaforsocialchange.wordpress.com\/?p=104"},"modified":"2016-07-24T21:42:28","modified_gmt":"2016-07-24T21:42:28","slug":"the-revealed-truth-part-2-cross-culture-shock","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jplarroque.com\/index.php\/2010\/06\/18\/the-revealed-truth-part-2-cross-culture-shock\/","title":{"rendered":"The Revealed Truth Part 2: Cross Culture Shock"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The crowd gathers as the play gets going.\u00a0 Not many people can afford cars, but many have bicycles.\u00a0 This is a parking lot for them and the kid in the suit on the left is the valet.\u00a0 The bags slung over the bikes are for collecting corn, bananas, or firewood.\u00a0 After the show, the audience will peddle back into the fields to harvest their crops as the sun goes down and it’s not so hot.\u00a0 The generator in the foreground powers the sound system.\u00a0 The speakers were so loud that the play could be heard from miles around.\u00a0 This was not unusual for the village.\u00a0 Ugandans love blasting music, public service announcements, and sermons over their P.A. systems at all times of the day and night.<\/p>\n

[youtube=http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=qsZWkO4DO5Q&searchbar=0&iv_load_policy=3&ap=%2526fmt%3D18]<\/p>\n

Part 2 of The Revealed Truth<\/strong> opens up with a shot of the Kiwangala playground.\u00a0 That’s my neighbor Vieney and his sister clowning around.\u00a0 The playground plays host to soccer matches, concerts, religious services, and once on Christmas there was a motocross rally.\u00a0 On slow days cattle graze the field.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>One thing that I’ve never understood is why Jesus speaks into a microphone.\u00a0 It’s not plugged in.\u00a0 A CD of the audio I recorded is playing on the speakers.\u00a0 The actor playing Jesus is just mouthing the words.\u00a0 Nevertheless, he carries the microphone all the way up to the cross, stopping like a talk show host to to interview saints and sinners along the way.<\/p>\n

I remember going out one night in Masaka, the city closest to Kiwangala, to watch some karaoke.\u00a0 In Uganda you don’t get up to sing something embarrassing, you let the professional entertainers handle that.\u00a0 The music came on and performers gave it all they got with choreographed dance moves.\u00a0 It was high energy, but it was also Milly Vanilli<\/a>.\u00a0 The singers lip-sync into turned-off microphones.\u00a0 False advertising or not that was their style.\u00a0 The microphone is an aesthetic prop that makes The Revealed Truth <\/strong>just a long karaoke number.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Something else that perplexes me in this bit is when the disciples gather fruit from the trees on the Sabbath.\u00a0 The actors reach up into the branches and pull out a loaf of bread.\u00a0 Why not fruit?\u00a0 Uganda is a garden of Eden for tropical fruit<\/a>.\u00a0 It grows everywhere in abundance.\u00a0 Ugandan bread, on the other hand, is nothing to write home about.\u00a0 It’s bland and, because the nearest bakery is 40 km away, often stale.\u00a0 However, while most fruit is cheap or even free, you’ve got to have cash to buy a loaf of bread.\u00a0 In some circles of village society it’s a sign of wealth.\u00a0 When a guest comes over for morning tea the hospitable thing to do is offer them a few slices of bread spread with Blueband margarine.\u00a0 While the first appearance of bread is odd, it’s a theme that naturally weaves itself throughout the play up to the Last Supper. \u00a0 It’s just bizarre watching it from a Western perspective where the value system is reversed.\u00a0 If you walked into an American supermarket and bought a pineapple<\/a> it’d be twice the cost of a loaf of Wonderbread<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Another surprising sight in the movie are the two men walking into the bushes holding hands.\u00a0 Like many agricultural societies, Uganda is conservative in its behaviors.\u00a0 PDA between couples <\/a>raises eyebrows.\u00a0 Outside of Kampala, kissing and hugging are never seen.\u00a0 A man and a woman holding hands insinuates that they have carnal knowledge of each other.\u00a0 Hand holding between members of the same sex however is acceptable and common.\u00a0 It’s a show of fraternal goodwill, but it would make me do a double take when I passed by two burly biker dudes or a couple of coeds on their way to campus.\u00a0 Often when I’d meet a man and shake his hand a game would start to see how long we could hold onto each other.\u00a0 This makes introductions long and leaves you with sweaty palms, but also builds trust and rapport.<\/p>\n

Nobody sees this behavior as gay because in Uganda homosexuality is illegal.\u00a0 Earlier this year the parliament attempted to pass a bill that would give convicted homosexuals the death penalty.\u00a0 It has been said that American evangelists lobbied parliament to put the bill into place<\/a>.\u00a0 Luckily, it caught the attention of the international community who threatened to withdraw humanitarian aid if the law was passed.\u00a0 The MPs have since backed down, but the homophobic sentiment remains.\u00a0 It’s ironic that the camera captured Jesus and the two men in the same frame.<\/p>\n

The Revealed Truth Blog Series<\/span><\/p>\n

This post is the third of a nine part series that takes an in-depth look at the The Revealed Truth<\/strong> and how rural Ugandan culture influenced the making of the film.\u00a0 The\u00a0 movie is about an hour\u00a0 long\u00a0 but I’ve broken it down into 5 to 10 minute blog-size episodes.\u00a0 The next post will feature Nicodemus.<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The previous post was The Revealed Truth Part 1: Shepherds and Fishermen<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The crowd gathers as the play gets going.\u00a0 Not many people can afford cars, but many have bicycles.\u00a0 This is a parking lot for them and the kid in the suit on the left is the valet.\u00a0 The bags slung over the bikes are for collecting corn, bananas, or firewood.\u00a0 After the show, the audience …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":1239,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[21,175,204,30,40,41,46,48,52,295,317,66,72,362,77,379,86,100,432,111,127,6,519,136,569,141,145],"class_list":["post-104","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-africa","tag-anti-homosexual-law","tag-bread","tag-children","tag-diy","tag-documentaries","tag-east-africa","tag-education","tag-filmmaking","tag-fruit","tag-hand-holding","tag-humanitarian","tag-jean-pierre-larroque","tag-karaoke","tag-kiwangala","tag-lip-sync","tag-masaka","tag-nutrition","tag-passion-play","tag-rakai","tag-technique","tag-technology","tag-the-revealed-truth","tag-uganda","tag-uncategorized","tag-usaid","tag-vote"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jplarroque.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jplarroque.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jplarroque.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jplarroque.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jplarroque.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=104"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jplarroque.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1240,"href":"https:\/\/jplarroque.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104\/revisions\/1240"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jplarroque.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1239"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jplarroque.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=104"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jplarroque.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=104"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jplarroque.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=104"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}