Kiwanja Ndege Community Project "One thing is for sure though – it has made me realize that the only way to make other people aware of the world outside their own front yard, is a device you carry on your shoulder with a big red button that says - RECORD!"

Day 3: The next day presented itself. It was time for me to seriously start thinking about what story I was going to pursue and how to form and structure the overall narrative of my film. My initial idea was to spend a day with one of the kids from the school, to see what it really meant to live out here. I started to make my way through the classrooms, on the lookout for that one kid that I could base the story on. The initial idea was quite simple: Get a kid, ask him a couple of questions, spend some time with him, wrap. Of course I was wrong... Based on past experiences, documentaries don’t form themselves. The key is to find that one story that has been there all along and you just couldn’t see it. I spoke to the schoolmistress, explaining that I needed a child that would meet certain criteria’s. Nothing special, simply a character most people could relate to and would make an interesting story. I had it all sorted, that’s what I thought anyway. They arranged for me to spend some time with one of the children. The child was wary of the big bulky black eye that was staring him right in the face. For me it was a simple camera, yet the child had never seen such a thing before. I asked him what his name was, he replied by saying “good”. I didn’t think much about the first answer, but when all the answers to my questions were “fine”, “ok”, “football” and “Ronaldo”, I realized I was encountering a little problem. I was always under the impression that the kids in the school would understand English. They sort of did, but not as much as I needed them to. This started to become a major problem as my knowledge of Swahili and masai was very limited. Sorry, let’s make that zero. How could I make a personal story on a child that didn’t understand me and most importantly I didn’t understand him? I couldn’t afford to lose much time. We had only a few more days left to finish what we originally came for and my shooting time was running out. At about midday, I walked up to the football field that overlooked the magical valley of this spiritual place. I was trying to take some nicely framed location shots, while thinking of an alternative of how to approach this film. I just set up my tripod when suddenly someone kept yelling “Shoot me!”, “Hello Mr, Shoot me!” After being slightly confused as to what was going on, I noticed one of the kids was asking me to kick back the soccer ball that was lying next to my tripod. And so I did. He waived me over to join them in their quite vicious way of playing. I started chatting to one of the older kids. It had come to my attention that it would make more sense to base the film on an older kid than a child that would simply be too young to understand what was being asked of him. And my search started again... The end of the day arrived, and I finally had found someone that was happy to assist me in my undertaking. His name was Robin and I was quite glad it wasn’t “good”, “fine” or “Ronaldo”...