it’s 3:21am.
Around 1am I had a headache, and wasn’t particularly tired, so I decided to make myself a warm drink, curl up in front of the tv and watch something interesting.
surprisingly, it wasn’t too difficult to find something!
TVO has documentaries at 8pm everyday from Monday-Friday during August!
That didn’t help me at 1am, but there was a different documentary program on called Human Edge.
I’ve watched it a few times, i think.
I think it’s just a time slot where they show documentaries that are specifically ‘human interest’ stories… i think.
[A Couple Asides:
1. what’s good for a headache? I don’t get them regularly… a cup of hot chocolate seemed to do the trick… but maybe drinking anything would’ve worked!
2. I feel like I should record my prediction that the song ‘Those Dancing Days Are Gone’ by Carla Bruni will be played on a future Grey’s Anatomy episode. …It just seems to ‘fit’ the show’s music… anyways, when it happens I want to have this record to link back to and say, “LOOK! i predicted it!!”
That’s It.]
So the documentary I watched is Sisters in Law.
It follows two women “judges” in Cameroon and their work fighting cases of abuse towards women/girls.
It was so interesting!
and fairly depressing… so I’m hoping that writing a few of my thoughts done, will help me ‘digest it’ and hopefully get to sleep okay tonight. …
There were so many interesting things about the film/society/cases/mannerisms.
The environment reminded me of Guyana in some ways. Like there was a scene where a woman was walking down a street and there was a trench next to the sidewalk! I haven’t seen one of those in ages!
When the judge enters the courtroom someone yells out ‘Court’ for the whole time it takes the judge to be seated. I was so perplexed by this b/c I thought it was just a long moan, meaning “everyone stand up”. Eventually I put on closed captioning and determined that the ‘bailiff’ is actually saying something.
Incredibly sad stories of abuse…
After defendants were found guilty, a couple of the pleaded with the court to be lenient with their sentence b/c they were orphans and didn’t have any family. (I suppose they meant, they didn’t have anyone else to care for their children.)
The sentences were interestingly worded. Example: “One year hard labour”, or “sentenced to pay 30,000pounds or 1 year hard labour”
The difference of sense of humour across cultures is something that intrigues me.
The two cases of spousal abuse that they featured in the film were the first cases in 17 years (in Cameroon) where men have been found guilty.
People had an interesting reaction to ‘crying’. There was a man in court a ‘reverend’ (although he was Muslim, so I’m not quite sure what the deal was) was on trial and was caught in a lie by the cross examiner, and he started crying, and the judge was like, ’stop crying! I have other cases to see today.’ and his own lawyer was like, “be a man!”
it was “different”…i was confused.
but the man got a hold of himself within a few minutes.
He never touched his face though. The whole time he just stood there with his hands behind his back.
And then there was a scenerio in an office where a woman was confronted by her relatives for badly beating a child who was in her care. They told her to respond to the girl (who didn’t quite seem to understand what was happening), and the woman immediately got down on the floor and started weeping!
It was so confusing b/c she had been so (comparably)calm 2 seconds prior. So I assumed she was just acting remorseful (I’m suspicious when people who cry without tears). But I suppose I’ll never know.
I think this documentary was my first time hearing people speak ‘pidgin’! very interesting!!
…alright, it’s 4am now. sleep time!
